Eight Months, One Vote: Lorain County's Striking Workers Oust the Commissioner Holding Their Contract

On the morning of February 18, 2026, at 6:30 a.m., roughly 150 workers at Lorain County Job and Family Services in Ohio walked out in front of their Elyria Township building with signs, after more than a year of contract negotiations with the county commissioners collapsed. These are the people who run the county's child welfare casework and its public benefits programs — the staff on the phones, the caseworkers at the desks, the ones who tell a struggling family what help exists.

They are UAW Local 2192. As of this week, they have been on strike for 259 days.

The union says the commissioners refused to bargain in good faith and held out on the roughly $1-per-hour raises the workforce needs just to keep up with the cost of living. The board's own messaging framed the union's ask differently — a 26 percent compensation increase over three years, a $5,000 signing bonus, and expanded work-from-home provisions. The numbers don't line up, but the standoff does: the commissioners issued what they called a final and best offer, the union walked, and the line held.

There is a specific cruelty to striking over a place like this. Job and Family Services is where people go at their lowest — a child's safety in question, a family counting out a heating bill, a parent trying to understand a benefits form. UAW President Shawn Fain called the walkout "a public service crisis," and put the math of it plainly: "An agency that can't keep staff because they can't afford to eat lunch or have their children on their health care plan — that's an agency in crisis." The agency stayed open through the fight. Leadership and non-represented staff kept the lobby running, documents moved through drop boxes, and the county said services to children and families would continue with as little disruption as possible. The striking workers weren't withholding work from the public. They were withholding consent to be paid like the work doesn't matter.

The holdout had a name, and in Ohio, names come with terms. Commission President Dave Moore called the workers "unreasonable" in a video message, saying they were "asking for things that we just don't have the money for." Commissioner Jeff Riddell — the commissioner the UAW has pointed to as the one responsible for the eight-month strike — was blunter in a February text message: "No one wants a strike. No one wins in a fight," he wrote, "But, expectations have to be reasonable."

That word, reasonable, did a lot of work around that table. The county has 18 collective bargaining units, and by October, 11 of them had signed agreements, including a three-year wage package for 9-1-1 agency workers. The Job and Family Services unit was the loudest open sore on the county's labor docket, and Riddell was its most visible obstacle.

So the union moved the fight. The UAW says its operation began building in the summer: members from workplaces across the county trained as canvassers, and by November the union counted 10,000 doors knocked in Lorain County, 150 members and volunteers organized, and phone calls reaching tens of thousands of union members across Elyria, North Ridgeville, Avon, Vermilion, Oberlin, Wellington, Grafton, and Sheffield. Striking JFS workers knocked on doors on Saturdays — on the line during the week, on porches the rest of it.

Gina Jones, a case worker on strike and co-chair of the Local 2192 bargaining committee, said the campaign was a referendum on the kind of government this county gets: "Voters in Lorain County are sick of elected officials like Jeff Riddell who are bad at their jobs."

This was not a generic get-out-the-vote effort. It was an ouster campaign, and it named the target.

One detail makes the vote land harder. The union says Riddell first won the seat in 2022 by just over 100 votes and survived the May primary by 18. Thin-margin officeholders are fragile ones. In Lorain County, the strikers became the margin.

Unofficial results from the Lorain County Board of Elections on November 3: Democrat Carolyn White, 68,454; Riddell, 54,910; write-in independent Andrew Lipian, 3,285. White, a Democrat with 37 years in local politics and a resume that includes the Lorain County Community Action Agency and the Urban League, took the seat — a four-year term worth $98,563 a year — and her first public line was an echo of the strike itself: "I will work hard to be the commissioner that they elected me to be."

UAW Region 2B Director Dave Green called it what it was: "The fight is to hold the county accountable to its promise to settle fairly with the union. Voters sent a strong message that they want accountability from elected officials."

What happens next? The strike is not over. The union's demands are unchanged, and the bargaining table now faces a board with one commissioner who lost a campaign the strikers paid for. That is the mechanism most of these stories miss: the strike did not end in a contract. It ended in a changed government. A strike with an exit — a strike that can make itself an election.

The UAW says the JFS walkout is already the longest public-sector strike in Ohio history and is weeks away from becoming the longest public-sector strike in U.S. history. If that record stands, the next milestone is already on the calendar: the day the Lorain County strike becomes the longest in the country, with a new commissioner's name on the other side of the table.

For 259 days, the lobby at 42485 North Ridge Road has stayed open from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Families still bring documents through the drop box. The workers who process them are still out front — and for the first time, they have a vote inside the county building.