DaytonDailyNews.com

That sucking sound you heard Thursday was Gov. Ted Strickland breathing again.

Ohio's businesses, big and small, have been apoplectic about the proposed Healthy Families Act, which would mandate that employers with more than 25 workers provide employees up to seven sick days per year and similarly prorated time off for part-timers. Last week the Service Employees International Union, which initiated the idea, reluctantly said it would give up on putting the proposal on the ballot, even knowing that there's substantial public support for the benefit at least in principle.

The credit — or blame — for the pull-back belongs to Strickland. Had he not cajoled the SEIU, the idea would have been before voters in November.

In the run-up to the election, businesses would have bombarded you with commercials insisting that Ohio is hemorrhaging jobs and that it's already seen as unfriendly to business. The state's marketing challenges would have gotten monumentally harder as Ohio businesses spent at least several million dollars denouncing the state and its future.

Be sure of it: businesses would not have shown deftness in their campaign or worried about what Ohio's reputation would be the morning after the election. The only thing they and their handsomely paid political consultants would have cared about was defeating the issue at hand.

Succeeding at that would have been easy in comparison to climbing out of hole that would have been dug. After all, Ohio and its most important institutions aren't exactly known for their marketing genius as it is. If it were otherwise, Ohio would be noted for Ohio State's standing as one of the country's top research institutions and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base's place in the military's orbit and the Cleveland Clinic's place in the world of medicine; the state would be getting credit for showing remarkable resiliency in the face of wrenching economic change; there would be wider appreciation for Ohio's abundant natural resource called water (which, for the future, will be more important than oil).

The fundamental problem with the SEIU proposal was that it's written by a union for workers. The union assumed the best about employees and the worst about employers.

Employers reacted in precisely opposite fashion. They insisted many employers are already doing the right thing for their employees, without a mandate, and they argued that if this idea were law, slackers would have a hey day.

For instance, the proposal said that time-off has to be tracked by the hour. Ridiculous as this possibility sounds, it's conceivable that a worker could get sick every Friday at 4 p.m. and there wouldn't be much an employer could do to challenge his Friday fevers. The business could fire the worker and assume that if the matter went to court, the facts would speak for themselves. But the language of the proposal says what it says:

"For periods of paid sick leave less than a normal workday, that leave shall be counted: (1) On an hourly basis: or (2) If less than an hour in the smallest increment that the employer's payroll system uses to account for absences or use of other leave."

This is why proposed laws initiated by interest groups are almost always a bad idea. They're written without benefit of the give-and-take that's built into the process of passing something via a legislature.

On Thursday, Strickland said he and Becky Williams, president of the SEIU for Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky, argued fiercely, but civilly, about the idea. He said his pitch was that "perception oftentimes is, or can become, reality," and that he did not want Ohio to be the only state with a sick-day mandate.

He said that Williams agreed to pull the measure in discussions they had at the Democratic convention in Denver. Asked if he went over her head to Andy Stern, the national SEIU president, he said he spoke to Stern, but that the decision was Williams' and that she agreed to back down before he approached Stern.

Strickland and U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown said they'll push for passage of a national sick-leave policy with protections for workers a la the Family and Medical Leave Act. As national policy, he said ensuring sick leave is only fair.

One of the fears about Strickland has been that he just isn't built to say no to labor. He did this time.

Ellen Belcher is editor of the Dayton Daily News editorial pages. Her telephone number is 225-2286; her e-mail address is ebelcher@DaytonDailyNews.com.