Friday, January 4, 2013

Who's behind No Rights At Work in Ohio?

You can bet it isn't the teacher, autoworker and forklift driver featured on the "Ohioans for Workplace Tyranny Freedom" website. It's a bunch of billionaire-backed troglodytes who are trying to put "No Rights At Work" on the ballot in Ohio.

Dan Greenburg, writing in Voices of Change, tells us these are the wonderful folks who are trying to bring RTW4Less to the Buckeye State:
Maurice Thompson ... is Executive Director of The 1851 Law Center. That’s the group that tries to repeal school levies, like they recently tried in Westerville for example. The 1851 Law Center also pushed Ohio lawmakers to eliminate Ohio’s estate tax in the last budget, which cost the state millions of dollars, while at the same time cutting funding to Ohio schools and other programs. 
Upon continued examination, you discover Chris Littleton, a spokesperson for “Ohioans for Workplace Freedom,” is also the President of the Cincinnati Tea Party. Another key figure of the “Ohioans for Workplace Freedom” group is Bryan Williams, who happens to be Director of Government Affairs for Central Ohio Associated Building Contractors. This group supports the repeal of Federal prevailing wage laws, which establish guidelines for fair compensation for employees.
He forgot to mention ALEC, which wrote the so-called "right-to-work" law now threatening Michigan's standard of living (unless we can manage to repeal it). ALEC is the corporate dating service for state legislators who put their names on bills written by corporations. The bills are aimed at gouging consumers, busting unions, strengthening monopolies, privatizing everything that isn't nailed down and immunizing corporations from lawsuits when they damage people or communities. In exchange, the lawmakers get lavish family vacations and introductions to deep-pocketed corporate donors like the Benedict Arnold Koch brothers, who are big supporters.

And while we're at it, here's a terrific letter to the editor about right-to-work by Swede Little in the Spokesman-Review. He writes:
Those obsolete unions brought us the single wage-earner family and stay-at-home moms, paid-off mortgages and children off to college. Right to work delivers a two-and-a-half wage-earner family, working moms, latch-key kids, bondage to the slumlord and children off to prison. 
Follow the battle against No Rights At Work at We Are Ohio's Facebook page.