COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- Ohio wants to use
prisoners to replace Statehouse janitors and groundskeepers who were
laid off because of budget cuts, angering a labor union.
The
state board that operates the building says it will probably use two
inmates to do grounds work and another five for night cleaning.
The
Ohio Civil Service Employees Association, the state's largest public
employees' union and the one that represented the laid-off workers,
filed a grievance Wednesday to reverse the plan.
"These aren't phantom jobs - these are real
jobs, real people," said Sally Meckling, union spokeswoman.
The
union said it's wrong to substitute inmate labor for good-paying union
jobs. It also questioned the wisdom of allowing inmates to work in the
frequently visited, 147-year-old Statehouse.
The
Statehouse needs the inmates because it has lost 17 employees since
January because of budget cuts, William Carleton, executive director of
the Capital Square Review and Advisory Board, said Thursday.
"Get the money reinstated, and we'll bring
the employees back," Carleton said. "I'm not the one who cut the
budget."
Statehouse
operations have been cut $310,000 this year, almost 10 percent of the
Capitol's budget. Gov. Ted Strickland ordered $640 million sliced from
state government operations in December, including 5.75 percent
across-the-board cuts to all but the most vital programs. That brought
total cuts for the current budget year now to $1.9 billion.
A
guard will supervise the inmates, who will wear clothes identifying
them as prisoners. They'll make $100 a month, the top wage for an
inmate working outside a prison, but a fraction of a Statehouse
laborer's pay of around $26,000 annually.
Ohio
also uses carefully screened inmates to garden at the governor's
residence in Bexley in suburban Columbus, to build furniture and work
on cars at prison factories around the state, and to clean along
highways.
The inmates who will work at the
Statehouse are nonviolent offenders serving short sentences with clean
prison records, said Stuart Hudson, warden of Pickaway Correctional
Institution, south of Columbus.
They are carefully screened and will be
interviewed for the jobs by Statehouse officials, he said.
"We're
very comfortable with the inmates we send up to perform the duties,"
Hudson told The Associated Press Thursday. "We take this job very
seriously and our priority is to protect the public."
The
American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, based in
Washington, D.C., said it's unaware of any other state directly
replacing laid-off workers with inmates.
Inmates
in Virginia have long tended the grounds of the state Capitol in
Richmond, while Arizona prisoners have done custodial work on state
buildings in Phoenix.
In Maryland, owners of
seafood processing plants on the state's Eastern Shore are considering
hiring state prisoners to pick crabs because the foreign workers
they've depended on for years have recently had trouble getting
temporary visas.
Prisoners from the old Ohio
State Penitentiary helped build the Statehouse foundation and ground
floors during its construction from 1839 to 1861.
The
practice was controversial then, and the prisoners were removed after
tradesmen complained they were losing out on good-paying jobs,
according to an advisory board history of the Statehouse.
---
On the Net:
Statehouse board: https://www.csrab.state.oh.us/
Ohio Civil Service Employees Association: http://www.ocsea.org/
©
2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not
be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Learn more about
our Privacy Policy.
![[Get Copyright Permissions]](gifOvKdXaID0d.gif){kind=small}
