The Battle of Ohio
On the evening of November 8, 2011, Ohio Gov. John Kasich stepped before microphones to admit that the centerpiece legislation of his administration, Senate Bill 5, had been heavily defeated in a referendum by the people of his state.
“When you get beat,” an at least temporarily chastened Kasich said, “you’ve got to admit it. It is clear the people have spoken.”1
On Election Day 2011, with voter turnout unusually high for an off-year ballot, Ohio voters defeated Senate Bill 5, or Issue 2, as it was known on the ballot, by a margin of nearly 62 percent to 38 percent (2.2 million votes to 1.3 million).
Senate Bill 5, or SB 5, launched with great fanfare by its right-wing Republican Party supporters early in the year, had been decisively defeated by Ohioans—Democrats, those increasingly rare moderate Republicans, and independents—who didn’t believe in scapegoating public employees for the recession or the state’s budgetary woes.
For me, a university professor and union member, as for so many others, this fight had become very personal. It said a great deal about two different views of Ohio and two different views of America. On the one hand, the proponents of SB 5 suggested that the world was one where, if only individuals would offer themselves up to the benevolent corporate forces of the free market and conservative political officials, then the state’s budget and economic problems would be solved. Backed by corporate titans, conservative think tanks, and right-wing politicians, supporters of SB 5 promised they were only trying to do what was necessary and best for Ohio. In reality, they represented an ideology that, despite borrowing from some of the worst strands of American history, is actually quite foreign to American traditions.
The United States had never been a place, until recently, where any significant portion of the population believed that submission of individual freedom to corporate power was a necessity.
On the other hand, like many others, my life experience had suggested a very different world. In my world, ordinary people needed some protection from the rapacious corporate and political forces that saw their labor as only another commodity to buy and sell. Empowered by shared interests and goals, people could craft lives that were both successful and satisfying. There was no need to sacrifice individual freedom to market forces. More than that, my experience had shown to me how essential it is that the people who actually do the work and produce value also have a say in the workplace.
For me, part of this view was generated by growing up in a small town in the Rocky Mountain West. Anaconda, Montana, was created and dominated by a huge multinational mining corporation, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. The fabulously rich copper mines in nearby Butte, and the rumbling of the world’s largest copper smelter in Anaconda, kept generations employed while creating a unique urban industrial world in the agrarian vas