This week’s defeat of Ohio Senate Bill 5 is just a preview of what can be expected during the 2012 elections, as Ohio voters rejected public union limits.

Big Labor, realizing that it had to protect its public unions, showed its solidarity as it spent almost $30 Million dollars and filled the streets with foot soldiers to ensure Senate Bill 5 was defeated (see Public Unions: Last Hope for Big Labor at America’s Expense!, Off-year Ohio election posts highest turnout in 20 years and Unions Target New Ohio Law). In a foreshadowing of the 2012 elections, the gasping dinosaurs showed they are not going down quietly!

Conversely, it was evident that Governor Kasich and other Ohio republicans were not prepared and did not understand the labor machine or their corporate campaign playbook, and they were subsequently steamrolled by these tactics (as described in Corporate Campaigns: Vehicle to Forced Unionism and Political Payback). Obviously, they did not learn from Wisconsin, where massive changes to collective bargaining laws were successful and, as a result, the state is now headed towards a balanced budget (as seen in A Win in Wisconsin! Next, the Rest of the Country). The difference in these two situations was that Wisconsin’s Governor had a plan and was prepared for Big Labor’s scorched earth attacks. (more…)

School reformers across the nation are closely watching Ohio, where a statewide referendum next Tuesday will determine the fate of SB 5, the legislation that would greatly curtail collective bargaining privileges for teachers and other public employees.

This gutsy law, approved by the legislature and Gov. John Kasich, is similar to the very effective Act 10 in Wisconsin. It would allow cash-strapped school boards to cut labor costs, balance their budgets and put more focus on student instruction without interference from local unions.

Of course the teachers unions (and every other sort of union) hate this law, because it threatens their ability to dominate school budgets. They led a petition drive to challenge the law through popular referendum and are pouring cash into the campaign to kill it.

We Are Ohio, the coalition spearheading opposition to the law, received $19 million in donations during the last campaign financing reporting period, according to a recent story in the Columbus Dispatch. In contrast, Building a Better Ohio, which supports the law, reported contributions of nearly $7.6 million.

Of course, much of the money for We Are Ohio is coming from organized labor. Reports indicate that the Ohio Education Association contributed more than $4.75 million to the campaign in the most recent filing period. (more…)

Over the past few weeks, we have brought your attention to how the unions behind the front group “We Are Ohio” are intertwined with the radical socialist/communist movement in America. First, we laid out for you who funds the vast majority of “We Are Ohio’s” campaign and how they have expressed not only support but provided coordination and accommodations for the “Occupy” movement, which is organized almost entirely by socialists who want to overthrow the American economy.

Then, we showed you that their “Statewide Youth Outreach Coordinator” is deeply involved in the “Occupy” protests around Ohio and openly decribes himself as a “revolutionary” whose goal is to implement communism in America. Now, “We Are Ohio” is hosting an official event with another radical self-admitted communist, Van Jones.

The American Dream Movement is flexing its muscle in Ohio. I’m coming to Columbus to be a part of it. This Thursday, November 3, we’re gonna Rock the Repeal of Senate Bill 5 and restore the voice of hard-working, middle-class Ohioans in their workplaces by voting “No” on Issue 2.

Yes, the “We Are Ohio” unions are bringing in the same guy who said this:

But in jail, he said, “I met all these young radical people of color — I mean really radical, communists and anarchists. And it was, like, ‘This is what I need to be a part of.’” Although he already had a plane ticket, he decided to stay in San Francisco. “I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary.” In the months that followed, he let go of any lingering thoughts that he might fit in with the status quo. “I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th,” he said. “By August, I was a communist.”

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There’s something union front We Are Ohio doesn’t want you to know about their largest donor, the Ohio Education Association: OEA has such a history of internal strife, it’s obvious OEA bosses are awful negotiators. This is a tiny problem for people who siphon millions from teachers on the strength of their negotiating skills, don’t you think?

Signs placed by OEA staff during a 2010 strike encouraged their Executive Director to kill himself

I’ve covered in depth the unlovely things OEA staff have said about union bosses, but they pale compared to this:

PROFESSIONAL STAFF VOTES “NO CONFIDENCE” IN EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
The 110 member Professional Staff Union (PSU) has voted overwhelmingly “…to declare a lack of confidence in the Executive Director of the Ohio Education Association to lead the professional staff or to implement the program of the Ohio Education Association effectively.”

Emphasis in the May 31, 2010 original (view as PDF), which I printed from an official OEA staff blog before it vanished from public view weeks after I began sharing quotes. Coincidence!

The resolution states that the Executive Director, “…in little more than a year on the job, has presided over the greatest and most rapid deterioration in the relationship between the OEA and its professional staff since a month long strike in 1997” as well as “…the greatest and most rapid deterioration of professional staff morale.”

Serious stuff, ultimately leading to a strike against OEA. This Executive Director got the boot, right?

Wrong!

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In the fight against government union reform in Ohio, the Ohio Education Association (OEA) is the largest donor by a landslide. Ohio’s NEA affiliate charged every member $54 to help kill Senate Bill 5, and they’ve dumped $5.8 million into a $30.5 million campaign whose message is equal parts simple and dishonest:

Vote NO on Issue 2 on November 8th to help repeal Senate Bill 5, the unfair attack on employee rights and worker safety in Ohio.

The unions are too busy beating this drum to offer any evidence reform is an attack on workers that makes them less safe; the only reason to vote against Issue 2 is because the unions demand it. Since OEA has given more to the anti-reform effort than anyone, let’s see if OEA deserves Ohio’s trust!

Government unions have a straightforward business model: using money from members’ paychecks, lobby for endless tax increases and convince workers that only the union cares. From a taxpayer’s perspective this is bad enough, but OEA takes it one step further. The union pays itself big bucks to demonize Ohio’s elected officials and job creators.

These are just the OEA staff & officers paid more than $150,000. In 2010, more than 100 OEA employees were paid six figures! Strange that folks who make a living defending poor, unappreciated educators do so by shaking them down for triple the average Ohio teacher’s salary.

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Union bosses in Ohio and Washington, D.C. are – oddly enough – opposed to the sensible government union reforms in Ohio’s Senate Bill 5. Exactly how opposed? Combine yesterday’s cash and in-kind numbers from the Ohio Secretary of State with the figures from July, and you’ll see that unions have sunk more than $28 million into the campaign against Issue 2.

Out of $30.5 million dollars given to We Are Ohio since the union front group was created this spring, the overwhelming majority is directly from union bosses standing to lose power over Ohio taxpayers when Issue 2 passes. It’s been expensive convincing Ohioans that government union reform will destroy the middle class and return Ohio to the days of Jim Crow laws. Who has contributed the most to “We Are Ohio’s” dishonest smear campaign?

• Ohio Education Association (state NEA affiliate): $5.87 million
• AFSCME (D.C.) $3 million
• National Labor Table (D.C.): $3 million
  
• AFSCME Local 11: $1.94 million
• National Education Association  (D.C.): $2 million
• Communications Workers of America (D.C.): $1.5 million
  
• AFL-CIO (D.C.): $1.5 million
• AFSCME Local 4: $1.46 million
• Ohio Federation of Teachers (state AFT affiliate): $1.26 million
• SEIU 1199 (New York): $1 million
• SEIU 1199 (Ohio): $1 million

It’s also worth noting that more than $100,000 of the non-individual Ohio contributions are from the Ohio Democratic Party, and nearly every individual donor who lists a profession is a union rep. This could prove donors’ selfless dedication to the happiness of Ohio government employees (taxpayers and cruel “mathematics” aside)… but that isn’t what my past few months of Ohio Education Association research would suggest!

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Folks, the Democrats and We Are Ohio unions will stop at NOTHING to preserve the government union advantage over the officials we elect to manage our tax dollars. They will say, and do, absolutely ANYTHING to stop the reasonable reforms in Issue 2 from taking effect.

• They lied to you about being able to bargain for safety equipment.
• They continually wage class warfare by asserting that unionized government employees are the entirety of Ohio’s middle class, when in fact, they are actually a tiny single digit percentage.
• The Plain Dealer and Politifact reported that they lied to you when they said Issue 2 would make it harder for nurses to care for patients, and also about legislators writing a supposed “loophole” into the law.
• Disgustingly, they somehow brought race into the debate by saying that Issue 2 would take us back to the days of Jim Crow laws.
• The continually cite a compensation report written by a questionable “researcher” who was caught on tape agreeing to “kill” information that didn’t meet the Ohio teachers’ union’s desired outcome.

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As Ohio’s SB5 (collective bargaining reform) goes to a vote on November 8th, pressure is being ramped up in the final week and a half. According to the Columbus Dispatch, unions and their fellow reform opponents have bankrolled the We Are Ohio anti-SB5 campaign to the tune of $19,048,680, dwarfing the pro-reform Building A Better Ohio’s $7.6 million.

Democrats and their union cronies have dominated Ohio for decades and the collective bargaining reforms signed into law earlier this year pose a very real threat to their continued base of power. As a result, the Democrats did something incredibly arrogant on Thursday afternoon when the official Twitter account for the Ohio Democratic Party released the names of several businesses that have contributed to SB5, then told their 4,000 followers to “contact them.”

Although the Ohio Democrats promised to tweet the names of the businesses and outside organizations “bankrolling unfair attacks on Ohio’s middle class,” they only listed three businesses before removing all four tweets. (more…)

We have been warning about the bad news in the recent polls on Issue 2, and stated why the huge wins they show for the anti-reform side won’t be as big as the polls suggest.

Now, the Washington Post is reporting on a leaked memo from liberal mob Progress Ohio to the “We Are Ohio” union front group. They also believe it’s a LOT closer!

An internal memo from a key labor-backed group in the state is flatly warning that the polls are “flawed” and that a big win for labor is not even “remotely possible.” It adds that the right’s messaging has “worked,” and that there’s good reason to suspect that a “massive amount of voter confusion remains,” suggesting the fight could still go either way.
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If you’ve been following the Senate Bill 5 debate in Ohio, at some point you have surely seen the “We Are Ohio” union front group refer to studies written by Rutgers University professor, Jeffrey Keefe, for the Economic Policy Institute.  ”We Are Ohio” is the union front group who is spearheading the opposition to collective bargaining reform for Ohio’s public-sector employees.  The legislation is on the ballot for Ohio voters this November.  A “Yes” vote upholds the new reforms.  The study is a comparison of private-sector versus public-sector compensation, and is frequently cited by the anti-Issue 2 crowd.

EPI Researcher Jeffrey Keefe agreed to publish a study for the Ohio Education Association
and to kill any information that would be contrary to the outcome that OEA desired.

In July, “We Are Ohio” spokesperson Melizza Fazekas steered Columbus Business First reporter Jeff Bell to Keefe’s study.

The folks I interviewed said those trying to save S.B. 5 will hammer us with information on how the benefits and pay for Ohio’s public workers are better on average than those of us in the private sector. When asked that question, Fazekas quickly steered to me to a study on the compensation issue completed this year by Jeffrey Keefe, a labor and employment relations professor at Rutgers in New Jersey.

“We will combat it with the truth,” she said.

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How much do you know about Ohio’s Issue 2, the state ballot issue to uphold overdue government union reform passed this spring? Even if you’re burned out from the Wisconsin union circus — and who could blame you! — this is one swing-state issue you should care about.

‘We Are Ohio’ cares, to the tune of millions spent flooding Ohio’s airwaves with discredited class-warfare hackery. Who, you ask, is behind this “grassroots, citizen-driven” effort to kill government union reform in Ohio?

Yesterday on Third Base Politics, we shared with you how the anti-Issue 2 group “We Are Ohio” is made up of organizations that have given their full endorsement to a movement that seeks to overthrow the entire American economy, by violent means, if necessary.  In fact, 74% of the money behind We Are Ohio comes from the unions who have publicly praised a movement that consists of radical Marxists.

Occupy Wall Street and its various offshoots in other cities seems not to be satisfied until the society that has produced the most mass prosperity, the most advancements in technology and freedom, in human history, is replaced by the model more like the failed and deadly Soviet model.  And We Are Ohio is fully on board with that!

But not only do they support the socialists behind the Occupy movement, they even employ one.

Meet Will Klatt. He is a self-described “community organizer” and claims on his Facebook page to be the “Statewide Youth Outreach Coordinator” for We Are Ohio.

Since it appears often on his Facebook wall, and he is officially the Youth Outreach Coordinator, he is presumably the brains behind the Facebook group “We Are Ohio Students.” So, how is young Will reaching out to Ohio’s youth? By organizing and attending “Occupy” protests around Ohio, of course! Here is a part of his wall highlighting that We Are Ohio Students is directly endorsing, attending and organizing the Occupy Columbus protests.

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