Posts tagged COVID-19 pandemic
Workers at more Chicago cultural venues are unionizing, even during a precarious moment for museums
December 12, 2025 // Still, the process of unionization may not be smooth at every site. At Chicago Botanic Garden, there’s a disagreement between workers and management with what steps should be required to establish a union. Employees who are advocating for better pay, health care and safety on the job and are represented by CMRJB Workers United say they are asking employees to sign union cards. However, Chicago Botanic Garden leadership opposes that approach in favor of a secret ballot election to vote on the union. “To skip that step would really be disenfranchising those eligible employees,” Chicago Botanic Garden President and CEO Jean Franczyk told the Chicago Sun-Times. “The process has multiple steps and options that you can pursue. But the one that we think protects individual eligible workers’ rights is that supervised election.”
Op-Ed: Federal union bosses: To ‘save democracy,’ let us finish destroying it
June 30, 2025 // How are federal union bosses reacting now that a president is finally taking action to put a halt to a system that, as former union attorney Kurt Hanslowe foresaw back in 1967, empowers “entrenched and mutually supportive government officials and collective bargaining representatives” over whom the public has “diminishing control” to make joint decisions about tax rates and other public policies? True to form, union officials are claiming Trump’s efforts to restore representative government are anti-democratic! For example, American Federation of Government Employees President Everett Kelley, whose union filed the pending lawsuit to block E.O.14251, unsurprisingly claims the Trump Administration’s actions “represent a clear threat” to “every American who “values democracy.”