Earlier this year, Ohio state legislators passed a controversial bill limiting the collective bargaining rights of public employees unions. Included in the SB5 legislation is a provision to eliminate small automatic pay increases for state workers, including teachers, cops, and firefighters.

Ohio Republicans justified the move by arguing that state needed to shrink the size of government and save money in public employee contracts. However, when it comes to the salaries of Republican staffers, Ohio Senate President Tom Niehaus (R) was not nearly as concerned with fiscal discipline.

A new investigation by the preeminent Ohio blog Plunderbund shows that rather than leading by example and asking his own employees to tighten their belts like they did public employees with SB5, Niehaus has been giving major retroactive pay increases to his staff. Those raises were as high as 37 percent:

Plunderbund research reveals that GOP Senate President Tom Niehaus, leader of the brain trust behind a bill to strip benefits from rank and file public employees, and champion of a budget that makes painful cuts to nearly every program in the state, has now committed the ultimate act of hypocrisy. [...]

Now, in the most recent move, quietly, effective with the first paycheck of the new fiscal year, Niehaus has followed the lead of the Governor by rewarding his top staff with enormous taxpayer-funded pay increases. His Chief of Staff, Assistant Chief of Staff, Finance Director and Senate Clerk all received a $15,000 yearly pay increase. The Deputy Finance Directory received a whopping $23,005 increase. [...]

Furthermore, the increases were retroactive, such that on July 16, these same staffers each took home checks containing 26 weeks of back pay at the higher rate, as if their raises had been in place since January. [...]

So, after passing SB5 which eliminates automatic 3% pay increases for state workers, the Senate handed their own staff raises ranging from 12 to 37%.

After SB5 was signed into law, one consequence has been that public workers are retiring in droves in order to avoid the new legislation’s onerous pension reforms.

Still, many in the Buckeye State are fighting back. A major opposition effort emerged, gathering nearly 1.3 million signatures to get a repeal referendum on the November ballot – one million signature more than necessary to hold a vote. A poll in May found 54 percent of Ohioans want to repeal the law, outpacing supporters by 18 points. Even Gov. John Kasich (R) has recognized SB5′s unpopularity and offered to sit down and negotiate the bill with labor organizers in advance of of November’s repeal vote.

Of course, all public employees should receive adequate compensation for the important work they do, not just Republican Senate staffers. For Niehaus to cut firefighter’s pay while giving major raises to his own staff isn’t just unfair; it reeks of hypocrisy.

Today, nearly three-quarters of a million teachers, immigration officials, court workers, and other unionized civil servants in the United Kingdom are on a 24 hour strike. These workers are protesting harsh austerity policies by the right-wing British government that will ask poor and middle class Britons to sacrifice in the form of pension costs and pay cuts, but leave the rich largely untouched. Al Jazeera English interviewed some of the strikers and filed a video report about the action. Watch it:

The reason these workers can protest their government’s policies in this way is because most non-security public sector employees in the country have a robust right to strike. Unfortunately, labor laws in the United States are not nearly as permissive. In fact, according to United States Code: Title 5,7311, U.S. federal employees are actually not permitted to strike against the government:

An individual may not accept or hold a position in the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia if he —
(1) advocates the overthrow of our constitutional form of government;
(2) is a member of an organization that he knows advocates the overthrow of our constitutional form of government;
(3) participates in a strike, or asserts the right to strike, against the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia; or
(4) is a member of an organization of employees of the Government of the United States or of individuals employed by the government of the District of Columbia that he knows asserts the right to strike against the Government of the United States or the government of the District of Columbia.

Additionally, in many parts of the United States, public employees who work for municipalities or states are also prohibited from striking. In states as diverse as Washington, New York, and Wisconsin there is a broad framework of laws that prohibits most strikes by most public employees.

Some British conservatives, fearing the rights that public employee unions have in their country, are already calling for changing the United Kingdom’s strike laws to make it more difficult for workers to exercise their power. It seems they would prefer their workers to be as relatively powerless as their American counterparts.

Earlier this week, despite raucous protests from Main Street New Jerseyans, the New Jersey Senate — thanks to the defection of eight Democrats who sided with the GOP — passed S-2937, a bill Gov. Chris Christie (R) backs that would ask the state’s half a million public employees to pay dramatically more for their health care and pension costs and limit the ability of public employees to negotiate over their health care packages.

Today, the New Jersey Assembly is expected to vote on its version of the bill. Speaking to the New York Times about the bill, Bob Master, who is the political director at the Communications Workers of America, District 1, noted that the bill would perversely ask teachers to pay more than upper-income earners were asked to pay in a tax that was rescinded in 2010:

Bob Master, political director of the Communications Workers of America, District 1, which represents most state workers, points to the inverted math. Under the tax surcharge rescinded in 2010, a couple who made $750,000 would have paid about $4,800 a year, or slightly less than a teacher making $65,000 will be forced to pay in higher health care and pension payments under the new plan.

Indeed, the so-called “millionaire’s tax,” which New Jersey eliminated in 2010, increased taxes for upper-income earners by less than 2 percent, and the number of millionaires in the state actually grew while the tax was in effect. But it now appears that New Jersey is on the path to demand that teachers and other hard-working public workers pay more of their income for health care and pension plans — 5 to 10 percent by some estimates — than the state’s richest had to pay under the now-expired tax.