Minimum Wars: 1988, Ohio's Original Minimum Wage Increase and Richard Olivito's Leadership

Saturday, August 2, 2008

The Night of Lead Proponent Testimony Before the House Labor Subcommittee

I always wanted to be in front of the microphone but never in my teenage dreams, did I realize it would be fielding questions before a State House Labor Committee as the Celeste Administration's lead proponent witness parrying with House veteran republicans Jim Petro and Beatty Jo Davidson and their Chamber of Commerce lobbyists from DC ....

The Halcyon Days of the State of Ohio's Democratic Party: Dick C and the Last of Big Labor

It was the end of an era, but we did not quite realize it yet.

I was fortunate to be found inside the largest union oriented democratic major state party comeuppance' since the days of old...

Senator Metzenbaum, Senator Glenn, state Senator Harry Meshell of Youngstown, party bosses from Cleveland and Toledo and Chief Justice Celebreeze and another Celebreeze running the State's AG's office for over a decade...it was a good time to be a Democrat in Ohio...[and big hair was still the rage
among young women...it was the eighties!]

The Pipefitters Local 120 from Cleveland and the UAW from Lordstown and the Steelworkers from across Ohio were the organizational means by which these leaders ruled...

....and having a southern Ohio democratic insurance industry lobbyist strongarm running the Ohio state legislature for over twenty years with a tight fist.... it was a heady time to be from a political name family, a union town, and a strong young democratic lawyer working for a popular intelligent good looking young Governor who had higher, much higher political ambitions...

The Democrats were in power in Ohio for what seemed like a generation or two, i.e. forever....or so we thought and there was no republican on the horizon that could topple such a regime ...or so we thought...this would prove to blindly wrong...

and the public liked apparently the fact that things got done, or appeared to, for the ordinary working man...in the midwest, despite having a Republican movie actor in the white house for most of the same decade...

Little did all of us young dems and turks comprehend at the time, we were the last of an era, living inside a political and economic dream state, that would come all too suddenly to end, crashing and burning so rapidly, that what we did, when last in office, we can only look back upon as a unique in time moment in this bell weather's state's and his nation's history...

....as the era of the big union and the Roosevelt politics along with the labor movement of democratic politics in America's great midwest, reach its zenith, near the end of the twentieth century.

Little did we then realize in 1987, just how razor thin was the margin of error that we were working within in order to bring substantive change for the working persons of american at a time, when we thought the future was nothing but bright and clean and wide open for those of us working in our small but bright lit state offices...in the state's capital at a time when
michael jackson, madonna, bruce springsteen and an Irish rock band named U2 were distinqushing modern rock and turning the culture wars of the world, upside down.

Minimum Wars: 1988, Ohio's Original Minimum Wage Increase and Richard Olivito's Leadership

Saturday, August 2, 2008

The Night of Lead Proponent Testimony Before the House Labor Subcommittee

The Halcyon Days of the State of Ohio's Democratic Party: Dick C and the Last of Big Labor

My Blog List

Blog Archive

Minimum Wars: 1988, Ohio's Original Minimum Wage Increase and Richard Olivito's Leadership

Saturday, August 2, 2008

The Night of Lead Proponent Testimony Before the House Labor Subcommittee

The Halcyon Days of the State of Ohio's Democratic Party: Dick C and the Last of Big Labor

My Blog List

Various Feeds

Blog Archive