This year marks 40 years since OCSEA bargained and ratified its first union contract under Ohio Collective Bargaining Law. After embarking on one of the largest organizing drives in union history, OCSEA emerged as one of the lead labor organizations and voices of Ohio public workers on the job.
The 1986 contract marked the first time that state employees––32,000 across Ohio at the time––had the right to bargain a comprehensive collective bargaining agreement that would govern every aspect of their working lives. This accomplishment was the result of immense foresight and a five-decades-long effort by OCSEA, AFSCME and its allies in the fight for workers’ rights in Ohio.
Over the past 40 years, OCSEA, a member-driven labor organization, has grown and built its main state contract and benefits––well beyond what our founders likely even imagined. But it is also not lost on us that our right to collectively bargain could be gone with the stroke of one Governor’s pen. With the election of an anti-union, government-cutting, and profit-over-workers Governor and State Legislature, collective bargaining and public union contracts as we know it could be gone.
Does that sound far-fetched? Not for our union brothers and sisters who work for the federal government who have been fighting an onslaught of attacks since January 2025. “They have been gutting agencies, where they can, and attacking union workers and their missions, agency by agency,” said Dave Cann, the Director of Membership and Organizing for the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents more than 800,000 union members. Over the past year and a half, the Trump administration has fired union members, abolished dues deduction and union leave time, excluded entire agencies from collective bargaining and sought to de-certify union contracts.
Cann was a guest speaker for the OCSEA Leadership Training this spring, and he had a warning for our members: “The same target that was on our backs a year ago could be coming for Ohio employees as well. They’ve stated that they have plans like this for state government. Some of the people that were the engineers and architects of what the federal government is experiencing are candidates for office in Ohio,” he said. Of course, that’s a reference to Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for Ohio Governor, who worked with Elon Musk in the early days of the Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE. The blatant attacks, straight out of the Project 2025 playbook, sought to dismantle parts of the federal government through mass layoffs and attacking federal employee unions.
“I take this very seriously, and I don’t like the things they are trying to do,” OCSEA activist Janice Parker said after listening to Cann talk about the attacks on collective bargaining rights for federal public employees. Parker, a Construction Project Specialist 2 for the Ohio Facility’s Construction Commission and Vice President of Chapter 2570, says this is the most important election she has seen in her lifetime for the state of Ohio. Parker said she comes from a family of public servants and added, “I truly believe we have to come together to gain the power back, to take it back from them.”
With negotiations beginning later this year on a new state contract, a lot depends on who becomes Ohio’s next Governor. Bryan Weaver, the President of Montgomery Chapter 5700 and an Infrastructure Specialist 2 with Public Safety/Ohio State Highway Patrol, agrees that the November election will be consequential for public employees, especially with Ramaswamy on the ballot. “I was always told as a kid that a rising tide lifts all ships. If we have an elected leader who is only concerned about the biggest ships in the water and is okay with other people running aground, then we are going to fail––not only as a state but also as a nation,” Weaver said.
What’s the strategy for surviving these attacks on public sector labor unions? Cann from AFGE says the answer is something OCSEA has taken to heart for a long time––and that’s mobilizing and engaging members to push back effectively together.
VOTING OUR JOBS is how we make real progress for working people! This means prioritizing the issues that impact us as union members––in the workplace, at the bargaining table, at home, and in the communities that we serve as public employees.
If we’ve seen anything at all this past year, it’s that those with political power can and will eliminate public jobs and services AND public collective bargaining agreements quicker than they can give a billionaire a tax break.
Read more in the Spring magazine's President's column about how you, as a union activist, can get involved in the fight this year. This includes activism within the constraints of the law, especially for public employees covered by the Little Hatch Act. Stay informed this election season at OCSEAVotes.org.