Derek Bauman

Derek Bauman is an Over-the-Rhine resident, a 25-year police officer and former union president.

For over half a century, since the days of political patronage jobs and the anti-worker 1947 Ohio Ferguson Act, Democrats in Ohio have fought to create a process for public employees to bargain collectively, not only for wages, but for working conditions and safety equipment, free from the whims of elected politicians, particularly those who would use them as pawns in political games for their own personal benefit.

This culminated with the passage of Senate Bill 133, Ohio’s Collective Bargaining Law, by a Democratic legislature and signed by Democratic Gov. Dick Celeste in 1983.

What we have learned since that time is that this process has worked well, not only for employees, but for municipal employers and all of the citizens of the state. According to statistics presented at the time by Sen. Eugene Branstool, who introduced the bill, 434 public employee strikes took place in Ohio from 1971 to 1981.

That was a time of chaos. But since that time, the collective bargaining process has worked and public employee strikes and other unrest have been rare.

The system is set up with checks and balances, and a process for contracts to be negotiated and for sticking points to be resolved without necessitating the upheaval of strikes, with fair representation for workers, and with respect to the fiscal realities of local government.

The last time our collective bargaining process was under attack from politicians in Ohio was with the passage of Senate Bill 5. Senate Bill 5 was resoundingly repealed by 62 percent of Ohio voters in 2011. In short, the collective bargaining process works. This has been proved. Collective bargaining fails when politicians try to inject themselves and their own personal interests into the process.

And that is what we have in Cincinnati.

I know the risks that our public safety servants face every day, having spent 25 years – my entire adult life – as a cop on the streets. I am on crutches right now because of an on-duty injury sustained during a felony arrest. I support significant raises for our police officers, firefighters and all municipal employees. They are well-deserved.

But Mayor John Cranley's current proposal isn't really about raises, it's about political divisiveness. If it was about the raises, he would be working in Columbus and elsewhere to find more revenue for the city to be able to afford them. If it was about the raises, it would have been brought up in June, during the process when the council passed and the mayor signed a city budget that did in fact include raises. Why the dog and pony show now? Just six weeks later and after two bargaining units already have signed contracts that were agreeable to all involved?

Because it’s about everything that the three years of the Cranley administration have been about: political gamesmanship and divisively attempting to play natural allies against one another for his own personal political benefit. In this case, the mayor is trying to create a wedge between progressives and unions.

We have learned that politicians getting involved in the collective bargaining process harms the process. And in the long term, anything that harms collective bargaining harms workers.

We’ve strived for over half a century to keep pandering politicians out of public sector employment issues and collective bargaining. Now is not the time to return to the chaos of pre-1983.

We must allow the system to work as it was intended to by Celeste, and the visionary legislature of the time. Permit the process to work for the benefit of employees, citizens and all parties involved.