Official Arguments For And Against Ohio Senate Bill 5 Veto Referendum, Issue 2 (2011)

A YES vote on Issue 2 will make long overdue reforms to unfair and costly government employment practices in Ohio, while helping to get government spending under control and making government more accountable to taxpayers.

Your YES vote on Issue 2 will:

Protect Good Teachers and Improve Our Schools

Issue 2 keeps the best teachers in the classroom by ending the unfair practice of seniority-based layoffs, which forces struggling schools to cut many of our best teachers first.

Issue 2 returns control of our schools to taxpayers by bringing increased transparency to teacher contract negotiations.

Issue 2 enables schools to retain and reward good teachers by allowing them to base pay raises on job performance.

Restore Balance and Ensure Fairness

Issue 2 ensures that government employees receive quality health care, but asks them to pay a mere 15% of their health insurance coverage which is still less than half of what the average private sector worker pays (31%).

Issue 2 asks government employees to make make a fair contribution (10%) to their taxpayer funded retirement plans instead of requiring taxpayers to provide these pension benefits for free. Many private sector workers get no retirement benefits at all.

Issue 2 allows good job performance to be considered when awarding pay raises to government employees. Private sector workers earn their paychecks by doing a good job, and so should government employees.

Get Spending Under Control, Retain Jobs, and Protect Taxpayers

Issue 2 will save our communities millions of dollars annually, helping them balance their budgets and retain jobs.

Issue 2 will protect taxpayers by giving them the right to reject unaffordable government employment contracts.

UNSAFE

* Issue 2 puts all our families' safety at risk -- making it harder for emergency responders, police and firefights to negotiate for critical safety equipment and training that protects us all.

* Issue 2 will make our nursing shortage worse. It makes it illegal for nurses, hospital and clinic workers to demand reasonable safe staffing levels -- so nurses will juggle more patients while their salaries and benefits are cut.

UNFAIR

* The same Columbus politicians who call for "shared sacrifice" exploited a loophole, giving a special exception to politician and upper management.

* Ohio's public employees have already sacrificed -- saving Ohio taxpayers over $350 million through concessions, including pay freezes and unpaid furlough days.

* It's not Ohio values to let firefights, police and teachers lose their rights and see wages and benefits gutted, while insiders, politicians and people at the top sacrifice nothing.

HURTS US ALL

* Instead of creating jobs to fix our economy, politicians like Governor Kasich gave away hundreds of millions in corporate tax breaks -- draining our state budget while Ohio continues to lose jobs -- and passed flawed laws like SB 5 to pay back their campaign donors.

* Teachers, nurses, firefights are not the reason Ohio's budget is in trouble. Big corporations, their high-paid lobbyists and the politicians they fund are blaming middle class Ohioans for a problem they caused.