At what point does the personal become political?

Specifically, at what point does negotiating wages and benefits become an act of political speech, rather than a boring old exercise in labor relations? That’s the question before the Supreme Court in a case called Friedrichs v. the California Teachers Association.

The plaintiffs do not want to pay the substantial “agency fees” that the union charges them for collective bargaining of their employment contracts, and they’re arguing that they shouldn’t have to, because effectively, the requirement that they do so is coercing political speech.

A study done last year by the think tank State Budget Solutions found that total compensation for Illinois state employees was on average 27 percent higher than their counterparts in the private sector.

Illinois state employees made nearly $4,000 more in wages and $13,000 more in benefits than the private-sector employees.

More than half of Illinois state workers will retire before age 60 with guaranteed state pensions that average more than $42,000 and compound at 3 percent annually.

Unions representing Chicago police officers are fighting for the destruction of tens of thousands of documents from disciplinary files dating back several decades, just as activists and community leaders are demanding more access and transparency from a department under intense scrutiny after several controversial police shootings.

The two unions’ contracts with the city stipulate that the records, including complaints alleging misconduct, be destroyed after five years in most cases if no litigation is ongoing. The city says it has had to keep the files because of federal court orders issued in litigation going back to the 1990s. But the unions say they only recently discovered they still existed when the city informed them it would release all documents as part of a massive public records request by several newspapers.

A judge who has kept the records in limbo for more than a year said at a hearing Friday that he would keep a union-requested injunction in place pending the outcome of more negotiations between the city and the unions. Arbitrators have sided with the unions but in a decision this week gave the sides until March 15 to work out a system for determining which of the documents are subject to destruction.

At the old Nabisco bakery on Chicago’s Southwest Side, with mass layoffs looming, the bakers’ union is cranking up the heat on its employer as the two sides approach contract negotiations.

Mondelez International announced in July that it would lay off half of the 1,200 employees at its Chicago plant, where Oreo cookies and other processed snacks have been made for years. But the plant’s largest union — the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers — continues to fight the loss in an increasingly public campaign.

“We’ll talk about severance if and when we have to, but we’re fighting for these jobs. We’re not acquiescing,” said Ron Baker, a spokesman for the bakers’ union, which represents 455 of the 600 workers to be laid off.

Chicago schools are borrowing to pay mounting debt bills and fund capital projects as the district’s liquidity deteriorates and its credit rating tumbles.

The Chicago Board of Education will sell $875 million of bonds on Jan. 27, according to Bloomberg data from J.P. Morgan, an underwriter on the deal. The deal is made up of $796 million of tax-exempt securities and $79 million of taxable debt, according to bond documents. The proceeds will cover capital projects, convert variable rate debt to fixed, fund swap termination payments and pay debt-service bills, bond documents show.

This is getting serious.

Population flight is killing Illinois. As the story in Thursday’s Southern Illinoisan pointed out, no state lost more residents than Illinois in 2015, and at this rate we will forfeit at least one congressional district in Congress after the 2020 census makes the decline official.

What does that mean?

It means the state loses representation and influence in Washington. It means larger districts in our end of the state, which means each of us will have less access to our representative. Our voice, individually and collectively, will be diluted.

If you care about democracy, this is a big deal.