A coalition of Ohio labor unions is hitting the road this week to support Democratic incumbent U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown – and to draw attention to their concerns about his Republican opponent, Trump-endorsed northeast Ohio businessman Bernie Moreno.
While it's likely Ohio will end up choosing former president Donald Trump, the U.S. Senate race is likely to be close. While union membership is down slightly in Ohio, unions will be among those groups weighing in to influence working Ohioans.
The Ohio AFL-CIO's bus tour will highlight wage theft lawsuits that Moreno settled with former employees, his stated opposition to a minimum wage and other union concerns.
Mike Knisley with the Ohio State Building and Construction Trades Council, which is part of the AFL-CIO, said Brown's support for the bipartisan infrastructure law and the $280 billion law that Intel pushed for as it builds a huge manufacturing plant outside Columbus makes him the clear choice.
"It's definitely Sen. Brown who supports the Infrastructure Act, supported the Inflation Reduction Act, was pivotal on getting the CHIPS Act through that is benefiting not only central Ohio, but will have a ripple effect on the different manufacturing chains for Intel," Knisley said. "He's supporting veterans, who is supporting strong defense, who is trying to keep VAs closing. It’s Sen. Brown. It's hands down. It isn't somebody who has been convicted of wage theft or is looking just for power and nothing more than that.”
All Republicans in Congress voted against the Inflation Reduction Act, a sweeping piece of legislation that invested $1.2 trillion in federal money in green energy jobs and construction and allowed Medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies, while also raising the tax on large companies and allowing the IRS to hire 87,000 new employees. House Republicans have tried repeatedly to repeal the law in opposition to the spending in it. Moreno has also criticized it, writing on social media in 2022 that the "Inflation Reduction Act does the opposite."
Ohio's union membership is above the national average, but it slipped last year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows union members were 12.5% of wage and salary workers in Ohio, compared with 12.8 percent in 2022. That's almost half of the 21.3% union membership rate in Ohio in 1989. But it's higher than the national average of 10%.
Exit polls showed 55% of union households in Ohio said they voted for Trump in 2020. Moreno has said he'll support Trump's economic policies, and that undocumented immigrants have taken American jobs and damaged the economy. As he greeted Democratic protestors during his bus tour earlier this month in Chillicothe, Moreno told them, "workers are going to vote for me."
“I think sometimes union members can get a little bit wrapped up in some of the things that aren't pocketbook issues that I think that we need to look at," Knisley said. "But I think after all these years with President Trump and his surrogates out there, here in Ohio even, that they're starting to see that's a lot of BS and not a lot of legitimate background that can can help them."
The tour starts in Portsmouth and hits smaller cities such as Martins Ferry and Defiance as well as the big cities.
