This November, Tennesseans will vote on whether to continue taming public-sector unions, while Illinois citizens vote on doubling down.
This November, Tennesseans will vote on whether to continue taming public-sector unions, while Illinois citizens vote on doubling down.
L ook at a map and you’ll find that the capitals of Illinois and Tennessee are about 400 miles apart. Both states are at crossroads that could push them closer together or farther apart, depending on how their voters react to proposed constitutional changes about union power.
On November 8, Tennessee voters will face Amendment 1, a constitutional amendment that would permanently outlaw mandatory union membership — that is, the requirement that workers join a union and pay union dues if they’re to keep their jobs. The message: The fast-growing state is codifying a business-friendly climate that gives employees flexibility in the workplace.
On that same day, Illinois voters will weigh a ballot question, also called Amendment 1, that would grant public-sector unions unprecedented powers and lock those powers into the state constitution. The move would cement Illinois’s status as an anti-business state, guaranteeing rising government costs and tax hikes in perpetuity.
Big labor is playing down the Illinois amendment as a “workers’-rights amendment,” but that is disingenuous. No Illinois worker would lose rights or their job if it doesn’t pass. Instead, the proposal would give public-sector unions a “fundamental right” to collectively bargain on issues even beyond wages and benefits, such as affordable housing and restorative justice. The more issues for unions to bargain over and the longer negotiations take, the greater the cost to taxpayers — and the higher their property-tax bills.
If voters were to approve the respective amendments to the state constitutions, Illinois and Tennessee would head in very different directions. Tennessee would promote a future in which all workers have choices and are free to prosper. Illinois would give public-sector-union bosses more power and influence so they can prosper at the expense of all other workers.
These ballot questions affect real people, because labor policy affects the economy — especially job prospects, which have a significant impact on people’s decisions about where they make their homes. Employment in Tennessee is up 24.8 percent since the beginning of 2010, while employment in Illinois has grown at barely one-third of that rate — 8.6 percent — over the same period. In general, Tennessee’s economy has grown more than 56 percent faster than Illinois’s during that time.
Tabitha Hardin, a former resident of suburban Chicago, felt forced to move to Tennessee. When the economy shut down in 2020, her husband lost his job and her full-time hours dried up. The family’s income dropped from $90,000 to $14,000.
So Hardin took her last $100 and the family car south to Murfreesboro, Tenn., where the economy wasn’t shut down. Within a week she found a job, and her husband quickly did, too. A short time later, the family could afford a second car and their kids were back in school full-time. “We loved Illinois, but we’ve never bounced back so quickly,” Hardin said.
In recent years, powerful public-sector-union lobbyists have killed bipartisan bills in the Illinois General Assembly that would have provided more money to classrooms through school-district consolidation and allowed nurses from other states to more easily work in Illinois and fight pandemics. By comparison, Tennessee lawmakers have passed a series of practical measures, including replacing teachers’ ability to strike during negotiations with a collaborative-conferencing model — where both sides come to the table to negotiate in an open and friendly environment — and making it easier to fire underperforming state employees. Most significantly, they’ve also tackled pension reform, freeing government to spend money on services that support struggling families and attract new residents.
In Amendment 1 as well as in various policies, Tennessee lawmakers have made successful choices to encourage growth and open opportunities to workers such as Hardin. Time and again, Illinois legislators have chosen the opposite and enacted policies that favored a handful of workers at the expense of many.
As leaders of organizations that promote freer and more-competitive markets in our respective states, we have the unique experience of watching and living out a real-time “what could happen” if we walked a proverbial mile in each other’s shoes. So much of life comes down to choices. Tennessee lawmakers have made many of the right choices on economic policy, and now voters have a chance to solidify those gains with its Amendment 1 on the right to work.
The other Amendment 1 is a chance for Illinois to dig itself deeper into a hole. Or it’s a chance to damage the unholy alliance through which state lawmakers give unaffordable benefits to the public-sector unions that fund their campaigns.
Blues or country. Chicago dogs or fried pickles. Those should be the reasons to pick one state over the other — not because state lawmakers hand you hard choices about jobs and taxes.
— Matt Paprocki is the president of the Illinois Policy Institute. Justin Owen is the president and CEO of the Beacon Center of Tennessee.