Brigid Kelly, Opinion contributor
Published 12:00 p.m. ET Jan. 3, 2018
While everyone is getting into the holiday spirit of giving, a colleague of mine in the Ohio House is circulating six dangerous and divisive amendments to our Constitution. Amendments that would only take away from working families.
These radical changes to the Ohio Constitution and anti-family ideas are corroded with the fingerprints of the billionaire Koch brothers and anti-American propaganda organizations Americans for Prosperity and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). These special interest groups are driven by greed and power. It makes absolutely no sense that people with that much money would spend so much time, effort and resources trying to deprive working people of food on their table, roofs over their heads, and day-to-day dignity and security.
The six proposed amendments to the Ohio Constitution are all related to a nefarious and deceptive concept known as “right to work.” Time and time again, we’ve seen that right-to-work experiment leads to lower wages, more injuries and deaths in the workplace and employees are stripped of their voice and rights. But failed experiments don’t seem to get in the way of destructive ideology.
The bottom line is this: lawmakers elected by Ohio citizens should not sign on to an agenda directed by out-of-state special interests who don’t care about the people we are elected to serve.
We’ve been down this road before. In 2011, the out-of-state interests pushed lawmakers to ramrod Senate Bill 5 through the process in order to deny employees of their collective bargaining rights. We successfully fought back by collecting 1.3 million signatures, amassing 17,000 volunteers and vetoing SB 5 by a 62-38 percent margin. In 2011, SB 5 was unfair, unsafe and hurt us all. Today is no different.