Governor Dayton’s Baleful Influence on Labor Relations
By John McCormack/The Weekly Standard
Although the polls show Ohio’s collective bargaining reform headed for repeal in a referendum Tuesday, Governor John Kasich has no regrets he signed the legislation last March. “Everybody’s got to face this sooner or later,” Kasich told THE WEEKLY STANDARD in a phone interview. “This is part of an overall plan to get reform from top to bottom. It’s extremely difficult. No one has tried this level of reform, that I’m aware of in the country, including Wisconsin.”
“People will learn from this,” Kasich says. “And we’ll see what happens on Tuesday.”
If an October 25 Quinnpiac poll is anywhere close to being accurate, the law will be struck down on Tuesday. “It’s going to lose because this is a very large complex piece of legislation,” says Quinnipiac pollster Peter Brown. “It has two major components. One component requires public employees to contribute [at least 10 percent of their wages for their pensions and 15 percent of health insurance premiums]. And that is popular. But the other part of the law—the part that the debate has most focused on—is about limitations on the ability of public employees to collectively bargain and certain other union rules.”
