Ohio in poverty

Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell ruled on Sept. 6 that an initiative the Ohio AFL-CIO proposed to raise the state minimum wage qualified to be on the ballot this coming November.

From Cleveland in its northeast to Cincinnati in its southwest, Ohio has suffered from economic restructuring going back to the 1980s. Closing after closing in auto, steel and related industries gave the rust belt its name. One can barely recall the time when the Great Lakes industrial region was called the “steel belt.”

As a direct consequence of the restructuring, in 2004 Cleveland was named the poorest city in the U.S. Data from 2005 showed other cities to be poorer, but the latest economic figures put this rust-belt city on the bottom again. This time Cleveland is joined by Cincinnati as among the 10 poorest cities in the country.

Ohio has one of the highest state unemployment rates, but that alone does not explain the high poverty rate. More and more workers, especially young workers, have joined the ranks of the so-called working poor. In a Cleveland neighborhood formerly dominated by steel mills, a new shopping complex is opening with the sickening name, “Steelyard Commons.” Its major draw is Wal-Mart.

Even a modest increase in the minimum wage would help ease the pain of Ohio’s lowest-paid workers. In the fall of 2005 the Ohio AFL-CIO launched a heroic effort to obtain the 350,000-plus signatures required to put this needed increase, from $5.15 to a mere $6.85 an hour, on the November 2006 ballot.

This was no small achievement. With signatures typically disqualified on the most insignificant technicalities, unions and their community allies had to collect over 750,000 names. Petitions had to have a percentage of signatures from at least 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties, many of which are sparsely populated.

The only place to petition in many areas might be a supermarket or Wal-Mart where, if spotted, a petitioner could be asked to leave. The excessive requirements forced the labor movement to hire a number of paid petitioners at a tremendous cost.

In an attempt to defeat the initiative, business interests have formed “Ohioans to Protect Personal Privacy.” Their attempt to defeat it claims poor wording, burdensome record-keeping, and the false allegation that it would let anyone see an employee’s payroll record. While the business group may be well funded, the latest statistics on poverty undermine its arguments against raising the minimum wage for the first time in nine years.