6
Extremism’s High Tide
Early on the morning of March 18, I was reading The Cincinnati Enquirer online and saw a brief notice that Gov. Kasich was going to be at the University of Cincinnati late that afternoon to meet with President Gregory Williams and the media about the success of a research program. Naturally, we saw this as an opportunity to question the governor about the attack that he and his supporters had launched against faculty across Ohio.
One of the characteristics of Gov. Kasich’s style is his insistence on never being in a situation where he might face questions from Ohioans—whether hostile or otherwise. My personal experience in Montana had been quite different. When I was a journalist in the Big Sky State, the then-governor of Montana, Ted Schwinden, a Democrat, had his home phone number listed in the Helena phone book. If you needed to talk to him, you just called him. One night, working on deadline and needing a quote from Schwinden, I called him. The governor answered the phone: “Hello.” Since I knew Schwinden from my years of reporting, I identified myself, apologized for calling him at home, and said I needed to ask him a question. “No problem, John. What can I do for you?”
I did not anticipate that the situation would work exactly the same in Ohio, but I believed then—and I believe now—that politicians should be prepared to answer questions and face the public. They are public servants and should not view the public as their enemy. It is part of the job to endure questioning—to face people opposed to political decisions that have been made. As Harry Truman famously said, “If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.” If a politician cannot face his critics when pushing harsh and unreasonable policies, then he should either find another profession or adopt more rational and collaborative policies. Gov. Kasich, from the beginning, was only interested in forcing through his own ideologically driven union-busting policy with Senate Bill 5, and those who refused to get on the bus would get “run over by the bus.” His unwillingness to ever face his critics became crystal clear during his visit to UC. It is no surprise that this visit was scheduled on the first day of spring break so that there would be minimal opportunity for the governor to encounter any students or faculty.
Word spread quickly through the union and beyond that the governor would be visiting a laboratory on campus, in Rhodes Hall. On campus that morning, a group of students and faculty assembled outside Baldwin Hall, which is connected to Rhodes. Many were wearing anti-SB 5 buttons and carrying signs protesting Senate Bill 5 and other extreme legislative proposals. It was already clear that this was going to be an odd situation. Two large black SUVs with darkened windows were parked on the sidewalk in front of Baldwin Hall, a historic quad in the center of campus. Two state patrol cars were also parked nearby. Clearly, rather than walking across the campus, our visitors had ridden in their vehicles across campus sidewalks to get there. Given the heavy security presence, the governor and his party were apparently seeking protection from someone. But from whom?
In total, there were probably about 20 to 25 of us, split roughly equally between students and faculty. Very soon after entering Rhodes Hall, we were confronted by plainclothes and uniformed and armed UC security, who blocked the hallway. We told them that we were there to talk to the governor since he had come to our university. They told us that, given our signs and buttons, we were protesting, and “protestors” had to use the small “free speech zone” on the lawn behind McMicken Hall, quite a distance from where we were. In an effort to be cooperative, we took off our buttons and put our signs into garbage cans. Thus, we were only citizens wanting to speak with our governor. But our request to see the governor was of no avail. The anger that faculty began to express about these restrictions came largely because we considered UC to be our university, where freedom of inquiry and expression were encouraged, not suppressed. These were hallways that faculty walked every day. Our last effort was to try to get a glimpse of the governor when he exited the building to get into the black SUV with the darkened windows. We were reduced to the hope that we might be able to at least shout to him. But then things got worse. As we waited outside Baldwin Hall, UC security backed by state police told us that we could not be in the quad, a very large space ringed by three historic buildings, with the governor. We had to go to the “free speech zone.”
The university’s notorious “free speech zone” deserves some comment. Although the exact history of the zone is not clear, it seems to have been created initially in the late 1960s or early 1970s because of regular Vietnam War protests that disrupted the campus. But over time it had become institutionalized as a small patch of lawn behind McMicken Hall.
So, security forced both faculty and students (we really could not abandon the students at this point) back away from Baldwin Hall about a hundred yards—about the length of a football field—to corral everyone into the free speech zone. By the time faculty and students were cornered in the free speech zone, leaders of other city unions had also arrived, including Doug Sizemore, executive secretary of the Cincinnati AFL-CIO, and stood by us. By this time, it was 5 p.m., and some staff getting off work at administrative offices joined us to show their support. One of them said to me, “We saw what they were doing to you. This is completely wrong.” One campus police officer, sitting in his patrol car “guarding us,” watching the spectacle, remarked, “They should just come out and talk with you. It would solve the whole problem.”
Then it began to rain. In the distance now, we could see people, including President Williams and Gov. Kasich, coming out of the building and getting into the SUVs. We stood our ground because they were going to have to drive on the sidewalk past us to get out. It was the closest we would get to the governor. They took their time as they approached us, but then the drivers stepped on the gas, and the SUVs sped past us. Students chanted, “This is what democracy looks like” as the governor and the president left us standing in the rain.
In retrospect, it is not just the complete lack of respect for Ohioans that the governor demonstrated—though that was bad enough—that concerns me. The events of that day remind me that, as faculty, we must continually press our administrations to understand what the true values of the university are and to defend those values. Not surprisingly, Gov. Kasich never came back to UC during the SB 5 struggle.1
In spite of the Senate’s vote in favor of Senate Bill 5, we remained hopeful that, with the enormous resistance that had been demonstrated against this attack on working people and union workers, we might be able to turn the tide in the House. We had, after all, won over some reasonable Republicans in the Senate, and we aimed, win or lose, to do the same in the House.
The gallery was packed as the House convened late on the morning of March 30. The Democrats, expecting to be run over by the Republican majority, tried delaying tactics. Rep. Connie Pillich (D-Cincinnati) asked that the five-hundred-page bill be read in its entirety. That was quickly defeated on a party-line vote. Later in the debate, Rep. Ted Celeste (D-Columbus) tried to table the bill, which was defeated by another vote, also split along party lines.2
Rep. Joe Uecker (R-Miami Township) opened the Republican attack, saying he was “happy” to be returning to local governments the power to manage their budgets. Uecker seemed to express exasperation at what he perceived as the long and tedious process to which the representatives had been subjected. In reality, it had been a rapid process. He wrongly suggested that substantive changes had been made in the bill, and he criticized the Democrats for making no attempts to amend the bill. As they had in the Senate, Democrats in the House took the position that the whole bill needed to be rejected, not tinkered with. Rep. Uecker portrayed as generous such changes as no longer requiring strikers to be jailed, or that it would no longer be an unfair labor practice to talk to elected officials during contract negotiations, or allowing emergency and medical staff to negotiate for personal safety equipment. In fact, such changes were either common sense or were made to address some of the unconstitutional aspects of Senate Bill 5.
Republican Rep. Louis Blessing of Cincinnati, a longtime opponent of unions, noted that he had voted against the collective bargaining bill back in 1983, and he would vote to eliminate it again through his support of Senate Bill 5. He presented a badly distorted view of the rarely used arbitration process and, quoting Thomas Jefferson in misguided Tea Party parlance, suggested there was “no consent of the governed” in the process that had obviously been established by the people through their elected representatives by legislative action. He particularly criticized the use of union funds to back political candidates but, like other Republicans, did not recognize the parallel situation of corporate political use of revenue generated by employees who, unlike the unions, have no democratic process.
“I rise in opposition to Senate Bill 5,” Rep. Kenny Yuko (D-Toledo) announced. “We call this the People’s House for a reason,” he continued. “It’s because this is where our constituents get their voices heard and get their rights protected. It greatly concerns me that the direction that Senate Bill 5 takes us in tramples on the rights of lots of Ohio workers, it tramples on the very heart and soul of what makes this the great state that it is. That’s our working families.” Yuko, in his fourth term in the Ohio House, said, to warm applause from the gallery as Speaker Batchelder pounded his gavel for order, that he was “very proud to be a union member.” Yuko, a 37-year member of Laborers’ Union Local 310 where he had also served as a union organizer for 25 years, said that he was proud that for more than a hundred years his union had “worked to improve the working rights of every man and woman” and had won for their workers decent pay, a retirement plan, and safe job conditions. “They’ve done a tremendous job . . . They are here today, in force, and I thank them for that and for their friendship and support over the years,” he said.
The 1983 collective bargaining act, Senate Bill 133, had stood the test of time, Yuko said. He noted the state had endured hundreds of strikes before it was adopted but that now strikes were rare. “We keep hearing that if unions don’t get their way, they call a strike. Let’s look at 2010. No strikes. Zero.” In fact, he said, Ohio had had only five strikes in the last three years. “It is not broken. Collective bargaining is working, and it is working well,” he said.
“This is certainly not the first day that middle-class Ohioans have been under attack,” said Matt Szollosi, a Democrat from Oregon, a Toledo suburb—adding that, based on Gov. Kasich’s budget, it would not be the last. Szollosi, the assistant minority leader, said that the governor had tipped his hand during the campaign when he said “we need to break the back of organized labor in the schools” and that workers having a collective voice “threatens our American values.” It was no surprise, then, Szollosi said, that after the election Kasich announced that all the teachers’ unions should take out full-page ads apologizing for the things they had said about him.
The attack on workers in Senate Bill 5 was veiled beneath the argument that “we need to give our managers the tools they need to control their costs,” Szollosi said. “If this were truly about the budget, here is a radical idea: Ask for concessions. Communicate. Not one phone call was made to the state unions offering to reopen negotiations, because Kasich would not have taken yes for an answer.”
The truth, Szollosi said, was that the “underlying purpose of Senate Bill 5 is to weaken the traditional political adversaries of Gov. Kasich and the Republican Party.” Coupled with voter suppression legislation, also being adopted by the legislature despite Democratic resistance, Szollosi argued that “a very clear message” was being sent to working-class Ohioans: “You weren’t on the bus, so you are getting run over.”3
Szollosi specifically corrected Rep. Uecker about the changes that had been made since the bill’s initial introduction in the Senate. The changes had made Senate Bill 5 worse and even more vindictive against the unions and public workers. Szollosi noted that unions are required by federal law to provide fair representation to all members, so for Senate Bill 5 to bar the unions from collecting “fair share” fees for services provided to bargaining unit members who have chosen not be members was not only unfair but was solely designed to cripple the unions politically. Meanwhile, the unions would still be required to represent all members, but those who chose to opt out of membership would get the services for free. Such an attack on the unions, Szollosi said, would do nothing to provide the “tools” and “flexibility” that backers of the bill said they wanted to give to local governments. “What will this do to create jobs? Nothing! What will this do to lower costs? Nothing,” Szollosi thundered. He said that a colleague in the Commerce and Labor Committee, where the provision had been inserted, had told him in explanation, “I like freedom.” Szollosi said, “I think what he should have said was, ‘I like freeloaders.’” Again the gallery burst into applause as Batchelder pounded his gavel.
Szollosi expressed doubt that the Republicans had met with any union correctional officers. He said the supporters of Senate Bill 5 see public employees only as costs. He recounted the dangers faced and injuries suffered by the correctional officers. Szollosi said that during this process he had heard that belonging to a union was a sin, and union members, like those in the gallery, were referred to as “union thugs.” Szollosi introduced Beth Earl in the gallery, president of Franklin County Federation of Children Services Employees, noting to general laughter that she was one of the alleged “union thugs.” In a particularly aggressive speech, Rep. Lynn Wachtmann (R-Napoleon) said he had “never before heard such outrageous comments from the other side.” An ALEC member who has been “honored” as an ALEC Legislator of the Year, Wachtmann said he came to Columbus to represent all workers, not just union workers. “Anyone who has worked in the private sector—or, as I call it, ‘the real world’—needs to understand that we need to have a productive workforce.” He said of Rep. Szollosi, “I won’t call you a liar, but you are wrong.” He said that many Republicans had met with union members from all over the state, “so you’re dead wrong, representative from Toledo,” jabbing his finger toward Szollosi. “For those of you who claim that we don’t listen to all the parties, you’re dead wrong,” he said, glaring around the chamber. He complained about high taxes and poor government services. The current collective bargaining law, he asserted, had been “rammed through the legislature on a 100 percent partisan basis back in 1983” and makes the workforce “unflexible and unproductive compared to the private sector.” Wachtmann idealized the private sector, apparently overlooking the private sector financial collapse of 2008 and Ohio’s own governor’s links to the failed Lehman Brothers. He said that workers and management could get along much better if not for unions getting in the way. Discounting union efforts to create safe working conditions, he essentially blamed the unions for on-the-job injuries.
As Wachtmann went on with his wide-ranging attack on public employees and their unions, a roar of protest from the crowds gathered around the capitol building could be heard. Wachtmann was breathing hard and stopped to catch his breath while boos and jeers filled the room from the protestors in other parts of the capitol. For the most part, the audience in the gallery had remained quiet during Wachtmann’s tirade, but when he said Ohio had “crumbled” under former Gov. Strickland, the gallery erupted in laughter. As he went on and had to speak louder to be heard he said, “I hope there are no school groups taking a tour, because the rudeness and the loudness of people . . .” he paused again as laughter again filled the room and Speaker Batchelder pounded his gavel. “I’m dead serious. You think it’s funny. Hundreds of school kids come in the building every week to learn about Ohio history,” he continued as more laughter rippled through the room. If there were any children in the building, they were getting a lesson from Rep. Wachtmann in what ruthless, ideologically driven politics was all about.4
Democrat Dennis Murray of Sandusky said that such an important piece of legislation, which would so dramatically change the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, deserved a careful dialogue with the unions and with management. Instead, there was only a “monologue.” Because of the billions of dollars in budget cuts being imposed on school districts and local governments by the Republican-controlled legislature, “Senate Bill 5 is a union-busting bill masquerading as cost-control.” Far from offering “flexibility,” Murray maintained, Senate Bill 5 would be the precursor of “vastly more top-down control of local governments.” He scoffed at Republicans who wanted to get credit for not having language in the bill requiring jail time for strikers. Because the bill makes strikes illegal and gives administrations the right to ask for court injunctions, “it is obvious that the only way to enforce an injunction is either a fine or jail time.”
“These are moral issues” that the legislature was dealing with, Murray asserted, “involving principles of justice and participation,” not just dollars and cents. While Americans were living through the greatest disparity of wealth in American history, he said, the corporate greed that had really caused the great recession was fueling a national scheme to scapegoat unions. “Unions are the thin blue line for the middle class,” Murray said. And, make no mistake, he said, antiunion forces would next take on private unions through so-called right-to-work legislation as soon as Senate Bill 5 was accomplished.
Rep. Ron Young (R-Leroy Township) said he supported Senate Bill 5, not because he was part of some huge corporate conspiracy to destroy unions, but because it was a matter of “pure mathematics.” Echoing the discredited claims of Sen. Jones, Young said, “we simply don’t have the money any longer.” And although he accurately recounted the heavy job losses that Ohio had faced in the last ten years, he inaccurately said that the number of public employees had stayed the same—and, most importantly, he did not point out that public unions had made large concessions over the last several years or that Republican tax policies were largely responsible for manufacturing the revenue shortage.
Several other Republican representatives echoed the same inaccurate depictions of Senate Bill 5’s provisions, tweaking them a bit for their own personal interests, to express support of the bill. They included Rep. Kristina Roegner of Hudson (near Akron), Rep. Mike Dovilla of Berea (suburban Cleveland), and Rep. Michael Henne of Clayton (suburban Dayton).
Rep. Dan Ramos (D-Lorain) said he had many problems with the bill, given its “gaping holes, glaring omissions, and rampant contradictions.” He noted, for example, that new provisions in the bill would bar university professors from union membership simply for doing their jobs, like designing courses. “Every professor who testified before us, and others who have contacted us separately, have maintained that this just doesn’t make sense,” he noted, adding that “professors do not run our public colleges” and should not be wrongly defined as management.
Rep. John Adams (R-Sidney) provided a lengthy statement in favor of Senate Bill 5. Although the Ohio legislature is packed with ALEC members, Adams is the most prominent. Ohio’s ALEC co-chair, not only was Adams a 2010 recipient of ALEC’s Legislator of the Year award but he has been a longtime member of the organization’s Tax and Fiscal Policy Task Force. Having such a stalwart as majority whip of the Ohio House really put ALEC in the driver’s seat for getting legislation hostile to the middle class enacted as long as Adams and his Republican colleagues had control of the legislature. Even Adams’s legislative aide Kara Joseph won the 2011 ALEC Volunteer of the Year Award.
In a classic political strategy, Adams worked to keep the issue focused locally by attacking his own school district. Interestingly, in the Republican primary in 2012, self-employed engineer Dave Easton ran against Adams and was particularly opposed to Adams’s support for private school vouchers because they would undermine the local school district. Further, Easton said he would have opposed Senate Bill 5. Adams handily defeated Easton in the primary.5
In clinical terms, Adams said that if costs are never realigned with tax revenues, then greater levies will become a constant. “Over and over again,” he said, “my school district has failed to control costs.” Adams complained about steady and significant increases in per-pupil spending that greatly outpaced inflation. He was, however, quoting numbers and comments from an essay by Mary McCleary from the right-wing Buckeye Institute about the Sidney school district.6 As any public employee knows, the Buckeye Institute’s numbers about public employee compensation are often inaccurate because of over-estimating compensation. For example, they provide inflated pension estimates for members of the State Teachers Retirement System (STRS) but then do not check to see whether the person in question is actually a member of STRS. To further obscure the reality, the Buckeye Institute shows Social Security totals for Ohio public employees despite the fact that they are ineligible for Social Security.7
Rep. Bob Hagan (D-Youngstown), known for his fiery speeches, said he had made some notes for his address that underlined the advice “Don’t get angry.” “But,” he said, “as I listen to my Republican colleagues, in more cases than not, they sound like concession speeches at the next election.” Once again Batchelder pounded his gavel to silence the laughter and applause. “We have to be mindful of what is transpiring here today,” Hagan continued. “Think about what we’re doing.” He noted that March 25 marked the hundredth anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City, in which 146 union workers were killed, most of them immigrant women. They were “killed because the greed of that owner made him decide it was more important to lock the doors because someone might take a break on the fire escape.” Because of that tragedy, the nation started to adopt labor laws, fire codes, and child labor laws. “I know you are thinking ‘these are private sector people,’” Hagan said. But, he said, he himself was marking his fortieth year as a locomotive engineer for the CSX Railway. “For 24 years, I’ve sat in this chamber and listened to people denigrate working people as if they were a scourge on America, as if they were responsible for the budget,” he said. He reminded the Republicans that they had voted to cut more than $4 billion from the budget in 2004 under the Taft Administration, a giveaway largely to big corporations and the wealthy.
“Now you are saying the cookie jar is empty. But you are responsible for the largest corporate tax break in the history of Ohio,” Hagan said, because “you wanted to make sure that your friends were taken care of.” Continuing to hammer away at the Republican position, he said, “Some of you have said you ‘listened’ to the testimony. Apparently, you didn’t ‘hear.’” Hagan noted that his father, as a legislator, had voted in favor of the collective bargaining bill back in 1983 and that now he, too, would be voting to protect working people. “This is an attack on the middle class,” he roared. “Don’t try to dance around it.”
Rep. Nickie Antonio (D-Lakewood) said she had heard much in the debate about how SB 5 protected “traditional management rights.” She then talked about her mother, who had worked in a bank. It was a private sector job, and there was no union. Because of discrimination against women in the workplace, her mother had had to train a young man to be her supervisor. “He was going to make twice as much, and if my mother didn’t like it,” Antonio said, “she was told, ‘There’s the door. Go, because there are ten other people who want your job.’” Antonio said that during the testimony they heard stories of families being hurt by breaking the unions. “What in the world are we doing?” she asked. “What have we come to that we are trying so hard to lower the bar?”
Antonio also objected to apparent Republican displeasure that 85 percent of the budgets at public schools are directed toward teacher salaries. “What else would we be paying for?” she asked in disbelief. “Chalk?” Antonio said she was ashamed that many of the public employees in their testimony felt the need to apologize for their modest salaries. “I think it is appalling that their right to make a decent middle-class living has been demonized,” she said.
Perhaps the most puzzling statement came from Rep. James Butler, a Republican from Oakwood, a suburb of Dayton. “I’m disappointed,” he said, “about what I’m seeing from the other side of the aisle. I see anger, I see separation. We are all in this together.” The gallery laughed out loud at this comment. “Yeah,” he said, “people are angry, people are pointing, you can see it in their eyes. That’s the system, ‘Us versus Them,’” he continued. “The underlying disease,” Butler said, finally getting to his point, “is public sector collective bargaining—collective bargaining, in general, for that matter.” Contrary to Butler’s comments, the disease, in the eyes of many, was the extremism that had seized the legislature.
“We are undergoing a profound change,” said Rep. James Barnes (D-Cleveland), “and I know that on Election Day in November, the people of Ohio did not vote for radical change.” Ohioans, he said, had voted for an “opportunity for access to the American dream: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Calling the debate a “historic day,” Barnes predicted that what the House was about to do would be mocked across the nation. “We are sending a message that the welcome mat is not out in the state of Ohio for workers. We are sending a very definite message . . . ‘Don’t come to Ohio if you want a fair shake in the workplace,’” he said, adding that supporters of Senate Bill 5 had been “demonizing” workers. “That’s wrong, and we shouldn’t be doing this in this day and time.” Barnes noted that he has been very involved in the labor movement through his work with AFSCME. Barnes, a Black man, said that in the history of that union, perhaps the most significant single event was on April 4, 1968, when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while helping over thirteen hundred sanitation workers, members of AFSCME, in Memphis. “Dr. King went down to Memphis,” Barnes said, “and he tried to help people in a peaceful way to recognize the importance of the dignity of man and to understand the collective bargaining process and the inherent rights guaranteed by our Constitution.”
Barnes noted that the sponsor and supporters of Senate Bill 5 continually claimed it was needed to give tools to the government to cut costs. Barnes picked up a copy of an AFSCME contract, noting that many contracts have similar provisions, including a management-rights section. He read: “Management has the right to run the city.” Barnes remarked, “that sounds like plenty of rights.” He continued in another section: “Management shall have the sole right” to take action to run the city. Barnes said he wanted to know whose idea it was to use Senate Bill 5 to send a message to all the city governments that they are incapable of running their cities. “Is that the reason that we have not been able to produce jobs in Ohio?” he asked. “If you can’t negotiate a contract, is that why we are losing people across this state every day? If you can’t negotiate a contract, why are you there?” Tossing the contract on the table, he said loudly and with exasperation, “If you can’t negotiate a contract, why don’t you just sit down and get out of the way? Because evidently you don’t know what you are doing if you are saying that public employees are not giving you the authority to act.” Criticizing Ohio’s city governments that were lobbying in favor of Senate Bill 5, he went on: “Isn’t that interesting, they come down here with all that we have to deal with, a host of issues, yet they come down here and say ‘We can’t do it.’ Well, they need to get out of the way and let some people who can do it.”
“This bill is not about policy,” emphasized Michael Foley (D-Cleveland). “This bill is about raw political power. That’s why we are so upset, and that’s why our friends in the gallery are. This has nothing to do with balancing budgets.” Instead, he said, it was all about “consolidating Republican power,” the same as it had been with House Bill 159 (a voter suppression bill), which the GOP had pushed through a week before. Foley said he understood there would be changes with the Republican sweep in November 2010, but that this was “consolidating power to the detriment of the middle class.” He said his son had become very interested in politics and had come across a definition of what was going on in the Ohio legislature. The word was “Plutocracy: government of, by, and for the rich,” an observation that drew approving laughter and applause from the crowd and a pounding gavel from Batchelder. “That’s what I fear we are heading for,” Foley said, and recited a list of indications of the growing disparity between the rich and poor. He mocked the governor’s recent statements about “shared sacrifice.” Kasich was not talking about the wealthy, Foley pointed out; instead, Kasich was asking for sacrifice from the poor and the middle class and “the people who fight fires and teach kids” and provide security.
“Ohio is polarized because of Senate Bill 5,” Alicia Reece (D-Cincinnati) observed, saying that real leadership would lead to rejecting the whole bill and starting over. Ohio’s shareholders are not just the rich, she said; they are everyone, including public workers. “We work for them, too, and the people that sweep the floors in the capitol.” She said that she had spent a lot of time in the hospital with her mother, who had succumbed to breast cancer. “Thank God for those nurses. The nurses were wonderful,” she said. “So, who am I to say that you are good enough to take care of me and my mother but not good enough to negotiate better wages and not good enough to have health care yourself?” Reece said she had come to the legislature to move Ohio forward but that this bill “takes us a hundred years backwards.” She said she had been thinking of her grandfather, a Navy veteran who had served in two wars but who, as a young Black man, could only find work shining shoes when he came home. Thanks to the unions, who had created a fair employment process, her grandfather was able to get hired at the post office. “He was able to build his house, his piece of the American dream,” she said. “The people in the labor movement, they got our backs,” Reece said.
“And we show our gratitude by introducing Senate Bill 5 to stab them in the back. My grandfather would turn in his grave if he thought his granddaughter would support something like this.”
Like Rep. Barnes, Reece referenced Martin Luther King. On Martin Luther King Day, she said, Americans are now quick to quote and praise the civil rights leader. But, she noted, “we should remember that not everyone was on his side [when he was alive].” The question facing the House that day, she said, was, “Which side of history are you going to be on? I want to be on the right side of history.” She said she wished the public employees and their unions had been brought in as the bill was being written, rather than only being allowed to comment as it was being imposed upon them. She talked about the huge crowds from all over Ohio that had turned out at the capitol to oppose SB 5. “I see this as a David and Goliath movement—little Davids, the nurses, the teachers, the janitors, the custodians, the little Davids, firefighters, the police officers, the correctional officers, the little Davids, the bus drivers, the social workers, the sanitation workers.” She paused for emphasis before concluding, “I urge a no vote on this bill. But I will tell you, the little Davids are in this fight to the end. And there will be a time, when we take this to the ballot, that the government Goliath will be challenged.”
Rep. Armond Budish (D-Beachwood) gave the last anti-Senate Bill 5 address. The House minority leader also cited the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and then listed the several specific aspects of the bill that would be detrimental to public workers. Looking across the chamber, he said, “Listening to Representative Wachtmann today, I could picture him giving that anti-worker speech a hundred years ago, and Representative Wachtmann, I also hope there were no school children here to hear your speech.”
Loud cheers and applause broke out, and in addition to pounding his gavel, Speaker Batchelder growled sharply, “That’s enough! The gentleman is instructed to make no personal references to another member of this House.” Of course, when Rep. Wachtmann had attacked another House member, Speaker Batchelder said nothing.
Budish maintained that “collective bargaining levels the playing field between workers and their employers. It is only a question of fairness.” Budish ridiculed what he saw as the main conception behind Senate Bill 5—that government officials, at both state and local levels, are too weak and incompetent to negotiate contracts. “Is that really your argument? Seriously?” Budish asked. “Governor Kasich and many of you say Senate Bill 5 is needed to give government tools to control their costs,” he said, noting that it appeared that Gov. Kasich had built his whole budget on that concept. Kasich, Budish observed, planned to cut more than a billion dollars from local governments and more than $3 billion from school districts, but was telling them they should not worry because SB 5, by crushing the unions, would allow governments and schools to control costs. “That sure sounds a lot better than telling them the truth,” Budish said, and the truth was that “the draconian budget cuts means slashing jobs and salaries.” He further declared, “We should honor and respect our public servants. Your vote for Senate Bill 5 insults and demeans them and undermines the middle class.” But, he said, this would be only a first step, because attacks on private sector unions were sure to be next.
The last two House members to speak on Senate Bill 5 were Republicans who supported the bill and were both members of the ALEC Civil Justice Task Force: Rep. Bill Coley of Middletown and Rep. Matt Huffman of Lima. They repeated the largely unfounded Republican arguments in different ways and added little of substance. At the conclusion of Huffman’s statement, Speaker Batchelder called for the vote. The panel lit up in red and green, and Batchelder announced the total: 53 in favor and 44 against, a nearly perfect party-line vote. Four Republicans had joined the Democrats in voting no, and two Republicans were not present for the vote.
Howls of protest erupted from the gallery. “Will the patrol clear the hall,” Batchelder called. As the din grew louder and angrier, he asked that House members remain seated. Many Democrats, however, wandered the floor taking video on their cell phones of what they knew was an historic moment.
Jeers and shouts of “Ohio hates you” filled the air in the House chamber. A large banner was unfurled from the gallery, saying in big bright letters, “Your Corporate Owners Thank You,” with a reference to the Koch brothers. Another banner read, “Thanks for Corporate Welfare.” As the crowd very slowly left, their defiant chant echoed loudly in the chamber, making normal conversation impossible: “Shame on you, shame on you, shame on you.”
On Thursday, March 31, the amended bill quickly flew through the Senate in the concurrence vote by the identical 17–16 margin. The expectation was that Kasich would act quickly and sign the bill on Friday. But, reflective of the extremist nature of the process and ideology behind SB 5, Kasich scheduled a special Thursday evening signing.
Gov. Kasich had said that when the bill passed, there would be no celebratory signing event and that he might sign it privately. That certainly was not true. Instead, Kasich gathered in an ornate room with his Republican allies in the union-busting drive to sign the bill with fanfare. With a full contingent of cameras and journalists, Kasich signed the bill with, at his elbow, Senate President Tom Niehaus, House Speaker William Batchelder, Rep. Louis Blessing, and the bill’s sole sponsor, Sen. Shannon Jones.
Kasich even used the hours before he signed SB 5 to try to fundraise with the legislative victory. Shortly after its passage, Kasich sent out an email to his supporters, asking them to back his “ongoing efforts to fight for Ohio taxpayers” by donating $5, $10, or $20. Talking about people like me, who, as a “boss,” served in an unpaid position with the AAUP, Kasich wrote, “There is a reason that the union bosses opposed these changes, because it strips power from the union leaders and returns it to the taxpayers and workers.” Such a comment suggests that he never did understand what the fight over Senate Bill 5 was really about.8
The signing itself was broadcast live on the Ohio News Network and provided plenty of film for late-night news across the state. Kasich, enthused by his apparent victory, explained the same talking points that all supporters of the bill had parroted: “gives tools to control costs,” “provides flexibility,” “unsustainable costs,” and so on. Kasich continued that this was an effort to provide a balance between government employees versus “those folks in the private sector.”
“Let me be clear about a couple of things,” Kasich said, going on to deny criticisms that many had leveled at the union-busting drive. Kasich maintained that the bill would not cut anybody’s salary, would not take away anybody’s pension, and would not destroy anybody’s healthcare. However, he neglected to say that it would create the probability of all that happening. “This is an effort to provide balance,” he said about a bill that made collective bargaining a sham. He then went on to misrepresent, once again, the fact that public worker’s compensation is demonstrably less than that of those employed in comparable work in the private sector. Kasich then pointed out how the economic collapse had hurt so many Ohioans. Since, as an investment banker on Wall Street, Kasich had taken part in the profession that had crippled the economy in 2008, there was much irony—apparently lost on the governor—in his suggesting that now he was trying to help Ohioans whose livelihoods had been shattered. Anticipating that his own budget bill was going to hurt local governments and school districts, he said SB 5 would allow them to deal with fewer resources. He then went on to suggest that his SB 5 and its union-busting impact were part of his “growth agenda.”9
“I’m proud of the members of the legislature,” Kasich said. “They have been my partners since I was inaugurated as governor.” He went on to point out a couple of other controversial bills he had pushed through the legislature, specifically mentioning his JobsOhio program, which had privatized the economic development arm of the state government and, as seems obvious, made it easier to funnel public money into wealthy private hands. Much of the news conference was an opportunity for the Republican leadership to congratulate themselves on a job well done.
President Niehaus, saying “this was a good day for Ohio,” repeated many of the same maxims. But Niehaus particularly praised Sen. Jones for sponsoring the bill. “This is kind of an amazing evening,” Speaker Batchelder said, “for those of us who served here in 1983 when the original bill was passed . . . Tonight, we will know that the people of this state will be treated equally.” Like Kasich, Batchelder repeated the misinformation that public workers were paid more than their private sector counterparts, but he went further, to perfectly explain the flaw in the argument: “When you have a lady working at McDonald’s, who doesn’t really have much to take home to her kids, to tax her to subsidize those who are paid a great deal more and given better benefits, it’s not fair.” Batchelder suggested that busting the unions would give “inspiration for those who work very long hours, for very little pay, almost no benefits. Now they know they are just as important in Ohio.”
Batchelder, of course, was endorsing a race to the bottom where, no matter how many college degrees or how much experience or what kind of expertise a school teacher or a government engineer or scientist had, they should be in exactly the situation of the fast food worker that he described: “long hours, very little pay, almost no benefits.” Obviously, McDonald’s workers and others in the fast food industry deserve better pay and benefits, but Batchelder and the Republicans never proposed that in any legislation.
Saying that Speaker Pro-Tem Louis Blessing of Cincinnati had been “integral” to the passage of SB 5, Kasich praised Blessing for his important role, equating Blessing’s work on SB 5 to the Cincinnati Reds hitting a walk-off home run. “Thank you, Governor,” Blessing said with a broad smile. The long-term legislator then praised Shannon Jones for her courage. Saying that all the leadership was “spectacular,” he said he had never before worked with a governor who would say “Let’s do this” without considering the political consequences. In time, Blessing said, union contracts were going to “compress”—an artful way of saying that salaries and benefits would shrink for middle-class Ohioans.
Calling Shannon Jones a “friend,” Kasich introduced the sponsor of Senate Bill 5 to the assembled media. “I think a handful of thank-yous are appropriate,” Jones said. She thanked her family, Niehaus (for his “resolve”), the entire leadership team of the Senate, especially Sen. Kevin Bacon (who was a “rock”), Speaker Batchelder and Rep. Blessing (for some really “smart work”), and “obviously,” Gov. Kasich for his “unwavering commitment.”
“But mostly,” Jones went on, “I would like to thank all those brave constituents all across Ohio, really dedicated and committed public servants . . . under difficult circumstances, who came to the statehouse to show how they need the flexibility to turn their communities around.” She concluded by thanking the governor again and saying she looked forward, “maybe, for what’s to come.”
“Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet,” Kasich quipped.
It would turn out that Gov. Kasich was right about that—but not in the way he expected. Soon the smug confidence expressed at the signing and the ruthlessness demonstrated in the passage of Senate Bill 5 would be shattered by a historic groundswell of resistance to union busting and to attacks on the middle class that would reverberate far beyond Ohio’s borders.