10 “Stage Is Set for Battle”

“Great news from Ohio,” wrote Prof. Howard Bunsis, chair of the AAUP’s national Collective Bargaining Congress, in a message to AAUP members. Noting that Sara Kilpatrick, state executive director, and Rudy Fichtenbaum, a leader of the Wright State chapter, were in Columbus for the delivery of the massive number of signatures to get SB 5 on the ballot as a referendum, Bunsis wrote, “We are so proud of our members and leaders in Ohio who worked so hard on this campaign. What is encouraging is how the entire labor movement in Ohio has come together, and how the AAUP is an important part of that movement.”¹

“SB 5 Makes Ballot; Stage Is Set for Battle,” the headline in The Columbus Dispatch reported on July 22. “This is really a historic moment for us. We’re kicking off a campaign for social rights and justice,” National AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told The Cleveland Plain Dealer at a gathering of union leaders and other SB 5 opponents in downtown Columbus. “This is about defending the middle class,” Trumka continued; “This is about saying what kind of state we will be and what kind of nation we will be.” For her part, Pierrette “Petee” Talley, secretary-treasurer of the Ohio AFL-CIO, told the Plain Dealer, “We’re headed into a very bad campaign. We’re up against interests that have a lot of money.”²

Evidence of the powerful forces backing Senate Bill 5 was clear when one of Gov. Kasich’s closest allies, Newt Gingrich, announced his support for the legislation. The conservative group backing SB 5, Building a Better Ohio, produced a video of Gingrich with his statement of support. In the video, as The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported, the former House Speaker repeated the central—and flawed—argument made by supporters of the bill, that it would give local governments tools to better manage themselves without raising taxes. “Gingrich, who appears a bit sluggish in the video, offers high praise for Gov. John Kasich, mentioning his name three times,” the Plain Dealer reported. The writer then speculated, “Perhaps Gingrich is hoping to snag Kasich’s endorsement,” in a reference to Gingrich’s presidential aspirations. Near the end of the video, Gingrich states, “This is a chance to be involved and strengthen what Gov. John Kasich is doing.”³

This renewal of the Gingrich–Kasich partnership was just a piece of the conservative coalition that was targeting Ohio’s working people. In addition to Building a Better Ohio, other groups that contributed large sums of money and brought in outside organizers included Alliance for America’s Future, with Liz and Mary Cheney, daughters of Dick Cheney, in its leadership; FreedomWorks, a creation of former Republican Sen. Dick Armey; the Ohio Liberty Council, a coalition of Tea Party organizations; the Ohio branch of Americans for Prosperity, chaired by David Koch and funded largely by Koch money; and Make Ohio Great, a creation of the Republican Governors Association and funded by several wealthy conservatives, including Rupert Murdock. All of these groups would spend millions in out-of-state money mainly bankrolled by wealthy plutocrats whose primary objective was to crush the union movement in Ohio.

On August 3, I attended the local kickoff event of the campaign at Laborer’s Local 265 in Cincinnati. The large meeting room was packed with union leaders and members from the area, several politicians, and a handful of university faculty like myself. Several speakers, including AFL-CIO Executive Secretary Doug Sizemore, spoke confidently, even defiantly, about how we were going to fight these attacks on unions and working people, and we would win. But in talking with people and looking around the crowd, I saw many anxious faces, and there was fear, and there was anger. I was, nevertheless, encouraged by the meeting, not because of the rhetoric, but because there was a unity in the fear and the anger and the defiance. I began to believe that such unity might be able to overcome the powerful and wealthy forces that opposed us.

At the AAUP at UC, we sent a message to our membership on August 10, titled “It’s Time to Roll Up Our Sleeves.” Executive Director Deborah Herman struck the right tone. Informing UC faculty of We Are Ohio locations for phone-banking and canvassing in the city, she wrote that polling seemed to show that the people were on our side. However, she emphasized, that would not matter if we did not get people out to vote—and to accomplish that would require months of get-out-the-vote activities. Herman wrote that with the Wisconsin recall elections now over, national conservative organizations could focus on stopping the repeal of Senate Bill 5. “They may outspend us,” Herman wrote, “but we have the edge in people-power and we’re right on the issues. We just need to do the work.”

We were very much aware of events in Wisconsin. The recall elections held between July 19 and August 16, we believed, were a victory for the Democrats, since two Republican legislators were defeated in districts that were traditionally held by the GOP. But they had failed to recall a third senator, which was the magic number to gain control of the state Senate. Still, winning two of those three seats was a huge accomplishment. What this meant in the Ohio context was more uncertain. Our repeal and Wisconsin’s recalls were two very different animals. We believed that it would actually be easier to repeal bad legislation than it would be to recall bad politicians, and that idea would be borne out later when We Are Wisconsin failed to recall Gov. Scott Walker. But we also saw that Walker’s conservative allies outspent We Are Wisconsin by a 2–1 margin. As one of my colleagues earlier noted about the legislative races, “Wisconsin was a win for truth and beauty, and now it is our turn to nail down a victory.”

We were realistic about our chances. Faced with such powerful opponents and masses of misinformation, we could lose the repeal. So we began to make contingency plans if that should occur. We were aware that the UC-AAUP chapter, for example, had existed before the legislation that SB 5 was eliminating. We talked about ways to collect dues if our universities were barred from doing so through payroll deduction. Our union, after all, had existed for more than 30 years without fair-share fees. We talked about continuing this grand coalition with other unions to try to force our employers to respect and work with us. We talked about hanging on until we could get the legislation reversed in the future. But as I look back on these conversations, we seemed to have been driven by a need to have some kind of future to look forward to if we failed to repeal SB 5. In reality, as I see it now, as contracts expired, we would increasingly be cut out of an important role in our universities, especially with the special provision SB 5 contained to eliminate the AAUP and other faculty unions. Like other union employees, we would certainly lose our voice in the workplace.

As it became certain that SB 5 would be on the ballot, that its opponents had assembled a formidable coalition, and that the public was on our side, murmurs of discontent with the initiative campaign began to reach us from the Republican side. First to voice this discontent was Brent Larkin, editorial page editor, at The Cleveland Plain Dealer on June 25. He wrote that there were “many thoughtful people on both sides of this issue. It’s time for them to push aside those who view Senate Bill 5 through a purely political prism and to explore the possibility of a compromise.” Then on August 7, The Columbus Dispatch, which had given a ringing and enthusiastic endorsement of SB 5, editorialized, “Ohio is about to tear itself apart. No matter which side wins the impending war over State Issue 2, the state will suffer deep and long-lasting wounds that will threaten its already fragile economy. At a minimum, labor-management relations will be set back years.” The Dispatch then went on to urge a compromise in the interest of all Ohioans.⁴

Our coalition did not take such talk about compromise seriously, since Gov. Kasich and his allies had been determined from day one to force this radical legislation through no matter how much damage was done. But then we got some interesting news. Gov. Kasich and his Republican allies now appeared to want to avoid the fight they had precipitated. “As a critical deadline approaches,” The Toledo Blade reported on August 17, “Gov. John Kasich on Wednesday formally offered to negotiate over Ohio’s controversial new law weakening public employee collective bargaining in exchange for a promise from labor to pull a politically divisive referendum from the ballot.” Kasich made the announcement at a press conference, flanked by House Speaker William Batchelder and Senate President Tom Niehaus, both of whom by this time had become symbols of the ruthless attack on unions.⁵

On first hearing of Kasich’s offer, we at the AAUP were concerned that such talk might undermine the unity of our coalition and that some groups—perhaps one of the big unions or perhaps one of the public safety unions—would feel it was safer to try to work with the Republicans on SB 5 than to gamble on the repeal. It appeared that some union leaders were actually talking behind closed doors with Kasich and his allies about a compromise. At the AAUP, we felt that we had been completely rebuffed as the bill went through the legislative process while actually being made more destructive. We did not believe that the people who had demonstrated such ideological extremism had suddenly become reasonable. We were relieved when we heard We Are Ohio’s response.

“These politicians who passed Senate Bill 5 have the ability to come back and repeal the law, and that’s what they should do—repeal the entire law,” We Are Ohio spokesperson Melissa Fazekas told Ohio’s assembled media. “Or they can join us and vote ‘no’ in November on Issue 2 . . . We’re saying that if you repeal the bill—and that’s what you should do, then there’s really nothing left to talk about, is there?” Under questioning at a news conference, Fazekas stuck to her guns: “We stand together with the 1.3 million Ohioans who signed the petition and want a no vote on Issue 2.” When reporters suggested to her that the public might view the unions as the side that didn’t want to compromise, she replied, “I think that Ohioans are very smart, they were very involved in the process going through the legislature where they were literally locked outside in the cold and their voices were not allowed to be heard. It is awfully funny to now be standing here and talking about coming to the table when this entire bill takes away their rights to do so.” She also made clear that whatever communications had taken place between the governor and his allies and any union representatives, no such discussions had taken place between the two sides in any official capacity and that We Are Ohio had never been contacted by the governor.⁶ Since that time, no union leader has come forward to admit to participating in such a meeting with the governor and his allies. Among the factors that made the Republican gambit untrustworthy was the public letter itself. It contained all of the tired false statements we had now been hearing for months. It attempted to portray the Republican effort to undermine the middle class as a reasonable and valiant attempt to save Ohio from a terrible fate, consistent with the GOP effort to manufacture a crisis context. Signed by Kasich, Batchelder and Niehaus, the letter began,

Without a doubt, Ohioans have made it clear that they believe our state is headed in the wrong direction. The status quo has failed us and certain policies of the past have led only to unprecedented fiscal shortfalls, historic double-digit unemployment rates and economic recession.

This passage, like the rest of the letter, was a political statement and not a rational analysis. The first sentence made it sound as though Gov. Kasich’s very narrow victory had given him a mandate. This was not true, of course, but the governor always acted as though it was. In the letter—which was oddly addressed to “Government Employee Union Leaders of We Are Ohio”—the Republican authors of the letter admitted no responsibility for the fiscal shortfalls, nor any recognition that Ohio had been caught in a crushing national recession upon which state policies could have had little impact. The letter went on, “While we passionately believe in the reforms of Senate Bill 5 and stand ready to vigorously—and successfully—defend them, we ask you to consider this option and join us in working with determination for a compromise for the benefit of the taxpayers we all serve.” The advocates of SB 5 then asked union leaders to cooperate with them to “avoid the bitter political warfare that so many have come to detest.” Of course, their own attempt to crush the unions was a perfect illustration of “the bitter political warfare” that those being targeted by SB 5 certainly “detested.”

Perhaps the only completely accurate statement in the letter was about the unnecessary conflict that Gov. Kasich and the Republicans had created: “In a matter of days, Ohioans will be thrust into a costly political battle that will likely result in lasting scars and bitter divisions at one of the most fragile moments in our state’s history.” Citing the public’s growing concern with the “political brinksmanship,” that has consumed our national political debate, the Republican leaders closed with a request that a delegation of ten union leaders from the We Are Ohio decision-making authority meet with them at 10:00 a.m. Friday morning in the Riffe Center, a government building in downtown Columbus. In other words, they were proposing a classic exercise in political brinkmanship.⁷

It was almost certainly the We Are Ohio coalition’s inability to trust Gov. Kasich and his allies that led to the united front. Republican Sen. Timothy Grendell of Chesterfield, who had been an eloquent critic of SB 5, told the Plain Dealer that he had urged his fellow Republicans to slow down and reexamine portions of the bill he and others considered problematic. “We had union people willing to have discussions, but nobody who was leading the charge from the legislature wanted to have those meetings,” Grendell said.⁸

On Friday, August 18, in a staged scene that outraged union members across the state, Gov. Kasich, Speaker Batchelder, and Senate President Niehaus sat at a long table in the Riffe Center, a government building in downtown Columbus. Across the room were empty seats with name cards for Ohio’s unions. Headlined “Kasich Stages ‘Talks,’ Assails No-Show Unions,” The Columbus Dispatch reported: “With no union leaders in sight yesterday, Gov. John Kasich and Republican legislative leaders welcomed a horde of reporters into a Riffe Center conference room arranged to prove their point.” Kasich told the Dispatch: “Ninety-nine percent of life is just showing up. Obviously, they flunked the test.”

Kasich objected to We Are Ohio’s position that there would be opportunity to talk once SB 5 was repealed by the legislature, which the governor called an “ultimatum, not a negotiation,” wrote Plain Dealer Columbus Bureau Chief Reginald Fields in a political analysis. Kasich used the event as an opportunity to ramp up his rhetoric, Fields reported: Kasich blasted the unions for not negotiating and accused union leaders of misleading their members. Noting that the “governor’s approach is clearly aimed at painting the unions as stubborn and unyielding as campaigning for Issue 2 kicks off,” Fields observed perceptively that there were risks involved, too. “The tactic could backfire,” he wrote, “if voters think the governor is bullying unions and caving at the last minute on his own collective bargaining law while trying to silence voters who may want to have their say on Nov. 8.”⁹

“Why now, Gov. John Kasich?” asked Plain Dealer columnist Phillip Morris on August 19, in a powerful piece.

Why now does this tough-talking governor, who came into office and immediately set about to disembowel Ohio’s public unions, suddenly pretend he’s in the mood for tea, crumpets and compromise on Senate Bill 5? . . . Why now does he feign that his political gamesmanship is a form of statesmanship with unions that have united to wreak what appears to be certain havoc on the measure at the polls in November?

Morris went on excoriating the governor:

This is a war that Kasich started without discussions. This is a war that he should have the commitment to finish without belated discussions . . . He awoke the sleeping middle-class labor giant, and he should have the courage to face it head on, even though polls show that his measure will be devastated in the fall election.

The fight over Senate Bill 5 was a defining moment in Ohio history, Morris said: “We as a state are now in the necessary process of finding out a lot about ourselves. The referendum war on SB 5 is a just war that will provide answers to a host of moral, social and economic questions.” Morris went on to say that there are legitimate questions to be asked about the state’s powerful public unions, but that the issues had been clouded by distortions Kasich and his allies promoted about jobs and savings that would be created by undermining the unions. “That was a falsehood,” Morris wrote, referring to the administration’s claims, and “union leadership, which had shown signs that it was willing to compromise on certain economic issues, responded with a line in the sand. It gathered 1.3 million signatures on a petition to let voters decide the fate of SB 5.” Morris labeled the governor’s offer of compromise “cheap idle talk.” “It wasn’t that long ago,” Morris pointed out, “that the governor was famously quoted as saying, ‘If you’re not on the bus, we’ll run over you with the bus,’ in regard to lobbyists who would oppose his efforts to rein in government spending. Well, don’t bail now, tough guy.”¹⁰

In Columbus, Sara Kilpatrick, AAUP’s executive director, was straightforward in her evaluation of Kasich’s strategy. “It was very clear,” she wrote to Ohio AAUP members, “that this was a publicity stunt in order to position Building a Better Ohio, the pro-SB 5 campaign, going into the fall battle.” She noted that Kasich “was sure to assert that the lack of labor leaders at the meeting was reflective of the uncompromising nature of unions. We Are Ohio was sure to remind the Governor that there is nothing stopping him from doing the right thing on his own.” She made clear to us that, barring a repeal from the legislature, SB 5 would be on the ballot in November: “We Are Ohio continues to ramp up its staff, garner volunteers, and raise the money necessary to run an effective campaign.”¹¹

Any large-scale political campaign like the fight to defeat Senate Bill 5 requires more than just the enormous quantities of personal time and effort being committed by thousands of people across Ohio. It also requires money. The big unions were in the process of committing millions of dollars. The AAUP, for the first time, also contributed a significant amount of money to the cause. Most of Ohio’s AAUP collective bargaining chapters contributed—often tens of thousands of dollars. The state and national organizations dug deep for money that could be invested in the campaign. And perhaps most moving to us was the money voluntarily contributed by out-of-state conferences and chapters, even from individual AAUP members across the country. But we needed to do more, as Cary Nelson, then-president of the AAUP wrote in a national message to all AAUP members. “The AAUP’s chapters and its national leaders have contributed half a million dollars to the cause,” Nelson wrote on August 25. “Our members and our staff are on the ground waging this battle. We urge you to contribute now to help repeal this legislation.”¹² In the end, the AAUP, its state and national organizations, the Ohio chapters, and chapters from all over the country, contributed more than $700,000 to We Are Ohio to, in our view, protect higher education and the principles the AAUP represents.

It was obvious that the unions were pouring in money to defend themselves. On the pro-SB 5 side, however, where the money was coming from was purposely much more difficult to identify.

As The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported in September, Building a Better Ohio would announce in late October who had donated to the campaign but was not required by law to say how much the donations were, and that would remain “a secret.” While Building a Better Ohio was hiding its finances, We Are Ohio was not. We Are Ohio’s Melissa Fazekas criticized the makeup of the Republican organization and said that Ohioans have a right to know who was behind the campaign to pass Issue 2. “While We Are Ohio . . . is publicly releasing our campaign finance reports, our opposition is hiding their donors,” Fazekas told the Plain Dealer.<¹³

It was a “mystery,” the Dayton Daily News reported on October 25, which corporations and individuals were contributing, and how much they were giving, to the campaign to defend SB 5. Building a Better Ohio spokesman Jason Mauk, who had said that in late October his group would list their donors but not the amounts, was eager to point out that the secrecy was legal. The Daily News explained why: “The limited disclosure requirement is a result of how the campaign committee was set up. Building a Better Ohio is a separate PAC from the 501(c)4 nonprofit Building a Better Ohio Inc. The nonprofit can take unlimited, undisclosed donations and then write a check to the PAC.” For those interested in following the money, this was not good enough. “We’re missing one of the most essential parts of the puzzle, which is how much money did they invest. Some disclosure is better than nothing, but just barely,” Catherine Turcer of Ohio Citizen Action, a nonpartisan nonprofit group that tracks campaign money, told the Daily News.¹⁴

When the finance reports were released, the stark difference was clear. We Are Ohio listed its donors by name and amount. It had raised $30.5 million, in both cash and in-kind donations. Donations had come to the cause from more than two hundred unions, including locals and chapters all over the country, with the Ohio Education Association, AFSCME, and SEIU leading the way, the Daily News reported. The unions contributed $18.6 million of the $19 million in cash and 98.8 percent of the $4.6 million in in-kind help. Roughly $5 million in cash came from the national offices of labor organizations. Also, showing the grassroots nature of the campaign, We Are Ohio received contributions from more than 7,100 individuals whose average donation was $46. By contrast, Building a Better Ohio received $5.97 million. Fifty-one organizations contributed, including the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, Owens Corning, the Ohio Automobile Dealers Association, the Ohio Farm Bureau, and Motorists Mutual Insurance. No amounts were included. Even the list of contributors and the total was misleading, because several conservative groups were spending on their own separately. For example, Alliance for America’s Future (AAF)—a Virginia-based and GOP-friendly non-profit—spent millions of dollars mailing to voters millions of fliers urging a yes vote on Issue 2. AAF’s fliers contained such misleading information that the Plain Dealer’s fact-checker generously judged them “problematic.” AAF’s principals include Dick Cheney’s daughters Liz and Mary, and Barry Bennett, a former top aide to former Rep. Jean Schmidt, a Republican from southwest Ohio. “Alliance for America’s Future,” John Nichols of The Nation reported, “is one of the most aggressive of the out-of-state special interest groups that have elbowed their way into the referendum fight. Cheney’s group is part of a shadowy network of campaign organizations in which Dick’s daughter [Liz] serves as a principal operative.”¹⁵

The Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce was a powerful player when it entered the fight. “We recognize that this change is not without discomfort, but this reform is long overdue,” chamber CEO Ellen van der Horst said in a news release that clung closely to Republican talking points. “Senate Bill 5 is another strong step in tackling the current fiscal crisis and making long-term, transformational change. It puts Ohio in a better position to create more flexible governments that can allocate resources based on market conditions, provide maximum value to the taxpayer and, ultimately, grow jobs.”¹⁶
Van der Horst’s statement, of course, misrepresented the manufactured fiscal crisis and repeated inaccurate statements that union busting created jobs. What it would certainly do would be to increase corporate profits at the expense of all other social concerns in Ohio.

The Ohio Chamber of Commerce produced a similar statement. It came as no real surprise, since the chamber’s attack on union workers was in sync with Gov. Kasich’s position and with the chamber’s long-term policy of support for lower wages. The chamber had also been on the wrong side of the minimum wage fight in 2006. A Constitutional Amendment that had indexed the minimum wage to inflation was adopted by a statewide vote of 57 percent to 43 percent, over shrill opposition from the chamber of commerce. Thus, the minimum wage in Ohio would be increased to $7.85 per hour starting January 1, 2013. Tipped employees were to be paid a minimum hourly rate of $3.93. Ohio’s minimum wage in 2011 was $7.70 per hour for non-tipped employees and $3.85 per hour for tipped employees.

In late August 2011, we also learned that the Cincinnati USA Partnership, an economic development organization directed by the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce, had been awarded $2 million by Gov. Kasich through his controversial new JobsOhio agency, an attempt to privatize the state’s economic development efforts. Several other economic development agencies, almost all with some ties to their local chambers of commerce, had also been part of Gov. Kasich’s giveaway of a total of $14.9 million in taxpayer’s money. These funds had been generated by the innovative economic development program Third Frontier, initiated in 2002 and designed to help fund new high-tech jobs in the state. Since the state’s high-tech research centers are largely in the universities, much of the money invested through Third Frontier found its way into university research programs. It was never intended to be a giveaway to the state’s chambers of commerce. But during the 2010 campaign, Kasich had been clear that he planned to use the program to funnel public money into private hands. He said that Third Frontier should be restructured so business executives controlled more of the money. “I’m also not really thrilled with the idea of universities running it because I’ve seen glaciers move faster at decisions than universities,” he said.¹⁷ An interesting observation from someone with broad experience at Lehman Brothers, where flawed decisions seem to have been a specialty.

This tax giveaway to the Cincinnati chamber, which came only weeks after the chamber announced its support for Senate Bill 5, certainly had the appearance of a political payoff. However, finding creative ways of channeling Ohioans’ hard-earned tax dollars into the pockets of corporate interests, not economic development, has been a primary objective of the Kasich administration, so the transfer of funds might have occurred without SB 5. But what we wanted at the time was a promise from the chamber that it would not use the windfall of taxpayer money to campaign for SB 5 or to free up other funds to do so. The people of the Cincinnati region never received such a commitment.

We did learn more about where this newfound wealth might be directed. In the fall of 2010 the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, in conjunction with the Cincinnati organization and other metropolitan chambers of commerce, produced a report called, “Redesigning Ohio: Transforming Government into a 21st Century Institution.” It has reissued this badly flawed report in subsequent years with slight changes.

“Redesigning Ohio” is mainly filled with proposals based in right-wing ideology that arguably do not serve the middle class, and seems to have as its primary purpose the reduction of tax contributions for the state’s corporate heavyweights. This is no surprise, since nearly all of the substance of the chamber’s plan has one source: the conservative group ALECs “State Budget Reform Toolkit.” Much of the language and argument contained in both plans are strikingly similar, pushing something called “Budgeting for Outcomes,” or BFO. The argument embracing BFO in both the ALEC report and the Ohio Chamber proposal is surrounded by much verbiage that makes it sound both new and harmless. It is neither. Essentially, making use of zero-based budgeting, it is budget planning based not on what needs to be done but on how much money will be expended. Much of this approach requires the existence of a crisis so that people will make decisions they ordinarily would not. David Osborne, a principal in Public Strategies Group, provided many of the ideas behind the chamber’s proposal. “Crisis as Opportunity” is the title of an article that he co-authored on his organization’s website. He and his coauthors argue that “we all know that crisis brings opportunity. During a crisis, the politically impossible becomes possible.”¹⁸

In reality, BFO suggests to policymakers that they can be justified in slashing government expenditures to some undetermined lower level based on ideologically driven choices because of the many supposed positive benefits that will ensue. Cutting funding, for example, will make state government services more “creative” and will actually “improve” public services. There is no mention of layoffs, of important work not accomplished, or of the heavy tax burden passed on to local communities. It is all gently covered in a smoke screen of happy talk about “improvements.” As noted earlier, much of this approach relies on the existence of a budget crisis, so that people will be willing to make decisions they would ordinarily reject. “Ohio is facing an unprecedented fiscal crisis,” the Ohio Chamber website states breathlessly. “Although we’re not alone, we would be remiss in not taking this opportunity to transform our state government to one that is sustainable and provides greater value to our citizens.” Clearly, in tandem with a legislature purposely reducing revenues, BFO is a tool for conservatives of the Grover Norquist “starve-the-beast” school of undermining government services.¹⁹

Not all Ohio chamber members simply accepted this radical political approach by the state and local chambers of commerce. When the Youngstown Chamber announced its support for Senate Bill 5, Tom Byers, general manager of A. B. Crane & Steel Service Inc., withdrew his membership, as did others. “I just wish they would’ve stayed neutral on [SB 5],” Byers told the local newspaper. “I don’t see how it helps to support it so strongly.” Fireline, Inc., a manufacturer of fire rescue and safety equipment, also withdrew its membership.²⁰

My whole experience with the chamber in Cincinnati and Ohio has been a puzzle to me. In my newspaper years in Montana and Idaho, I had found that the chambers of commerce that I covered were a friendly bunch of small business owners who were devoted to their neighbors and their communities. They liked union workers because they earned good wages, which they could then spend in the stores. And union members’ decent benefits gave them the kind of stability that contributed to prosperous neighborhoods. However, in the 1990s, while I was in graduate school, the chamber changed into a very different kind of organization.

Thomas Donohue began the transformation when he took over as president of the national office in 1997. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce “has become more brazenly pro-Republican” under Donohue’s leadership, Britain’s The Economist news magazine reported in April 2012. “Its ranks of lobbyists, strategists and flacks bristle with former Republican congressional attack dogs. Its people are said to meet periodically with Republican-supporting groups to share intelligence, such as polling data, and to coordinate ad spending. It has ties to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads political action committee, whose president is the Chamber’s former chief lawyer.”²¹

SourceWatch, which monitors right-wing organizations, has, with other public interest organizations, done a good deal of work on tracking the Chamber of Commerce’s activities. In the wake of President Obama’s victory in 2008, the chamber ramped up its political efforts. “We plan to build a grass-roots business organization so strong that when it bites you in the butt, you bleed,” chamber President Tom Donohue told the Los Angeles Times. Reacting to what the chamber sees as a potentially hostile political climate, Donohue told the Times that the organization would seek to punish candidates who target business interests with their rhetoric or policy proposals, including congressional and state-level candidates. In rhetoric more appropriate to the robber barons of the nineteenth century, Donohue said, “I’m concerned about anti-corporate and populist rhetoric from candidates for the presidency, members of Congress and the media . . . It suggests to us that we have to demonstrate who it is in this society that creates jobs, wealth and benefits—and who it is that eats them.”²² This belief that only the people in suits in the corporate board rooms generate wealth has become a central concept of the contemporary Republican Party.

Not surprisingly then, the chamber was determined to crush the union movement in Ohio in 2011, through its ardent defense of Senate Bill 5. And the chamber could be a front for the corporate interests behind SB 5. “Under a system Donohue pioneered,” the Times reported, “corporations contribute money to the chamber, which then finances attack ads targeting individual candidates without revealing the name of the businesses involved in the ads.”²³
The chamber is, after all, an organization driven primarily by the nation’s largest corporate interests. In 2008, for example, only 45 huge multinational corporations contributed nearly half of the chamber’s $140 million in donations. In 2010, Dow Chemical gave $1.7 million, Prudential Financial gave $2 million, and Rupert Murdock of News Corp. gave $1 million.²⁴ With activities closely paralleling Karl Rove’s American Crossroads group, the chamber on the national level has lobbied against climate change regulations and against regulations of business, even after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the corporate malfeasance that brought on the Great Recession. Another relationship that draws it very close to the Senate Bill 5 battle is that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was a member of ALEC in 2011. Its deep involvement with the organization is evident in its membership in ALEC’s Civil Justice Task Force, the Education Task Force, the International Relations Task Force, and the Telecommunications and Information Technology Task Force. Several prominent chamber leaders, including Vice President Page Faulk, were prominent speakers at ALEC’s meetings in recent years.

I have spent a good deal of time examining the Chamber of Commerce’s role in the Senate Bill 5 campaign, because it was the largest and most visible in-state organization that advocated for the union-busting legislation within the large group of national conservative groups that entered the fray in 2011. In Ohio, small business owners who are members of their chambers of commerce should ask themselves, in the wake of SB 5, whether the chamber is really supporting the kind of state they want to live in—and whether vilifying the police who protect our streets, the firemen who protect our homes, the teachers who educate our children, and the many ordinary union members who are customers of businesses around the state, is really the road Ohio should take.

These important issues were at the center of public debates that were held all over the state in September and October of 2011. One of the most important of the debates pitted two local Cincinnati-area legislators against one another: Sen. Shannon Jones, SB 5’s Republican sponsor of the bill, and Rep. Connie Pillich, an outspoken opponent of the legislation. Held in suburban Cincinnati on September 22, during the debate Jones repeated the inaccurate central talking points behind SB 5: that there was no money left, that it would leave bargaining intact, and that it leveled the playing field between private and public sector workers. Pillich countered that it was interesting to hear that the public sector had created the recession. She emphasized that SB 5 was no modest reform. “The deck is stacked in the favor of management from the beginning to the end of the process, there is no bargaining,” Pillich told the audience. “It is like going to divorce court and finding out your spouse is the judge.”²⁵

One of key televised debates was carried on NBC affiliates state-wide with a panel of journalists from Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati, and moderated by White House correspondent Chuck Todd. It featured Republican Sen. Keith Faber on the pro-SB 5 side and former Democratic congressman Dennis Eckert on the anti-SB 5 side. Both men traded heavy verbal blows during the debate, but the strongest message coming out of it was Eckert’s argument that any of the reforms the Republicans and others wanted to make could be made within the context of collective bargaining—change could be accomplished best through negotiation. But crushing the unions through SB 5 was an objective driven by national Republican political goals, Eckert pointed out, not Ohio’s budget issues.²⁶

“Seldom in the history of Ohio,” Eckert said, “have the people had such a unique opportunity to stand and be counted. The citizen’s veto of Senate Bill 5 gives us one of our most cherished opportunities and responsibilities.”

As the bruising campaign went into its final months, it would soon be clear just where the people of Ohio would stand.