Ohio House Approves Bill to Curb Benefits for Public Workers
The Republican-led Ohio House approved a bill limiting collective bargaining for about 360,000 state and local government workers and requiring minimum contributions for health care and pensions.
The House voted 53-44, returning the measure to the Senate to concur with changes it made. The Senate approved a version of the bill March 2 and Republican Governor John Kasich has said he supports it.
“I am happy today to be part of giving back to local governments the tools necessary to manage their budgets both today and in the future, to manage their expenses and to be returning traditional management rights to those who were elected to make those decisions,” Representative Joseph Uecker, the Republican chairman of the House Commerce and Labor Committee, said before the vote. The remark prompted heckling from the audience in the House chamber.
Ohio Democrats have vowed to ask voters to repeal the measure. That would require collecting more than 231,000 valid voters’ signatures within 90 days of its approval, thereby preventing it from taking effect until the vote, according to the secretary of state’s office. That would happen in November or in November 2012, depending on when Kasich signs the bill, the secretary’s office has said.
Not Just Numbers
“These folks are not numbers on a page or lines on a graph,” state Representative Matt Szollosi, assistant Democratic leader, said during debate on the bill. “They are people with families, often times living paycheck to paycheck.”
“They do not deserve to be slapped in the face and put further into harm’s way, because the liberty groups or Tea Party groups or whoever is pulling the Republican strings right now have demonized public workers,” Szollosi said.
Similar legislation that passed this month in Wisconsin championed by Republican Governor Scott Walker has been challenged in court by Democrats, who also are seeking recall elections of eight Republican senators.
With states facing combined shortfalls that may reach $112 billion during the next fiscal year, Kasich and Walker say the bills will help balance budgets without raising taxes and give state and local governments tools to control costs.
Democrats and union leaders say the Republican governors, who both took office in January, are trying to bust unions and limit their support of Democratic candidates. The bills have sparked weeks of protests at the statehouses in Madison and Columbus.
Into the Bone
Tim Alger, 38, a firefighter from Portsmouth, Ohio, protesting the bill outside the House chamber, said it would cut his family’s income by 10 percent at a time when he already lives paycheck to paycheck.
“All the fat’s been cut and now they’re going to cut into what we need,” said Alger, who has already stopped contributing to his son’s college account so as to pay his monthly bills.
Ohio House Republicans made changes to the bill, including prohibiting contracts that require employees who are not part of a union to pay “fair share” fees and banning deductions for contributions to a political action committee, according to an analysis by the Ohio Legislative Service Commission.
Limited Negotiations
The bill continues to allow collective bargaining only for wages, hours and working conditions. The House added a provision saying that safety force could still bargain over equipment issues, the commission said. Leaders of Ohio police and fire unions had said their members would otherwise be endangered.
The measure would eliminate binding arbitration to resolve impasses in contract negotiations with police and fire unions, and makes all public-employee strikes illegal. It removes the proposed fine and jail time for violating the no-strike provision, the commission said.
The bill also preserves requirements that employees pay at least 15 percent of the premium costs for their health insurance and forbids public employers from paying any of the employees’ share of their pension costs. It replaces automatic pay increases for public workers with merit-based pay.
A Quinnipiac University poll conducted March 15-21 found that Ohio voters disagree with limits on state worker contracts when asked about “collective-bargaining rights,” 54 percent to 35 percent. When the question was rephrased to just “collective bargaining,” the margin was 48 percent to 41 percent, according to the poll released March 23.
-- With assistance from Lisa Aurand in Columbus, Ohio. Editors: Stephen Merelman, Walid El-Gabry
To contact the reporters on this story: Mark Niquette in Columbus, Ohio, at mniquette@bloomberg.net; Alison Vekshin in San Francisco at avekshin@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Tannenbaum at mtannen@bloomberg.net
Rate These Stories
Rate this Page