WORKERS COMPENSATION
The Heart of It All
“The agency designed to compensate workers injured by capital is spending public dollars to track those workers' movements, looking for evidence to deny the claim."
MOVEMENT I
In Columbus, Ohio, roughly 7,000 single-family homes are owned by private equity firms. A portion are kept empty deliberately.
Not abandoned. Not in foreclosure. Not awaiting renovation. Empty by design -- held vacant while their value appreciates, while the city’s housing crisis worsens, while first-time buyers are outbid in cash by $40,000 on houses in which they will never live.
The same week those homes sat locked, Vivek Ramaswamy stood before the Ohio Chamber of Commerce PAC to accept its endorsement.
He said he would move immediately [his word] to eliminate Ohio’s capital gains tax. The tax that investors pay when they sell assets. As when they sell houses, for instance, that appreciated because they were kept empty during a housing shortage. The nonpartisan Legislative Service Commission estimates the cut would cost the state $650 million a year. Elon Musk has given $5 million to the PAC supporting Ramaswamy’s campaign. Jeff Yass, $20 million. Bill Ackman, $1 million.
Two photographs on a table.
In one: a house in Columbus with the lights off, the lawn managed, the deed held by a firm registered to a shell company, the property generating no shelter but steadily generating value.
In the other: Vivek Ramaswamy at a podium in a suit, flanked by the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, announcing that the people who profit from that empty house should pay less tax on their profit.
No explanation is required. No thesis is needed yet. The juxtaposition is the argument. Or rather, it is the question the argument must answer: what kind of system produces both of these things in the same week, in the same state, and presents them not as related but as unrelated — one a “market problem,” one a “tax policy?”
Ohio, last week, was a place where capital works exactly as designed. The disorder is the order. The emergency is the policy.
MOVEMENT 2: The Surface of the Week
Last week in Ohio, the state’s machinery moved along several tracks at once, and the tracks did not contradict each other.
In Columbus, a grassroots organizer named Jordan McLaughlin has been mapping the addresses. Private equity firms like VineBrook, Homes for America, Blackstone and others, own approximately 7,000 single-family homes in Columbus and Franklin County. A portion of them sit vacant, deliberately, while the city’s housing affordability crisis deepens. McLaughlin, who was outbid three times on houses he tried to buy -- each time by all-cash offers $40,000 over asking price -- describes the logic plainly: the firms treat houses like stocks, plant money in them, wait for appreciation, and sell. A sitting tenant is a liability. Vacancy is the strategy. Mayor Ginther and City Council have said repeatedly that the city needs more housing. They have not said this about the empty houses.
Mayor Ginther has received $250,000 from developers this year.
At the Ohio Chamber of Commerce PAC in Columbus the same week, Vivek Ramaswamy accepted an endorsement and announced he would move immediately [his word] eliminate Ohio’s capital gains tax: the tax investors pay when they sell assets. The Legislative Service Commission estimates the cut at $650 million a year.
The political action committee supporting Ramaswamy’s campaign has raised nearly $42 million. Its largest donor, Jeff Yass, has given $20 million. Elon Musk, $5 million. Bill Ackman, $1 million. Ramaswamy also pledges to phase out the state income tax within a decade and roll back property taxes — the revenue streams that fund Ohio’s schools, libraries, fire departments, and public transit.
That public transit is in crisis already. The Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority faces a fiscal cliff. Without a new sales tax levy put before Cuyahoga County voters -- voters already squeezed by inflation, already being asked for additional levies for health and disability services -- RTA will cut service on 27 of 41 bus lines over the next three years and discontinue 8 routes entirely. Ridership remains below pre-pandemic levels. The agency that cannot fund its buses serves a county of 1.2 million people.
Meanwhile, the federal government advanced plans this week to lease 2,840 acres of Ohio’s only national forest -- Wayne National Forest, in the southeastern Appalachian hills -- to oil and gas developers, with a lease sale scheduled for September 15. Ohio has already opened 22,000 acres of state parks and wildlife areas to energy companies since 2024. In the northeast of the state, residents near a proposed Google data center are learning that a single hyperscale facility can consume the electricity of 100,000 homes — more than half the occupied homes in Cleveland — and as much as 5 million gallons of water per day. No law requires data centers to report their water use. The Ohio EPA quietly dropped a plan this week to permit data center discharges into lakes and rivers, though not before the proposal had demonstrated what was being considered.
429,000 Ohioans are now more than 360 days delinquent on student loans — 24% of all Ohio residents who hold them. Nationally, 9.5 million borrowers are in default, a record. The pandemic pause has ended, the SAVE income-driven repayment plan is being dismantled, and wage garnishment is expected to begin within the year.
In Lima, a small, western Ohio city, approximately 5,000 Haitian residents are bracing for an uncertain future following the Supreme Court’s decision to allow the Trump administration to revoke Temporary Protected Status. Jacson Joseph, a former schoolteacher who fled gang violence in Haiti in 2021, has already been fired. “They fired us from our job,” he said. “Whether you are a good worker or not, they don’t care.” His employer is still operating.
And across multiple Ohio state agencies, the Bureau of Workers’ Compensation, the state Fire Marshal, the Department of Corrections, the Department of Youth Services, the Attorney General’s office -- contracts with Flock Safety’s AI license-plate surveillance network have expanded quietly. The Bureau of Workers’ Compensation, whose statutory purpose is to compensate workers injured on the job, paid $24,000 last year to track the movements of Ohioans on public roads. In Columbus, the city’s own police department searched Flock’s database nearly 16,000 times for immigration purposes, in direct violation of city policy. The city renewed the contract.
These are the week’s events in Ohio. They do not appear, in the bourgeois press, to be related.
MOVEMENT 3: The Hidden Architecture – What Connects These?
A single operation runs beneath all of these stories. Once named, it isn’t complicated: the systematic reallocation of public resources, public land, public infrastructure, and the coercive power of the state away from the working class and toward capital -- conducted simultaneously on every front, in every register, without pause.
The key word is simultaneously. These are not sequential events, not a policy drift, not a series of mistakes. They are parallel tracks of a single class project, moving in the same direction at the same speed in the same week.
Consider the geometry. The capital gains tax cut frees $650 million annually from public revenue — revenue that would have funded the services now being cut. The RTA’s fiscal cliff is approximately $140 million over three years. The Wayne National Forest lease converts public land to private extraction rights. The data center tax abatements transfer public fiscal capacity to private infrastructure. The student loan collection system extracts value from workers across entire lifetimes. The Flock surveillance network, funded by public agencies including the Bureau of Workers’ Compensation, tracks the people those agencies nominally serve. The Haitian workers in Lima are fired, surveilled, and threatened with deportation by the same state apparatus that is simultaneously eliminating taxes on the capital that employed them.
This is not disorder. This is the state performing its actual function.
What is being constructed is a two-tier infrastructure.
On one tier: the infrastructure that capital needs -- data centers, energy extraction rights, deregulated permitting, tax-free appreciation on assets, wage-garnishment mechanisms for debt collection, AI surveillance networks to manage population movement.
On the other tier: a systematic dismantling of the infrastructure that workers need -- public transit, affordable housing, stable student loan repayment, homelessness services, and the legal status of immigrant workers who built their lives inside a framework the state has now decided to revoke.
The Flock contract held by the Bureau of Workers’ Compensation is the week’s most precise emblem of this structure.
An agency whose name announces protection — Workers’ Compensation — uses its public budget to surveil the workers it is supposed to compensate. The name is not ironic by accident. It describes a real promise that was made and a real institution that was built and a real reorientation that has occurred, in which the protection apparatus has been converted into a control apparatus while retaining its original name. The promise is left standing as cover. The machinery underneath is reversed.
Lima’s Haitian workers illumine the same structure from below. Jacson Joseph was legally invited by the state, through TPS, to live, work, pay taxes, pay rent, raise children, and participate in the economy of Lima. Capital needed his labor. The state provided the legal framework. Now capital no longer needs the political cover of appearing to welcome immigrant workers; it needs a scapegoat for the housing costs and wage stagnation that its own policies produced. The state revokes the framework. Joseph is fired. The mechanism that needed him -- that extracted his labor, his tax payments, his rent payments -- continues operating unchanged. He is expelled; the extraction continues.
Engels saw this operation in its early industrial form and named it with appropriate clinical precision. Writing in 1845 of the English working class, he described how the bourgeoisie concentrates workers, uses them, and then -- in moments of crisis or political convenience –- turns the instruments of the state against them while maintaining, in every public formulation, the language of protection, improvement, and order. The housing question, he observed in 1872, is never solved by the bourgeoisie -- it is periodically “solved” by demolishing the poor quarters and rebuilding them elsewhere, so that the crisis moves but the cause remains intact.
Columbus’ private equity vacancies are not a new housing crisis. They are the same housing crisis, operating with updated financial instruments: the demolition has been replaced by the deliberate non-use, the effect is identical, and the city government’s response — building 200,000 new units via tax-abated developer partnerships — is precisely what Engels identified as the bourgeois “solution”: relocate, reconstruct, and leave the property relation unchanged.
The student loan system belongs to the same architecture. It is not a social mobility program that has failed. It is a debt extraction mechanism that is working. It transfers value from workers -- across entire careers, through garnished wages and garnished Social Security payments –- to the financial sector, while maintaining the ideological cover of educational investment.
The $94,000 balance that Ashley Dreahn discovered after believing her debt discharged is not a glitch. The confusion, the opacity, the contradictory letters from different servicers, the loans sold and resold and lost and found — all of it is functional. A system that is deliberately opaque and punitive and non-dischargeable in bankruptcy is a system that was designed to be those things.
What the week in Ohio reveals, taken whole, is a ruling class that is not confused, not drifting, not making policy errors. It is executing. The tax code, the surveillance network, the debt system, the land lease, the transit defunding, the deportation apparatus — these are not different policies accidentally converging. They are expressions of the same interest, operating through the available instruments of a capitalist state whose function is the protection and reproduction of class power.
The week’s events in Ohio are not an accumulation of bad luck. They are a system operating at full capacity.
MOVEMENT 4: The Dialectical Confrontation – Pressure at the Fault Line
The ruling class in Ohio last week was not confused. It was precise.
Its calculations are worth stating plainly -- without caricature or moral judgment, as strategic rationality operating from specific interests. Eliminating the capital gains tax costs the state $650 million annually and delivers that sum to the investor class, which, as Columbus demonstrated, does exactly that with capital when left unobstructed: it buys houses and leaves them empty until they appreciate, then sells them, then reinvests.
This is not speculation. It is the recorded behavior, mapped by Jordan McLaughlin and documented by the Free Press, of firms operating in the Columbus market right now. The tax cut doesn’t change this behavior. It rewards it retrospectively, with public money that would otherwise have funded the transit system, the school district, and the fire department in the neighborhood where the empty houses sit.
The ruling class understands all this. But it doesn’t say it that way. It says: capital gains tax elimination frees investment for economic growth. The first formulation is the press release. The second formulation, which makes the first fully visible, is 7,000 houses, a portion of them dark, in a city with a housing shortage, in a week when a man backed by $42 million in billionaire PAC money announces the cut at the Chamber of Commerce and calls it liberation.
Consider what the same state, Ohio, last week, is actually building. Not transit. Not affordable housing. Not student debt relief. Not legal security for Haitian workers who have paid taxes in Lima for five years. It is building data center infrastructure with tax abatements while the power grid strains and the adjacent farmland is sold out from under the neighbors who signed NDAs they didn’t understand.
It is building a surveillance network that now encompasses the Bureau of Workers’ Compensation -- an agency whose name is a promise, but whose machinery has been turned around. The agency designed to compensate workers injured by capital is spending public dollars to track those workers’ movements, looking for evidence to deny the claim.
Read that sentence twice. The Bureau of Workers’ Compensation. The bureau that compensates workers. Is paying Flock Safety $24,000 a year to read the license plates of the people filing claims.
This is not an anomaly.
It is the week’s most exact image of what has happened to every institution that was built, over decades, in the name of protecting workers from capital. The protection remains as a name. The machinery has been reversed. HUD’s new 40-hour supportive services requirement for transitional housing funding is the same operation in a different register: you may have shelter, but you must perform participation in the labor market for 40 hours weekly to prove you deserve it -- addressed to people who are homeless precisely because the labor market has failed them, or because the housing market has priced them out, or because the medical system has destroyed them, or because the student loan system is garnishing their wages. The requirement is not designed to be met.
It is designed to be failed, so that the withdrawal of support can be claimed to be the recipient’s fault.
Against this, what is the working-class reality that last week assembles?
429,000 Ohioans in default on student loans. Ashley Dreahn, 40, a first-generation college student, living in an RV park, saving for surgery -- the money now going to a debt she was told in writing had been discharged. Jacson Joseph, a former schoolteacher, fired from his job not for cause but for the revocation of the legal status that was the condition of his employment -- fired by a company that is still operating, that needed him when it needed him, that let the state dispose of him when it no longer did.
Seventy-eight thousand bus riders in Cuyahoga County facing the elimination of 27 of 41 routes. Twelve thousand people in Cuyahoga County who accessed homeless services last year, returning at a 13% rate within six months, in a system being restructured to prioritize “workforce-focused programs” over permanent housing. And 2,840 acres of the only national forest in Ohio, one federal lease sale from fracking -- because the forest is, in the end, also a resource, and a resource can be priced.
The epexegesis runs through all of it. TPS -- Temporary Protected Status -- names a protection, then clarifies it: temporary. The temporary was not a warning to Jacson Joseph; it was a tool for capital. Workers are imported on a temporary basis, given a temporary status, build permanent lives inside it, and are then expelled on a permanent basis when the political calculus changes. The temporariness was never about the workers. It was about the option: the option to keep them or discard them, held by the state, on behalf of the class the state actually serves.
Workers have faced this before -- the same logic, operating through different instruments.
The company towns of the 1890s provided housing, then raised the rent, then called the Pinkertons. The New Deal built a welfare state. Then successive decades of austerity ratcheted it backward until what remains is the name. What is different now is the simultaneity and the visibility. Every track of the operation is running in the same week, in the same state, in plain sight.
The capital gains cut, the surveillance contract, the forest lease, the transit death spiral, the student garnishment, TPS revocation – they all appear in separate news feeds, tagged to separate beats, covered by separate reporters who do not read each other’s copy.
But they are not separate. They are the same class, operating through all the instruments available to it, simultaneously, against the same class that produces everything in Ohio and is being systematically dispossessed of the conditions of its own reproduction.
No earlier generation of workers had this picture in real time -- every instrument of the operation visible at once, documented in public records, mapped by activists and transit advocates and housing organizers who are already connecting what the news cycle keeps separate. The picture exists now.
The question that follows from it -- the question the evidence honestly assembled has always eventually forced -- is not whether this system can be reformed. It is what kind of power, organized at what scale, with what program, could actually stop it.
Ohio, last week, this and ever week, is where that question lives.
References
WSWS Articles
The mass surveillance infrastructure of Trump’s assault on immigrants and protesters — Kevin Reed, February 3, 2026
Trump revokes protected status for over half a million Haitian immigrants — Jacob Crosse, June 30, 2025
Trump’s campaign of political terror against immigrants in Springfield, Ohio — Eric London, September 16, 2024
Trump administration threatens to deport half million immigrant workers, who entered US legally — Jane Wise and Jerry White, April 17, 2025
The US tax bill: A massive handout to the financial elite — Andre Damon, November 18, 2017
Classical Texts
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) — on the systematic production of working-class immiseration as the outcome of capitalist accumulation, not policy failure
Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question (1872) — on the bourgeois “solution” to housing crisis as relocation of the condition rather than resolution of its cause
Ohio Independent Media Sources
Private equity is deliberately leaving single-family homes in Columbus unrented and empty — Columbus Free Press
Vivek Ramaswamy touts plan to quickly axe Ohio taxes on capital gains — Signal Cleveland
More Ohio agencies deploy Flock AI cameras, including workers comp and the fire marshal — Signal Akron
As defaults on student loans surge, millions are trying to get their lives back on track — Signal Ohio / Associated Press
In a small western Ohio city, Haitian residents prepare for an uncertain future — The Ohio Newsroom
Feds advance plan to open 2,800 acres of Ohio’s Wayne National Forest to fracking — Signal Ohio
How data centers could affect Northeast Ohio’s power grid, water use and air quality — Signal Ohio
RTA sales tax increase would lead to more service and boost ridership, transit chief argues — Signal Cleveland
Ohioans complain about soaring property taxes. But what happens if they’re cut or eliminated? — Ohio Newsroom / State News
What new HUD guidelines mean for Cuyahoga Homeless Services — Signal Cleveland / Cleveland Documenters