Illinois

Chicago Teachers Approve Contract With Remarkable Gains

April 22, 2025 Jackson Potter, Labor Notes. Organize! Chicago Teachers Union, Education, Illinois, Teachers, Unions, Victory, Worker Rights and Jobs

This month, 85 percent of the Chicago Teachers Union’s 27,000 active members voted on a tentative agreement covering 500 public schools across the city. A record 97 percent voted yes. The contract will run from 2024 to 2028, expiring at the same time as the UAW’s contracts with the Big Three. The negotiation drew the greatest level of member participation and support in the CTU’s history and was achieved without a strike or a strike vote. The new contract addresses both bread and butter concerns and common-good demands. Said CTU president Stacy Davis Gates, a member of the union’s Caucus of Rank and File Educators: “It was the whole buffet.”

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

March 8, 2025 Zane McNeill, Truthout. Resist! Chicago, ICE, Illinois, Immigrant Rights, Landlords, Tenant Rights, Victory

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. Educate! Amazon, Chicago, Illinois, Unions, UPS

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.

Thousands Take To The Streets In Defense Of Immigrants Rights

February 4, 2025 Jimena Vergara and Madeleine Freeman, Left Voice. Resist! Arkansas, California, Chicago, Georgia, ICE, Illinois, Immigrant Rights, North Carolina, Solidarity, Texas

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. Resist! Chicago, ICE, Illinois, Immigrants, Know Your Rights

“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.”

Threat Of Amazon Workers’ Strike Spreads During Peak Holiday Season

December 17, 2024 Michael Sainato, Portside. Resist! Amazon, Atlanta, Chicago, Georgia, Illinois, Jeff Bezos, New York City (NYC), Strikes, Worker Rights and Jobs

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. Organize! Chicago, Gun violence, Illinois, Police, ShotSpotter, Surveillance

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. Resist! Chicago, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Illinois, Torture, Wrongful Imprisonment

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.

You’re Already On Strike; How to Turn Up the Heat

November 28, 2024 Keith Brower Brown and Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes. Strategize! Detroit, Illinois, Oil and Gas, Strikes, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Teamsters at Marathon Petroleum in Detroit have been on the picket line since September 4, their first strike in 30 years. Tankers filled with gasoline regularly exit the massive, belching refinery on a main Detroit artery, as Marathon continues production with supervisors brought in from other facilities. Workers have handbilled gas stations, as well as sometimes following Marathon trucks and picketing them when they make deliveries. They’ve gotten support from the Detroit City Council and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, as well as other unions like the UAW who have joined their picket lines.

Students Who Protested Gaza Genocide Face Felony Mob Charges

November 26, 2024 Tara Goodarzi, Truthout. Educate! Freedom of Speech, Gaza, Illinois, Israel, Palestine, Palestine Solidarity, State Repression

Pre-trial hearings for students who participated in a Gaza solidarity encampment in central Illinois last spring are being held on November 20 and December 4, 2024. The outcome of the four students’ trials will determine whether they will risk up to three years of incarceration on felony “mob action” charges for having exercised their free speech rights on campus. The students from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) — one of the largest public universities in the country — constructed an encampment known as the Popular University for Gaza in April 2024, after months of Israel’s relentless slaughter of Palestinians, mirroring dozens of other student-led sites across the United States.

1800 Nurses Strike University Health In Chicago

November 15, 2024 Fight Back! News. Resist! Chicago, Health Care, Illinois, Nurses, Strikes, Unions

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. Educate! Chicago, Energy, Energy Transformation, Gas, Illinois, Pipelines

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. Strategize! Chicago, Education, Illinois, Teachers, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

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.

The Nation’s First Commercial Carbon Sequestration Plant Is Leaking

October 23, 2024 Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco, NPR Illinois. Educate! Carbon Capture, Carbon Dioxide, Illinois, Leaks, pollution

A row of executives from grain-processing behemoth Archer Daniels Midland watched as Verlyn Rosenberger, 88, took the podium at a Decatur city council meeting earlier this month. It was the first meeting since she and the rest of her central Illinois community learned of a second leak at ADM’s carbon dioxide sequestration well beneath Lake Decatur, their primary source of drinking water. “Just because CO2 sequestration can be done doesn’t mean it should be done,” the retired elementary school teacher told the city council. “Pipes eventually leak.” ADM’s facility in central Illinois was the first permitted commercial carbon sequestration operation in the country.

Mutual Aid And Mosh Pits

October 18, 2024 Briana L. Urena-Ravelo, In These Times. Organize! Chicago, Illinois, Immigrant Rights, Music, Mutual Aid

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.

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