Ohio avoided a showdown over sick leave this election

Ohio avoided a showdown over sick leave this election

Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland favors a law that would require companies to provide workers with paid sick leave.

There are those who would agree and those who don’t. We believe, along with chambers of commerce and other business organizations, that sick leave and other fringe benefits are issues that should be left to companies to decide. They know the demands of their own workplaces, they know their labor pool and they know which benefits they can afford and which they can’t.

There’s a growing movement within organized labor and the Democratic party to replace the company’s judgment with that of the government. It’s an element in this presidential election, although it may not take center stage. It is bound to be a national issue in years to come.

Mandatory sick leave almost became a center stage issue in Ohio this year, and but for Strickland’s intervention, it might have.

Ohio’s Republican legislature had refused to pass a mandatory sick-leave bill, so an organization called Ohioans for Healthy Families took up the cause, which had been pushed by the Service Employees International Union. Petitions were circulated and a ballot issue was prepared for the November election.

No common ground

Strickland and Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher attempted to broker a compromise between labor, business and the Republican Legislature, but this wasn’t an issue that lent itself to compromise. The bottom line is that any legislation — whether it had been initiated in the Legislature or at the ballot box — that would have made Ohio the first state to require companies to provide sick leave would have been a bad deal for Ohio. Such a mandate would have made Ohio a national hunting ground for states eager to lure companies from Ohio. It would have made it difficult for Ohio to retain jobs and near impossible for it to attract new companies.

Even companies that provide generous vacation or leave time to their employees don’t want to be told that they have to provide it. And the law as proposed would have mandated seven days per year, allowed employees to take the time in increments of as little as an hour at time and would not have required the employee to provide any evidence of illness unless he or she had taken three consecutive days off.

Regardless of his philosophical leanings toward providing sick leave and his political ties to labor, Strickland took a firm stand against passage of the November ballot issue.

After spending $1.8 million on the effort, Ohioans for Healthy Families pulled the plug., It would have had to spend millions more if had hoped to get voter approval of the measure. And as more people began recognizing that the proposal would have set Ohio apart from every other state, it became increasingly clear that no matter how much money was spent, the issue was likely to fail.

Even having the issue appear on the statewide ballot would have sent a message to companies considering a move to Ohio that this was not the most business-hospitable state in the union.

Ohioans should be happy that it is one less thing they’ll have to worry about on election day.