Somebody is going to read what I wrote about the version of capitalism this generation never saw and call it nostalgia. Call it an old man’s memory dressed up as an argument. I understand why. Memory is soft. It bends toward the good years and away from the bad ones. So, I am not going to ask anyone to trust my childhood this time. I am going to ask them to look at the ledger. Ohio kept one. The numbers are not sentimental. They do not remember things more kindly than they happened. Let us see what they say.
Start with a date, because every real story needs one. 1982. That is the year the Securities and Exchange Commission legalized stock buybacks, reversing a rule that had stood since 1934, a rule that had treated this exact practice as market manipulation for the better part of five decades. Policy Matters Ohio, the state’s own nonpartisan economic research institute, traces the runaway growth in executive pay back to that exact regulatory change. Nobody rang a bell. Nobody announced that the deal was changing. A switch got flipped in Washington, and the money that used to build things and pay people started finding its way, quietly and legally, into a smaller and smaller circle of hands. That is not a metaphor. That is a date, a rule, and a signature. Everything I am about to show you traces back to that hinge.
The first bill comes due in what we stopped building. For most of the twentieth century, if you wanted to learn a skilled trade in Ohio, Labor built the ladder and held it steady while you climbed. The Center for American Progress has documented that union apprenticeship programs outperform non-union programs on completion rates, and that participation and completion for women and people of color run higher in union programs too. That was not an accident. It was the point.
Look at Ohio today. CNBC’s own 2026 Top States for Business study, the same report that just named Ohio the best state in America for business, ranks us 35th in the nation for workforce, calling it our most glaring competitive weakness. Read that twice. Best state for business, thirty-fifth for workforce, in the same study, in the same year. That same reporting puts Ohio adult bachelor’s degree attainment at only about nineteen percent, in the bottom tier of the country. JobsOhio, the state’s own economic development corporation, estimates Ohio will need over half a million STEM workers in the next decade and has committed hundreds of millions of dollars trying to build, from scratch, a pipeline that Labor used to run as a matter of course, out of union halls, on apprentice wages, with no student debt attached.
We did not lose that ladder to bad luck. We lost it to the same forty years everything else in this piece traces back to. The generation this whole conversation is about did not inherit a training system. They inherited a gap, and a state scrambling to explain how it got there.
The second bill is written in obituaries, and this is the part I wish I did not have to write. Dr. Steven Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University, publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association, tracked working-age mortality in this country back to 1959 and found it held steady or improved for decades, and then it did not. His research puts the decline beginning in the 1980s. It hits hardest among people with less education, concentrated in the Industrial Midwest and Appalachia. Woolf’s study found that four states, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Kentucky, the Ohio Valley, account for one third of all excess working-age deaths in America since 2010. One third. From four states.
This is not only an opioid story, though the opioids are part of it. Woolf’s team tracked increases across thirty-five separate causes of death. Heart disease. Liver disease. Suicide. Diabetes. The body keeps score across every system it has when the floor gets pulled out from under a family for long enough. Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who coined the term deaths of despair, tie the crisis directly to the weakening position of Labor, the growing power of corporations, and a healthcare sector that redistributes working-class wages upward. Not as one factor among many. As a documented driver.
Hamilton County is not exempt. County health data reported by the Cincinnati Birth Center shows our own infant mortality rate rose from 5.5 per thousand live births in 2023 to 6.8 in 2024. Deaths tied to preterm birth jumped nearly fifty-five percent in a single year. For Black infants in this county, the rate climbed from 9.0 to 13.7 per thousand, three and a half times the white rate. That is not a statistic from some other state. That is a mile from where I sit at 1385 Tennessee Avenue.
When people ask what forty years of cronyism actually costs, this is the true answer. Not just wages. Not just pensions. It costs years off a life, and in some homes, it costs the whole life.
The third bill tells you where the money actually went. It did not vanish. It moved, and Ohio’s own corporate filings, analyzed year after year by Policy Matters Ohio, show exactly where it landed.
Among Ohio’s fifty largest employers, the median CEO took home 14.9 million dollars in 2023. The median employee at those same companies took home 54,857 dollars. That is a ratio of 308 to 1, up from 273 to 1 just the year before. Two out of every three of those fifty companies paid their chief executive more than two hundred times what they paid their typical worker. The highest paid CEO in the state that year ran Charter Communications, the company behind Spectrum, and pulled in 89 million dollars, 1,635 times what the median employee at his own company earned.
Policy Matters Ohio’s own researchers, and I am reading their words plainly here because they said it better than I could, wrote that the growth of CEO pay reflects the loss of union membership over recent decades, a countervailing power that used to hold corporations accountable to their workers and their communities, and not only to their shareholders. When that power disappears, this is what fills the vacuum. Not a mystery. A vacancy, and someone was always going to occupy it.
Three bills, one root cause. But here is where this piece has to go somewhere the last one did not, because a fair reader deserves the whole truth, not just the parts that end in a rally. Somebody built a wall around all three of those bills, so none of them could ever come up for a real vote.
In 2011, inside a hotel room in downtown Columbus, mapmakers drew legislative lines built to guarantee a decade of supermajority control no matter how Ohioans actually voted. The Ohio Supreme Court struck those maps down as unconstitutional gerrymanders, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, which represented Ohio voters in the legal challenge, five separate times on the legislative maps and twice more on the congressional maps. Seven rulings against the state, and the answer from Columbus each time was to redraw the lines and dare the court to strike them down again.
When citizens organized to raise the threshold that could stop this cycle, the same legislature moved first, proposing to raise the bar for citizen amendments from fifty percent to sixty percent. The Ohio Capital Journal obtained a memo written by one of the bill’s own sponsors, Republican State Representative Brian Stewart, to his colleagues. Two reasons, he wrote. Stop the abortion rights amendment. Stop any further anti-gerrymandering reform. He said the quiet part out loud.
The same forty years that hollowed out apprenticeship pipelines, that shortened lives across the Ohio Valley, that handed CEOs a bigger share of every dollar their workers produced, also built a legislature insulated from the one check that was supposed to correct all of it. You cannot vote your way out of a supermajority built to survive your vote.
So here is the honest turn, and I am not going to take it the easy way. I am not going to tell you to show up in November and everything corrects itself, because the math does not support that promise, and I have never respected anyone who sells hope they know is thin. But I am also not going to leave you standing at the edge of the cliff with nothing in your hand.
In August of 2023, according to the official statewide results, Ohioans defeated that sixty percent threshold, fifty-seven to forty-three, in a special election nobody was supposed to notice, with over three million ballots cast. Three months later, by a documented 56.8 percent, they passed the reproductive rights amendment outright. The tool still works. People organized around it, and it held.
Then, in November of 2024, Ohioans had the chance to take the map-making power away from politicians entirely and hand it to an independent citizens commission. That effort, known as Citizens Not Politicians, was led by Maureen O’Connor, the former Republican chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, the same justice who had been the swing vote striking the gerrymandered maps down in the first place. The official count shows it lost, fifty-four to forty-six. I will not pretend that loss did not happen. A credible, cross-partisan reform effort, with real institutional weight behind it, still came up short.
Here is what I take from both of those results, sitting side by side. The tool survived. The specific fix has not won yet. And when you look at where that 2024 vote actually fell, the coalition that could win the next one is already sitting there in the numbers. Reporting from the Ohio Capital Journal found that a meaningful share of the counties that voted no on redistricting reform still went for Trump. That same reporting notes that averaged out over the last ten election cycles, Ohio is a fifty-six to forty-three state, not the supermajority the current maps manufacture. People on both sides of our politics are already looking at the same rigged deck. They have simply never been organized around it at the scale a statewide constitutional fight requires.
So here is where this actually goes. I have spent my working life in rooms full of people who do not agree on much, tradespeople who vote every kind of ticket there is, standing next to each other on the same job site, paying into the same benefit fund, sending their kids to the same schools. I know what that coalition looks like because I have watched it hold together on a picket line when it could not agree on a bumper sticker.
That is Labor’s actual job in what comes next. Not persuasion. Not another speech asking people to believe harder. Assembly. Building the coalition that already exists in these vote totals into something organized enough to win the fight the ballot box alone cannot win by itself, not while these maps stand through the rest of the decade.
We identified the iceberg. The training pipeline that disappeared. The years that got taken off Ohio Valley lives. The money that moved from every paycheck in this state into three hundred times its own reflection at the top. And the maps built to make sure none of it ever came up for a real vote.
Icebergs do not move because you are angry at them. They move because enough hands, in the right place, pull hard enough, together, for long enough. I have seen this Labor movement do exactly that before. I intend to help it do it again.
Why Eye Write 