Union Busting

(Updated 3-6-11 to reflect correction: Senate Bill 5 passed in the Ohio Senate, but is not yet law. It is expected to pass this week in the House of Representatives where Republicans have a majority.)

"If you were my husband I'd throw you're out on your ass," my multi-millionarie Republican state Sen. Karen Gillmor told me Tuesday, a day before passage of Ohio's union busting Senate Bill 5. Gillmor said I should work part-time at Lowe's rather than collect the benefits from the unemployment fund I've been paying into for over 30 years.

As Gillmor sat in her state capitol office in Columbus lecturing me about how America's economic problems are due to people not wanting to work - implying those of us who collect unemployment are deadbeats - I stared up at a photo of Gillmor and her late husband, U.S. Rep. Paul Gillmor, posing with President George W. Bush and Laura Bush. It was Bush who inherited an approximately $260 billion surplus and left office with a $1.3 trillion deficit primarily due to tax cuts for wealthy people like the Gillmors.

Paul Gillmor was the 43rd richest member of Congress with wealth of  at least $6 million and and stock holdings $25 milllion when he died in 2007, according to Roll Call, the congressional newsletter http://www.badcongress.com/news-politics/the-50-richest-members-of-congress.htm Like most Republicans, Paul Gillmor voted to lower the capital gains tax which helps the superrich like himself, but he also voted to stick it to the poor by raising the eligibility rate for food stamps from 25-years-old to 35.

And Gillmor flaunted Ohio's residency law by spending most of his time at the family's $1 million home in the Columbus suburb of Dublin rather than at a Tiffin condo in his district http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070513/NEWS09/70513002 Karen Gillmor was cleared of violating the residency rule in a decision essentially relied on taking her word for where her primary residence is http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2009/12/16/gillmor-residency-status-upheld.html

Wealthy and powerful people like the Gillmors get the make up the rules as they go along and their idea of democracy and equality is a dog-eat-dog capitalism at its worst. If you're rich it's because you're smart and hard working and if you're poor it because you're dumb and lazy. When I told Gillmor deficits like Ohio's projected $8 billlion shortfall was due to a lack of revenue from lowering federal taxes on rich people like her rather than overspending - and Ohio eliminating corporate taxes in 2005 http://www.ohiomeansbusiness.com/incentives-and-tax-reform/tax-climate/index.php -  she said rich people had earned their wealth.

I reminded her that most wealth is inherited - like the trucking business Paul Gillmor inherited from his family - and that a lot of it was misbegotten wealth like JP Morgan gettiing rich selling defective rifles to the US Army and John D. Rockefeller having Pinkerton thugs shoot striking coal miners in West Virginia.

Those strikers were in a union like the public and private union workers I rode up with on a bus to Columbus. They included striking workers from the Tsubaki manufacturing plant in Sandusky http://www.sanduskyregister.com/sandusky/news/2011/feb/17/us-trsubaki-looks-new-workers The company fired workers like Jerry Goff, a 43-year employee and worker Mike Leone who refused to make huge concessions in benefits after agreeing to past pay freezes.

"The more they do us out of the more they have," Leone told me. "When you have somebody bargaining the way they do, I don't know what you can do."

Just 6.9 percent of private sector workers are unionized, but about 35 percent of the public sector. Unions mostly contribute to Democrats despite being sold out by the party years ago http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=0h&oq=winner+&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4ADRA_enUS407US407&q=winner+take+all+politics  which is why Republicans like Ohio Gov. John Kasich targeted them. And most of the approximately 20,000 people out there protesting with me outside the capitol voted against Kasich - a former executive at Lehman Brothers - the company that helped cause the Wall Street crash with risky financial derivative trading - so it's a win-win for Kasich and Republicans.

SB-5 criminalizes the right to strike, removes the right to collectively bargain over healthcare benefits and pensions and privitization. Privitization is a primary objective of union busting because of the financial windfall for corporations. I asked Gillmor to be a hero and rather than support the investor class, stand up for the working class which comprises most people in her district.

Gillmor, who voted for SB-5 which passed by a narrow 17-16 vote in the Senate Wednesday http://www.dispatch.com/wwwexportcontent/sites/dispatch/local_news/stories/2011/03/02/vote.pdf said she would vote the way the majority of her constituents would vote. This is the classic split and divide, race to to the bottom strategy. Because many private sector workers don't have decent wages and benefits we should take them away from public sector workers even though I pointed out to Gillmor that Ohio public sector receive 5.9 percent less compensation than comparable private sector workers http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/ohio_publicsector_workers_are_undercompensated/

Gillmor said she received 63 percent of the vote in the last election including some Democrats and doesn't think her SB-5 vote will cost her re-election. I hope she's wrong.

One of the few positive impacts of the union busting that's going on in Ohio, Wisconsin and much of the nation, is that the political apathy that so many Americans brag about is decreasing. People are slowly starting to recognize the myth of rugged American individualism and recognize that the only gains working people have made were by fighting together.

"We can't go back," Democratic State Sen. Nina Turner told a cheering crowd inside the capitol on Tuesday. "And we won't go back."

Yes, SB-5 is will almost certainly become law with passage in the Ohio House of Representaves where Republicans have a majority, but we can try to overturn it with a ballot initiative in November. We need to agitate, educate and organize.

There are two kinds of people in this world: bosses and workers. The bosses have the guns, money, pols and the power. They've created an us-against-them society. But there are more of us than them. We can't go back and we aren't going back.