Largely as a consequence of longstanding Illinois policies authorizing and promoting union monopoly bargaining control over state and local government agencies, Chicago’s public finances are a disaster.
As a September 21 Wall Street Journal editorial noted, the Windy City “carries more than $35 billion in pension debt and a credit rating barely above junk status.”
This past summer, acting at the behest of government union bosses, Big Labor solons in the Illinois Legislature and Democrat Gov. J.B. Pritzker teamed up to throw gas on Chicago’s fiscal fire.
On August 1, ignoring a last-minute warning from Chicago Chief Financial Officer Jill Jaworski that this scheme would make the city’s police and fire pension funds “technically insolvent,” Mr. Pritzker signed into law H.B.3657, sponsored by a team of union-label state legislators.
As Austin Berg of the Chicago Policy Center has said, H.B.3657 is “one of the most irresponsible bills in Illinois history.”
Key provisions of this government union kingpin-backed money grab have added “$11 billion [in new liabilities] to the city’s police and fire pension systems,” which were already, stated Mr. Berg, “the worst-funded in the nation,” and with “no new revenue to pay for them.”
Less than three weeks after Mr. Pritzker’s gave H.B.3657 the green light, Bloomberg reported that Chicago had been forced to provide emergency funding to the city’s firefighter pension fund so it would not have to sell off assets to cover retirement checks.
“This is what insolvency looks like,” observed Mr. Berg.
Even H.B.3657 architects such as state Sen. Robert Martwick (D-Chicago) admit this reckless measure piles additional billions of dollars in spending obligations on a city whose taxpayers are already grossly overburdened.
But they insist state policy makers had no choice but to pass it anyway in order to comply with the IRS’s so-called “Safe Harbor” rule, which requires, to quote Mr. Martwick, that all public employees “receive benefits equal to or greater than Social Security . . . .”
However, neither Mr. Martwick nor any other H.B.3657 supporter ever produced any evidence that Chicago’s police and fire pension funds were in violation of Safe Harbor with regard to any group of retirees.
And in her memo urging that Mr. Pritzker veto the legislation, Ms. Jaworski flatly concluded it “does not represent a structural fix to . . . Safe Harbor compliance.”
National Right to Work Committee Vice President John Kalb commented:
“Gov. Pritzker and the equally proforced unionism Democrat mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, are now castigating one another for failing to stop what they both tacitly admit is a terrible piece of legislation.
“The fact is, the governor and the mayor are both to blame. The governor could have vetoed H.B.3657, but he didn’t, and the mayor could have personally and publicly called upon the governor to veto it, but he didn’t.
“Of course, Illinois and Chicago were both on downhill trajectories for years and years before their current chief executives came along.
“Real reversals in these trajectories cannot, in all likelihood, be achieved unless the monopoly-bargaining privileges of Illinois’ government union bosses, which have been statutorily enshrined since 1983, are revoked.
“Unfortunately, this is a virtual impossibility in Illinois.
“In 2022, a well-heeled propaganda campaign in Illinois succeeded in locking in Amendment One, a constitutional provision that makes it extraordinarily difficult for Illinoisans to roll back, much less eliminate, government union kingpins’ ‘exclusive representation’ power over public employees and beleaguered taxpayers.
“Consequently, even as the fiscal lots of Chicago and Illinois as a whole almost inevitably get worse and worse over the years and decades to come, concerned citizens will face a steeply uphill battle in trying to set things right.
“As one commentator noted a couple of years ago, Illinois’ outrageous labor law stacks the deck in Organized Labor bosses’ favor so thoroughly that, even ‘if Abraham Lincoln came back from the dead and became mayor,’ he couldn’t fix Chicago!”
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