The city of Chicago may need to rehire, with back pay, all of the workers it fired for refusing to receive the Covid vaccine last year, if the state’s labor board signs off on the recommendation of an administrative law judge who ruled the city trampled the rights of its union workers when it refused to bargain over the consequences of objecting to the city’s Covid vaccine mandate.
On April 19, Administrative Law Judge Anna Hamburg-Gal, of the Illinois Labor Relations Board, ruled City Hall, under Mayor Lori Lightfoot, violated Illinois labor law when it began to fire city workers in 2022 who had refused to receive a Covid vaccine under the mandate imposed a year earlier, after nearly 10 months of shifting those workers to “no-pay” status.
“… From December 31, 2021 to August 2022, the sole penalty imposed by the Respondent (city of Chicago) for an employee’s failure to vaccinate was placement of the employee on non-disciplinary no-pay status,” ALJ Hamburg-Gal wrote. “Yet, after approximately 8 to 10 months of this approach, the (city) changed its treatment of those same employees by terminating their employment.
“The (city) thereby elected to pursue a far harsher approach than it had taken before against violators of its vaccination policy,” illegally giving their unions no opportunity to negotiate before terminating their employment, the ALJ said.
The decision comes as the latest step in a long simmering battle between the Lightfoot administration and a group of labor unions representing thousands of city employees, who assert the city violated their contract and the law by imposing its vaccine mandate in 2021.
Under that mandate, Lightfoot demanded every city worker receive full doses of an approved vaccine against Covid-19 by October 2021, or secure a religious or medical exemption. Those who did not do so by the deadline faced discipline, up to and including termination, the city said.
Workers from across the city workforce, individually and through their unions, sued, claiming the city’s heavy-handed actions violated their constitutional rights and their collective bargaining rights, as well as the terms of their existing contracts.
Those lawsuits failed in court, as judges repeatedly declared the city had the authority to require the vaccines, as a means of enforcing workplace safety rules and in the name of protecting public health.
After a Cook County judge declared the city needed to at least take the mandate demands to arbitration, to address union grievances, an arbitrator also sided with the city.
About eight months later, the city acted on those threats, terminating a host of employees in a show of force, over the objections of the workers’ unions.
The unions took the matter to the Illinois Labor Relations Board, arguing the city violated state law, running over the union workers’ rights to negotiate the terms of the mandate.
In the ruling, the ALJ made clear she believes the city had the authority to impose a vaccine mandate.
However, she said, nearly everything the city did after that likely violated state labor law and the city workers’ rights.
While the city had the authority to impose the mandate in the name of protecting the safety of its workers and the public without negotiating with labor unions, the mayor did not have the unfettered authority to dictate to the unions how and when they must comply, and what consequences workers could face for failing to comply.
State labor law requires the city to negotiate those consequences with unions, the ALJ said.
Further, she said, the city broke state labor law in 2022 when it abruptly refused any longer to allow workers to continue avoiding receiving the Covid shot by testing twice weekly for infection, and instead moving quickly to fire workers who had not provided proof of vaccination.
These changes amounted to a unilateral move by the city to upset a status quo that had been in place for months, the ALJ said.
Pointing to such illegal unilateral moves, the ALJ recommended the ILRB overturn the city’s Covid vaccine mandate and order the city to rehire and “make whole” with back pay and unpaid benefits to every worker who lost their jobs as a result of the mandate.
The ALJ said the city could still negotiate with the unions to create a modified vaccine mandate, with terms acceptable to both sides.
The order applies to Chicago city workers and former workers who are members of about two dozen labor unions, collectively known as the Coalition of Unionized Public Employees. The COUPE group includes the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees Council 31; Service Employees International Union Local 1 and SEIU Local 73; Teamsters Local 700; Operating Engineers Locals 150 and 399; Laborers International Union Locals 1001 and 1092; IBEW Locals 9 and 134; among others.
The city could yet appeal the ruling.