Posted on 11/10/2011 5:19:16 PM PST by SteelToe
COLUMBUS, Ohio - The group of conservatives and Tea Party activists that won a landslide victory on Tuesday with Ohio's "healthcare freedom" amendment wants to come back to voters with a new proposal -- a "right-to-work" initiative.
Dubbed the "Ohio Workplace Freedom Amendment," the issue would place into the Ohio Constitution a ban on requiring Ohioans to join a union as a condition of employment.
The proposal also follows the decisive defeat in Tuesday's election of another measure aimed at unions, Issue 2, which was a referendum on Senate Bill 5, the law that aimed to sharply restrict collective bargaining for public employees.
"We defend the freedom of all Ohioans to be free from the forced participation in labor organizations just as a condition of employment," said Chris Littleton, a spokesman with the Ohio Liberty Council, an umbrella organization of Tea Party groups.
Chris Redfern, head of the Ohio Democratic Party, said during a Statehouse news conference that the amendment would have "draconian impacts on working families" and cause wages to drop.
Supporters of the amendment dropped off petitions Thursday containing 1,621 signatures with the Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine's office. If 1,000 of those signatures are valid, the group would get the green light to begin gathering the 386,000 signatures needed to bring the issue to the ballot.
Littleton said the group hopes to have it on the ballot in November 2012, but acknowledged that gathering enough signatures by the deadline of early July could prove tough for an all-volunteer effort.
Supporters said only federal employees would be exempt from the law because of existing federal law.
The proposed amendment is similar to the right-to-work legislation that Republicans brought to the Ohio ballot in 1958, which was defeated by a 63 percent-to-37 percent margin.
"Right to work doesn't guarantee rights to the workers nor does it protect the access that women and minorities have had," said Rep. Tracy Heard, a Columbus Democrat. "What we have protects workers, protects their wages, it protects them physically on the job," she said. " Lower wages doesn't make for better employees."
Senate President Tom Niehaus, a New Richmond Republican, appeared to try to tamp down on the effort in a statement released Thursday.
"We just finished a very divisive and contentious election, and Ohioans made it clear they want us to be more deliberate in our approach to major reform," Niehaus said. "We need to work to build consensus on the direction we take from here."
The ballot in 2012 could be a crowded place. Democrats are gathering signatures to get a repeal of an election reform bill on the ballot as well as a possible repeal of a congressional map they think is too favorable to Republicans. Meanwhile, social conservatives who oppose abortion hope to get a "personhood" amendment on the ballot that defines life as beginning at conception.
It’s wasted effort, but if the labor unions spend $30 million fighting it, then it might be worth it.
Except that it will draw liberals to the polls.
This is one of the most important things we can do in every state that forces union membership on its citizens.
Right to work laws allowing people to CHOOSE whether they want to be in a union are very popular and should be able to prevail even in a powerful union dominated state.
I hope this gets on the ballot and that every Ohio conservative assists with this effort. It really would be game changer. Worse case scenario, we force the unions to spend millions of dollars again - this time opposing the freedom for people to chose whether they want to be in union or not.
It would alleviate the strangle hold the unions have on government. I’d like to see it happen.
No, we know their weak point now. It took years for conservatives to finally figure out that public employee unions are the real enemy. It is only recently that we've really put 2 and 2 together and took the fight right to the lefts power base.
A right to work ballot initiative will be easier to sell than Issue 2 was. The unions managed to frame the issue as mean conservatives trying to take a RIGHT away from people, so even many Republicans voted against it. Right to work laws offer to give rights to people - the right to CHOOSE whether to be in a union or not.
Public sector unions are the liberal jugular vein. To stop the left, you've got to cut off their source of funding. They are living off what is effectively tax payer dollars which they use to promote leftist causes. We have to break that cycle. This initiative is a great idea - in fact, we should be putting these on the ballot in every union dominated state.
The last vote was taken 54 years ago. It’s time to try again.
Yep, the unions will pull the safety issue, that’s what worked this week; hopefully this group will be wiser in addressing that lie.
Does he mean you won't get the crap beat out of you if you are a union member?
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