Mayor Brandon Johnson has rescinded a pandemic-era requirement that city employees be vaccinated against COVID-19, fueling demands for back pay to those who defied the mandate.
Fraternal Order of Police President John Catanzara led the charge against the vaccine mandate, unilaterally imposed in 2021 by then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot.
Catanzara encouraged rank-and-file officers to resist the mandate and ignore the demand to report their vaccination status on the city’s data portal.
He was so incensed by Lightfoot’s failure to negotiate something he believed should have been the subject of collective bargaining, he compared it to the Holocaust, later apologizing for the comparison.
On Wednesday, the vaccine mandate was abruptly rescinded even as the marathon court battle it triggered continues.
The Illinois Labor Relations Board has twice ruled that the city violated employees’ collective bargaining rights by failing to bargain collectively before imposing the vaccine mandate and placing employees who defied it on “non-disciplinary, no-pay status” before moving to fire them.
In addition to rescinding the policy, the board demanded that the city reverse “any discipline” against employees who violated the vaccine mandate and expunge it from their records. Anyone terminated must be “made whole for lost pay and benefits” and compensated at an annual interest rate of seven percent for every year they were off the job.
Instead of abiding by that ruling, the city appealed both rulings to the Illinois Appellate Court. That’s where it stands, even after the city’s Department of Human Resources notified Catanzara this week that the vaccine mandate that triggered the court fight had been rescinded.
“The city’s not coming off the court case. … If they pay us, they’re gonna have to pay every other union. So they’re not coming off that. They’re gonna appeal that as far as they need to appeal it to put it off because they’ve got no money,” Catanzara said.
“We still have three officers who never reported to the portal because they believe it was a violation of their personal health information and they stood their ground. They’ve been off the payroll for over three years now. They’ve continued to put these three officers through this mental torture. … literally crippling their financial life. It’s just inexcusable.”
In addition to the three fired officers, Catanzara said there are “a couple hundred” more FOP members who suffered “various lengths of no-pay status” — plus five-day suspensions — and must be made whole.
“Drop the court appeal. Make everybody whole and let’s move on finally and put these officers back to work.”
Corporation Counsel Mary Richardson-Lowry refused to discuss the volatile issue of back pay or respond to Catanzara’s demand that the city drop its appeal.
“This is not related to those issues. It’s strictly related to where we are now as a city, a country and the state of affairs with respect to COVID. We are no longer in a COVID crisis,” Richardson-Lowry said.
Richardson-Lowry also denied the vaccine mandate was a mistake, arguing that Lightfoot and Dr. Allison Arwady, who at the time was the city’s health commissioner, were “trying to save lives and keep people from being sick. They were doing the proper thing. And by extension of what they did then, it ultimately allowed people to live.”
Rob Tebbens was a Chicago Fire Department captain at Engine 71 in West Ridge when the vaccine mandate was issued.
He was placed on no-pay status on Nov. 2, 2021 and fired on Sept. 27, 2022.
“They rescinded the vaccine policy. Is this the first step of an admission of guilt? Make me whole again. Bring me back to the day I was fired and give me all of the pay I lost during that time. Put me back on the payroll today,” Tebbens said.
“I was a captain at the time they removed me from the payroll. During my no-pay status, I would have reached the rank of battalion chief. It’s horribly disrupted my life. … We’ve been snubbed by a so-called union-friendly mayor who could remedy this injustice today.”