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 Illinois still has a lot of work to do to clean up its culture
of corruption, but that work would become more difficult if voters a year from
now pass an amendment to make unions the only special interest protected by the
Illinois Constitution.
Illinois is ranked the second-most corrupt state in the country, costing
taxpayers $556 million a year. The recent ethics omnibus bill passed into law
took a first step toward fixing the corrupt culture, but many advocacy groups
criticized the reforms for not going far enough.
The new law failed to empower the Legislative Inspector General to issue
subpoenas and publish summary reports of wrongdoing. It actually further
restricted the powers of the office, limiting the office’s jurisdiction to
matters arising from government service or employment, even while granting the
power to initiate investigations without approval from the Legislative Ethics
Commission. It was the passage of this bill that led Inspector General Carol
Pope to resign, calling the office a “paper tiger.”
Then lawmakers put a proposed constitutional amendment on the Nov. 8, 2022,
ballot that would enshrine a fundamental right to collectively bargain for all
employees within the state. While advertised as a prohibition on right to work
in Illinois, Amendment 1 does much more.
 Amendment 1 would elevate government union collective bargaining agreements
above Illinois state law. This means any state law that involves employees,
whether those laws establish protocols for investigating police misconduct or
determine qualifications for teachers, could be voided if it runs counter to
union contracts.
More than that, the amendment does not define what constitutes an employee.
Depending on how courts interpret the amendment, even managerial employees and
public administrators could be considered employees with a fundamental right to
collectively bargain. Any collective bargaining agreements could overrule
current and future state ethics laws, even related to public officials.
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For example, a law that enhanced the Executive
Inspector General’s or Legislative Inspector General’s or other
government watchdog’s ability to investigate could be voided by the
terms of a collective bargaining agreement negotiated by government
unions.
And even if public officials or managerial
employees are not covered by the amendment, there are other public
employees that could be, and will have newly acquired fundamental
rights to organize. There is a list of employees currently exempted
from the definition of public employee that would have an argument
that their exclusion from the right to bargain is a violation of the
constitution. That list includes elected officials, executive heads
of a department, members of boards or commissions, employees of
various inspectors general, commissioners and employees of the
Legislative Ethics Commission as well as employees of any agency,
board or commission created by the Illinois Public Labor Relations
Act.
If those employees organized under the amendment, their collective
bargaining agreements could trump any rules governing discipline and
investigation into allegations of misconduct by those employees,
effectively short-circuiting any efforts to heighten oversight of
those offices.
Even if the General Assembly passed the most robust ethics reform
that advocates asked for, and even if the Legislative Inspector
General were given the authority to be truly effective, those
reforms could be negotiated away or rendered null in the face of a
union collective bargaining agreement. The state constitution would
make ethics laws in Illinois readily avoidable by employees with
union representation, and the work reformers have put into restoring
the state’s image would be diminished.
Earlier this year, the General Assembly took a first step toward
addressing corruption in Illinois through ethics reforms. If
Amendment 1 passes, it could mean two steps back in the fight
against Illinois corruption.
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