Chicago Warehouse Workers Navigate Maze Of Contractors To Organize
Labor Notes
By Jane Slaughter
Heading down I-55 or I-80 southwest of Chicago, a driver passes mile after mile of anonymous, windowless warehouses. Each year a trillion dollars worth of goods moves through the area, one of the bigger nodes in the global distribution network of consumer products.
Computers, air conditioners, vacuum cleaners, Halloween costumes arrive at West Coast ports on ships from Asia, are loaded onto trains, and chug to the City of Big Shoulders, where all six Class 1 railroads meet. Workers offload the goods, which are piled onto trucks or other trains and travel to the big boxes.
In between, those goods spend some time in a warehouse. “If it wasn’t for us, none of the stuff you have in your house would be in your house,” says Monica Morales, a former worker at a warehouse for Bissell, the vacuum cleaner maker. “There’s not many items that we don’t touch.”
Morales was fired in November 2009, along with 70 co-workers, a week after they filed charges against their employer, the contractor Maersk Logistics, for violations of minimum wage, civil rights, and labor laws and told management they had formed a union.
She is a member of Warehouse Workers for Justice, a worker center affiliated with the United Electrical Workers (UE). WWJ unites workers from across the dizzying array of contractors that operate in the warehouses and helps them fight for their rights with lawsuits, media pressure, and in-plant actions.
On October 15, with support from WWJ, UE launched an organizing committee, pulling together 50 leaders from different shops as a first step toward forming a union among the 150,000 warehouse workers in the area.