Change at the Lake County Health Department
On June 3, 2025, the employees of the Lake County Health Department filed their union authorization cards with the Illinois Labor Relations Board. These cards, gathered by dozens of employee activists over the course of 11 months, conclusively showed that a strong majority of the 600 Health Department employees wanted to join the AFSCME (American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees) family and stand united to improve the material conditions of the employees as well as the broader community that they serve.
Everyone had their own reasons for signing a card to join our union. For some people, ongoing issues have stretched back years if not decades. For others, more immediate issues stemming from political uncertainty pushed them to sign. But no matter the reason for signing a card, everyone recognized that the way to solve our collective issues is to come together under one banner and to demand change. As this new union begins to take its first steps, it has an opportunity to set an example for the rest of the public sector and organized labor more broadly. If we want to see the wages and working conditions that we truly deserve manifest, producing better outcomes and services for the people in our community, we need to form a strong union, one that recognizes our collective power and one that isn’t afraid to dive headfirst into the world of politics to get what we deserve.
DISCONTENT AMONG THE RANKS
There have been at least four previous attempts to unionize the health department, either in whole or in part, two of those attempts were successful with Animal Care and Control unionizing with the Illinois Council of Police and the Maintenance department unionizing with the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150. The two previous attempts to unionize the entirety of the health department narrowly failed to reach their 50%+1 thresholds but showed that there has been discontent in the ranks for years, discontent that was never addressed and which finally led to our successful union drive.
One of the most common complaints that we heard when talking to coworkers was that wages were far too low. This is a common refrain among workers in the US today, but it is not one that should be voiced by Lake County employees. Lake County is the second wealthiest county in the state of Illinois and thus has the ability to pay a living wage to its employees, something that the county knows it doesn’t do. During a recent compensation study that the county conducted (paying a private organization who knows how many tens of thousands of dollars to conduct) the county admitted that its average wages were almost 8% below average for the surrounding area. The result of that compensation study gave each employee either a 2% raise or the minimum of their new job class whichever was higher, on average wages only rose 5% well below what the county knows it should be paying us. The living wage for a single adult in Lake County is $26.19/hour and under the new job classifications the county still has nearly a quarter of both hourly and salaried job codes starting at under a living wage. With our union we will be fighting to raise wages to a point where our members don’t need to fear their landlord pricing them out of their homes and where they don’t need to make the decision of buying groceries or paying for their medication. We will be fighting for raises that properly compensate us for years of service and for cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) so that our wages keep pace with inflation. We will be fighting for a future where we quality candidates don’t pass Lake County up in their job searches because of our embarrassingly low compensation rates.
While wages and benefits are major issues that we will be pushing for in the coming contract negotiations, another major point we will be negotiating for is a seat at the table. Before the union our ability to address management culture, redress grievances or have our safety concerns listened to and addressed were limited to hoping that our managers would view our complaints as more than “whining” (their word) or to vent during our semi-annual employee satisfaction survey. Our members want to work in a place where they are listened to when they complain about a hostile workplace. Where management can’t yell and swear during meetings or play favorites when it comes time for promotions. Where employees who deal with irate clients are able to have their reasonable safety requests listened to. With a union we are no longer individual voices screaming into the wind, we will have elected representatives that will have regular meetings with management to address our concerns and we will have the power of the people to back those representatives up.
AN URGENT PUSH
When Donald Trump took power in January 2025, one of the first things that he did was declare war on public employees. One of his first actions was to form the Department of Government “Efficiency” (DOGE) which has attempted to fire 284,000 federal employees across 27 agencies. Those employees that were not protected under a union contract have had limited recourse, however those that did have the backing of one of several federal workers unions have had their positions re-instated. While the Trump administration can’t reach down to the states and outright close non-federal departments, his power to end federal funding to the state and municipalities gives him immense power over our ability to provide services to our communities. In March of 2025 we found that the Trump administration was planning on cutting upwards of 450 million dollars in public health grants to the state of Illinois. ***These cuts are even before the house and senate passed the “BBB” so we have yet to see how that will affect our budgets***
This sudden loss in funding is going to leave the state and local health departments scrambling to figure out how to make up their budget shortfalls and one of management’s favorite tools to do that is to slash employment and force those that are left to do more with less. Lake County was one of the largest non-union health departments in the state and that meant that our members were at real risk of losing their livelihoods when those cuts hit our budgets, this is because like every other state in the nation, Illinois operates under at-will employment. At-will employment essentially means that your employer can fire you at any time without prior notice for any reason and is an anti-worker cudgel which can only be blocked by a union contract. The reason for this is that under a strong union contract employers are limited in what they can deem an action worthy of termination and even in cases where termination is on the table, they are required to provide notice and an opportunity for the employee and the union to raise a case in their defense. In cases of mass layoffs due to slashed budgets contracts can stipulate that employees be given the option to fill open roles that are not getting cut and if that is not enough, employers and the union negotiate to ensure a fair layoff structure (instead of just firing the most senior employees because they cost the most) with a planned recall to ensure that jobs are returned to their members when budgets are restored.
We knew that when these budget cuts came to pass our members were going to be on the chopping block and so we jumped into action to make sure that everyone understood the risk of working without a contract. This messaging was extremely effective and was the final push that we needed to get us over the hump.
What’s Next?
Now that we have submitted our signatures to the Illinois Labor Relations board our job is not yet complete. The county is going to have a chance to split our union into a “professional union” (for job codes that require a specific college degree/certification) and a “non-professional union” (for job codes that do not require a specific degree/certification). This is an attempt to make two weaker unions that they can play off each other, promising a better contract to one so that they don’t support the other. The county is currently attempting to shift job codes out of the “professional” classification, they are hoping that if they are successful, they can break our majority with both classes by only keeping job codes that we have a smaller representation with in the “professional” union and hoping that they can dilute the lead we have in the “non-professional” class. They will fail in this attempt, and it will only drag out the inevitable. After the county is done with their union-busting games, we will have an opportunity to combine the classes into a single Lake County Health Department employee union. While the state might recognize two classes of employees, we understand that this is a false division and that we are all workers who want a better life for ourselves and that only together can we win that fight.