Ohio Electrician Urges: ‘Don’t Slow Down the Recovery’
Gregg Ogden, a 17-year member of Marietta Local 972, has worked only seven weeks out of the last 20 months. Despite the hard times, Ogden sees signs that Ohio is beginning to turn the corner, thanks to some of the policies of the Obama administration and leaders in Congress.
 Ogden says that he is supporting Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher for U.S. Senate because he doesn’t want to see this progress sideswiped by a return to measures promoted by Republican nominee Rob Portman. As the Bush administration’s trade representative, Portman, who also represented a district in Ohio in Congress, supported billions of dollars in tax breaks and other measures that helped send 100,000 Ohio jobs overseas.
Ogden says, “I don’t see why anyone who earns a paycheck could go out and vote for Portman.”
Gregg Ogden, an unemployed member of Marietta Local 972, is helping get out the vote for Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher for U.S. Senate and Linda Secrest for state representative.
Drawing the contrast between candidates, Fisher says, “If Ohioans want to see the jobs that Congressman Portman has created after spending 20 years in Washington, they have to go to China, India and Mexico.”
Choices for IBEW members in November couldn’t be clearer than in Ohio. Gov. Ted Strickland, elected four years ago with strong labor support, began his term by appointing Fisher as head of economic development. They both won national recognition for attracting employers to Ohio. A June report from the Pew Charitable Trusts found that Ohio is fourth among states in the number of workers employed in green energy manufacturing and development.
Strickland’s opponent is John Kasich, a former U.S. representative and a supporter of Bush administration economic policies who favors the partial privatization of Social Security.
In 2001, Kasich became managing director of the Columbus investment office of Lehman Brothers, the now-bankrupt Wall Street firm that nearly brought the U.S. economy to a collapse. He tried to convince the two Ohio state pension funds to increase their share of investments with the company. Ohio ended up taking a $480 million loss in Lehman Brothers-managed investments when the banking giant collapsed.
Kasich, who was paid nearly $600,000 in 2008, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the finance and securities industries and also money from anti-union Associated Builders and Contractors.
Mitch Lewis, a 31-year member of Portsmouth Local 575 has been out of work since September and has signed books in seven local unions. Lewis, who worked hard on Strickland’s last campaign alongside his wife, Nora, understands how members are frustrated by the political process and the lack of work. But he asks them to consider what kind of economy and policies both Strickland and President Barack Obama inherited from George W. Bush, advisors like Rob Portman and partisans like John Kasich.
Lewis has already seen the effects of redistricting under previous Republican governors. “They cut up southeastern Ohio like a piece of pie,” says Lewis. He is concerned that if members vote for Kasich as a protest against unemployment in Ohio, they will only hand him a knife to make sure that the next redistricting – a result of this year’s U.S. Census – will give the edge to even more anti-labor legislators in coming elections.
Lynda Wenzel, an 18-year member, a registrar and member of the examining board of Mansfield Local 688, says: “This year’s Ohio election is a choice between Wall Street values and Main Street values.”
Wenzel said Strickland, a steelworker’s son from rural Ohio, has been a champion of working families throughout his career. As a measure of Strickland’s character, she says, the governor has refused to accept state health benefits, paying for himself and his wife until his fellow citizens enjoy the same coverage that the state offers to him.
Challenging Key Bush Appointee in Ohio
Mitch Lewis, a 31-year member of Portsmouth, Ohio, Local 575, has been out of work since September and has signed books in seven local unions. But Lewis says he’s still fortunate to “own what I own” and to have the support of his wife who has a decent-paying job.
Lewis, whose father and brother are retired from Local 575 and who has a nephew and cousin still working out of the hall, is more concerned about the next generation. He says:
I feel real bad for the younger guys who are trying to get themselves out of dire straits. Some of them have run out of unemployment benefits and are losing everything they have.
Lewis’ concern about his co-workers drives his support for Ohio Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher in his U.S. Senate campaign against Rob Portman, a former member of Congress who served as the Bush administration’s trade representative during the years that hundreds of thousands of Ohio jobs were outsourced overseas. Says Lewis:
Lee is a grassroots guy who understands the working class person more than Portman.
As lieutenant governor, Fisher has worked with Gov. Ted Strickland to attract industry back to the state.
He served 10 years in the state legislature, served as attorney general and became a leading advocate for victims of violent crime, missing children and patients in hospitals and hospices.
Drawing the contrast between candidates, Fisher says, “If Ohioans want to see the jobs that Congressman Portman has created after spending 20 years in Washington, they have to go to China, India and Mexico.”
Lewis, who worked hard on Strickland’s campaign alongside his wife, Nora, tells members who are out of work and sour about the political process that they have to consider what kind of economy and policies both Strickland and President Barack Obama inherited from like George W. Bush and Rob Portman.
“I’m not going to lie,” says Lewis. “I’m a staunch Democrat and I tell them that I know that our candidates are fighting against a “wall of no” from the Republicans. Pro-labor candidates are also challenged, he says, by the redrawing of districts by Republicans who preceded Strickland. “They cut up southeastern Ohio like “a piece of pie,” says Lewis. |
