As we revisit your successful effort to protect collective bargaining rights 15 years ago by repealing SB 5, we want to take a look at a pivotal month in that victory: April.
We Are Ohio was formed in April.
John Kasich fueled our fire when he signed SB 5 into law in a “brief Statehouse ceremony” as described by the media.
The Plain Dealer reported: “His administration would not say whether he will raise money for a separate campaign or spend his own campaign funds to push back on We Are Ohio. But hours before Kasich signed the bill, his gubernatorial campaign issued a far more politically charged statement in a fund-raising appeal.”
When the media pressed Kasich on the email, he played victim.
“Do you have any idea the politics that have been used to club me over the head and Republicans over the head? I think there is nothing inappropriate to the fact of letting people know what we’ve done, and if people want to help us, that’s great. Period, exclamation point.”
Kasich ran for governor so he could run for president in 2016, and he wrote his national political obituary when he signed SB 5 into law.
He would come to rue and regret poking the hornet’s nest.
But we had other things to do in April, 2011.
To get a referendum on the ballot, we had 90 days from the time Kasich signed the bill to draft the ballot language, collect an initial round of signatures, and submit the language and the petitions to then-Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine and then-Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, who both supported SB 5 and were no friends of ours.
The clock was ticking, but we were moving at lightning speed.
On April 4, we delivered summary language for two referenda – a long and a short version – to DeWine and the signatures to Husted.
DeWine took the full 10 days granted him to review the language for both, but our petition language was so tight and on point due to our crack legal team that DeWine approved our language on April 15.
This is unusual. Typically, an Attorney General who opposes an idea rejects the initial language and that often takes two weeks or more away from the 90-day period.
We had printing presses rolling the moment DeWine approved the language. We had a paid signature collection firm with people ready to hit the ground, and we had possibly the largest grassroots campaign chomping at the bit to start collecting signatures.
We had the rest of April, May and June to collect 231,149 valid signatures from Ohio voters in order to place SB 5 on the November, 2011 ballot.
There was another hurdle: We had to collect valid signatures from voters in 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties, equal to 3 percent of the total vote cast in the county for the office of governor in the 2010 gubernatorial election.
As the We Are Ohio campaign began to unfold, Kasich, a media outlet reported, argued that the controversy has not been as polarizing as many assume.
He was right. It was not polarizing to working people. It was unifying.
Each month, we are sending you an email that looks back at 2011.
Where were you during the fight to protect collective bargaining rights?
Tell us your story here.
In Solidarity,
We Are Ohio
