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Chicago

South Side Neighbors Want Housing Protections Before City Oks ‘Luxury’ Hotel Near Obama Center

May 8, 2025 Maxwell Evans, Black Agenda Report. , , , ,
With a 26-story hotel planned blocks from the Obama Presidential Center site, housing activists are calling on city leaders to prioritize a long-delayed slate of housing protections for residents near the center before advancing any hotel plans. More than 50 members of the Obama CBA Coalition rallied Tuesday on the vacant lot at 6402-6420 S. Stony Island Ave. in Woodlawn, where developer Aquinnah Investment Trust is looking to build a 250-room hotel . CBA stands for community benefits agreement. The rezoning application for the hotel, which was submitted last month, comes as the South Shore Housing Preservation ordinance proposal remains stalled in the City Council’s housing committee 18 months after its introduction.

Chicago Teachers Win Greener Schools

April 17, 2025 Nick Limbeck and Lauren Bianchi, Labor Notes. , , ,
The Chicago Teachers Union won a tentative agreement in December that, for the first time, addresses climate and environmental justice demands—making healthy green schools a priority in our city. We achieved this breakthrough even while broader contract negotiations stalled. Finally, in April, we ratified the full agreement, which also includes big raises and lower class sizes. Our environmental justice victory stems from a collaboration between teachers and environmental activists to expose urgent problems facing us and our students—and link those problems to larger struggles.

DOJ Knew About and Used Notorious Homan Square ‘Black Site’

March 19, 2025 Iain Carlos and Sam Carlen, Black Agenda Report. , , , , ,
Scandals don’t get much more disturbing than that of Homan Square. In 2015, the Guardian revealed Chicago Police had allegedly employed torture and days-long unlawful detention at the secretive “black site”-like Homan Square facility, a nondescript warehouse located in Chicago’s west-side Garfield Park neighborhood. Outraged and alarmed by these revelations, politicians and activists clamored for the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate human rights abuses at the facility, which still operates today. Despite the pleading, the DOJ elected not to investigate Homan Square, and instead conducted a broad investigation of Chicago Police Department use of force practices.

Landlords Fined $80K For Threatening To Call ICE On Chicago Tenants

March 8, 2025 Zane McNeill, Truthout. , , , , , ,
An Illinois circuit court judge has ordered Chicago landlords to pay former tenants $80,000 after they threatened to report the tenants to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in June 2020. The decision is the first under the state’s 2019 Immigrant Tenant Protection Act (ITPA), which prohibits landlords from using a tenant’s immigration status to harass or intimidate them. “This decision provides a measure of justice to a family facing a landlord willing to threaten to call federal immigration authorities in the belief that it would scare tenants,” Thomas A. Saenz, MALDEF president and general counsel, said in a statement.

UPS Cuts Back On Amazon Deliveries, Announces Building Closures

February 7, 2025 Eliza Schultz and Bill Aiman, Fight Back! News. , , , ,
Chicago, IL – On Thursday January 30, UPS announced a major cutback in Amazon package deliveries, with the goal of dropping over 50% of the volume from the company’s largest customer by June 2026. In conjunction, UPS is looking to permanently shutter 10% of buildings, shrink their fleet of vehicles and lay off workers. The plan to close more buildings comes on the heels of the hard fought 2023 Teamsters contract, which resulted in major wage gains for part-timers and the end of the 2-tier system among package car drivers. The credible threat of a strike forced UPS to concede to the union’s demands in contract negotiations and look elsewhere for cost savings.

Chicago Clinic Offers Free Legal Aid To Solidarity Economy Groups

February 6, 2025 Damon Orion, Resilience. , , ,
Chicago, Illinois, has a rich history of grassroots organizing. Notable examples are the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council’s efforts to improve local economic and social conditions and the Black Panther Party’s establishment of housing cooperatives and free food, clothing, and medical services. The solidarity economy movement has continued to gain momentum in Chicago. In 2024, a map from the worker-owned ChiCommons Cooperative showed more than 800 solidarity enterprises, co-ops, and mutual aid groups in the city.

Thousands Take To The Streets In Defense Of Immigrants Rights

February 4, 2025 Jimena Vergara and Madeleine Freeman, Left Voice. , , , , , , , , ,
Immigrants and their communities are leading the fight against the Trump administration’s attacks on democratic rights. Since Trump unleashed a series of ICE raids in his first days in office — ordering ICE and the police to arrest over 1000 people per day — thousands of people in the cities most targeted by the anti-immigrant offensive are taking to the streets, walking out of their schools, and shuttering businesses to show that immigrants won’t be criminalized and made to live in constant fear of deportation. The raids come on top of a barrage of anti-immigrant attacks launched by Trump on his very first day in office.

How Chicago Is Frustrating ICE’s Campaign Of Fear

January 31, 2025 Sarah Lazare and Rebecca Burns, In These Times. , , , ,
“Tom Homan said Chicago is very organized,” Margarita Klein, director of member organizing for Arise Chicago, proclaimed gleefully in Spanish to a room of 80 people at an immigrant rights training, many of whom laughed and clapped in response. Klein was calling back to a CNN appearance two days earlier by Trump’s handpicked border czar. “Sanctuary cities are making it very difficult,” Homan told anchor Kaitlan Collins of the administration’s immigration sweeps. ​“For instance, Chicago … they’ve been educated on how to defy ICE, how to hide from ICE.”

Chicago: Ready For The Fight To Stop The Trump Agenda

January 16, 2025 Joe Iosbaker, Fight Back! News. , , ,
Chicago, IL – 300 activists, mostly from Latino communities, and many who are immigrants, packed into City Hall this morning to oppose an attack by city council members against Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance. Cook County Commissioner Anthony Quezada kicked off the rally with chants alternating between Spanish and English. “When Black people are under attack, what do you do?” “Stand up, fight back!” “When sanctuary is under attack, what do you do?” “Stand up, fight back!” Then in Spanish, “Pueblo, escucha! Estamos en la lucha!” Which roughly means, “People, listen! We’re in the struggle!”

Threat Of Amazon Workers’ Strike Spreads During Peak Holiday Season

December 17, 2024 Michael Sainato, Portside. , , , , , , , ,
Thousands of workers at Amazon are threatening to strike at the company after giving the company a deadline of 15 December to agree to begin negotiating a first contract with the union representing employees. The strike threats, which started in New York, have now spread to Chicago and Atlanta. They come during Amazon’s peak holiday season and after the company experienced record sales during its 2024 Black Friday and Cyber Monday events. The workers at the company’s JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island became the first Amazon warehouse in the US to win a union election in March 2022.

How Chicago Organizers Managed To Rid The City Of ShotSpotter

December 9, 2024 Noah Berlatsky, Next City. , , , , ,
In September, the city of Chicago stopped using ShotSpotter, a sensor system designed to detect gunshots and alert police and first responders. During his 2023 campaign for Mayor, Brandon Johnson promised to end the use of the expensive technology, which he has referred to as “walkie-talkies on a stick.” Johnson’s decision to end ShotSpotter was not popular with the Chicago City Council. Alderman Silvana Tabares issued an inflammatory statement declaring that “every gunshot victim left bleeding in the streets of our city will be a worthy sacrifice in the eyes of the mayor for his radical agenda.”

Chicago Rally Demands State’s Attorney Free Torture Survivors

December 3, 2024 Gabe Miller, Fight Back! News. , , , ,
Chicago, IL – On the morning of Monday, December 2, about 30 demonstrators, led by survivors of wrongful convictions and their loved ones, gathered in below-freezing temperatures outside the downtown Chicago office of incoming Cook County State's Attorney Eileen Burke to demand she free torture survivors and the wrongfully convicted. Speakers gave testimony, chanted, and held signs that reinforced their demands. Burke has a lot of work to do to keep up with her predecessor Kim Foxx, who freed over 300 survivors of wrongful conviction and police torture during her eight years in office.

1800 Nurses Strike University Health In Chicago

November 15, 2024 Fight Back! News. , , , , ,
Chicago, IL - On November 13, 1800 members of the Illinois Nurses Association (INA) went on strike against University of Illinois Health for continuing to refuse to negotiate a decent contract. Since June, the union has had 47 bargaining sessions with UI Health, to no avail. In August, a week-long strike was held, but this did not stop management’s greed. The union was left with no choice but to go on an open-ended strike. The workers are striking for higher wages, safety for nurses (and by extension, their patients), as well as family leave that lasts at least 12 weeks. UI Health has offered a measly 2% pay increase.

Plan For Aging Gas Pipelines Runs Up Against Energy Transition

November 1, 2024 Sharon Kelly, DeSmog. , , , , ,
If you ask Chicago’s gas pipeline utility, Peoples Gas Light and Coke Company, or PGL, the best way to fix the problem of leaks from underground gas pipelines, their answer is the most ambitious option — running new, upgraded plastic pipelines throughout the city, leaving their old network of leak-prone iron pipes behind. Consumer watchdogs, however, are calling foul. A newly published report by the Illinois Citizens Utility Board (CUB), a nonprofit utility watchdog established by the state legislature, finds PGL’s cost projections underestimate how expensive and time-consuming those upgrades would be, while massively overestimating how costly other options might be.

Chicago Teachers Are Fighting For A Historic Contract

October 26, 2024 Kari Lydersen, In These Times. , , , , ,
In 2012, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), along with thousands of supporters, took to the streets in a historic battle with then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel over his corporate education reform and austerity plans for the city’s public school system. That strike helped define the increasingly popular concept of ​“bargaining for the common good,” an approach ​“where unions make demands that would benefit not just members but the larger communities,” as CTU Vice President Jackson Potter explained two years ago on the tenth anniversary of the walk out. Today, the union is in the midst of another struggle over the future of the country’s third-largest public education system.
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