FREMONT, Ohio — Ohio Farmers Union (OFU) is opposed to Issue 2; the issue, which will be on the November ballot, is a referendum on Senate Bill 5, Ohio’s anti-collective bargaining law.

“It’s not about the economy, because there are 4000 fewer state workers now than there were four years ago,” said Roger Wise, OFU president. “In the last year of the last administration, all of the state workers took 10 furlough days, which amounted to about $360 million that they gave to the state of Ohio.”

Before collective bargaining in Ohio, Wise said, there was a teacher’s strike in his small, local school district. It wasn’t planned, it just evolved because there was no communication.

“The administration, the teachers, the parents and the students, there was a lot of acrimony,” Wise said. “When collective bargaining came into play, it leveled the playing field … everybody was at the table and everybody felt like they had input into the process. It stabilized things and things worked very well in Ohio ... until now.

“S.B. 5 will not help the economy,” Wise said. “We’ve got to have an economy that has jobs, that people can participate in the system with them. We’ve got to have disposable income and to just lower the quality of life and the standard of living and wages is not going to do it.”

Ohio’s income tax structure needs to be revisited, he opined. The few people at the top are doing well, but the middle class is struggling – and to suggest the middle class is the problem completely misses the point, he said.

“We have a lot of hard workers and a lot of dedicated civil servants, firefighters and policemen and certainly teachers, as well,” Wise said. “If those folks aren’t able to sit at the table the quality of life is going to go down.”

Passage of S.B. 5 will impact farmers negatively because most live in rural communities with a lower tax base and already have trouble attracting the best teachers, he said. The National Farmers Union has advocated for collective bargaining ever since its founding in Point, Texas, in 1902.

“That has been the core of our principle,” Wise said. “We’ve always supported the right to organize and for labor, because a strong middle class makes for a strong economy and a good quality of life.”

In addition, Ohio’s funding formula for education needs to be reconfigured, and S.B. 5 does not address that problem. Wise said his school district paid more in taxes than most districts pay; the inequity in funding is a big problem.

He added the Farmers Union is grassroots-driven and this policy decision was made by the county chapters and agreed upon by the majority of membership.

“I would encourage people to remember it is not about money, it is about collective bargaining, and if the public sector collective bargaining goes away that is the last bastion of organized labor,” Wise said. “The private sector has diminished dramatically over the last number of years, and if this issue is sustained I believe it will not be for the benefit of the ‘Main Street’ of Ohio.”

(The Ohio Farm Bureau Federation, which supports passage of the November referendum, and citizen group We Are Ohio, which opposes it, were the subject of a Sept. 7 article in Farm World on this issue, as well.)