Tim Ryan cited his immigrant grandfather several times to provide examples of his ideals for civic involvement Saturday when he brought his campaign for Ohio’s open U.S. Senate seat back to Toledo.
Midway through a 27-minute speech at the United Auto Workers Local 12 hall on Ashland Avenue, Mr. Ryan described a grocery-shopping errand that hopscotched around his Niles, Ohio hometown hunting down bargains.
After more than two hours, there was one last butcher-shop item to pick up, but the grandfather — who had been a union steelworker in the once industry-rich Mahoning Valley for 40 years — said they would have to drive just a little farther because the meat cutters were on strike at the store they were at.
And as his remarks drew to a close, Mr. Ryan — the Democrat who since 2008 has represented Ohio’s 16th House of Representatives district sprawling along the Ohio and Mahoning rivers from Portsmouth to the Youngstown area — described finding a history of their neighborhood church in his grandfather’s belongings that identified him as a volunteer helping build the parish school.
When Ohio’s blue-collar workers had good-paying union jobs, the Senate candidate said, they not only could afford comfortable lives for themselves and their families, but they also had time to give back to their communities.
Mr. Ryan had a receptive audience for the pro-labor message he has given throughout his campaign: scores of Toledo-area union members, many wearing shirts bearing union logos or slogans. Particularly prominent in the audience was a large contingent of railroad workers, whose unions are embroiled in contentious national contract negotiations with the seven major railroad companies operating in the United States.
While held at the UAW hall, the rally was hosted by several railroad unions, and Mr. Ryan cited the ongoing negotiations as well several times during his remarks.
The railroad industry’s posture, he said, “is the perfect example of greed and disrespect … ignoring what workers are going through every day.”
Respect, Mr. Ryan said, “is on the ballot in the fall — the idea of whether or not we’re going to respect everybody in this country regardless of what your title is. We’re gonna make sure that everybody gets a fair shot, everybody has opportunity, every community is plugged in, because we respect each other.”
A Presidential Emergency Board on Tuesday proposed a series of raises and bonus payments for railroad workers to settle the negotiations, with its recommendations starting a 30-day “cooling off” clock during which management and labor ostensibly will consider that proposal.
But railroad workers say their dissatisfaction goes beyond money to working conditions, including attendance policies they say have only worsened the industry’s recent labor shortages by inducing many railroaders to quit rather than comply and by scaring off new hires.
Bill DeCarlo, the national legislative director for the Transportation Communications Union, praised Mr. Ryan as “someone who has always stood by labor’s side,” while Gregory Regan, president of the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trades Division, told the crowd that labor is well positioned to influence the nation’s political future.
“Unions have the highest favorability ratings in decades,” he said. “People are waking up. They’re recognizing they have power in their jobs.”
“Rail labor is very excited about his campaign and about the potential for having a real voice and flipping the Senate,” Matt Weaver, a track and bridge maintenance worker from Genoa who is the Ohio state legislative director for the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees Division of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, said afterward.
Mr. Ryan’s remarks about his ancestors’ union work made Mr. Weaver think of his own family, while the candidate’s House voting record “is all pretty much straight ‘What’s good for workers?’” Mr. Weaver said.
Mr. Ryan said railroaders being forced to work up to 16 hours a day, with only rare days off, is not the “economic freedom” that he considers to be one of two key freedoms at stake in the upcoming midterm election.
“Do you have enough money in your pocket to be relaxed and take care of your family?” he offered as the “Youngstown definition” of economic freedom.
The other, which he described without actually naming it, is the freedom of reproductive choice, undercut by the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that denied the existence of a right to abortion under the U.S. Constitution.
“We have a small group of people who have hijacked the Supreme Court, and now they want to be in everybody’s bedroom, they want to be in everybody’s doctor’s office, they want to repeal marriages, they’re talking about banning birth control,” he said. “I mean, what planet are we … living in here?”
He mentioned his rival, Republican businessman J.D. Vance, only briefly, describing him as “another millionaire funded by a billionaire” and once again chastising him for starting in 2018 an addiction-services nonprofit in Ohio that “didn’t spend one nickel on anybody that had an addiction issue” but employed his now-campaign manager and a publicist from Purdue Pharma while paying for political polling out of its budget.
Republicans like Mr. Vance are “not for unions. They’re not for workers,” Mr. Ryan said. “They’re for tax cuts for the top 1 percent of the people.”
Mr. Ryan was flanked by, among others, U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D., Toledo), who is running for a 21st term in the House against Republican newcomer J.R. Majewski of Port Clinton. With her district recently redrawn to include a broad swath of Republican-solid rural northwest Ohio, Ms. Kaptur faces the stiffest challenge of her Congressional career since her first election.
“This is a time for America to be serious,” Ms. Kaptur said before recounting her personal experience with the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
“To listen to the animalistic behavior that was occurring all around us, and the Capitol that my relatives shed blood for, desecrated,” she said, comparing the violence with the peaceful election campaign the previous year in which people unhappy with the Trump administration voted it out.
Numerous other election candidates, including Craig Swartz, the Democratic challenger to U.S. Rep. Bob Latta (R., Bowling Green), various incumbents and challengers for Ohio legislative seats, and other local candidates also attended the rally, but among them, only Marilyn Zayas, an Ohio Supreme Court candidate from southwest Ohio, addressed it.
First Published August 21, 2022, 12:16 a.m.
