Support for the Statehouse News Bureau comes from Medical Mutual, dedicated to the health and well-being of Ohioans, offering health insurance plans, as well as dental, vision and wellness programs to help people achieve their goals and remain healthy.

More at Med mutual.com.

The law offices of Porter, right, Morris and Arthur LLP.

Porter Wright is dedicated to bringing inspired legal outcomes to the Ohio business community.

More at porterwright.com.

Porter Wright inspired Every day in Ohio Education Association, representing 120,000 educators who are united in their mission to create the excellent public schools.

Every child deserves more at OHEA.org.

A decision comes out on an abortion related law, but still no ruling on another one.

Republicans launch a drive for volunteers to watch for problems at the polls.

And a Labor Day.

Look at how Ohio workers are faring this weekend.

The state of Ohio.

Welcome to the state of Ohio.

I'm Karen Kasler, a Franklin County judge has blocked one abortion related state law, and another court has delayed once again its decision on a different law.

Late last week, Judge David Young halted Ohio's 2021 law requiring a 24 hour waiting period before a patient can get an abortion.

He wrote.

The five abortion providers, which sued over the law, have a strong likelihood of success on the merits of the case, and the plaintiffs, quote, are suffering injury each day.

Their constitutional rights are infringed upon and, quote, the state argued the law does not violate the reproductive rights constitutional amendment approved by voters last fall, saying the waiting period and the information that must be provided to patients are part of informed consent.

But young cited last year's analysis of the issue from Republican Attorney General David Yost, which said the amendment would make it harder for the state to maintain many abortion related laws.

And young wrote, the amendment's language is again quoting clear and unambiguous end quote, the state is appealing.

Meanwhile, a Hamilton County judge has once again delayed his ruling on Ohio's six week abortion ban.

Providers sued when the ban went into effect in June 2022, following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision overturning a federal right to abortion.

But Judge Christian Jenkins blocked the law a few weeks later, the case went to the Ohio Supreme Court, which sent it back to Hamilton County after the passage of the Reproductive Rights Amendment.

The ruling has been delayed twice before.

Voter fraud is extremely rare in Ohio, is often mentioned as having the gold standard of election and voting laws, with bipartisan elections workers in every county.

But Republicans say they plan to bring in thousands of volunteers to watch for issues on Election Day nationwide and in Ohio with what it's calling the Protect the Vote tour.

The Republican National Committee wants to find thousands of volunteers to serve as poll workers and observers, hoping to have 5018 states, including Ohio.

is you need to be in the room when the votes are being cast and the votes are being counted.

That's why we're here today.

We are here today because we are going to recruit and train thousands of folks to work as poll observers and poll workers on Election Day and during the early vote process.

RNC Chair Michael Whatley held the event with Attorney General Dave Yost and former Florida AG Pam Bondi, an ally of former President Trump, who served as one of his lawyers during his first impeachment trial.

Whatley said this effort will create more confidence in the election system, and he's not concerned about voter intimidation.

No.

I think one of the things that we focus on, in the training sessions is making sure that we respect the process, we respect the poll workers, and we respect, most importantly, the voters.

and Whatley said they'll work with county officials to ensure election systems work correctly.

And when they do, people are going to have more confidence and they're going to be more inclined to come out there.

If we have even 1% of voters stay home because they don't think their vote is going to be protected.

That's a huge problem.

what?

Lee also says the RNC will hire thousands of attorneys to observe nationwide on Election Day.

This comes as former President Donald Trump has said his focus is not on voter turnout among Republicans, but instead to watch Democrats, quote, to make sure they don't cheat because we have all the votes we'll need and quote.

Trump has made unfounded claims about widespread election fraud since 2016 and continues to falsely state the 2020 election was stolen from him.

The attempt to bring in more poll workers has the interest of both voting rights groups and Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRosa.

But Catherine Tercer, with common cause Ohio, which is part of the Ohio Voter Rights Coalition, said efforts focusing solely on fraud could have a negative effect.

Unfortunately, they often make voters question everything, and I think it's so important that we don't just assume everything is working smoothly, that we're thoughtful and we pay attention.

But efforts like this can cause everybody to be worried that things aren't fair, or that something is going wrong behind the scenes.

Now, a cure to this is to actually, you know, go to the Board of Elections meetings.

Tercer has been on opposite sides of LA, Rose on redistricting and some voting laws.

But on that last point, they agree.

being a poll worker, an actual election official is far better than being a so-called poll watcher.

It's right there in the name.

If you're a watcher, all you can do is watch.

And if something's happening that you don't agree with or you think violates the law, you can watch it happen.

You can walk outside and call the hotline number they give you.

And maybe, you know, the lawyers will get in touch with that county's Board of elections and And Lareau said his focus on election integrity did not start when former President Trump started making his unfounded claims about the 2020 election being stolen.

always have concerns about voter fraud.

I wouldn't call it widespread, but I would say that it's important that we keep it rare.

Voter fraud is rare, and we keep it rare by aggressively enforcing the law.

And that's why there's this disconnect where I'll see people say, well, why do you care about voter fraud?

Or why do you remove voters from the voter rolls?

Or why do you refer people for prosecution?

Voter fraud is so rare.

That's like saying, carjackings are rare in my neighborhood.

Thank God they are.

But if one happens, I want the police to investigate it.

There's never been a credible allegation of mass voter fraud in Ohio.

Again, voter fraud is very rare.

Experts say Ohio is likely to end up going to Trump.

But the US Senate race between Democratic incumbent Sherrod Brown and northeast Ohio businessman Bernie Marino will likely be close.

The last year has been a good one for Ohio workers, according to the annual Labor Day report of the progressive leaning think tank Policy Matters.

Ohio.

The state gained back all of the jobs it lost in the recession as of May 2023, and as job growth continued, the state reached its largest number of jobs in its history.

Wages grew and outpaced inflation, and unemployment hit a record low of 3.3%.

But the report says pay is still too low.

The jobless rate has been rising.

There are still gender and racial pay gaps, and state tax cuts have helped the wealthy and corporate interests to create what it calls a rigged economy.

Policy matters Ohio Executive Director Hannah Halbert is a coauthor of the report.

And she talked my Statehouse news Bureau colleague Joe Ingles on paper, 2023 is one of the best looking years for Ohio workers in recent memory.

So we had, wage growth at the median.

So the typical worker so the person there at the median typical wage in Ohio actually saw wage growth, significant, wage growth.

We caught up to median wages, nationally, which is something that has not happened in decades in Ohio.

We saw that broadly, wages increase.

So it wasn't just those in the middle or the trend that had been happening for several years where wage growth tended to happen at the upper limits of the wage scale, but not so much for the bottom 60%.

That was different.

So we saw wage growth across the the income scales.

And particularly for the lowest paid workers in Ohio.

So the people that really needed to get a better bang for their labor saw it last year.

Well, let me ask all good news.

Yeah, that is good news, except that we saw a lot of push to get a $15 minimum wage, and that didn't make it end up making it to the ballot.

But is there a need for a $15 minimum wage with your report?

Absolutely.

The problem with all of this wage growth and what the economy for working people looks like on paper, and what is actually happening in reality, couldn't be more different.

So despite all of this improvement, working people are still highly insecure in Ohio.

So one good year is not enough to overcome decades of, having wages pushed down by market forces.

So, we are heading in a better direction.

But Ohio, where people are still not able to, afford that high quality of living, sort of the kind of lifestyle that they may remember their grandparents living, where you could, pay your bills, maybe take a vacation in the summer, not have to worry so much.

That's still out of reach for a lot of working Ohioans.

And, it's because we've allowed the wage scale.

We have not had working people share in the wealth that they have been creating in the same way that they shared in that wealth back in like pre 1979, pre mid 80s.

Right.

And so for people to get out of this you know you hear it called the vibe session.

I think it's it really is like it's time to do deep investment in working people.

We've seen that what's been going on with the federal spending is working.

We see like, not just Ohio, but broadly in the Midwest economies recovering for working people.

We got to stay on track and do many more years of that so people can actually feel secure again.

Did you look at inflation and what effect that has on working people in Ohio?

Yeah, we we did look at inflation and the wage growth that I mentioned is actually, adjusted for inflation.

So those wage increases beat the overall inflation.

Right, right.

The problem is, is that inflation isn't universally felt.

So, the rate of inflation for things like housing or groceries was higher than that.

Overall general inflation.

Right?

Right.

So if you're a working person, a big chunk of your income goes just to the basics.

You don't have a lot of disposable cash sitting around.

And so when the the basics, when the cost on those basics like groceries and housing goes up, you're going to feel that in a way that maybe someone at a higher income that has a smaller share of money going to those things just isn't going to have the same impact.

And so that's what a lot of Ohioans are feeling.

So even though overall wages are improving, the the thing is the kinds of things that have outpaced, general inflation, it's the kinds of stuff they most need.

So that hurts.

That really does hurt.

We looked at the some of the drivers of inflation because I think a lot of folks or some of the so-called common sense on this has been like, oh, well, it's the wages driving inflation.

And that's what and that's not accurate.

It's just not what is seen in the data.

What we have seen is that profits corporate profits are the, have are responsible for an outsized share of that inflationary increase.

And this is different than other inflationary periods in the past where wages were a larger, driver of those price increases.

Now it's just profits.

And so I think people see that, too.

I think people have a sense that this isn't just the market, but there's some gouging going on.

And the response from both federal and state governments has just been to deal with the interest rate side of things like treat this like old time inflation instead of really addressing this root cause, which is, excessive price gouging, a price increasing.

We've always heard trickle down economics.

I mean, we've heard that since the 80s at least.

Are are the is there this seems to prove that trickle down economics are not really working, but that's that's from what I'm hearing here.

Is that your assessment.

That's right.

Hopefully we've we are learning some lessons.

So after the great Recession, I think the federal government, really saw that if you want to get out of a recession, you need to have spending big enough for the problem you're trying to invest.

And so we saw historic spending during the Covid pandemic to keep families afloat, whether it's the child tax credit, the stimulus payments, the payments to small businesses, payments to state and local governments, and then that was supplemented with big investments in infrastructure.

We see a lot of that happening now in the state.

And that set the stage so that when the pandemic started to subside, Ohio and the rest of the country was open and ready for business.

People came back.

It set the stage for rapid job growth and that job growth is what is creating the tight labor market, the low unemployment, and allowing us to finally, finally have you know, a little bit of parity for working people whenever they're, out looking for a job.

It's not just an employer labor market anymore.

Oh, how has, fewer than, one job opening per worker for worker now or there's fewer then, yeah.

So it's actually a favorable time to be a working person.

You have options, you can shop around for a good deal, or you can get a better way out.

You can, you know, the, the in it's called friction.

So if you were, at a job, maybe the job doesn't pay very well.

It's not the best job for you.

There's call us to leaving that job right.

Like, and trying to find a new job.

Well, the pandemic, a lot of people are already out of a job, so they didn't have that hurdle to overcome.

And then whenever we came back online with rapid job growth, people could really look for a good job.

And so we're seeing some of that show up in wages.

If you want an economy that works for the middle class, you have to build an economy designed to support a middle class.

The state of working Ohio looks good to the conservative think tank, the Buckeye Institute as well.

But research fellow Greg Lawson told Joe Ingles he has some different ideas on how to improve things.

I think there's a lot of things that are happening that are good for workers.

We obviously, notwithstanding some of the issues with Intel nationally, all the signs are go at Intel.

Obviously, that's going to be a huge economic development project, not just for Central Ohio, but with all the supply chains, everything else.

We're seeing a lot of effort in the education space, in the certification space for a lot of folks.

So I think that there is an awful lot of promise here in Ohio.

I do think that we are running into there's a few winds that are starting to blow in our direction.

We're starting to see some things where the unemployment rate is tick back up.

And we've seen the labor force participation or the people that are actually out, looking for work is actually, declined some and is not as good as the National.

So those are things that we definitely want to watch for, because if we see any cooling off in those kind of numbers, that is a sign that maybe things are starting to kind of shift a little bit against us.

And so we need to watch that.

But I think that there is still a lot of promise, a lot of opportunity.

Obviously, there's a lot in central Ohio.

There's being a lot of effort to try to expand that to other parts of the state so that we can expand the prosperity.

And so I think it's positive, I don't think it's overwhelming yet.

I think we there's still a lot of proof that's going to have to, you know, in the pudding, so to speak, as time goes on.

So we're not we're not where we need to be.

But I think that there are some, some trends, that are helpful.

Let's talk about worker wages.

Where do those stand?

Are they ticking up?

They did tick up.

And we had a pretty good post-Covid, bounce there.

I will say that this is something that Ohio has struggled with for a while is when you compare Ohio to the nation, we tend to do a little bit below.

If you look at household overall, like median household earnings.

And so we're a little bit below where the nation is.

And so we do need to want to see a little bit more there.

And that's where a lot of these new sort of information jobs, a lot of the jobs that are not necessarily for your degree jobs, but jobs where you can get certifications and things like that to get into the workforce pretty quickly are very important, because those are the things where you can start earning more money more quickly.

So Ohio's a little bit below where it really needs to be.

And, you know, I've, I've talked for a while about that, that this is a challenge that Ohio has, that Ohio was the Rust Belt state, a quintessential Rust Belt state.

And in some ways, it kind of missed some of the early era of some of the changing economy.

We hear a lot about the Silicon heartland now because of Intel, because of those things.

And I think, again, all the promise, it's there, but there's a lot more work to be done.

So the incomes are not bad, but we definitely could see some improvement in that.

Now we're seeing signs that inflation is, by and large, going down a little bit, inching lower.

But people still, especially working people who are on the lower end are still feeling the pinch because when they go to the grocery store, the groceries are still high.

And when they go gas their car, the gas is still high.

What what's your take on that?

Well, I think that we are starting to see inflation stabilize.

It's unfortunate because we literally had the worst inflation that we've seen in practically a generation, really since the late 70s, in the early 80s.

So that is a you can't really underestimate how important and profound that is.

And it does hit, folks, that are lower to lower middle income, Ohio.

It's much, much harder because obviously that makes up a much bigger share of of their earnings is the staples of daily life.

The milk, the eggs, the, the food, you know, all those things, the kitchen table stuff.

So I think it's starting to turn a corner.

I don't think we're totally there yet.

I think that there and I think it's going to take a while for the wages to catch up.

So that is where those two things kind of are a little bit not working real well together.

We have below the national average in wages still moving up, seeing improvement, but not where we need to be.

And we're still in living, with the after effects of inflation.

And those are going to really hurt, those workers that need the income to move up more quickly.

So that's why I think Ohio has promise.

But I think we have to be very diligent, very careful, and we need to really focus in on our education.

We need to focus in on our workforce training, because we've got to get people moving up the ladder of success so that they could have upward income mobility.

If we stay where we are today, another five years, then unfortunately we're going to continue to kind of missed the boat a little bit here.

The opportunities need to be taken advantage of.

You can't just rest on your laurels and think that we're where we need to be because we're not.

So I think that this is a cautiously optimistic sort of perspective.

But it really is, I hope, a message to policymakers to keep working on regulatory reform, keep working on not just tax fraud at the state level, but at the local level, which is in some respects an even bigger problem than taxes at the state level.

And keep working on the workforce training and making sure that our education is aligned in such a way that we have the skills that the employers of today need today.

So we saw earlier this year where the $15 minimum wage amendment, that went by the wayside.

They couldn't get it on the ballot.

Do we need a minimum wage increase in Ohio?

And, and how do you get those workers on the lower end up?

Well, I think answer number one is not through the Constitution like that.

No.

You know, I think that when you try to mandate stuff like that, you do see effects that are not what you want to see happen.

And one of the key things is what you a lot of the folks who earn the minimum wage aren't necessarily like the single income earner.

They sometimes are teenagers or another person in the household, but there's more than one person working.

So you want to be careful that you allow people to get into entry level jobs and can move up the job of somebody who's on a minimum wage.

It shouldn't be to stay on the minimum wage, but is to get those opportunities, especially when they're new in a career.

And maybe haven't done work before at the young, young stages of life and then move up that again, I kind of call it the ladder of success.

And it sounds a little cliche, but it's really true.

You get that experience.

You you learn what you need to know for the job.

You learn the interpersonal skills and the dynamics that you need to have so that you can work with people in all different, layers of work and stuff.

And that's when you start to climb up, and we need to be able to get the jobs and the good paying jobs so that they're there so that people can move into those jobs as they get the kind of training that I was talking about earlier, I think that's a much better thing than a, some kind of a government mandate or put into the Constitution especially.

That would even be worse than doing it through statute, because at least a statute you can modify and watch it, you put something like that in the state constitution, and it's not modifiable and on.

You could end up with a situation where you have a lot of problems.

I think that if we do our workforce training right, we do the education right, we can start moving people there so that people aren't stuck in minimum wage jobs.

For for that at all, really.

And again, it's all about the upward mobility.

The market really does work if we have all these other things getting people the skills they need so that they can actually interact with what's out there, that the market is, demanding.

know, since the 80s, we've had kind of trickle down economics.

And, people on the bottom rung often say that they're not feeling the trickle.

They don't get it doesn't make it down to them.

What about that?

I think this is the thing that Ohio really needs to do is look under the hood and figure out how we can do systemic reforms.

When you go to states that are growing a lot, when you see large population growth down in southern states or Sunbelt states, those states tend to have fewer layers of government.

They tend to have less per capita government spending.

But they have higher private sector activity.

Ohio is still struggling to maximize that.

I think that is what we are saying.

The trickle down argument is, is not you know, I know that that's sort of the rhetoric that's out there.

But at the end of the day, it's about can we get the private sector empowered to create the kind of jobs or the high paying jobs that get them off of minimum wage, people off minimum wage?

But the only way to do that is to have an ecosystem that allows for innovation.

We're seeing some of it in Columbus.

I don't know that we're seeing that across the whole state, and that is something that Ohio does still need to work on.

And if we want to make everything good for workers from all four corners of the state, whether you're in Appalachia, whether you're in Dark County, you know, on the on the western side, whether you're in Steubenville, what we really absolutely have to have is we have to have policies that, open the door to all sorts of businesses, not just big boys who come in with ribbon cutting ceremonies, but the mom and pop shops, the new innovative company that's new and may only have 1 or 2 employees but can grow.

Ohio is still struggling there, and that's what we really should be focusing on.

You can hear more from those interviews with Hannah Halbert and Greg Lawson on our podcast, The Ohio State House scoop.

Look for it every Monday morning wherever you get your podcasts.

And that is it for this week for my colleagues at the Statehouse News Bureau of Ohio Public Radio and Television.

Thanks for watching.

Please check out our website at State News Dawg or find us online by searching.

State of Ohio show.

And please join us again next time here for the State of Ohio.

This is.

A.

Support for the Statehouse News Bureau comes from Medical Mutual, dedicated to the health and well-being of Ohioans, offering health insurance plans, as well as dental, vision and wellness programs to help people achieve their goals and remain healthy.

More at Med mutual.com.

The law offices of Porter, right, Morris and Arthur LLP.

Porter Wright is dedicated to bringing inspired legal outcomes to the Ohio business community.

More at porterwright.com.

Porter Wright inspired Every day in Ohio Education Association, representing 120,000 educators who are united in their mission to create the excellent public schools.

Every child deserves more at OHEA.org.