Enacted with the
encouragement of Governor Rauner, the village of Lincolnshire’s December 2015 anti-union
“Guarantee of Employee Rights” ordinance came to an abrupt end with the filing
January 7, 2017 of U. S. District Judge Matthew F. Kennelly’s order
invalidating the ordinance as preempted by the National Labor Relations Act. The
Lincolnshire ordinance, passed under that village’s home rule powers, purported
to make unenforceable labor union contract provisions requiring workers not
belonging to a union to pay union dues and be hired through union halls.
In a federal lawsuit
filed against the village by the Carpenters union, Laborers union, and two
Operating Engineers locals, Judge Kennelly held that the U. S. Constitution’s
supremacy clause prohibited local governments from overriding provisions of the
National Labor Relations Act. While the Act permits state legislatures to enact
statewide laws eliminating the Act’s grant to unions of the right to
contractually require employers to deduct dues equivalents from non-union
employees’ wages, allowing local units of government to do so on a piecemeal
basis would create an unmanageable patchwork of labor laws across the nation,
and effectively negate the collective bargaining rights granted to labor unions
by the NLRA.
