Ohio Gov to Public Employees: You strike, you get punished

Kasich: You strike, you get punished

Joe Hallett and Jim Siegel
The Columbus Dispatch
February 11, 2011

A day after hundreds of public employees jammed the Statehouse to protest a bill they believe will kill their unions, Gov. John Kasich said he is working on an even-tougher version, one that would punish workers who go on strike.

If the Republican-controlled legislature doesn't fashion a collective-bargaining reform bill to his liking, Kasich said yesterday, then he will include language in the coming state budget to enact the changes he wants.

"I have my own proposal right now," Kasich told reporters after a speech to the Ohio Newspaper Association in Columbus.

"We would outlaw strikes, and the penalties would either be firing or docked wages," the governor said.

Asked what recourse public union workers would have under his proposal, Kasich said, "They have a job. They should continue to negotiate and try to come up with something."

Kasich's statements underscored the resolve of Republicans, who enjoy hefty majorities in the House and Senate, to roll back the power of public-employee unions. On Wednesday, a Senate committee opened hearings on a measure sponsored by Sen. Shannon Jones, R-Springboro, to eliminate collective bargaining for all state workers and significantly weaken it at the local level.

More than 800 public-employee unionists, including police and firefighters, packed Statehouse rooms as the hearings began, signaling an all-out campaign to stop what many of them view as a GOP assault on the very existence of their unions.

"We're going to have a lower-wage employee, where the state is going to be less competitive," said Bruce Wyngaard, associate executive director of the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association. "These lower wages and benefits are going to have an impact on our communities. In order to have a healthy community, you've got to have good jobs."

Although on Wednesday Kasich signaled support for Jones' bill, he said yesterday that he is working on his own bill, the elements of which could end up in the two-year budget he must unveil by March 15.

Kasich said he will watch Jones' bill go through the process, "and if it doesn't come out the way that I like it - and that's fine, you have to let the legislature do their job - I'll have it in the budget."

The governor said his bill would include provisions for a fact-finder to bring clarity to labor disputes and for transparency so the public would know what management and labor are proposing.

"At some point, there would be a vote; the legislative body would be in a position to finally vote (on labor contracts)," Kasich said.

Some Republican lawmakers last week got a two-page guide to proposed changes in the collective-bargaining law from a top official at the Department of Administrative Services. They were told it was the governor's plan, but administration officials disavowed it yesterday, saying it did not necessarily reflect what Kasich ultimately will propose.

Pieter Wycoff, department spokesman, said the guide was prepared by Cleveland lawyer Gary Johnson, whom the administration might hire for collective-bargaining advice.

"He was just generating some ideas about things to look at to reform collective bargaining," Wycoff said. "We're still considering those ideas and others. We haven't made any final decisions on what we're going to have in the bill."

Provisions in the guide, most of which are included in Jones' bill, would prohibit all public employees, not just police and firefighters, from going on strike. Along with possible termination, workers could be fined two days' pay for every day they strike, and their unions could lose the right to deduct dues from paychecks.

In his speech to the newspaper association, Kasich restated his intent to eliminate binding arbitration, the use of outside arbitrators to break contract stalemates with public-safety forces.

"I can promise you that big-city mayors favor what I'm doing," Kasich said. "They want this. They're not going to tell you that, but they want this."

But a spokesman for Columbus Mayor Michael B. Coleman said the mayor supports binding arbitration.

"The threat of binding arbitration is one that neither labor nor management looks forward to," said Dan Williamson. "Having said that, it has worked quite well for us in terms of the end result. We've liked where we've ended up when we've used binding arbitration. So our experience is that it's a fair process, and if you have a good case to make, you'll be heard."

Kasich also told the newspaper association that he wants to eliminate the law requiring union-scale wages, the so-called prevailing wage, to be paid in public construction projects.

Jeffrey Keefe, associate professor of labor and employment relations at Rutgers University, recently completed a study of public-worker compensation in Ohio and found that hourly wages of state and local workers are 3.3 percent lower than those of comparable private-sector employees.

"State and local government employees in Ohio are not overcompensated," Keefe said. "If anything, they're undercompensated, but basically what I see is that they're equitably compensated."