Tuesday, March 29, 2011
SB 5 could be sent to Kasich by weekend
By Marc Kovac
COLUMBUS
Republican lawmakers are expected to move on controversial changes to Ohio’s collective-bargaining law, potentially sending Senate Bill 5 to Gov. John Kasich for his signature before the end of the week.
Democrats in the Ohio House on Monday were resigned to that time line but said they were ready to continue the fight to stop the law from taking effect, via a referendum on the November ballot.
“This sounds like it’s going to move very fast and furious with very little debate,” said Rep. Nickie Antonio, a Democrat from the Cleveland area and member of the committee considering the bill. “Certainly, those of us in the Democratic caucus would like to have a lot more discussion about how to fix the budget. I don’t know that this is the answer, which is why I don’t see fixing Senate Bill 5.”
The legislation would allow collective bargaining for all public employees but would limit negotiations to wages, hours, terms and conditions — excluding other areas, including health-care-premium payments.
Both sides would be required to disclose more information about their contract demands. Pay rates and raises would be based on merit and employee performance, not just seniority. Binding arbitration would be replaced with a process that ultimately puts contract decisions before locally elected officials. And public workers would be banned from striking.
Proponents say the legislation is needed to enable local governments, school districts and the state to better control costs. Kasich has included savings resulting from the bill in his $55.5 billion executive- budget proposal.
“What we do here in this bill is to preserve the right of public employees to collectively bargain for wages and also for working conditions,” the governor told reporters Monday. “But when you have your average private-sector worker paying 23 percent of their health-care costs and the average city worker paying 9 percent, if the public found that out, they would say we absolutely need to rebalance what we’re doing.”
The legislation passed the Ohio Senate earlier this month and was subject to a couple of weeks of hearings before the House’s Commerce and Labor Committee.
The latter is scheduled to meet today and is expected to take up a substitute version of the legislation.
Republicans in the House and Senate have been meeting in recent weeks to hash out a compromise to ensure there are enough votes to pass the bill out of both chambers.
Democrats also could offer their own amendments to Senate Bill 5, though committee members indicated Monday they were not inclined to do so.
Rep. Kenny Yuko, a Democrat from the Cleveland area and ranking minority member of the committee considering the bill, said his members have not yet been allowed to see any of the changes to the legislation being considered by Republicans.
Rep. Bob Hagan of Youngstown, D-60th, said he still has an amendment that would wipe out the bill’s contents. And he said he had other amendments, but made it clear that there’s no way to fix Senate Bill 5 to address Democrats’ concerns.
“Even if they took all 50 [amendments] of mine, the bill still stinks, the process sucks,” Hagan said, adding later, “There’s nothing they can do to this bill. If it says Senate Bill 5 on it, we Democrats are voting against it. It’s unfair to middle-class people.”
Union groups have announced rallies today, Wednesday and Thursday, with hundreds or thousands of protesters again expected to descend on the Statehouse.
But their biggest push against Senate Bill 5 could start early next month, when they launch an effort to place a referendum on the November ballot to overturn anything Republican lawmakers and Kasich approve.
Yuko said that — and not amendments to the existing bill — is where Democrats will take up the fight.
“I think the people of Ohio are ready; they’ll be ready to respond,” he said.