Ohio union protest get little sympathy
Image via WikipediaWhen protesters descended this week to oppose a bill that would weaken collective bargaining for public workers, Elaine, a cashier at a Dollar Store in a crazy quilt of strip malls in southern Columbus, had little sympathy.Greedy unions and their bosses should get little sympathy from people who are struggling just to survive and pay taxes. The reporter, Sabrina Tavernise, also talked with a Harvard professor who seemed complete out of touch with the issues facing the opponents of the unions.
“Adults acting like children down at the Statehouse,” she said, ringing up a customer’s paper plates. “The unions are getting a little bit out of control.”
For a city so important in the formation of the modern American labor movement, Columbus, Ohio’s capital, seems remarkably free of affection for unions.
In interviews on Wednesday, some people, like Elaine, a woman in her 50s who did not give her last name because it was against her store’s policy to speak to reporters, were openly against them. But most people had mixed views, expressing sympathy for the deteriorating condition of the middle class, but also frustration that a union member could get a better deal.
...Fights with unions are erupting at a time when their public approval ratings are at nearly their lowest in a quarter-century, according to a Pew Research Center survey of 1,385 adults in early February. That finding was in the air in Hal Kuhn’s tobacco shop on Wednesday. “There’s a lot of complaining,” said Mr. Kuhn, 38, who said he lives paycheck to paycheck managing the shop six days a week. “It’s, ‘Oh, I didn’t get my break, and I didn’t get yesterday off.’ ”
But if the view of unions has deteriorated, support for allowing them to bargain collectively has not. A USA Today/Gallup poll found that 61 percent of the 1,000 adults they surveyed on Monday opposed laws taking away the bargaining power of public-employee unions. “You should at least get something after giving your whole life to someone,” said Martha Rollins, 53, a retired warehouse worker who was shopping in the Dollar Store.
But Ms. Rollins was in the minority, possibly because her husband, a retired mechanic who worked for the city, benefited from union protection. Ohio has about five million workers, and about half a million are local and state employees.
More typical was Brett Stephens, 23, who had worked in more jobs since he was 15 than Ms. Rollins has in her lifetime. He had jobs at a snack shop, as a lifeguard, at Little Caesars restaurants in South Carolina and Florida, at a Limited clothing store, with a temp agency, and most recently as a cook in a diner.
He did not go to college, he said, because his grandmother, who raised him after his mother died when he was 9, could not afford to send him. Now he scrapes by on $10 an hour, unable to afford health care for his two children. It is covered by welfare.
“I think they should stop crying,” he said of the protesting union members. Everyone was working hard and tightening their belts, he said, so why should unions be different?
...
He seems to chalk it up to jealousy of some sort, when the fact is that people like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christy show more empathy with the struggling tax payer like Brett Stephens than do liberals who are more sympathetic to the greedy government workers unions.
The photo is of the Ohio public employees retirement system building.
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