Preface

A decade ago, in 2011, a massive political struggle engulfed Ohio. Extreme politicians had imposed a sweeping union-busting bill on the state. The labor movement responded by fighting a determined and successful battle to repeal that legislation.

Much of the history of the labor movement is of defeats. The story of the repeal of Senate Bill 5 is not one of those.

Time and again, beginning in the 19th century, working people who sought to make their lives better were met by a combination of corporate greed and government enablers. From the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 to bitter mining struggles in West Virginia and Colorado and Montana to the grape groves of California, this combination used a variety of tools and advantages to cripple the labor movement.

The Wagner Act passed in 1935 during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal finally put the federal government mainly on the side of working people. The result was a great expansion of labor unions and widespread prosperity among working people across the country. In the 1960s and 1970s, unions began to grow in the public sector, in part because of the increasingly corporate behavior of federal, state, and local governments.

One can see this in the privatization of many functions of government at all levels. Inevitably, in this process, the services move from being about public service to being about making money. The objective of serving the public good is exchanged for the profit motive.

This problem has become particularly manifest in public colleges and universities across the country. Too many university presidents fancy themselves as CEOs and boards of trustees are usually dominated by business managers, lawyers, and sports boosters rather than anyone familiar with the work of higher education. Thus, instead of an investment in teaching and learning, we see real estate development, privatization of research enterprises, and athletic departments that are financial black holes. Much of the revenue funding the mission creep into non-academic areas is generated by transforming full-time faculty into part-time workers who are paid little and have no health insurance and no retirement. This drive to de-professionalize the faculty will have long-term consequences by discouraging new scholars from launching an academic career and by shortchanging students whose instructors have less opportunity to assist them because of their tenuous and intermittent employment.

Like other public workforces, faculty unions have grown since the 1970s largely because of a desire to push employers to invest in the essential work that needs to be done. At our colleges and universities, that is the academic mission of teaching and research.

The reaction of conservative forces to the growing voice of the union movement started slowly but gathered strength over time. The Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, with roots in Ohio, crippled much of what unions were able to accomplish but was passed by Republicans over President Truman’s veto. Gradually, by spreading laws that blocked democratic processes within the workplace that mandated collecting dues from non-members as well as members, so-called right-to-work laws, the conservative movement hampered expansion of unions into some parts of the country.

This conservative strategy of gradually chipping away at the ability of unions to operate and to have influence on political processes came to a peak in state elections in 2010. Republicans swept into statehouses across the nation, riding a wave of Tea Party extremism. Once in power, Republicans in Wisconsin and Ohio launched historic attacks on the union movement.

Led by conservative Gov. John Kasich, the Republicans in Ohio passed Senate Bill 5, a 500-page bill that would have dealt a death blow to many unions.

This book tells the story of that struggle in Ohio. During the battles that ensued in 2011, much of the press coverage centered on Wisconsin. This was for several reasons. Wisconsin, historically, had been the center of progressivism and the first public unions were formed there. Also, in Madison, a progressive city, the unions were able to bring huge crowds to the capitol to protest the attack that was being launched against working people by the extreme politicians in power.

But the struggle in Ohio was at least as important as that which went on in Wisconsin. The Buckeye state had a much larger public labor movement. Senate Bill 5 was a weapon attacking the livelihoods of 360,000 union members. Taking on the unions in Ohio was striking at the heart of the nation’s labor movement.

Given the size and importance of Ohio’s unions, I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that the repeal of union-busting Senate Bill 5 is one of the greatest victories in the history of the American the labor movement, rivaling even Wagner Act’s passage.

Most importantly, it was the people of Ohio who defended the labor movement by repealing Senate Bill 5 by a nearly 2-1 margin, a huge defeat for John Kasich’s central agenda.

Its impact has lingered on. Ties were formed among the labor unions that never existed before. We Are Ohio, the broad-based coalition of public and private unions, progressive groups, and faith groups that was created to combat SB 5, still exists and meets regularly. Politicians have steered away from more political attacks against labor unions.

The time might seem ripe for revitalization of the labor movement. It is possible to track the growth of income inequality with the decline of the labor movement. Union expansion could be a powerful way to begin to cut into economic inequality. After all, nearly two-thirds of Americans approve of labor unions. “Rather than allow inequality to fester,” as one writer has recently observed, “organized labor affords workers a means to achieve for themselves a full share of the nation’s prosperity.”

However, conservative forces in Congress continue to take action against unions. In a series of extraordinary, and many would argue un-Constitutional, moves, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has manufactured a very conservative Supreme Court. Almost its first act was to strike a blow against the labor movement by imposing nation-wide right-to-work on public unions. The conservatives on the court used a flawed and convoluted conception of the First Amendment’s freedom of speech clause to do this. The court ignored the basic principle that the First Amendment was meant to be a restraint on government and not a tool to undermine the labor movement by trying to silence union members.

The determination of conservative forces to cripple the labor movement, by any means necessary, makes the victory over SB 5 all the more important and relevant. It shows the possibilities that exist in organized labor campaigns to defend the freedom to improve the lives of all Americans. And while the unions have shrunk over the last 30 years, there is still much latent strength in the movement.

In the book that follows, I have made no changes from its original publication. It remains the only book written about this historic campaign and serves as a record of what was done and accomplished. I considered re-writing the book and broadening its scope so that it would not be so focused on the work of college and university faculty members through the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). After all, the victory over SB 5 was the work of many unions, many groups, many individuals.

But the book as it stands is a product of the fight for the survival the Ohio’s labor movement as seen through the eyes of a participant. You can hear that in the tone and the focus of the book since it was written in the still smoldering aftermath of the Battle of Ohio.