Hannah Halbert, Executive Director of Policy Matters Ohio, and Ali Smith, who leads the organization's Work and Wages team, joined the America's Work Force Union Podcast to discuss the annual State of Working Ohio report.
The report's central finding is that Ohio workers produce the wealth but are not being compensated for it, which is a gap the report says is directly tied to the collapse of the state’s union density. Since 19179, Ohio's union density has fallen from 35.5 percent to 12.8 percent in 2025. Halbert said this decline corresponds to an $8.6 billion annual gap between what workers produce and what they receive in wages and benefits. Smith described the productivity data: worker productivity has increased by 84 percent over the past generation, while wages have risen only 22 percent over the same period.
The report addresses the state’s minimum wage. Ohio's minimum wage is $11 per hour, leaving a full-time worker more than $10,000 short of basic cost of living in even the cheapest Ohio county. Smith also described the Workforce Investment Now (WIN) Act, a bill modeled on Kentucky's program that would provide free childcare to childcare workers as an incentive to stop the sector's workforce decline.
Hannah Halbert opened with a frame that defines the entire report: Ohio was recently declared the number one state for business. That is not necessarily a bad thing, she said. However, for Ohioans, it comes at the expense of the workers who produce the wealth those businesses rely on.
Every time Policy Matters Ohio goes to the statehouse to advocate for working people, they hear the same response: "We can't afford it.” The State of Working Ohio report is designed to answer that claim directly. The cost of not acting — in foregone wages, in weakened consumer spending, in a hollowed-out public sector, in childcare unavailable to the workers who need it — exceeds the cost of any of the policy solutions the report recommends. Ohio cannot afford the status quo.
Ali Smith walked through the productivity data at the heart of the report. Over the past generation, Ohio worker productivity has increased by 84 percent, while wages have risen by 22 percent. Someone is capturing the difference, and it is not the workers. Wealth is being concentrated at the top, while the people who created it fall further behind.
Halbert connected that gap directly to union density. In 1979, Ohio's union density stood at 35.5 percent, as more than one in three workers were covered by collective bargaining. In 2025, Ohio’s union density was 12.8 percent. The two trend lines track together: as union power to bargain for wages and benefits declined, the share of productivity gains returning to workers declined with it. Halbert said that if Ohio were at its 1979 union density level today, the state's workers would collectively receive approximately $8.6 billion more in annual wages and benefits. That money would not disappear into savings accounts. It would flow back into Ohio's local economies through rent payments, grocery purchases, childcare costs and small business spending.
Smith pushed back on the framing that separates what is good for workers from what is good for the economy. When people talk about the economy being strong, she said, they usually mean the stock market, corporate profits or the net worth of the top few percent. That is the wrong measure. The economy is Ohio's working families. A strong economy means those families have stability — the ability to absorb an illness, a job loss, an unexpected expense — and the purchasing power to keep local businesses running. Ohio consistently comes out of recessions more slowly than the rest of the country, precisely because its economy, as measured by working family stability, is weak.
Twenty years ago, Ohio voters took matters into their own hands and raised the state minimum wage, which was indexed to inflation. Halbert said that foresight was critical. Without it, she said, the situation would be far worse. However, $11 per hour, which is approximately $22,800 in annual income for a full-time year-round worker, does not come close to meeting the basic cost of living anywhere in the state. The least expensive county in Ohio requires more than $38,000 annually for a single adult to cover basic expenses. That is a gap of more than $10,000 at the lowest end. In higher-cost areas, the gap is much wider.
Halbert said the state’s minimum wage needs another significant bump after 20 years. The policy work to justify it is done, but there is no political will in the current legislature. She placed misclassification, gig work protections and the overtime threshold alongside the minimum wage as basic employment law updates that have been left to erode through neglect, not through any principled policy argument.
The conversation then touched on worker misclassification, which removes workers from the protections of employment law by labeling them as independent contractors. Halbert noted that the harm falls not only on those workers but on the state's tax base. Wages paid under the table or to misclassified contractors often go unreported, depriving Ohio of revenue it would otherwise collect. Legislation to address misclassification has been drafted and introduced by legislators who understand the problem, but the political will to move it has not materialized. Municipalities have been more responsive. For instance, Cleveland has a wage board that grew out of the work of the Worker Center and the North Shore AFL-CIO, and some other Ohio municipalities have strengthened local wage theft laws. However, the statehouse has not acted.
Smith described Ohio's unemployment compensation system as not solvent. It is not collecting enough money to function as it should because the earnings cap at which the system stops collecting contributions is set too low. Other states have raised that cap. Adjusting it, she said, is a simple change. Ohio's maximum benefit duration is 26 weeks, with conditions including active job searching and separation through no fault of the worker. Smith said there is a legislative appetite to cut that duration to 20 weeks rather than making the system work better. The report interviews six workers from across Ohio, including a software engineer navigating the unemployment system, to document the human cost of these gaps and the complexity workers encounter in accessing benefits they have earned.
Ohio is tied for last in the country in terms of eligibility for childcare assistance. It also has unfilled childcare slots, as centers licensed to serve more children cannot do so because they cannot find workers to fill educator positions. They cannot find workers because the median wage for a childcare worker is $14.27 per hour, with half the workforce earning less.
Since 2019, Ohio has lost nearly 40 percent of its childcare workforce. Each educator who leaves takes five to eleven child slots with them, depending on the age group served. The decline has not rebounded since the pandemic. It continues because the childcare business model is highly labor-intensive, and the state reimbursement structure leaves providers without sufficient margin to offer competitive wages.
Smith has been working with the Care Economy Organizing Project, a statewide group that has organized over 400 childcare providers alongside parents and other advocates, on the WIN Act, which is a bill that would make childcare free for childcare workers as an employment benefit. The model comes directly from Kentucky's program, which Smith described as wildly successful. The logic is straightforward: the workers who keep Ohio's childcare infrastructure running are themselves paying $10,000 a year on average for their own children's care. Eliminating that cost as a workplace benefit would stop the workforce from hemorrhaging and attract new workers to the sector without requiring the razor-thin-margin business model to fundamentally change.
Both Halbert and Smith framed the report as a set of policy solutions waiting for political will. Raise the minimum wage and index it. Protect collective bargaining by following Illinois' model, which requires contracts to be completed within a set timeframe to prevent the indefinite delay tactics seen in Starbucks organizing campaigns. Rein in misclassification. Fix the unemployment system's solvency by raising the contribution cap. Pass the WIN Act. Let workers associate freely and organize themselves.
The counterargument they have heard for two decades — that these policies are bad for business and therefore bad for the economy — is, they said, contradicted by every piece of data in the report. An Ohio where workers have more money in their pockets is an Ohio with a stronger economy, more resilient local businesses and a less precarious middle class. The cost of inaction is $8.6 billion a year. Ohio cannot afford to keep paying it.
The full State of Working Ohio report is available for download at policymattersohio.org.
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