Unilateral Actions Of Labor Union Representing City Police Officers, Without City Involvement, Does Not Satisfy State Action Requirement Of A Section 1983 Claim
HALLINAN v. FRATERNAL ORDER OF POLICE OF CHICAGO LODGE NO. 7 (June 25, 2009)
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Shawn Hallinan and Wayne Harej were Chicago police officers and members of the police union, the Fraternal Order of Police of Chicago Lodge No. 7 (the Union). They led an effort to unseat the Union’s president and his organization in early 2005. During the course of the campaign, they discovered that the president had underreported his income. They reported the matter to the Attorney General and discussed it publicly. The president was, nevertheless, reelected. The Union soon suspended, and then expelled, the two men from the Union. At the Union's request, the City of Chicago converted the two men into "fair-share payers." Fair-share payers are those members of the Police Department who are not Union members and do not pay Union membership dues but who contribute a "fair-share" for the Union's continued representation of them in matters concerning their wages, hours and working conditions. Hallinan and Harej brought an action against the Union under section 1983 alleging violations of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The court dismissed the action for plaintiffs’ failure to plead state action. Plaintiffs appeal.
In their opinion, Judges Rovner, Wood and Sykes affirmed. The allegations of constitutional violations in the complaint, noted the Court, are actionable only against conduct of the government -- not against private conduct. Unions, of course, are not government actors. A deprivation of a constitutional right may be actionable against a private actor in certain limited circumstances. The Court noted several examples: when the state compels the action, when the private actor is only nominally private, when the state delegates its function to a private actor, etc. Here, the state action alleged is that the Union is the sole collective bargaining unit for the Chicago Police. However, the acts complained of were not taken in concert or in agreement with the City. They were exclusively internal actions. The Court concluded that there was not enough evidence of entanglement by the City to give rise to state action. Although the Court agreed with the district court that the claim should be dismissed for failure to allege state action, it corrected the district court’s categorization of it as a lack of subject matter jurisdiction. An absence of a proper allegation of state action is simply a failure to plead an essential element of the claim.
Michael Rigney practices in the law offices of GVC Ltd. in Chicago. In this blog, he reports on select