John Kasich, Republican Governor of Ohio, is balancing the budget. As part of his plan they needed to bring the cost of public union employees down. Ohio passed a bill limiting collective bargaining rights for public employees and with changes that would reduce the cost of public employees by requiring them to pay part of the cost of benefits, etc.
Objectors got the necessary signatures for a referendum recall on the bill. Last Tuesday the voters of Ohio repealed the bill. There are 11,435,798 people in Ohio. There were 650,000 union employees impacted by the bill. Still, by nearly a two-thirds vote the bill was recalled.
I won’t go into the litany of budget reasons why this hamstrings, Governor Kasich in his effort to balance the budget. Those are patently obvious.
I will just cite some facts from a recent editorial by Phillip K. Howard.
In New York, 90% of the Long Island Railroad workers retire with a disability adding $36,000 a year to their pensions. “I’ve never seen anyone terminated for incompetence, said a long-time human resources person.”
In California 82% of senior state troopers are “disabled” in their last year before retirement. In Los Angeles 5 teachers were fired from a population of 33,000 at a cost of $3.5 million.
That’s what you want to keep going, Ohio voters. You supported workers who all become disabled just before retirement and workers who can’t be fired because the cost is not worth the firing.
Hope you feel good about your votes. You bought that old union label crap, supporting the working man and woman. What you got was pouring tax dollars you don’t have into corrupt practices that can’t be fixed.
