Illinois Public Sector Collective Bargaining Legislation: The First Fifteen Years

While Illinois was one of the last major industrial states to statutorily embrace public sector collective bargaining, it is a little-known historical fact that Illinois would have been the first state to statutorily authorize public sector collective bargaining in 1945, but for the governor Dwight H. Green's veto. 1 If this legislation had been enacted, it would have occurred a full fourteen years before the passage of Wisconsin's public sector statute, the nation's first.