The announcement last week that the Illinois AFL-CIO was withdrawing from the “agreed bill process” at least 40 years after its inception took almost everyone by surprise, but nobody was really shocked.

For years, whenever the group engaged in carefully constructed negotiations with business interests on workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance, labor leaders would grumble privately that most other states don’t have a similar process.

Unlike elsewhere, their hands were tied by a long-ago edict that the two sides would have to work out their differences and that the state’s executive branch would help referee the talks by providing research into the issues under discussion, and members from all four caucuses would participate. After that, the two parties in both legislative chambe

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