(The Center Square) – A lawsuit aimed at challenging the recently enacted workers’ rights amendment to the Illinois Constitution could be coming soon.
The amendment, certified in December, puts into the state Constitution prohibitions on regulating collective bargaining rights for wages, work conditions and other issues.
Attorney Philip K. Howard recently released the book “Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions.” In an interview on WMAY, he said he plans to take the amendment to court to argue its constitutionality.
“I am talking to lawyers in Illinois, and I will be flying out in a week or so to begin planning such a lawsuit,” Howard said.
Howard says this is an issue that can only be solved with the help of the court system.
“You can’t fix it politically, so there needs to be a lawsuit brought in federal court arguing that these controls in Illinois are unconstitutional,” Howard said.
The measure prohibits future laws from regulating collective bargaining in Illinois, which Howard said sets up a partnership between the public unions and the government that is unfair to taxpayers and voters.
“The government is over a barrel here, and even worse, the negotiating is collusive,” Howard said. “The unions helped J.B. Pritzker get elected, and then they come in and sit on his side of the bargaining table.”
Howard said the state could have financial problems due to removing specific powers from public department heads.
“The people running these departments don’t have the authority to manage it. Think about how much waste there is,” Howard said. “Are they wasting half the money, two-thirds of the money? You just simply can not get anything done without having a hub on the wheel that’s deciding how to best deploy the resources.”
The Illinois Policy Institute and the Liberty Justice Center teamed up in the spring of 2022 and filed a lawsuit that sought to remove the amendment from the November ballot. The lawsuit was originally shut down by a Sangamon County judge; later, that decision was reaffirmed by the state’s 4th District appellate court.
Labor unions have supported the amendment through the election process. The AFL-CIO, a group representing union workers from all over the state, released a statement after the measure was passed.
“History was made with the passage of the Workers’ Rights Amendment,” said AFL-CIO President Tim Drea. “This would not have been possible without the strong solidarity of a statewide labor movement that came together in unison to protect the rights of our hardworking families.”
