Ohio’s public employee unions should fasten their seat-belts: They may be in for rough 2011 rides, thanks to the clout — and long memories — of Statehouse Republicans, and not just because public employee unions threw everything but kitchen sinks at GOP Gov.-elect John R. Kasich and Republican General Assembly candidates.

Likely in Republicans’ cross-hairs are parts of Ohio’s 1983 collective bargaining law for public employees. A Democratic-run General Assembly passed the labor law without attracting a single Republican vote, and Democratic Gov. Richard F. Celeste swiftly signed the measure.

It replaced the unworkable Ferguson Act, passed after World War II, named for a Republican state senator from Guernsey County, not the Democratic dynasty. The Ferguson Act outlawed strikes by public employees. They struck anyway.

Term-limits or no, some of the same Republicans who voted “no” on the 1983 collective bargaining bill will be at the Ohio House’s helm in 2011: Speaker-designate William G. Batchelder of Medina; his designated deputy, Rep. Louis W. Blessing of Cincinnati; and the House Republican who’ll ride herd on the state budget, Rep. Ron Amstutz of Wooster.

If the GOP-run House, GOP-run state Senate and John Kasich do try to reshape the 1983 law — no one is talking seriously about repealing it — some Ohio Democrats may secretly, very secretly, cheer them on: Mayors, school superintendents and such.

Their gripe is that while Amended Substitute Senate Bill 133, formal name of the 1983 law, does some things very well — hold down the number of public-employee strikes — labor peace isn’t cheap.

The 1983 law maps out the procedural route cities and school boards must follow to arrive at labor settlements. But when cities and school boards reach that destination, how to pay the tab is City Hall’s headache, or the school board’s headache — that is, Mary or John Taxpayer’s headache — not the General Assembly’s (except for the roughly 59,000 state-agency employees).

And parts of the law, and related rulings, can spawn migraines. For example, in a brazen 1989 political flip-flop, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that — despite the home-rule powers the Ohio Constitution promises cities — the 1983 law imposes binding arbitration on a city if contract talks with safety forces deadlock.

That’s a head-splitter, because the law also requires “whatever actions are necessary to implement” an arbitrator’s decision: That is, cities are expected to pay up — and shut up.

The 1989 ruling was the exact opposite of a 1988 one, also 4-3. What changed? Not the law; the judges. Conservative Democratic Justice Ralph S. Locher, once Cleveland’s mayor, retired. Elected his successor in November 1988 was union-friendlier Democrat Alice Robie Resnick.

Result: The May 1989 switcheroo came in what’s called the Rocky River case. In Ohio courtrooms, “legal precedent” seems to be code for “election results.”

Binding arbitration for safety forces was a trade-off by Democrats. The 1983 law forbids police and firefighter strikes. So safety forces, deprived of that basic union weapon, get arbitration. It’s a reasonable theory. The question is whether, in practice, it’s fair, since it ties the hands of local officials, and it’s their job, not arbitrators’, to balance the books.

The debate Statehouse Republicans seem poised to launch in 2011 is this: How can the state require local officials to manage local budgets if they’re denied say-so over a big chunk of personnel costs?

True, for eons, that scam was a pillar of the Ohio Way: Play frugal in Columbus by shifting costs onto local taxpayers. But the rubes have caught on. Now they may boycott the game — unless someone changes its rules.

COLUMBUS — Gov.-elect John Kasich outlined a wish list of changes he would like to see regarding employee unions Thursday, including eliminating union-scale wages paid on public construction projects.

Kasich appeared at a press conference to announce Republican Joe Testa for state tax commissioner, but then spoke off the cuff about eliminating binding arbitration rules for police and firefighter contract negotiations and diluting Ohio’s collective bargaining law.

Safety forces are not permitted to strike. When the union and city reach an impasse, an outside arbitrator is called in to settle the dispute by picking the last and best offer presented by one side or the other — no matter how costly.

“Our local governments don’t want that. It drives up the costs,” Kasich said.

Ohio adopted a collective bargaining law in 1983 when Democrats controlled state government. Joe Rugola, president of the AFL-CIO Ohio, said before the law labor relations were unstable and there were constant strikes.

“If they want to return to that, I suppose they could take us back,” Rugola said Thursday.

While public workers such as teachers are still allowed to strike, the law put an end to strikes by safety forces.

“If they want to strike, they should be fired,” Kasich said of police and firefighters. “Look, you can have a change in the law that says — again, these decisions are not finally made — but there are ways to say that ‘You’re not going to strike and we’re going to continue negotiations without a binding arbitrator.’ ’’

John Mahoney of the Ohio Municipal League said cities often find arbitrator awards costly to absorb. Municipal support for eliminating binding arbitration would depend on the details and whether it saves money, Mahoney said.

Dayton city and union officials could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Since his election last month with 49 percent of the vote, Kasich has said teachers’ unions would have to take out full-page ads in newspapers across the state to apologize to him before he would invite them to the table; and he said that he would rescind two executive orders signed by Democrat Ted Strickland that led to the unionization of 14,000 home health care and independent day-care providers.

Kasich added: “I really don’t favor the right to strike of any public employee. OK. That’s my personal philosophy. How practical that is to implement, you know. But my personal philosophy is I don’t like public employees striking. They got good jobs, they got high pay, they got good benefits and great retirement.What are they striking for?”

COLUMBUS — It’s been more than 50 years since a Republican governor declared war on organized labor in Ohio.

That governor, C. William O’Neill, lost.

Gov.-elect John Kasich hasn’t made such a declaration, but Kasich seems determined to abandon the get-along, go-along approach that the last three Republican governors — Jim Rhodes, George Voinovich and Bob Taft — took with unions.

Already, Kasich has talked of ending the requirement that union-scale wages be paid on public construction projects and of eliminating binding arbitration in police and firefighter contract disputes.

Safety forces aren’t permitted to strike in Ohio, but when disagreement persists, an outside arbitrator is called in to settle things and the decision prevails, no matter the cost.

“If they want to strike, they should be fired,” Kasich said earlier this month. “Look, you can have a change in the law that says — again, these decisions are not finally made — but there are ways to say that ‘you’re not going to strike and we’re going to continue negotiations without a binding arbitrator.’ ”

Much has changed since 1958 when Ohio voters trounced — 63-37 percent — a right-to-work issue backed by O’Neill, other Republicans and their friends at the Ohio Chamber of Commerce.

The 1958 issue would have banned the adoption of labor agreements that made union membership a condition of employment. This exercise in political overreach crippled the state GOP and made the Ohio AFL-CIO a force to reckon with in Ohio politics.

That was then. This is now.

In 1958, about one in three Ohio workers belonged to a union. Most union members worked for private companies. They made cars, forged steel and rolled out tires.

In 2009, just 14 percent of Ohio workers overall belonged to unions. Not a lot of them made cars or worked in steel mills, a result of the exodus of manufacturing jobs.

Just 8.9 percent of private sector workers had union cards.

The clout that unions have these days is in the public employee unions representing safety forces, teachers and government workers at the state and local levels.

Forty-four percent of public sector workers belonged to unions in 2009, a result of the 1983 collective bargaining law signed by Democratic Gov. Dick Celeste after it passed the legislature with only Democratic support.

At a time of continuing high unemployment and a very pokey economic recovery, it’s not clear that voters these days have lots of sympathy for cops, firefighters, teachers and other public employees with decent jobs, benefits and pensions, all paid for by taxpayers.

“Given the recent skepticism about government in Ohio, there may be more sympathy for an overhaul of collective bargaining for public employees, including binding arbitration for safety forces,” political scientist John Green, director of the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron, said in an e-mail.

Kasich has said that he wants unions and union workers to join with him in turning around Ohio’s economy and doesn’t want to replay the 1958 right-to-work battle.

“They’ve got a lot at stake in this, too,” Rob Nichols, Kasich’s spokesman, said of unions. “We’re all in this together. That’s his (Kasich’s) message.”

Whatever changes Kasich proposes are likely to sail through the legislature, with both the House and Senate controlled by his fellow Republicans.

It’s the political opposite of 1983 when Democrats controlled the House and Senate and Celeste was governor.

Joe Rugola, president of the Ohio AFL-CIO, the labor federation that includes most Ohio unions, sounds like a man gearing up for a fight. Rugola also is executive director of the Ohio Association of Public School Employees, the first labor leader from a public employee union to head the state AFL-CIO.

“One thing we continue to drive home to our base is that since the right-to-work initiative in Ohio, no governor has been committed to what we believe is Kasich’s primary agenda, the same as the national Republican party, creation of a permanent low wage, no benefit, no pension economy,” Rugola said.

Caution is not Kasich’s style. Still, he was elected with less than 50 percent of the vote, 49-47 percent over Democratic incumbent Ted Strickland, hardly a mandate.

“Overreaching is always a danger when it comes to employment issues,” said political scientist Green. “Public sympathy for change could be reversed if there is a perception that public employees are being treated unfairly.”