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UPS Cuts Back On Amazon Deliveries, Announces Building Closures

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Mutual Aid And Mosh Pits

Chicago — On the Fourth of July, a group of punks and appreciators gather around the canal on the South Side for a mutual aid benefit show. They’re raising funds for Comedor Comunitario (“Community Dining Room”), a weekly Tuesday dinner run by Venezuelan migrants at a community church. With keffiyehs and Palestinian flags throughout the space, curious holiday revelers watched from their passing boats as folks slammed to the bands Hide and Stress Positions, their lyrics decrying American settler-colonialism and nationalism in a defiant take on the holiday. All told, we raised over $3,000to support the comedor.

In The Shadow Of The Obama Center, Residents Fight Displacement

When Barack Obama met with Chicago residents about his proposed presidential center in 2018, the former president downplayed the threat that gentrification might pose to their communities. “We’ve got such a long way to go in terms of economic development before you’re even going to start seeing the prospect of significant gentrification,” Obama said at a community forum where one attendee asked about the possibility of existing residents being pushed out. ​“Malia’s kids might have to worry about that.” But now, six years later, residents of Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood are fighting fears of displacement amidst looming real-estate speculation in the area surrounding the $830 million project, set to open in nearby Jackson Park in 2026.

A SWANA Space To Exist

In August 2022, I received an Instagram message that radically changed my life: ​“Hey cutie, I’m gonna try to organize a queer SWANA comedy night in October [and] wanted to see if you would be interested in this since you are hilarious.” We met organizing jail support for a comrade who was arrested protesting a Zionist speaker, and I soon found myself in a group chat with dozens of others in Chicago’s Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) diaspora. (SWANA is a decolonial term for what’s often called the Middle East and North Africa region, or MENA.) In this bustling WhatsApp group of personalities I would come to know, I was met with warmth. I shared my amateur cooking photos and was invited for dinners.

Fighting Privatization Is Good For Mental Health

This spring, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson announced a dramatic change in the city’s mental health policy, promising to reopen public clinics shuttered for more than a decade. Today, my administration is taking extraordinary steps to reverse the course and expand our city’s systems of mental health,” Johnson said May 30, outside the Roseland Mental Health Center. ​“We are standing here on the Far South Side to make it clear that we are prioritizing those who have been left behind and discarded by previous administrations.” In addition to Roseland, the city plans to reopen two more public clinics, in the Pilsen and West Garfield Park neighborhoods.

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Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

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