Gov. Ted Strickland's quest to head off a union-backed November ballot issue is common-sense, practical politicking. But if conference-table haggling doesn't derail a union-backed bid to require Ohio employers to provide paid sick days, Strickland must fight, not walk.
Ohio's is among the half-dozen most powerful governorships in the nation. That, and Strickland's popularity and Republican disarray, put Ohio at his command.
Strickland doesn't shy away from power. To help the House's Democratic minority become, he hopes, a majority, Strickland craftily used the power of patronage to lure two Republican House candidates off November's legislative ballot. In June, he gave Ohio's six Catholic bishops the brush by vetoing a legislative ban on embryonic stem-cell research. To do that, Strickland exercised his right to veto part of a bill, rather than all of it. That's a line-item power not even President Bush enjoys.
Likewise, Strickland -- just by signing two executive orders -- added 15,000 dues-paying members to the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
Strickland, by fiat, bestowed collective-bargaining rights on 7,000 independent home-health-care workers. They aren't public employees, but they're paid through Medicaid. After they ratify a pending contract, they will sign SEIU membership cards..
The governor, also by edict, bestowed collective bargaining rights on 8,000 independent child-care home providers. They aren't public employees, either, but they are Medicaid-paid. AFSCME now represents them.
Strickland owes organized labor nothing. If anything, labor owes him. And he should not hesitate to tell the SEIU, the primary force behind the sick-leave initiative, that it's a surefire jobs-killer.
The union wants to make Ohio employers with 25 or more workers offer those employees seven paid sick days a year.
No other state has such a law. In fact, last week, a California state Senate committee, run 9-6 by Democrats, killed a bill to impose mandatory paid sick days on California employers. Given California's far-out politics, that speaks volumes.
Whatever one thinks of statehouse business lobbies, the effect of a Strickland-brokered sick-leave compromise would be to give the SEIU something it couldn't win from the General Assembly, albeit a GOP-run General Assembly. Strickland counters that, absent a compromise, Ohio voters are virtually certain to enact the SEIU sick-leave initiative in November.
He seems surer of that than the business lobbies are: They're prepared to spend a great deal of money on a fight, and they're not known for embracing lost causes.
Strickland has gotten the SEIU to his conference table. He says the business lobbies are playing Russian roulette by staying away. Those lobbies retort that they tried negotiating earlier this year but got nowhere. Meanwhile, Strickland has stopped short of saying he will campaign against the SEIU's initiative if a compromise isn't fashioned.
Agreed, a governor saves such a threat for last. But if this initiative is as bad as Ted Strickland says it is -- and it is -- he has to go to the mat if it comes to that.
Strickland studied for the United Methodist ministry; he's familiar with the Bible. So the governor of Ohio knows that history isn't kind to a magistrate who washes his hands of a fight.
More info on Ohio issue 4.
