You can't say they're not determined. The Columbus Dispatch reports that "tea party activists" are mounting a drive to get a measure on next November's ballot titled the "Workplace Freedom Amendment," which is a new spin on the more common but also deceptive name for such bills: right to work. That's right: Just days after an attempt to take collective bargaining rights from one set of workers—public employees—failed spectacularly, these "tea party activists" are trying to revive the corpse and give it the added power to take workplace rights from all workers in the state.
Plunderbund's ModernEsquire points out something the Dispatch doesn't get to until five paragraphs into its article: One of the "activists" involved in the push is a former state representative and is now director of government affairs for the Associated Builders and Contractors of Ohio. That's a particularly anti-union construction business lobby that gave large contributions to supporting Issue 2. In other words, while tea party efforts are rarely as populist as the media likes to portray them being, even by those standards this is a pretty directly corporate campaign.
Proponents of this right to work (for less) bill are using the traditional language of "forced unionization," which of course ignores the fact that no one in any state can be forced to join a union; they can only be forced to pay their fair share of the costs of negotiating and administering their contracts. But because collective bargaining rights are so popular in Ohio, proponents of the new anti-worker measure are apparently talking about "the right to bargain individually." ModernEsquire asks:
Why can’t these folks just draft the proposal for what it really is “a constitutional amendment banning collective bargaining.” Why the deceptive language? If they honestly thought the people of Ohio shared their political views, why be so indirect about it.
Obviously, they hope to mislead, fear-monger and obfuscate. But doing it on exactly the issue that just got shot down in your state by a huge margin and which by all indications has energized voters against the politicians that pushed it? That shows a lot of nerve and no shame—but mostly it shows how high anti-worker and anti-union efforts are on the right's list of priorities.