Illinois Governor Quinn Continues His War on Public Service Workers
by Clyde Weiss and Anders Lindall | January 11, 2013
The rights of public service workers seem to be of no consequence to Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn. He’s prepared to sign a bill that allows him to deny collective bargaining rights to 3,580 state employees of his choosing, including up to 1,900 who currently are represented by AFSCME and other unions. The legislation also allows the state’s other constitutional officers broad latitude to take away bargaining rights from their employees.
A “quiet war on the collective bargaining rights of public employees” is how The State Journal-Register, the capitol city’s paper of record, described the governor’s campaign against the state’s employees. But Quinn’s war resembles a scorched-earth battle. In 2011 he canceled pay raises for 30,000 public employees. Then in November, Quinn terminated AFSCME’s collective bargaining agreement with the state, leaving some 35,000 employees without the protection of a union contract.
Quinn also tried to get the Legislature to pass a pension proposal to change the way the annual cost-of-living adjustment is calculated, drastically reducing pension values over time. Following strong grassroots pressure from workers and retirees coordinated by labor’s We Are One Illinois coalition, the Legislature adjourned Tuesday without acting on the proposal because it lacked the necessary votes.
Taking away collective bargaining rights from public service workers is right out of the playbook of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who stripped more than 200,000 public service workers of their union rights in March 2011, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, whose failed effort in 2011 to strip the collective bargaining rights of 350,000 public service workers in that state demonstrates widespread public opposition to such efforts.
In Illinois, however, voters were not given an opportunity to express their views on Governor Quinn’s anti-worker campaign. He used the opportunity of a lame-duck session of the Legislature to squeeze through a corporate-driven agenda to undermine workers’ rights, including collective bargaining.
Taking such rights away from thousands of employees now covered by the state’s collective bargaining law will set a dangerous precedent that could imperil collective bargaining rights throughout the public sector.
This is not about saving the state money. We fear he has a more sinister goal in mind: He wants to strip workers of the protections of their union contract in an attempt to intimidate them, and ultimately to replace them with political patronage workers.
AFSCME will continue fighting for workers’ rights, and push for a repeal of this law. The voters will certainly have something to say about this as well.
