Pritzker risks bankrupting Illinois to curry favor with Big Labor

Having watched Big Labor buy the White House for Joe Biden in 2020, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker has taken a page out of the same playbook. Last month, the governor, who reportedly has designs on the Oval Office himself one day, handed a taxpayer-funded sweetheart deal to one of his state’s largest public employee unions.

The state’s new collective bargaining agreement with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 31 gifts its 35,000 state employee members a nearly 20 percent pay raise over four years, including a 4 percent raise this year. That adds up to a 61 percent better deal than they got during their last round of negotiations.

But that’s just the beginning. The agreement also throws in an extension of parental leave to 12 weeks and stipulates that workers will have zero increases in their health insurance premiums during the first year, a $10 a month increase in the second year and $8 a month in the third and fourth years.

In addition to sticking taxpayers with the bill for higher salaries, the contract will require private-sector employees — whose own healthcare costs will certainly increase by far more than $26 over the next three years — to pick up the tab for Pritzker’s idea of what medical coverage should look like.

Meanwhile, the state’s pension system, already underfunded by $140 billion, will sink further underwater as state employees retire in ever-higher income brackets.

All told, the contract is projected to cost an additional $204 million in the first year and an additional $625 million over four years.

Members of AFSCME Council 31 eagerly voted in local union meetings over the past two weeks to ratify the contract, which negotiators had tentatively agreed to on July 1. And who could blame them? The contract also includes a $1,200 “stipend” paid to every worker merely for ratifying the contract.

Pritzker, a Democrat, included these bonuses in his last contract negotiation in 2019, ostensibly to compensate workers for the financial “hardship” of being state employees under his Republican predecessor, Bruce Rauner. Predictably, such payoffs have now become standard operating procedure.

The governor celebrated his and AFSCME’s windfall by tweeting out, “Illinois is a pro-worker state through and through.” The pronouncement was eerily reminiscent of Biden’s one-time campaign promise to become the “most pro-union president you ever saw.”

Of course, it is the taxpayers who will be forced to make good on these smug promises.

Not long ago, candidates at least paid lip service to putting constituents first, promising to be responsible stewards of the public treasury. Nowadays, they cannot even be bothered to conceal their true loyalties to the special interests that write the biggest checks.

Again, for public-employee unions like AFSCME, politicians like Pritzker represent the perfect investment opportunity. In return for a few million dollars’ worth of modest campaign contributions snatched from the pockets of members, who assume their dues are being used to secure better pay and working conditions, the titans of Big Labor guarantee themselves a return worth billions.

Even better, the now-compromised politician can forever be counted on to support legislation that increases the size and scope of the government, requiring the hiring of even more union-affiliated, dues-paying public employees.

This cycle will never be broken — and Big Labor will continue to function as this country’s unelected shadow government — as long as unions can confiscate dues dollars in sufficient amounts to tempt opportunists like the Bidens, Pritzkers, Gavin Newsoms, Gretchen Whitmers, Josh Shapiros and Kathy Hochuls of the world.

Aaron Withe is the CEO of the Freedom Foundation and author of Freedom is the Foundation: How We Are Defeating Progressive Tyranny by Taking on the Government Unions.