Letter from the Alderman (09.08.26) Dear Neighbors, Labor Day asks something of us beyond a day off. It's worth sitting with for a minute before the burgers come off the grill, thinking about what the weekend was actually built to honor. Chicago did not get handed its identity as a union town. It built that identity the way it built everything else here: brick by brick, shift by shift, and sometimes at real cost. In 1886, workers at Haymarket Square gathered to demand something that sounds modest now and was radical then, an eight-hour day, so a person's whole life didn't belong to their employer. In 1894, Pullman workers walked out over wages slashed while rent stayed the same, and their fight helped give this country the very holiday we're marking this weekend. The Chicago Federation of Labor grew out of that same atmosphere, born from the plain recognition that a single worker's voice is easy to ignore, and a hundred thousand voices together are not. That history runs straight through this ward. Our Near North community has its own chapter in that story. In December of 2008, workers at Republic Windows and Doors in Goose Island got three days' notice that their plant was closing after a bank pulled its credit line. Instead of walking out quietly, two hundred of them walked in and stayed, nine days occupying that factory floor, refusing to let a decision made in a boardroom erase the value of what they'd built with their hands. It was the first sit-down factory occupation this country had seen in decades, and it happened right here, because workers believed they mattered enough to fight for it. A worker asking for a safe scaffold, a fair schedule, or a wage that covers the rent isn't asking for a favor. They're asking for what this city's entire labor history says they're owed. So this Labor Day, I want to say plainly what I believe: every person who shows up to do honest work deserves a workplace that respects them, protects them, and lets them organize alongside their coworkers without fear of losing their job for it. That's not a controversial position in a ward with that history in it. It's just history, still writing itself. Sincerely, Alderman Walter Redmond Burnett 27th Ward |
