Remembering Darker Days in Ohio That Could Return
by Cynthia McCabe | November 04, 2011
Kathy Stewart, OCSEA secretary-treasurer (Photo by Cynthia McCabe)
If a heart attack didn’t stop Ohio union activist Kathy Stewart, Gov. John Kasich and his political allies certainly weren’t going to do it.
Just a few weeks after the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association (OCSEA/AFSCME Local 11) secretary-treasurer was home recovering from open-heart surgery, conservatives in the state legislature unveiled Senate Bill 5, a corporate-backed measure attacking public workers, unions and the middle class. Even as conservative lawmakers were locking down the statehouse in Columbus to keep out appalled protestors, a determined Stewart got inside and slowly made her way up the statehouse stairs, bound for the first hearing on the bill. When she had to stop after one flight of stairs, a staff member helped her the rest of the way.
Stewart knew better than most what was at stake in the bill’s earliest days in February and she knows what is at stake in this Tuesday’s vote to finally strike it down. She has worked for the state since the mid-1970s, before collective bargaining and labor contracts. Employees were hired, promoted and fired based on political favor. Women were mistreated and rarely promoted. A manager once spat on her. A single mother of two little boys, Stewart's pay was never secure.
“I never dreamed in my lifetime I would be back fighting again for collective bargaining,” Stewart says, shaking her head and widening her eyes in disbelief. “It’s all about corporate greed — taking the middle class and lowering their standards.”
Stewart’s father, who owned a small industrial shop in Columbus when she was growing up, stressed the importance of treating people fairly. She credits that philosophy for eventually guiding her to union activism. Her first job out of high school was as a unionized telephone operator. At 17, she went out on her first strike, but Stewart says she didn’t appreciate the benefits of unionism until she went to work for the state before collective bargaining.
Now she spends her days traveling the state to campaign against Senate Bill 5, urging people to vote it down by voting ‘No!’ on Issue 2 on Tuesday. She reminds fellow union members that the security of good wages and solid benefits came from the unions, not from the state that now seeks to take them away, and that they must go to the polls Tuesday.
“You can hang a yard sign; that’s fine,” she says. “You can put a bumper sticker on your car; that’s fine. But those alone don’t get the votes out.”
And given that she rallied against Senate Bill 5 while recovering from a heart attack, Stewart’s not likely one to take many excuses for failure to head to the polls Tuesday.
