IPSN, June 4, 1997
Evergreen Park CCPA Chapter Won with Diplomacy
Now Faces Need for Direct Action
BACK IN 1969, when John J. Flood and the then-named Cook County Police Association was teaching police groups to organize and stage “blue-flu” job actions and serious, up-against-the-wall kinds of strikes, CCPA’s Evergreen Park Chapter won recognition as the established union in that South Suburban, working-class town without firing a shot.
And, amazingly, the brand-new union won a 7 percent, cash-in-the-pocket pay raise as well as what were then called “fringe benefits” that were worth another 6 or 7 percent.
All told, the increases in that first Evergreen Park CCPA contract were worth something like $1,000 per year for a police group whose average annual salary was right around $7,000, recalls 30-year man Fred Kreil, who is now at the union-negotiated level of $54,000 per year.
Sgt. Kreil was one of the founding members of the Evergreen Park CCPA Chapter. He remembers the early days when he and his fellow officers held clandestine meetings in the basements of members’ homes. In the year or so before the union won recognition from the Mayor and Village Board, “We were very concerned that our meetings would be found out and we would all be fired,” Kreil recalls.
“Bob Princepato and Ray Nolan (both now retired) were the sparkplugs of the organizing effort,” Kreil remembers. “They brought in John J. Flood and Flood brought in everything else we needed.” Kreil, who spent some 20 years policing the streets of Evergreen Park and another five years in the Youth Division, now spends his days working as a Court Records officer.
ALTHOUGH EVERGREEN PARK is one of the early CCPA Chapters that was able to get itself established and win a signed contract without a strike, Kreil remembers working as a CCPA volunteer during strikes in Cicero, Waukegan and Skokie. The Cicero strike was a major win for CCPA and, in an odd bit of local labor and organized crime lore, the cops went back to work in Cicero only after Mafia boss Joey Aiuppa ordered the town authorities to settle with the police union.
The key word in the early Evergreen park contract wins, Kreil declares, was “diplomacy.”
Unlike police groups in venues where the political bosses were out to crush their fledgling cop unions, Mayor Anthony Vacco and various members of the Evergreen Park Village Board were more open to the kinds of changes Flood and the Chapter officers wanted to initiate. “They were willing to communicate,” Kreil says.
From the earliest days, CCPA’s Evergreen Park Chapter has always negotiated contracts for both its patrol officers and its sergeants as a single unit, which is something of an oddity in police labor relations. From a union standpoint, an obvious benefit to that approach to bargaining is that the town elected officials will be less likely to drive a wedge between the two ranks if both are represented in the same negotiation process and both are covered by the same union contract.
OPEN COMMUNICATIONS between the local CCPA Chapter officers and the town’s elected officials has always been the lubricant that kept Evergreen Park’s law enforcement machinery running smoothly.
According to Sgt. Dennis O’Dowd, a former Evergreen Park Chapter officer and current Vice President on the CCPA Executive Board, “Even before the 1984 law requiring local governments to bargain with public employee unions went into effect, we always had excellent communications with our Mayor and Village Board.”
BUT O’DOWD, who joined the Evergreen Park Police Department in 1982, is quick to admit, “Communications right now are very bad, and morale is even worse.”
O’Dowd came to Evergreen Park after more than five years as a correctional officer at the Cook County Jail. This is a man who has made law enforcement a full-time career now for over 20 years, with union activity being almost a full-time job for almost as many years.
When O’Dowd was at the jail, about 700 of the correctional officers were CCPA members with another 700 or so being in the Fraternal Order of Police. The FOP group staged a wildcat strike, which was repudiated by that outfit’s union leadership, and the strike was crushed by jail officials.
Today, neither the CCPA nor FOP represents correctional officers at the jail. During the corrupt regime of former Sheriff James O’Grady and his convicted-felon second-in-command, Jim Dvorak, the number of correctional officers was increased dramatically and, in a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t kind of labor relations shell game, they were slipped into the Teamsters union, where they remain to this day.
O’DOWD CREDITS John J. Flood with being a major voice of reason during the middle years of the Evergreen Park labor relations experience. O’Dowd echoes Sgt. Kreil’s recollections that Flood “was always there when we needed him.”
By the time O’Dowd became Chapter President—a post he held for 10 years—the 7 percent annual increases were slipping a bit to the 5 percent range. But the cost of medical insurance was also beginning its non-stop upward spiral, so that if an individual Evergreen Park cop was going with smaller annual pay raises, he was making it up in the insurance coverage that was negotiated for him by his union. In real dollar terms, the total value of the combined salary and benefit increases during those years continued to hold in the $3,000 to $4,000 range for the bulk of Evergreen Park’s CCPA members.
And during the O’Dowd years, communications between CCPA as an entity and individual CCPA members and Norbert Smith, the Evergreen Park Chief of Police, remained an open channel. Also, O’Dowd recalls, Mayor Vacco and CCPA people, including John J. Flood, continued to maintain a high level of free and open communication until about three years ago when a new Chief of Police was appointed.
O’DOWD POINTS OUT that during his ten-year tenure and during the dozen or so years before that, not a single Evergreen Park police grievance was taken to arbitration. Every dispute between the troops and their management was discussed in free and open negotiation and was settled without the need for either the expense or the hassle of arbitration. And, because everybody involved in the Evergreen Park-CCPA law enforcement venue is human, there were disputes. But none that couldn’t be resolved in-house.
HOWEVER, much of the open communication that characterized the early and middle years of the CCPA experience in Evergreen Park has been cut off. According to Mike Dwyer, the current CCPA Chapter President, the communication situation is “very sad” and police morale is “terrible.”
Dwyer traces the major problem within the Evergreen Park Police Department to the naming of Tom Evoy as Chief about three years ago. Oddly, Evoy is a former CCPA member and rank-and-file cop who has been quoted as saying he is “proud” of his police union background. But today, Dwyer and others who have known the Chief on a first-name basis for years, now speak to him only when they must and only on official police business.
Also, that proud record that O’Dowd had of never letting a police beef go to arbitration has fallen. The first-ever arbitration case in Evergreen Park police history reached the final decision stage just last month, with word of the outcome to be announced in the coming days.
The major problem that Dwyer cites does not stem from the fact that annual pay raises for Evergreen Park police are down to 3 percent this year, with health care and other benefit costs adding another 5 percent or so. Instead, the major, unresolved dispute that Chief Evoy refuses to even discuss, let alone act on, is the idea that the time has come for rotating shifts to go. It’s time, Mike Dwyer says, for permanent, fixed-shift assignments to become the order of the day.
DWYER RECALLS that when he led the union team in negotiations on the current contract, the management side, for the first time ever, abruptly got up and left the room. And even though the union side was armed with reams of medical studies and other solid material on the physical and emotional damage that rotating shift work does to people, Chief Evoy refused to even consider the union’s case. Today, now two years after a union contract that most CCPA Chapter members regard as an “insult” was put into effect, the ancient, if not obsolete practice of changing shifts every 28 days has become a festering sore on the morale of Evergreen Park police.
DOES CHAPTER President Dwyer believe some sort of collective job action is needed to resolve the issue? Does he think that perhaps a ‘60s style “blue flu” is in order?
DOES HE THINK the kind of hit-the-bricks, fire-in-the-belly brand of union passion that John J. Flood and other CCPA pioneers so freely displayed in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s will be needed in Evergreen Park in the late ‘90s?
“WE’RE GONNA have to do something,” Mike Dwyer says. “We’re just not going to announce it in the newspaper.”
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