The Council backs legislation that creates more work at wages and benefits a family can live on — and opposes legislation that pulls the floor out from under it. On each of these, here's our position and, separately, where Ohio law actually sits today.
Sets the wage floor on public construction so bids compete on quality instead of how far pay can be cut. Ohio has it, but K–12 school construction has been exempt since 1997.
Read our position → Issue 02One pre-hire agreement covering every craft on a job — known costs, no strikes or lockouts, trained crews, local hire. The federal mandate on large projects is being litigated.
Read our position → Issue 03Lets workers covered by a union contract skip paying for it while the union stays legally bound to represent them. Ohio is one of 24 states without such a law.
Read our position →Prevailing wage keeps quality high.
Prevailing wage is the hourly rate, overtime, and benefit package that has to be paid to workers on publicly funded construction. Ohio's version sits in Chapter 4115 of the Revised Code and is administered by the Department of Commerce, which publishes rates county by county and craft by craft.
Without a floor, the cheapest bid tends to be whichever contractor cut labor hardest — and the crew paid least is rarely the crew with the most training or the best safety record. Taxpayers do not save money on a job that has to be done twice.
The floor also stops a contractor from a low-wage region from underbidding local firms and carrying the payroll out of the county. With the wage fixed, bidders have to compete on the things that should actually decide a public contract: quality, schedule, and whether people get hurt.
This is the claim made against prevailing wage every session, and the research does not support it. A 2017 review by Bowling Green State University reported that roughly three-quarters of peer-reviewed studies since 2000 found no evidence that prevailing wage policies raise the cost of public construction.
The reason is not complicated. Labor is a minority of what a building costs — the BGSU review put it near a quarter in the United States. Better-paid crews turn over less, need less rework, and file fewer injury claims, which offsets the hourly difference. The same review warned that weakening the law shifts cost onto the public in another form, as construction incomes fall and reliance on public assistance rises.
Indiana repealed its common construction wage in 2015 and has not restored it. Michigan repealed in 2018 — and reinstated its prevailing wage law effective February 2024, after six years of operating without one. A legislature that repeals, watches the results, and puts the law back is worth more than any study.
Sources: Ohio Revised Code ch. 4115; Ohio Department of Commerce, Wage & Hour Bureau; Bowling Green State University prevailing wage review (2017); Michigan Act 10 of 2023, effective 13 Feb 2024.
PLAs are a win for the contractor and the worker.
A project labor agreement is a pre-hire agreement between a project's contractors and the building trades unions that sets the terms for the whole job — wages, benefits, work rules, and a process for settling disputes that bars both strikes and lockouts for the duration. They've been used since the 1930s, on private and public work alike, sometimes entered into voluntarily and sometimes required by the public owner.
Predictability. One agreement covering every craft on site, a labor cost known before the first shovel, and a dispute process that resolves a jurisdictional argument without stopping the job. Behind it sits the apprenticeship system, which means the contractor isn't gambling on who shows up.
A CBA is the related instrument and goes further. It typically commits a project to drawing most of its workforce from the surrounding community, with recruitment and apprenticeship targets aimed at women, minority and lower-income residents, plus a formal channel for hearing community concerns during planning rather than after. The owner gets a project the neighborhood supports; the neighborhood gets the jobs and the money.
Sources: Executive Order 14063 (4 Feb 2022); FAR Subpart 22.5; MVL USA, Inc. v. United States (Ct. Fed. Cl., Jan 2025); NABTU v. Dep't of Defense (D.D.C., May 2025); OMB memorandum, June 2025. Status current to mid-2026.
So-called right to work is wrong.
A right-to-work law bars a union and an employer from agreeing that everyone covered by the contract helps pay for it. The union's legal duty doesn't change: it still has to bargain for every worker in the unit, process their grievances, and represent them in arbitration — whether or not they contribute a cent toward the cost of doing so.
That imbalance is not an accident of drafting. Requiring an organization to deliver a service while making payment for it optional is a reliable way to starve the organization. Weaken the union's resources and you weaken its ability to bargain, which is the actual objective — the wage and benefit floor is what these laws are aimed at, not paperwork.
This is the part the name obscures. Federal law already protects any worker who does not want to be a union member, and no one in Ohio can be compelled into membership. What a right-to-work law changes is narrower and less appealing to say out loud: whether people who take the benefit of a negotiated contract have to help pay for negotiating it.
The Economic Policy Institute's position is that these laws are designed to undermine bargaining strength, and that although they're sold to legislatures as a way to attract employers, EPI's research finds no positive effect on job growth. Research from EPI and allied labor economists further reports that, compared with states that have not passed such laws, right-to-work states show:
These findings are contested by supporters of right-to-work legislation, who read the same state comparisons differently and argue the laws are a matter of individual choice. We think the burden of proof sits with anyone proposing to remove a wage floor that currently exists.
Sources: Economic Policy Institute research on right-to-work; National Conference of State Legislatures right-to-work resources; National Labor Relations Act § 14(b); Michigan Public Act 8 of 2023; Ohio Issue 2 (November 2011).
Prevailing wage exemptions and right-to-work bills move quietly, usually as a line in a budget rather than a bill anybody debates. The fastest way to be useful is to tell the person who represents you where you stand before the vote is scheduled — not after.