Ohio Association of Public School Employees (OAPSE) Executive Director Joe Rugola, who last week compared supporters of workplace freedom to Nazis, was paid $253,351 in member dues during the union’s most recent fiscal year. Joe Rugola At a May 1 press conference, Rugola decried workplace freedom as “extreme.” Asked by reporters why 24 states already have workplace freedom laws on the books if the policy is | Read More »
Republican leadership in the Ohio Senate has received nearly $200,000 in labor union donations since 2011, secretary of state records reveal. Senate President Keith Faber (R-Celina) announced on May 1 that he does not expect the Senate to pursue workplace freedom, signaling majority support for forced unionism. Nine of Ohio’s top ten Republican recipients of union contributions since January 1, 2011 are state senators – | Read More »
Ohio Representative Kristina Roegner (R-Hudson) and Rep. Ron Maag (R-Lebanon) held a May 1 press conference announcing the introduction of two bills which would make Ohio the 25th workplace freedom state. Roegner has drafted legislation to prevent private-industry labor unions from taking dues as a condition of employment, while Maag is the primary sponsor of a parallel bill for government unions. Rep. Roegner noted that | Read More »
The Ohio Education Association (OEA), union campaign arm We Are Ohio, and other labor groups hope to convince Ohioans that workplace freedom kills workers. Ohio union bosses are desperate to keep mandatory union dues in place across the state following the December 2012 adoption of a right to work law in neighboring Michigan. Confronted with evidence that letting workers choose whether to pay a union spurs | Read More »
With its text flanked on both sides by skull-and-crossbones “POISON” symbols, the billboard stands as testament to one of the reasons Governor John Kasich and the Ohio General Assembly have expressed no interest in pursuing a workplace freedom law.
Based on union filings with the U.S. Department of Labor, 436 NEA employees were paid over $100,000 from September 1, 2011 to August 31, 2012. Full-time teachers across Ohio were forced to pay NEA $178 – in addition to $425 in Ohio Education Association (OEA) dues – during the 2011-2012 school year.
Read More »Ohio Education Association (OEA) President Patricia Frost-Brooks was paid $267,916 in dues taken from Ohio teachers during fiscal year 2012, according to the union’s latest staff and officer data submitted to the U.S. Department of Labor. More than a hundred OEA employees and officers were paid six figures during the same period, as the union gave $77,500 to progressive groups who demonize “the rich” in the name of bigger government.
Frost-Brooks, the Ohio Democratic Party’s “Democrat of the Year,” was one of seven OEA employees and officers paid more than $175,000 from September 1, 2011 to August 31, 2012.
Read More »Michigan became the second workplace freedom state neighboring Ohio on December 11, less than a year after Indiana implemented right to work. The abrupt, lame-duck passage of “freedom to work” legislation by Michigan’s Republican-controlled state legislature and Governor Rick Snyder prompted renewed speculation that Ohio needs to follow suit to stay competitive.
Already union front We Are Ohio and other labor groups have worked to tie workplace freedom to Senate Bill 5 (SB 5), the complex collection of public employee union reforms overturned by Ohio voters in 2011 following a $40 million union smear campaign.
Read More »We Are Ohio reacted furiously to the Michigan state legislature’s passage of a workplace freedom law, comparing the move to Japan’s December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. We Are Ohio posted a branded graphic and a series of Facebook updates bearing this theme, the latest in the union front’s already vicious campaign to protect the flow of forced dues from Ohio workers into union coffers.
Read More »Average wages in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Kentucky were each leapfrogged by multiple workplace freedom states from 2001 to 2011 based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data. Comparing Ohio and its 5 neighboring states to the 22 workplace freedom states – whose ranks Indiana joined in February 2012 – Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana were 3 of only 5 states with wage growth below 30 percent over the course of the decade.
In terms of BLS-calculated wages, slow wage growth resulted in an erosion of the relative advantage in Ohio and neighboring forced-unionism states, where workers can be required to pay a union boss as a condition of employment, versus workplace freedom states. Without adjusting for taxes or cost of living, the statewide average wage in Ohio fell from 7th-highest to 9th-highest.
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