I’m extremely curious to see how a Governor Kasich will handle Big Labor once he enters office.
Will he go as far as Mitch Daniels did when he became Governor of Indiana?
On his first day in office, Daniels issued an executive order stripping government unions of their power to collectively bargain. The decision has not only cost the left’s perpetual dependence machine millions in taxpayer-funded union dues, but also enabled the state to cut costs by instituting a “pay-for-performance” personnel system. Without a burdensome labor contract, Daniels slashed government employment rolls from more than 35,000 to 30,454, a 14% reduction. As a result, Indiana now has fewer state employees than it did in 1982.
How very tempting.
Kasich recently gave us a preview of what we may be able to expect:
“With organized labor, look, the public-employee unions, particularly the teachers’ union, you know how I feel about them,” Kasich said during the Republican Governors Association’s annual meeting in San Diego this week, where there was a lot of talk from the governors and governors-elect about reigning in public employees’ pay and benefits.
“But for the unions that make things, I’m going to sit down with them. And I’ll tell you what, they’re going to become part of the solution, not part of this problem. And I’m going to give them a full opportunity to participate. … We’re going to give everybody a chance to pitch in.”
I love that phrase. “Unions that make things.”
Kasich has it right. And if he ends up following the lead of Mitch Daniels he may find himself in the same position Daniels was in when he ran for re-election in 2008. What happened then? He was endorsed by a number of unions.
After all, as Jason Hart said in his fantastic piece on the future of labor in Ohio on his blog, that hero….
….what are the union bosses going to do, support Republicans less?
Indeed.
I’ll end with yet another fantastic clip of NJ Governor Chris Christie putting unions in their place. I have a feeling we’ll be getting a bit of deja vu under a Kasich Administration.
