Earlier this year, Republicans in Ohio pushed through SB 5, which would extremely limit public sector unions’ collective bargaining rights, effectively crippling public labor unions in the state. Ohio unions have been gathering signatures to put the law to a public referendum this November, and a recent poll by Quinnipiac shows that if they manage to get the issue on the ballot, it will likely be repealed.

Societies collapse suddenly. Maybe the hyper-rich can find one of their trained seal economists to prove they don’t.

The bill changed from the version that passed the Senate. Police and firefighters can still collectively bargain for safety equipment, for example. And workers who strike cannot receive jail time. But other pieces were made even stricter, particularly on decertification and a bar on nonunion employees covered by union contracts from paying fees to unions.

Any bill passed into law in Ohio can be subject to a referendum, a “citizen’s veto,” which would be placed on the next statewide ballot. Union leaders and the Democratic Party have vowed to gather signatures for a referendum on SB 5 if it passes; they’d need about 300,000 names. The bill would have to be signed into law before April 6 for a referendum to be placed on the November 2011 ballot, which would include a bunch of citywide elections in Ohio. If the bill lingers past April 6, the referendum would go on the November 2012 ballot, which would include the Presidential election.

The team at MichaelMoore.com is streaming live video all day long from protests in Lansing, the latest site to see a backlash to Republican-led efforts to weaken the rights of workers. Moore says that over 6,000 protesters occupied the Rotunda in the Capitol as of an hour ago. About a thousand stayed overnight last night.

Apparently the Beltway Village Idiots Pundits are anxious to stop writing all those bummer articles about the un and underemployed and the destruction of the global economy. I guess it’s just too Debbie Downer for them. So they’ve started the “Everything’s Getting Better” articles.

Senate Bill 5, which will limit most collective bargaining rights for public employees in Ohio, bar all strikes under penalty of law, and ban binding arbitration, just passed the Ohio State Senate by one vote, 17-16. Republicans have a 23-10 hold on the State Senate, and six of them dropped off this anti-union bill. But they were just able to get enough support for passage.

In order to make it work, Ohio Republicans had to shuffle two committees to ensure they had the votes to pass the bill out.

Today, there’s another public committee hearing in Columbus, Ohio, on SB 5, a bill that would strip collective bargaining rights, in a variety of dimensions, from all public employees. Unlike in Wisconsin, police and firefighters are not exempted from this bill.

The protest crowd today in Ohio is enormous. There are no official numbers yet, but I’ve heard that they’re certainly the largest protests yet in Ohio against SB 5. Reuters puts it at more than 5,000, but the pic in the link above looks far bigger.

The overhaul of collective bargaining in Ohio, much like Wisconsin, could put federal transportation money in jeopardy, costing the state much of its $171 million annual haul. So this hardly has anything to do with the budget. Instead, it’s part of a pattern of new right-wing governors taking advantage of their opportunities to force through ideological policy they have long sought.

I’m in the plane en route to Madison, Wisconsin (thank you, Gogo In-Flight Internet!), but perhaps I should just rent a car and travel across the Midwest. Because labor fights are occurring across the region.