The Sentinel

Issue date: 9/24/08 Section: News

A victory for the citizens of Ohio occurred on September 4, 2008, when it was decided by the Ohioans for Healthy Families Coalition and the Service Employees International Union that they would withdraw their petition to place Issue 4 on the Ohio ballot in November. Issue 4 would have forced all Ohio businesses of more than twenty-five employees to pay for seven days of mandatory sick leave for all employees who work thirty or more hours a week. For employees who work only part-time, a pro rata amount of paid sick-leave would have been available.
This is a victory for Ohio, considering Ohio already has a hard enough time attracting and retaining businesses. Consider this: without businesses, and the jobs that those businesses bring, Ohio's cities have steadily declined in population since the 1950s. An Ohio coalition wanted to make life even harder on Ohio's private enterprise.

Fortunately for the citizens living in Ohio and for the businesses operating in Ohio, Issue 4 will not come to pass. However, let us look a little deeper into the nature of Ohio's economy, and what kind of negative impact Issue 4 would have had in Ohio had this legislation been given a majority vote in November.

Four Ohio cities - Dayton, Canton, Cleveland, and Youngstown - made it onto the Forbes.com list of the ten fastest dying cities. Ohio, making up a whopping 40 percent of the list, was the worst-off state, with Michigan coming in second-to-worst place with two cities on the list: Flint and Detroit. According to Forbes, 115,000 people have left Cleveland since 2000, and no, that fleeing populace has not been replaced by new babies or by an influx of outsiders from other states.
Nationwide metropolitan growth averaged 2.7 percent in the most recent decade. The cities on the Forbes list didn't crack 2 percent. Canton barely managed 0.7 percent.
If Issue 4 would have been given the opportunity to pass in November of 2008, Ohio would have been the first state to adopt a policy of mandatory sick-leave. Two cities in the country have passed similar laws - San Francisco and Washington, D.C. - but only Ohio has seen the grassroots push for mandatory sick-leave manifest at a state-wide level.

Ohioans for Healthy Families and the Service Employees International Union, the main organizations who pushed for the adoption of Issue 4, managed to amass the necessary amount of signatures needed to put Issue 4 on the November 2008 ballot. According to Dale Butland, communications director for the Coalition, employees should never "… be forced to choose between their paychecks and taking care of their families."

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