Page 35 - FOP_APR16.indd

just for FOP contact and set out to eventually change working conditions for what all Lodge 7 members have banked on the past 35 years. Dineen will be the first to confirm he didn’t do it alone, that he was merely taking his turn in the barrel.
He brought together a team that included then 14th District Rep and current Lodge 7 Trustee Ron Shogren, a detective from 19 named Jim Reardon who served for 42 years and, among others, input from the father of a current Lodge 7 president. They consulted with the best labor attorneys in the city and went to work on smaller gains at first like increasing vacation time and holidays off and what became the backbone of the organization, the right to choose shifts by seniority.
They worked on the first contract in 1980 by going out to see as many members as possible. They showed up at every scene where there was a shooting, and every hospi- tal when an officer was injured.
“Sometimes, we even beat the Department there,” Shogren recalled. “John made sure we were all prepared, and he made history. Just things like setting up the struc- ture for basic legal defense and negotiations.”
Those who were there repeatedly evoke the phrase, “Before John took over.”
Before John took over, officers who had a complaint
against them were on their own unless they had a pock- et full of money and could get a lawyer and go to court. He negotiated the right to appeal discipline penalties and even take the case to arbitration.
Before John took over, health care benefits were build- ing but salary was low. But one or two contracts in, and salary began to skyrocket for officers all the way up and down the line, according to Shogren.
“Nobody understands what the Department was like before the FOP became the bargaining agent,” Reardon reported. “If your supervisor got mad at you, they would change your shift or never give you weekends off. Some guys never worked days for years. All that stuff changed in the 80s and 90s under John Dineen. Anybody who came after that had no idea what the working conditions were like.”
Grand Master
So how did he do it, or how did Dineen marshal the ef- fort that made him a staple in police society and made his tenure leading the Lodge part of Chicago history?
For starters, he pursued educational opportunities by taking courses at DePaul’s business school and labor management classes at Roosevelt University. He set a tone that union leadership was not a job to be done in the
CHICAGO LODGE 7 ■ APRIL 2016 35