Kane Democrats, unions rally against Rauner's turnaround agenda

Less than 24 hours after Gov. Bruce Rauner won the largest battle in his turnaround agenda, Kane County Democrats and Aurora unions attempted to rally their troops for a renewed fight against what they deemed a pending middle-class massacre.

Illinois House Democrats fell three votes shy of overriding Rauner's veto of a union-supported bill that would have sent stalled negotiations with American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, one of the state's largest employee unions, to binding arbitration. Instead, Rauner's office will retain the ability to resist any and all union contract requests. That leaves union strikes as the last resort for organized labor.

State Sen. Linda Holmes told an audience of Aurora-area union members that's exactly what Rauner wants.

"He wants to force things into an impasse, force a strike, so he can fire everybody," Holmes said. "Then he'll shut it all down so he can start it over his way. We had better be the line of defense that stops that from happening."

Holmes said that line of defense starts with the next election. None of the Republicans in the Illinois House supported the veto override Wednesday. One Democrat voted present. One voted "no." And one was absent from the vote.

"If we would have had one more Democrat who gave a damn about the people of this state in Springfield yesterday, (the AFSCME bill) would have passed," Holmes said. "That's a lesson to all of us that we had better be watching out."

Holmes and Dick Manley, an Illinois Federation of Teachers vice president, called on Democrats and union members to put aside infighting and single-issue votes in favor of the big picture and "bread-and-butter issues."

"Rauner has indicated that he has studied under (Wisconsin Gov.) Scott Walker, which is a villain of the first class," Manley said. "The fear that we have is that if Rauner gets even a little bit of the nose of the camel in the tent, then the whole camel is going to be in the tent. We had some of our members vote for this guy. We can only hope that they see the errors of their ways now. Forget gun control. Forget abortion. You may have strong feelings about them, but they are certainly secondary to bread-and-butter issues."

After hearing from local church representatives that their resources to help the needy are nearly depleted as state funding for social services awaits passage of a full state budget, State Rep. Linda Chapa LaVia said that's another scenario she expects Rauner to seize upon. She believes Rauner wants churches and charities to assume all the social services costs.

"Because then he's going to say, 'See, you didn't need that money in the first place,'" LaVia said.

All participants at the rally, which occurred at the Painters District Council 30 headquarters, said the fight for the continued existence of unions in Illinois isn't about the unions themselves, but their middle-class membership and families.

State lawmakers will be off for several weeks before returning to Springfield for a new session.