Wall Street Journal
NOVEMBER 9, 2011
By MELANIE TROTTMAN
Labor leaders and Democratic strategists said Ohio’s repeal of a recent law restricting collective-bargaining rights for 350,000 public-sector workers will reverberate in other states where Republican governors have attempted or are mulling similar actions.
Officials said the repeal also could bolster Democrats in the national 2012 elections, noting that the repeal was supported by majorities of union and nonunion voters in Ohio, according to a labor-commissioned poll of 1,015 people. Ohio voters rejected the new collective-bargaining law, which hadn’t yet taken effect, by a margin of 61% to 39%.
The repeal “is bigger than just one law or one state. It sends a message to all those who would try to balance the budget on the backs of our workers: you do so at your own peril,” said Joe Hansen, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. Mr. Hansen said the votes cast Tuesday against the collective-bargaining measure signed earlier this year by Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich “will have aftershocks in Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, and Washington D.C.” as unions and others continue to fight measures and candidates they say harm the middle class.
The Republican National Committee disagreed, and noted that labor unions and their allies outspent conservative organizations by wide margins to push for the repeal.
“I don’t know that they have a very good leg to stand on to say that these results were somehow a national referendum,” said an RNC official. This person pointed out that the biggest labor unions spent nearly $30 million to repeal the measure, and had less success in Wisconsin when they tried to block a similar law earlier this year.
Opponents in Wisconsin plan to start a campaign to recall that state’s governor, Republican Scott Walker, who led the push for the collective-bargaining law.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said his labor federation “will monitor the actions” of governors in many states in coming months, including Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida. He said Democratic candidates should glean from Tuesday’s results that they should “be more aggressive” about standing up for workers rights.
The Atlas Project, a group co-founded by Steve Rosenthal, a Democratic political strategist who was a former political director for the AFL-CIO, issued an analysis that said the collective-bargaining win for labor in Ohio suggests Republicans overreached and unions and progressives can have more optimism going into 2012.
The coalition of voters that helped lead to Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008 “can still be coalesced and mobilized around a core Democratic issue,” the analysis said. It called the collective-bargaining outcome a “strong rebuke to Republicans” even though many of the same voters symbolically rejected President Barack Obama’s health overhaul law by voting in favor of a separate, Republican-led initiative on Tuesday’s Ohio ballot. That measure called for nullifying the 2014 requirement for individuals to carry health insurance or pay a fee, and passed with 65.5% of voters favoring it.
The RNC official said results from the health-law rebuke overshadowed the union vote. “Obamacare in our mind is a much bigger issue going into 2012,” the official said, and added that Mr. Obama’s name, not Gov. Kasich’s, will be atop the national ballot.
The AFL-CIO said the survey that was done on its behalf-by Democratic pollsters Peter D. Hart Research Associates-showed that while an overwhelming number of union members and public-employee households opposed the antiunion law, a majority of nonunion members also opposed it. Among union members surveyed, 86% opposed the law, while 52% of nonunion members opposed it, the survey concluded. Among households with a public employee, 73% opposed the law, compared with 57% among householders without one.
Still, the survey found that Democrats and Republicans were mostly divided on the issue. Democrats rejected the labor law at a rate of 94%, while just 30% of Republicans went against it. Independent voters rejected the law by 57% to 43%, the survey concluded.
“It remains to be seen whether Democrats can continue to tap into populist sentiment as we head into the 2012 presidential election,” the Atlas Project officials said in their report. “Given that nearly 30% of the vote in Ohio will come from union households in 2012, the enormous energy coming off of this win provides reason for optimism,” the report said.
Write to Melanie Trottman at melanie.trottman@wsj.com