(The following appeared on the Cleveland Plain Dealer website on February 17, 2011.)
COLUMBUS, Ohio — As many as 3,800 boisterous public workers from across the state descended on the Ohio Statehouse on Thursday, rocking the normally sleepy Capitol to protest a far-reaching bill that would restrict collective bargaining rights.
The protest was similar to what has exploded in Wisconsin this week. On Thursday, for the third day in a row, tens of thousands of state and local union workers protested against a similar proposal from that state’s governor, Scott Walker.
The union workers filled the Statehouse’s atrium, rotunda areas and adjacent stairwells as they listened to testimony on Senate Bill 5 being piped in over speakers from a heavily guarded second-floor hearing room.
At stake here is Ohio’s nearly 30-year-old collective bargaining law that hasn’t been changed since its inception. It gives organized state and local workers the right to collectively bargain for their working conditions and allows police and fire officials a right to seek binding arbitration.
But under the direction of Republican Gov. John Kasich, the GOP-controlled legislature is ready to rewrite the law and ban collective bargaining for all state employees and sharply curtail binding arbitration rules for local governments.
The full story appears at www.cleveland.com.