Stewart cites amendments as swaying him in favor of S.B. 5

State Sen. Jimmy Stewart said Saturday that amendments to Senate Bill 5 that kept collective bargaining for wages and working conditions persuaded him to favor the legislation when it passed last week with a 17-16 vote.

The original bill dismantled collective bargaining entirely. Stewart, a Republican from Albany, said he would not have voted for that bill. The legislation that did pass still eliminates collective bargaining for state workers on the issues of health insurance, pensions and so-called “management rights,” which for teachers, for example, would include staffing levels, class sizes and/or building assignments.

The bill would also prohibit any public workers from striking and, for police and firefighters, does away with the binding-arbitration process for dispute resolution. It designs a new process where a fact-finder would be brought in to make and present a public report. If that gets rejected, the city council, school board or other legislative body would then either accept its own last best offer or the last best offer of the union.

Critics charge that this almost certainly means that the government body will side with its own position.

Stewart, who also serves as majority leader in the state Senate, said that he wasn’t completely behind how the current bill replaces binding arbitration. With companion legislation to be introduced soon in the Ohio House, and changes expected to be made to the bill, Stewart said he hopes it gets better in that regard.

“The original Senate Bill 5 basically banned collective bargaining for public employees,” he said. “I’m not in favor of banning collective bargaining. I think being able to negotiate for your wages and such is basic.”

The changes made to the bill restoring collective bargaining for wages and working conditions, Stewart said, stemmed in part from concerns he and others had raised with the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Shannon Jones, R-Springboro.

“It’s one thing to reform; it’s another to completely repeal,” he said. “I can and do support reform to the way it works.”

Stewart said that there has been some confusion and misinformation surrounding the bill. He pointed to teachers who have asked him if it’s true that their wages will be cut or their insurance or continuing contracts taken away.

“This is not true,” he said. “Even the original bill would not have done that.”

He said another myth is that employee contracts will be based entirely on some sort of subjective merit-based formula.

“If you are a teacher who’s been teaching for several years and you have a continuing contract, you still have it until you retire,” he said. “Nothing changed there.”

New teachers who don’t already have a contract, he said, can get up to a five-year contract where things are based on other factors in addition to seniority.

“Years of service is still one factor,” he said. “But it’s not the only factor. And I don’t think it should be the only factor.”

In education, for example, he said, in addition to years of service, teachers will be evaluated on certifications, value-added metrics, evaluations and peer-review evaluations. He said that these standards of evaluation can be negotiated between unions and school boards.

“That’s subject to the collective bargaining process,” he said. “If Trimble wants to do it one way and Athens wants to do it another, that’s up to them in their bargaining process. They can work that out.”

With regard to health insurance, Stewart said the original bill was going to mandate a minimum employee contribution of 20 percent. Through amendments, the contribution has been knocked down to 15 percent, he said.

He said this expense would be mitigated by another project to pool all of the state employees under one health-insurance provider, instead of many different individual providers, to drive the costs down. He said this could be done by pooling them into the state employee plan that is already in place, or by creating a separate one.

“The pooling idea – they’ve already done a study on this – it would save well over $100 million statewide,” he said. “That was before they even got into the employee share issue.”

Stewart cited former Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher who advocated pooling when he was running for governor in the late 1990s.

The pooling idea, Stewart predicted, will be included in upcoming state budget process. Ohio faces an expected $8 billion shortfall in its next biennial budget that goes into place July 1.

STEWART SAID THAT S.B. 5 doesn’t do a lot to balance the current budget because most existing contracts go through at least the first year of the budget. The bill does not end current contracts, he noted. He said it would save the state about $190 million in the second year of the upcoming budget. If the bill was entirely in effect, Stewart said, it could save the state up to $1.3 billion over the course of a two-year budget.

Turning to the subject of pensions, Stewart said that typically a deal is struck where the employer share to retirement is between 10 percent and 12 percent of salary and the employee share is around 8 percent, using rough estimates. He said that sometimes employers will also pick up a portion or all of the employee share.

A myth about S.B. 5, he said, is that government employers will no longer pay the employer share. This is not true, he said. The employer will still pay the employer share, but may no longer pick up all or part of the employee share, he stated.

THE ONE PIECE OF THE legislation that Stewart said he is not fully behind is replacement of binding arbitration with the new system for safety forces.

Binding arbitration has its own problems, Stewart said, and the goal should be to come up with something better. One suggestion, he said, was having a local common pleas judge make the final decision. The bill eventually opted instead to let the local legislative authority have the final say. Between those two options and the binding arbitration that has been in place, Stewart said all three have problems and merits.

He said the good thing about the option of using the local legislative authority (as in S.B. 5) is that those elected officials are accountable to the voters. The system may have unintended consequences though, he acknowledged.

“That’s something I’m still struggling with,” he said. “I know that the House is going to revisit this issue.”

Meanwhile, Stewart said if the employer legislative authority is being unreasonable in negotiations, because they are local elected officials, they could be challenged at the ballot box.

In response to concerns that the bill was stuffed with items that had nothing to do with collective bargaining such as paragraphs about same-sex marriage, Stewart said he had asked the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Jones, about this and was told that this is not the case.

As far as politics go, Stewart was asked if he was concerned about political repercussions for his vote considering the high percentage of public-service employees in Athens County. Bitter anger at his S.B. 5 vote has shown up in letters to the editor, phone calls and Facebook posts, with some former supporters vowing to never vote for him again.

Stewart responded to the criticism by noting that with a budget crisis like the state is facing, political repercussions are inevitable, especially with controversial legislation such as this.

“There are people in my district who are on all sides of this,” he said. “It comes down to, you look at the contents of the bill.”

He said he expects to face other issues in the future where he may be on the same side of organized labor. On most issues in the past, he insisted that he’s been on the side of organized labor.

“This time I wasn’t,” he said. “Could there be another issue next month or in three months where I’m on the same side? Sure. There could be one coming up next week. On this issue we were not on the same side.”

In response to charges that this bill was meant to essentially kneecap Democratic Party machinery and the effectiveness of its labor support, Stewart noted that he himself has received the endorsements of labor unions.

Apologizing to constituents who haven’t been able to reach him (including The NEWS, which sought a comment from Stewart for 36 hours before he responded), Stewart said his office has been fielding thousands of calls and emails over the issue. He said he has never previously experienced this amount of call and email volume. In response to criticism that he didn’t attend a rally at the Athens Community Center last Saturday, Stewart said he was at a meeting in Zanesville working on getting the various amendments into the bill.