Fairborn commencement
Badin graduation
Division I regional track finals
Home > Blogs > Ohio politics > Archives > 2012 > February > 14
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Ohio voters support right-to-work, poll says
Even though Ohio soundly defeated the anti-union collective bargaining law last November, a new poll shows that 54 percent Ohio voters favor passing a “right to work” law that would prohibit any requirement that workers join a union as a condition of employment.
“Given the assumption that the Senate Bill 5 referendum was a demonstration of union strength in Ohio, the 54 - 40 percent support for making Ohio a ‘right-to-work’ state does make one take notice,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “In the SB 5 referendum independent voters, who are generally the key to Ohio elections, voted with the pro-union folks to repeal the law many viewed as an effort to handicap unions. The data indicates that many of those same independents who stood up for unions this past November on SB 5 are standing up to unions by backing ‘right-to-work’ legislation.”
But Mike Gillis, spokesman for the Ohio AFL-CIO, disagrees. He said the poll results show that voters don’t understand the issue.
“It is an attack on collective bargaining, it’s a political maneuver and it doesn’t create one job,” Gillis said. The Ohio AFL-CIO is an umbrella organization for unions representing more than 600,00 workers in the state.
Gov. John Kasich, who was a strong backer of Senate Bill 5, has been cool to any push for a right-to-work law, saying that if proponents go forward they would have to spend considerable time educating voters about it.
The poll found support for right-to-work strong among Republicans while Democrats generally oppose it; 55 percent of independents support it.
The poll released Tuesday surveyed voters about a handful of bills pending in the General Assembly and found: 55 percent of voters support a ban on smoking in cars if a child under the age of six is a passenger; 49 percent say it’s a bad idea to ban public schools from opening before Labor Day and continuing past Memorial Day; 53 percent support a 70 mile-per-hour speed limit on Ohio’s interstate system while 13 percent want an even higher limit and 31 percent support a lower limit.
And once again, the poll checked Kasich’s job approval rating: 40 percent approve, 46 percent disapprove. While that rating is poor, it’s up over the negative 39 - 48 percent rating in January and the negative 36 - 52 percent rating in October.
“When a governor’s approval rating in his own party can’t overcome the disapproval by the opposition party and he is getting bad reviews from independent voters, it is a sign of political weakness,” said Brown. “The governor still has almost three years until he faces the voters, but he would certainly like to get his job approval into the mid-40s, at least. The good news for him is that he is slightly more popular than the legislature, which gets 48 - 35 percent disapproval.”
The poll surveyed 1,421 registered voters between Feb. 7 and Feb. 12 on cell phones and land lines. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.
Permalink | Comments (14) | Post your comment |
Tweet
