After much talk going back to the start of this year, Cook County prosecutors appear ready to launch a serious organizing effort that could put them at the bargaining table across from a reluctant State’s Atty. Jack O’Malley.
Ten assistant state’s attorneys have sent a letter to O’Malley indicating their intent to form an independent group that would be part union and part professional association.
The group, called the Prosecutors’ Bar Association of Cook County, will file a petition with the Illinois Labor Relations Board in the next two weeks, asking that a union election be scheduled, according to Collins Whitfield and Janet Adams, lawyers at Hugh McCarthy & Associates who represent the organizers.
Whitfield said the group already has obtained enough authorization cards to call for a union vote. Organizers needed to sign up 30 percent of the 800 assistant state’s attorneys in the office and “got a lot more than that,” he said.
Prosecutors are concerned about delays in getting the pay increases that are supposed to go with a promotion to lead trial attorney and about being asked to take on additional responsibilities as lead attorney without being formally promoted, according to Whitfield.
O’Malley remains opposed to unionization, a spokeswoman said Monday.
Other prosecutors have been talking to representatives of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees after an office shakeup earlier this year raised tensions and sent morale dropping.
A spokesman for Council 31 of AFSCME said the union also has obtained enough authorization cards to force a vote and would seek to be listed on the ballot if the independent group files a petition.
The assistant state’s attorneys who are setting up the Prosecutors’ Bar Association don’t want to affiliate with a union, Whitfield said.
He said the group wants to be involved in other activities, including doing judicial evaluations and offering continuing education programs for prosecutors.
The group includes Bob Hovey, Colleen Hyland, Laura Lambur, John J. Muldoon, Michael K. Smith, Laura Sullivan, John O. Schmidt, John Kirby, Richard Lovell and Robert Milan.
AFSCME has represented assistant public defenders in Cook County since 1986. Other major metropolitan areas where prosecutors belong to a bargaining group include Detroit, San Diego and Orange County in California.
Going the distance
Vicki Peters is known to run circles around courtroom opponents as chief of narcotics and violent crimes for the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago.
She also is a distance runner, and on Nov. 14, she acquitted herself, breathlessly, in New York, completing that city’s crowded marathon of 26.2 miles by leading two Chicago colleagues, Assistant U.S. Attys. George Jackson III and Scott Levine, to the finish line in a respectable time of 4 hours, 9 minutes.
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But the real victory went to Levine, a Gotham native. Despite chronic asthma, he finished in 6 hours, winded but euphoric.
The trio ran as members of a New York police team, which meant they doubled as security agents while pounding the pavement, Peters said.
– Comings and goings. Lawyer Thomas O. Plouff, a former federal prosecutor in northern Indiana, has signed on with James Paul Costello, a Chicago personal-injury and products-liability attorney. A 15-year government veteran, Plouff successfully prosecuted imprisoned medical con man Michael Walton for conspiring to sell unsafe cardiac pacemakers. . . . Thomas J. Dwyer, a tax lawyer and certified public accountant, has set up shop on his own at 401 S. LaSalle St. He had been a tax partner at the accounting firm of Checkers, Simon & Rosner. . . . Charles R. Watkins has left Sachnoff & Weaver to join the litigation boutique of Susman Saunders & Buehler.
– Jim who? No one has ever suggested that former Illinois Gov. James Thompson, now chairman of Winston & Strawn, is inconspicuous in public. But at a ceremony last week honoring top federal prosecutors in Chicago, former Atty. Gen. Edward Levi, who was presenting the awards, looked up and down the row of one-time U.S. attorneys seated to his right for several seconds as Thompson stood patiently on his left.
The ex-prosecutors were honored by the Constitutional Rights Foundation Chicago for their support of the Bill of Rights.