Illinois governor's links to union questioned

[December 16, 2008]  CHICAGO (AP) -- Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was preparing an executive order that would have allowed a group of home health care workers to unionize even as a criminal complaint says the governor was exploring options to get a job with a powerful union.

The order would have let 1,200 people who work with the developmentally disabled in their homes in Illinois decide whether "they want a union or not, and if they do, which union," said Michelle A. Ringuette, a spokeswoman for Service Employees International Union.

Blagojevich and his chief of staff, John Harris, were arrested Dec. 9 on bribery and fraud charges, raising questions about the timing of the executive order. Ringuette said the governor might have intended to sign the bill last week -- but she was not certain.

Blagojevich spokesman Lucio Guerrero said Monday that there was talk of drafting an executive order but that he isn't sure how far it got. He said nothing had been signed.

On wiretaps referenced in the criminal complaint, Blagojevich discusses selling off President-elect Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat in exchange for a high-paying union position. Obama has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

An internal union e-mail obtained by The Associated Press identified the official in the complaint as Local 1 President Tom Balanoff, a longtime Obama supporter who spoke at the Democratic National Convention.

The union has said Balanoff is cooperating with federal investigators and doesn't believe any of its officials were involved in wrongdoing. Messages left with Balanoff have not been returned.

Asked Monday on National Public Radio to confirm whether Balanoff was the official named in the complaint, union President Andy Stern said: "I don't have any independent information on that."

Stern also wouldn't say whether he had spoken with Blagojevich since the election. "I think I am going to leave it right there," Stern said.

Stern also said he didn't know anything about the schemes laid out in the complaint.

"When I heard the charges I was rather shocked," Stern said. "It was rather surprising."

The union has given more than $1.8 million to Blagojevich's gubernatorial campaigns, making it the governor's biggest single contributor, according to the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform.

Blagojevich has used his executive authority to benefit the union in the past.

Shortly after he took office in 2003, he signed an executive order making it easier for health care workers who help physically disabled clients in their homes to unionize. In 2005, another executive order did the same thing for home-based child care workers.

The union organized tens of thousands of workers in those two cases.

Don Moss, a Springfield lobbyist, represents private agencies that oversee workers who would have been affected by the latest executive order. He said he started receiving complaints from agencies that union representatives were contacting workers at their homes. Moss said the workers complained that union representatives were using heavy-handed tactics to try to get them to join the union.

The worker program involves 3,900 independent contractors hired by families to care for developmentally disabled family members in their homes, Moss said. Not all of the contractors would be eligible for the union because they don't work the required number of hours per week.

Moss said the field is growing because it lets people stay in their homes, instead of being relegated to institutions, and saves the state money.

Robert Bruno, associate professor of labor and industrial relations at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the pattern of executive orders is not unusual. Bruno said that the union was probably talking with those workers for more than a year and that the timing could have been a coincidence.

"If the governor is not involved in his otherwise atrocious attempts to sell the Senate seat, this effort to push for an executive order would be understood in the framework of creative, successful union organizing," Bruno said.

[Associated Press; By ADAM GOLDMAN and JOHN O'CONNOR]

John O'Connor reported from Springfield.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.