What gall. After shoving a hard-right agenda at Ohio residents -- who gave him no mandate to do so -- Gov. John Kasich thinks an embittered public will fall for his belated conversion to compromise and conciliation.
As polls show, Mr. Kasich's drive to decimate public unions could backfire big-time in November. The Republican figured he'd pull a ruse on all the working families he had upset. He would pretend that he was actually concerned about labor's perspective and willing to negotiate on the collective-bargaining law he rammed through the General Assembly this year.
All labor leaders had to do in return for the feigned flexibility was to trust the GOP leaders who once dismissed them, and forget about repealing the law championed by the governor. If union leaders refused the invitation to sit down and talk with Mr. Kasich and friends -- as the administration insisted no reasonable folks would do -- proponents of the new state law would be forced to wage all-out war.
Nice try, governor. But attempting to frame teachers, police officers, firefighters, and other public-sector employees as uncooperative, when thousands of them descended on the Statehouse earlier this year in a futile effort to be heard on Senate Bill 5, is ludicrous.
Speeding the GOP-crafted measure into law was a Kasich administration priority, regardless of the uproar it provoked across Ohio. For the most part, opposing viewpoints are background noise to the party that has a lock on state government.
Mr. Kasich and obliging Republican lawmakers do as they please, whether it's defiling state parks with drilling rigs or destroying public education with deep budget cuts. State leadership bows to the wealthy and big business and turns its back on those without access or influence -- pretty much the rest of us.
We're the hard-pressed middle-class backbone of Ohio, torn between rising costs and stagnant wages, between struggling to make do and wanting the best for our kids, between hope and despair. We matter. But we have no say in the partisan program that threatens the state with radical regression.
The same goes for the roughly 350,000 public workers slammed by SB 5. They had no voice in the legislature's rushed deliberations. It was deemed unnecessary in the push to weaken their collective bargaining power, end binding arbitration, and ban strikes by all public employees.
Appeals to slow down the process that put SB 5 on the fast track were spurned, along with requests to extend the debate and discussion to include union leaders who sought input. As protests swelled, even to the point that Statehouse doors were locked to keep opponents out, the legislative majority remained undeterred.
Political dominion gave the party an opening to extract paybacks against traditional Democratic allies by means of an extreme, union-busting agenda. The punitive move against public employees that thrust the state into national headlines was strategically packaged by conservatives as a way to save money and create jobs.
But the political calculations to rip apart, not thoughtfully reform, the state's collective-bargaining law didn't count on so many people seeing through the partisan ploy. In no time, a record 1.3 million signatures were collected to put a statewide referendum on the November ballot to repeal SB 5.
Polls have shown that voters favor overturning the new state law by a double-digit margin. They also indicate that Ohioans are not opposed to parts of SB 5 that include increasing public workers' share of health insurance and pension costs.
The backlash over the law comes from the way it was foisted on the state as a take-it-or-leave-it dictate by an opportunistic governor and his legislative lieutenants. There was no interest in seeking a broad consensus or in giving labor a platform to press its case before SB 5 became law.
Yet now, with a Monday deadline looming to remove or retain Issue 2 -- the SB 5 referendum -- Mr. Kasich wants to make peace with the coalition behind the repeal campaign. Several Ohio newspapers, including The Blade, have encouraged a truce between the sides to avoid an ugly battle.
But the fact that Governor Kasich waited until the 11th hour to offer consultation and compromise suggests his peacemaker act was nothing more than a commercial waiting to be made about labor obstructionists who refused to meet with state leaders. Talk about unmitigated gall.
Marilou Johanek is a Blade commentary writer.
Contact her at: mjohanek@theblade.com
First Published August 25, 2011, 4:00 a.m.
