The city of Chicago may need to rehire the workers it fired for refusing to receive a Covid vaccine, because the city violated state labor laws by denying unions the chance to negotiate over the consequences vaccine-objecting workers could face under the mandate, an administrative law judge for the ILRB has ruled
Illinois public worker unions get to keep unconstitutional fees, because they collected the fees in “good faith,” relying on “good luck” in having state law and a later-overturned Supreme Court decision on their side for 40 years.
An Illinois state employee who physically assaulted her supervisor, but was protected by her union and allowed to keep her job, has been awarded $360,000 in back pay as part of Illinois’ new state budget.
A group of non-union Illinois state employees say their union illegally forced them to continue paying fees to the union, even when the union knew the fees were likely to be declared unconstitutional. Now, those workers have asked a federal judge to order the union to refund the money.
In the wake of the U.S Supreme Court’s landmark decision to declare unconstitutional forced union fees, the legal and political landscape will undoubtedly change. But precisely what will change, and how and when those changes will roll out, remains anybody’s guess.
Even as he seeks to dismiss a similar case in Chicago's federal court, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart is also aiming to pop a lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court in which seven sheriff's officers have asked for their disciplinary cases to be tossed because the sheriff's disciplinary board was improperly seated. The sheriff contends the board is now properly constituted and at any rate, the previously improper panel never disciplined the officers, much less even heard the officer's cases, he has asserted.
Illinois' powerful public school lobbying groups mobilized to beat back a measure that would have reined in massive school district borrowing, often concealed from taxpayers.
A group of nine Republicans currently serving in the Illinois General Assembly, including two rookie state lawmakers, have signed their names to a brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the court to uphold the state’s ability to allow unions to extract fees from government employees who don’t wish to join a union, arguing the country’s founding federalist principles should allow the 50 states to decide such policy questions for themselves.
A former Cook County Sheriff's Office sergeant, fired for alleged off-duty incidents involving alcohol, is suing Sheriff Tom Dart, claiming the sheriff's Merit Board had no authority to sack her, because board members were serving interim, rather than six-year terms as required by law, making the board a “sham.”
A powerful public workers’ labor union has sued the Cook County Sheriff, saying members of the Cook County Sheriff’s Merit Board – whom the sheriff essentially appoints - aren’t spending enough time in office, potentially undermining all disciplinary cases the board has handled against deputies and correctional officers represented by the union since 2005.
The U.S. Supreme Court has denied a group of Illinois child care providers and in-home care assistants for those with disabilities the chance to argue their constitutional rights were violated by an Illinois state law forcing the care providers to accept the Service Employees International Union as their bargaining representative.
For the second time in three days, a state appeals court in Southern Illinois has handed a win to a labor union representing state workers in disputes with a state agency that answers to Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, this time finding a state labor board must hold hearings on whether the state improperly threatened to make striking workers pay the full cost of their health insurance.
A state appeals court dealt Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner a setback Nov. 6 by ruling in favor of union employees on the question of stepped salary increases, saying whether or not there is a collective bargaining agreement in place, the union workers are owed the regular pay raises, which the state hasn't paid since a contract expired in 2015.
The U.S. Supreme Court will again wade into the question of whether public sector worker unions can force government employees who don’t wish to join their union to still pay fees, ostensibly for collective bargaining representation, after the court on Sept. 28 agreed to hear arguments in the case of Janus v AFSCME.
A group of Illinois child care providers and in-home care providers for those with disabilities have asked the nation’s highest court to step in to their dispute with a prominent labor union, arguing the state’s decision to force the care providers to allow the Service Employees International Union to serve as their bargaining representative as a condition of accepting payment through state assistance programs violates their constitutional rights.
A state appellate court has vacated an Illinois labor board's decision to dismiss a petition by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) to represent several workers in the Cook County Sheriff's electronic monitoring unit, saying the labor board erred in allowing its executive director to yank certification without due process.
The U.S. Supreme Court will get the chance to decide just how much public worker unions in Illinois and elsewhere can exact from non-union workers, after a federal appeals court in Chicago upheld a lower court’s dismissal of a lawsuit intended to challenge a longstanding legal precedent used by unions to justify the forcible collection of so-called “fair share” fees.
In the latest move in the ongoing battle between Illinois state union workers and Gov. Bruce Rauner, a state appeals court has refused the governor’s request to lift a court-ordered stay on the Illinois Labor Relations Board’s finding that the state and its largest union are at an impasse, a move that will impact the ability of Rauner to impose contract terms and of the union to strike.
A challenge to the power of state worker labor unions to extract so-called “fair share” fees from non-union workers could be ticketed for the U.S. Supreme Court, where opponents of the fees hope a conservative-majority court could overturn a longstanding legal precedent used by unions to justify their forcible collection of fees from public employees who refuse to pay formal union dues.
