Page 37 - July 2017 Newsletter

and killed in the line of duty seven years ago this July. It’s one of the ongoing tributes he makes to the police.
Another comes every Friday night when D’Alba attends Sabbath service at his synagogue in Oak Park. In the Jew- ish faith, there is a ritual to mourn those who have passed by saying a prayer known as “Mourner’s Kaddish.” Sons say it for their fathers daily for a year after their deaths. Every Friday night for the past five years, D’Alba has been saying Kaddish for an officer who has been lost in the line of duty.
“A sense of loyalty to what they do and appreciation for the dedication they bring to make our lives safer,” he ex- plains. “They need to be applauded and this is my personal way of doing it.”
There are so many influences that will drive the Asher, Gittler & D’Alba team to get Lodge 7 members the best wages, benefits and working conditions possible in the new collective bargaining agreement. Not the least of which is, as D’Alba relates, “I can’t imagine what it must be like to be an officer on the street and have a 12-year-old jump out of the car and shoot at you.”
Back to the beginning
Among the artifacts stored in the conference room is a hardcover-bound book that looks like it has about a thou- sand pages. In these pages are details of the agreements the firm negotiated starting with the first one in 1980 through 1992 and again in 2004-05. D’Alba offers how privileged he feels to be retained by his third Lodge 7 President, with Kevin Graham joining Mark Donahue and John Dineen.
Dineen recalls that first contract negotiation and how Gittler and D’Alba were like Jordan and Pippen going af-
ter the agreement that has generated so many benefits for Lodge 7 members. “Gittler was known as the mouthpiece and D’Alba the brain,” Dineen adds. “Joel was like an en- cyclopedia. I don’t think they could have made a better choice for this contract negotiation.”
When Dineen did the due diligence researching Asher, Gittler & D’Alba in 1980, he found that D’Alba helped write labor law decisions for the Michigan Employment Rela- tions Commission, and that Michigan was one of the first states to give police officers and public employees the right to collectively bargain.
Graham knew D’Alba was the right man for this job hav- ing seen his team work with Illinois FOP as well as State Troopers Lodge 41. He knew the firm has been represent- ing FOP lodges since the 1970s. And he knew that if D’Alba didn’t author the complete book on labor and employment law, he was certainly one of its lead writers.
From August 2013 to August 2014, D’Alba served as the chair of the American Bar Association (ABA) Section of Labor and Employment Law. As chair, he worked with the labor and management leaders of the Section to write pol- icy recommendations directed to high-level officials in the U.S. Department of Labor and the White House. His rise to section chair included leading the committee on State and Local Government Bargaining and Employment Law from 1988 to 1994.
In 2015, the Chicago Chapter of the Labor and Employ- ment Relations Association presented D’Alba with its Dis- tinguished Service Award for his “strong advocacy and ...
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