So, last Friday I got a parking ticket at the University that I work for. I was none too pleased about it, but the whole thing is resolved now and I wound up paying an additional $31.50 to get the whole thing resolved.

Anyway, I have a long standing hatred for university parking systems so when I stumbled across a recent Illinois Supreme Court case on the issue, I did not forget it. Since my parking wound is still fresh, I thought I would recount the Illinois case and its outcome in the hopes that unions may take some control over these parking systems away from universities, so that it might not cost over $300/year for a parking space in a small college town in the middle of the midwest.

In the case 2 of the unions (the SEIU & FOP) whose employees work at the University of Illinois sued the University of Illinois because the university refused to bargain parking. The unions claimed that parking affected their "wages, hours & terms and conditions" of their employment. The Illinois Supreme Court agreed, overruling the lower courts, which agreed with the University that parking was an inherent managerial right. The Supreme Court reasoned that parking was integral to the employees' jobs to the extent that they should have a right to bargain over it, even though it was initially provided voluntarily on the part of the University. Thus, at least in Illinois, parking at universities is a mandatory subject of bargaining for negotiations between the universities (and possibly all public schools) and their collective bargaining units. Of course, this may have no implication for non-collective bargaining units, such as students, but given the present state of parking operations at most universities, it can't get much worse so just about anything has to be an improvement.

University of Illinois v. Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board.

If you have ELA membership you can see my summary of the case in the July edition of the School Law Reporter, page 140.