Politically Extreme Government Unions Make Desperate Last Stand in Illinois
As Illinois employees flee public-sector unions, activists are trying to stop the bleeding — using a dangerous proposal that could be coming to a state near you.
As Illinois employees flee public-sector unions, activists are trying to stop the bleeding — using a dangerous proposal that could be coming to a state near you.
T he Chicago Teachers Union is the largest teachers’ union in Illinois, and it is best known for spearheading the progressive labor movement nationally.
Take, for example, the fact that CTU leadership had never endorsed a candidate for state’s attorney in its over 80-year history, until 2016, when it formally endorsed Kim Foxx in the Democratic primary. In 2020, it endorsed her reelection bid, though her tenure has seen a surge in crime so terrible that this May a 16-year-old was shot and killed while hanging out during the day at Millennium Park, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the city.
CTU tweeted its support of a staged guillotine placed outside the home of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos when news broke that he had become the first person ever to be worth $200 billion.
In 2019, the CTU sparked outcry from union members when a delegation went to Venezuela, despite United Nations reports of grave human-rights violations, including the government’s use of “death squads” to kill more than 6,850 people during an 18-month span in 2018–19.
“We didn’t see a single homeless person,” one member of the delegation memorably tweeted. Considering they were visiting a country with a poverty rate exceeding 90 percent, you wonder if they ever left the airport hotel.
How’s that political extremism affecting teachers’ unions? Union members are rushing for the exit.
CTU’s parent union, the Illinois Federation of Teachers, has lost over 11,000 members since 2018, the year the Supreme Court ruled in Janus v. AFSCME that workers do not need to pay dues to a union as a condition of employment.
In Illinois, where plaintiff Mark Janus worked as a state employee, government unions have seen a 9 percent drop in membership — more than 38,000 workers — between 2021 and 2017, the last full year of data before Janus. To put it in perspective, that is equivalent to a sold-out baseball game at Chicago’s Wrigley Field.
Though union membership is shrinking, the voices behind the megaphone keep getting louder. Those voices are also more detached from what workers want.
The National Education Association, which recently met in Chicago, is advocating universal vaccine and masking requirements in schools. It is taking aim at Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Bill and taking a stand against “environmental racism.”
Meanwhile, kids in disadvantaged parts of the city were locked out of the classroom for a year. Joe Ocol, a teacher in the Chicago Public Schools, crossed the picket lines multiple times and continues to make extra efforts to ensure that his students aren’t left behind, including coaching them to national chess titles. Ocol left the Chicago Teachers Union after the union went on strike in 2016.
“It is my duty to be with my kids,” Ocol said. “I joined CPS as a teacher, not as a union member. So my role first and foremost is to be a teacher, to be with my students inside my classroom. My loyalty to the union ends where my commitment to the students begins.”
When it comes to the most powerful government unions in the country, gone is a strong focus on pay and benefits. It has been replaced by political advocacy. As their membership numbers dwindle, government union bosses are attempting to make one last desperate power grab.
An innocuous-sounding referendum on Illinois’s November ballot, Amendment 1, would place four labor provisions into the Illinois constitution: a “fundamental right” to organize and bargain; the right to bargain over wages, hours, working conditions, economic welfare, and safety at work; a prohibition against lawmakers ever interfering with, negating, or diminishing those rights; and a prohibition of right-to-work laws.
Under Amendment 1, lawmakers would not be able to restrict what unions can negotiate or limit when they can go on strike. They would be unable to repeal a little-known Illinois provision that allows many union contracts to override conflicting state and local laws and regulations. Unions would be able to rewrite law through their contracts, leaving residents with no recourse and no way to hold anyone accountable.
A similar amendment was attempted by unions in Michigan in 2012. At that time, then–Michigan attorney general Bill Schuette penned a memorandum explaining that the amendment would overrule more than 170 existing Michigan laws. A review of Illinois’s state statutes shows the amendment would allow government unions to override more than 350 provisions, including hot-button topics such as protecting schoolchildren, the regulation of immunizations outlined in the Illinois School Code, and the setting of school curriculum.
Even those 350-plus provisions could be just a fraction, because the language of Amendment 1 doesn’t just guarantee a right to bargain over typical labor issues such as wages and benefits. It also adds the generic terms “safety at work” and “economic welfare” to the mix of negotiable subjects — making the issues that can be negotiated virtually unlimited.
The passage of Amendment 1 would guarantee higher taxes and state debt in Illinois. That’s because under Amendment 1 there is no limit to what government unions could demand. Every major government union in the state has thrown its support behind Amendment 1 because they understand the power it would bring union bosses.
We’ve already seen a preview of how this could play out across the state, through regular and disruptive strikes by the Chicago Teachers Union.
CTU has gone on strike 14 times since 1969, including three times in three school years — illegal work stoppages leaving 330,000 students and their parents helpless and at their mercy. In 2019, 2021, and 2022, parents were given just hours to develop backup plans when the union decided to shut down schools.
What if your local school went on strike every single year? If Amendment 1 passes in Illinois, you can bet government union bosses across the country will be pushing it in a state near you.
The future of government unionization is extreme and dangerous, and we need to stop it in Illinois and the rest of the country — before it’s too late.