Vivek Ramaswamy: Billionaires over Ohio Workers

Today, Ohioans are coming together in small towns like Cambridge and big cities like Cleveland. They’re calling for a policy agenda that puts workers over billionaires. Yet with Vivek Ramaswamy, we have a leading candidate for governor whose entire platform is putting billionaires like him over hardworking Ohioans.

Ramaswamy has never respected what it takes for many of us to put food on the table and care for our families. Even as a college student, he spoke out against paying Harvard’s janitors a living wage.

“[I]f the living-wage campaign were successful in achieving a wage increase for Harvard’s lowest-paid workers, it will have done so at the cost of respect that the rest of the Harvard community has for these workers—a cost that, no matter how high the wage increase, is too high to pay,” he wrote in a 2005 Harvard Crimson op-ed.

I’d be willing to chalk his tortured logic up to youthful ignorance, but the truth is Vivek’s outlook hasn’t changed much. The federal minimum wage sits at $7.25 – so low that a single person working full time would live below the federal poverty line. But Ramaswamy thinks that’s just fine. In fact, in 2021, he testified before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee to argue against policies that would compel corporations to make “a moral judgement” about paying living wages.

To Ramaswamy, American workers are not only ‘mediocre,’ they’re expendable. As the CEO of Roivant, he raked in $37 million from capital gains and laid off 10% of employees. We can expect more of the same if he becomes governor, because to him, it’s just a way to get his hands into our public coffers and rig the rules for his own profit.

For example, Ramaswamy’s financial disclosure shows that he has a stake in the same venture capital firm – 8VC – that is heavily invested in autonomous weapons manufacturer Anduril. The state of Ohio just gave Anduril $830 million in tax incentives to locate here – money that could be used to fund our schools, repair our roads, or improve our parks. As governor, Ramaswamy would have a direct say over incentives that would benefit his investments.

Well-paying union jobs and benefits have allowed countless Ohio families to buy a nice home, put food on the table and enjoy a vacation now and then. But we can’t trust Ramaswamy to protect working Ohioans’ right to organize. He wants to eliminate collective bargaining for public school teachers. We’ve seen this before with Gov. Kasich’s Senate Bill in 2011, but we came together and overturned it at the ballot.

Ramaswamy and his fellow corporate vultures are circling our state – hoping to get a chance to pick at our bones. But we won’t let him strip our communities for parts. And we won’t let him rip off Ohio workers.

Caitlin Johnson is the Senior Communications Director of Innovation Ohio.

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