Ohio's Senate Bill 5 - Don't Get Me Started

I object to the notion that public workers are the problem.  As was printed online last year during the levy campaign, I make about $42000 a year.  I show up, work my tail off, and then go home for a few more hours to work a bit more.  I spend my summers, unpaid, developing myself as a professional and planning for the year ahead.  My students perform well, parents and administrators have few qualms about my work, and I am proud to be a public servant.  In talking with the community, they point again and again to the fine work that we are all doing in their employ.  Lakewood is proud of us and we are proud to work in Lakewood.  We do so much that goes beyond our contract, and you don't hear much complaining from the ranks about our pay and work hours.  

In turn, Kalish and other elected representatives repay us by singling us out as a significant obstacle on the way to balancing the books.  Never mind the global economic collapse brought about by the kind of rampant corruption and shenanigans propagated by the likes of our governor's former employer, Lehman Brothers and other similar "investment" firms.  And even if it wasn't the banker's fault, though this seems to be the case, and it was the fault of regulators, insurance companies, and shoddy deal-making, I still find it absurd that these same people would turn and point the finger at public workers as the source of our budget woes.  I don't even need a union to be pissed off at stances such as the one that confronts us today in the form of Senate Bill 5.  But it is the labor union, fought for so fervently in the buried history of our country, that has provided the only check to the kind of corporate/government power grabs that will inevitably follow any passage of this bill.  To take away the rights of workers to strike, the only non-violent form of protest that laborers have the opportunity to wield in redress of their grievances, takes away a vital check in the machinery of greed.  

I'm not upset about my salary, work hours, or the ridiculous state testing and subsequently ridiculous mandates of an outmoded education system tied to standardized testing and that measures nothing of any value (ok, I am upset about that one;-).   It's that I need the labor union, faults and all, to protect what I think is a pretty nobel attempt to do something good for the children of this country.  Every one of us just wants to help kids.  And to be called to the floor as some kind of public whipping boy is unconscionable.