About 225 people crammed, jammed and elbowed their way around a jubilant catered affair at Bainbridge Township Hall June 11 to hear an address from Ohio’s Senior Sen. Sherrod Brown.
About 225 people crammed, jammed and elbowed their way around a jubilant catered affair at Bainbridge Township Hall June 11 to hear an address from Ohio’s Senior Sen. Sherrod Brown.
Brown, a Democrat from Cleveland first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006, told the crowd he was happy to be back in Geauga County and to see it become more Democratic.
“I represented Geauga County in Congress and we never had a turnout like this,” Brown said, referencing his tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives between 1992 and 2007.
Geauga County Democratic Party Chair Janet Carson introduced Brown and recognized several tables reserved by representatives from local labor unions, as well as the county’s Democratic elected officials in attendance.
“There is no shortage of Democrats in Geauga County,” she said.
Brown’s address to the crowd emphasized his positions on labor rights, including winning a hard-fought battle to enforce prevailing wage conditions on a new microchip manufacturing plant, Intel Corporation, planned for the Columbus area.
“What that means is they’re not gonna use scab labor,” he said. “This is the first time ever in a major (partially) federally funded private project … that there was a project labor agreement.”
Brown said the plant will bring at minimum 5,000 union jobs in the next 10 years to the state. Union building trades are good jobs that pay a living wage, he added.
“And you know what else? These jobs, you can be right out of Berkshire High School, or you could be right out of (West Geauga High School) and you can go into the trades at the age of 18, 19, 20. You go into this apprentice program, it lasts four or five years, and that job immediately starts paying 17, 18, 19 dollars an hour,” he said. “By your fourth or fifth year, when the apprenticeship is done, you’re making at least $60,000, right? And you get benefits from day one. You have no student debt.”
Brown said young people should be encouraged to go into the trades if they want to, adding the trades have, for decades, looked like him — mostly white men — but more women and people of color are entering the field.
Brown’s focus on workers has long been his signature. He said his use of the term “dignity of labor” is a callback to Dr. Martin Luther King, who, in turn, borrowed it from Pope Leo XIII.
“(Pope Leo XIII was) the so-called Labor Pope at the turn of the 20th century who talked about the dignity of work and how important it is that we honor work,” he said.
Brown contrasted the lives of workers who never have a vacation or struggle to get medical coverage with his own job as a senator.
“I went to a new dentist office — this was three miles from my house. (The receptionist) said ‘What’s your name?’ I said, ‘Sherrod Brown.’ She said, ‘spell it,’” he recalled. “I said, ‘I work for the federal government. She wrote that down. She said, ‘What’s your job?’ I said, ‘I’m a United States senator and she looked up and she said, ‘Is that full time?’”
Brown said the story is funny because it teaches humility, but also because there are a lot of people in the country who are struggling to make ends meet.
“They don’t have jobs that can enable them to come to a dinner like this. They don’t carry union cards. They don’t have a lot of opportunities in life, they’re struggling every day,” he said. “They’re working at McDonald’s, they’re working at nursing homes, … they’re working in doctors’ offices, they’re working in non-union construction, they’re in jobs that they just struggle every day just to get by.”
Those people are the ones he is fighting for, he said.
“Many of them don’t vote. None of them come to these kinds of dinners. Most of them just think politicians don’t care about them. They don’t think any of us care about them,” he said. “So why would she care enough to vote? Why would she care enough to know who I am?
And that’s … what, to me, is so important about the job we do — to make sure we look out for people who too often are left out.”
Brown praised President Joe Biden, who he said has prevailed over the creation of more jobs in 28 months than any president in a full 48-month term.
In a press scrum after the event, Brown said the most pressing need facing Northeast Ohioans is better wages and benefits for workers.
“We got to keep the focus on that instead of, you know, the (Ohio) legislature doing all this goofy stuff,” he said, referring to a recent spate of bills in the Ohio House addressing cultural issues. “Most Ohioans and most Americans think that human beings are human beings and should be treated that way. And when politicians demagogue and make fun of people and divide people, it’s shameful.”
