For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Fair Trade & Social Justice page, Politics and Democracy page, and our Ohio News page.

Across the nation, Americans are good and fed up. Fed up with politicians whose assault on public employees is sold as a boon to the economy. Fed up with political bosses trying to rig elections. Fed up with dirty tricks and nasty ads. Fed up with all of it. From the historic uprising in Madison, Wisconsin, to the Occupy movement that has swept the country, people power is becoming the coin of the realm. And Tuesday night in Ohio, that coin proved more valuable than the checkbooks of moneyed interests on either side of the divide.

When right-wing politicians in the state legislature, backed by the likes of the billionaire Koch brothers and assorted corporate interests, passed one law that revoked virtually all collective bargaining rights for public-sector workers, and another that rolls back the state’s voting rights, citizens got busy collecting signatures to put those laws to the test of the ballot box. On Tuesday night, the people defeated the anti-worker law, Senate Bill 5, by a resounding 61 percent majority. The voting rights referendum will come up on next year, on the same ballot as the presidential election.

In Ohio, Republicans and right-wing groups pulled out all the stops to keep voters from having their say on the anti-worker law signed earlier this year by Gov. John Kasich. But despite the arsenal of dirty tricks arrayed against supporters of collective bargaining for public employees, voters resoundingly defeated the power grab, called Issue 2 on the referendum ballot, by Kasich and his Koch-backed allies in the legislature.