From news service reports

COLUMBUS, Ohio  – Union rhetoric knows no bounds when compulsory dues schemes are threatened.

It was only a matter of time before Adolf Hitler and the Nazis made it into the recently launched right-to-work debate in Ohio.

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The rhetoric came courtesy of Joe Rugola, executive director of the Ohio Association of Public School Employees (OAPSE).

Via Media Trackers:

 At a May 1 press conference, Rugola decried workplace freedom as “extreme.” Asked by reporters why 24 states already have workplace freedom laws on the books if the policy is extreme, Rugola said, “all of Germany went extreme in 1933 … that doesn’t make it wise.”

Rugola added, “Extremism as a majority notion does not necessarily pass the test of good government, good policy, sound democracy.”

OAPSE, a local of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), staunchly opposes letting workers choose whether to pay a labor union. Rugola, a former president of the Ohio AFL-CIO, has worked with other union bosses to frame expanded worker rights as an attack on worker rights.

According to The Columbus Dispatch, Rugola was asked whether he meant to compare the introduction of right to work legislation with Nazi Germany and he replied, “No, I meant to compare it to extremism.”

An Associated Press story on the dueling May 1 workplace freedom press conferences quoted Rugola extensively but did not mention his allusion to Nazi Germany.

“America’s right-to-work states are the poorest, most unhealthy and undereducated states in the union. That is a fact,” Rugola asserted, warning that “right-wing extremist legislators” and corporations driven by “godless greed” were looking to rob Ohioans of their rights.

In recent years, Ohio has lagged far behind workplace freedom states in terms of job creation, wage growth, and disposable income growth.

But Rugola, who was paid a quarter of a million dollars in forced dues last year, exclaimed that it was OAPSE’s “intention with every fiber of our being to make war on those who want to make war on the American middle class.”