Labor tried to help patients, women

Saturday, May 13, 2000

By JAMES F. McCARTY

PLAIN DEALER POLITICS WRITER

The Ohio AFL-CIO said yesterday that it is killing an ambitious plan that would have asked voters to decide if patients should be allowed to sue HMOs and if women should be paid the same as men for equal work.

The labor group’s plan, announced a month ago, was designed as a maneuver to circumvent the Republican-controlled General Assembly, as well as a way to boost turnout for Democratic Party candidates. Instead, it ended up as a major embarrassment for labor and its Democratic backers, according to a Republican source in the Statehouse.

"Ohio labor was expected to deliver their portion of the plan," the Statehouse source said. "Now they’re left holding the bag, and people at the Democratic National Committee are wondering, What’s going on over there?’"

State AFL-CIO President William A. Burga called the proposed ballot issues worthy but said there was a lack of commitment for funding the campaigns to win their passage.

"We’re extremely disappointed," Burga said in a news release.

%%JUMP%%BALLOT/6-B "There appears to be strong support for the issues, but the money just isn’t there to put on a successful campaign."

Burga said he also scuttled a ballot initiative that, if passed, would have removed partisan politics from the redistricting process. The plan was for all three issues to be included in a single petition, then separated into individual ballot questions.

State Sen. Eric Fingerhut, a Cleveland Democrat, was a supporter of the ballot initiatives but said that, under the circumstances, he agreed with Burga’s call to kill the plan.

"It’s enormously difficult and expensive to run ballot initiatives in Ohio, and they were right before they took the plunge to evaluate all the pros and cons and make the best decision," Fingerhut said. "In this case, the cons outweighed the pros."

According to the Republican Statehouse source, Burga was persuaded to pull the petitions after learning that business interests were committed to fighting the ballot initiatives with major influxes of money, campaign advertising and legislation. The money required by labor to counter the business message would have been self-defeating, the source said.

"If they have to blow all this money defending it, it would have taken money away from their electoral efforts which the increased turnout was supposed to support," the source said.

e-mail: jmccarty@plaind.com

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