HILIA: What happened & what happens next?
What happened?
On September 15 the Illinois Appellate Court ruled on Illinois State University’s challenge to have HILIA employees included in the Lab School Education Association. We had previously prevailed in our petition before the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board (IELRB) to establish the LSEA in 2025 — as a single bargaining unit including U-High, Metcalf and HILIA employees.
The court determined that HILIA Faculty Associates and Civil Service employees are jointly-employed, subject to the governance of both ISU and the HILIA board. This decision seems to be intertwined with the current back and forth you see between ISU and HILIA communications about the status of their Memorandum of Understanding/Educational Services Agreement.
What happens next?
The court’s decision was to reverse the labor board’s ruling and remand it back to the IELRB who will make a final determination regarding the make up of our bargaining unit. We don’t know for sure when they will make that determination. As soon as we know what the IELRB decides, we will communicate that with you, along with what that means for us and what our next steps will be, as quickly and clearly as possible.
We want to be clear that we stand alongside our HILIA colleagues — who are, for all intents and purposes, OUR people. The opinion of ISU that HILIA is “separate” is just not true. While we cannot speak to what will happen between HILIA and ISU, we stand in full solidarity with HILIA employees. LSEA leadership and the bargaining team stand ready to advocate, communicate, and do what we can to ensure that HILIA remains a vital part of the meaningful work we do every day.
[…] and then once a week for the next four weeks. Those meetings have been postponed as a result of the Appellate Court decision regarding the composition of our bargaining unit. We will have more to share over the coming days […]