Committee on Workforce Development
Chicago City Council
Labor
Politics
121 N LaSalle St Chicago, IL 60602 (Directions)
This meeting will consider O2019-3928, Amendment of Municipal Code Title 1 by adding new Chapter 1-25 entitled “Chicago Fair Workweek Ordinance”.
Check the source website for additional information
Reporting
Edited and summarized by the Chicago - IL Documenters Team
Live reporting by
Mike Tish
Hey folks! Mike Tish here with @CHIdocumenters . Today I’m at City Council reporting the Committee on Workforce Development meeting. Today’s agenda has only one item, a potential new amendment: The Chicago Fair Workweek Ordinance
01:27 PM Jul 22, 2019 CDT
The committee has jurisdiction over collective bargaining agreements, employee benefits, matters affecting pensions of city employees, and all other personnel matters generally relating to the City gov. 1/2
2/2 this committee’s jurisdiction also includes efforts intended to expand the city’s private workforce and to create job opportunities.
Today’s meeting, set to start at 1 p.m., is yet to begin. There are probably about 100 people here, with dozens donning SEIU Healthcare t-shirts. Not surprising, as the potential new ordinance will greatly affect hospital and service-industry workers
Don’t get your hopes up, folks. Chairwoman @SSadlowskiGarza just called for a recess and says her committee will reconvene tomorrow for a vote on the proposed amendments to the Chicago Fair Workweek Ordinance
After the meeting, @SSadlowskiGarza met with hospital workers and union officials outside of the City Council Chambers
Sadlowski-Garza apologized for delaying the vote, but said that today’s cancellation happened because she hadn’t seen the most up-to-date version of the draft
“I could not, in good conscience, call the meeting to order and talk about something that no one has seen. That’s not good government”
She cited the importance of transparency as another factor in her thought-process
Sadlowski-Garza says that she thought she had the final version in front of her when the meeting was set to begin. So where’s the ordinance now? Still being negotiated, she said
The chairwoman went on to say that she has a commitment from the negotiating team that they will stay at the table until the ordinance is finalized
“I’m very hopeful that we get it tomorrow, Sadlowski-Garza said,” So that we can vote it out of committee and get it passed on Wednesday.”
Fran Zell, another Documenter present at today’s meeting, asked Sadlowski-Garza if she thinks public comment would’ve been helpful in these negotiations. The meeting was called into recess before any member of the public had a chance to speak
The chairwoman deflected and questioned whether there would have been a point to public comment regarding ongoing negotiations
In any case, hospital workers from places such as Mount Sinai Hospital and Northwestern Hospital waited outside of the chamber. They began letting @SSadlowskiGarza know what they wanted out of this deal
About this deal. Going off of the latest publicly available amendment draft of the Chicago Fair Workweek Ordinance, this ordinance focuses on protective scheduling. See a copy of this draft here: chicago.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&…
chicago.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&…
Protective scheduling is a labor-friendly issue that seems to be picking up steam across the country. In general, these laws require employers to post work schedules a certain number of days in advance.
In Chicago’s proposal, which would kick in on April 1, 2020, employers would need to provide schedules 10 days in advance. That number would eventually rise to 14 days
These has been implemented, in some form, in places such as Oregon, Seattle, San Francisco and New York City. lexology.com/library/detail…
lexology.com/library/detail…
Chicago’s proposal would be one of the most expansive protective scheduling laws in the country. Here’s why.
According to the Lexology report linked above, in most cases this kind of regulation has focused on retail and hospitality industries
In Chicago, this bill would be expanded to include most hourly workers. Think: employees at hospitals, airports, construction companies, manufacturing firms, and more.
In its most recent draft, the city states that the goal is to ensure that—through protective scheduling—Chicagoans are able to “attend to families, health, education, and other personal and familial obligations.”
It would allow folks you dtime to plan essential tasks such as child care, schoolwork, a second job... That’s hard to do when you receive your work schedule on one day’s notice or even one week’s notice
Back to the hospital workers. Rumors reached most of the folks at the meeting that hospital corporations were lobbying to cap eligible workers at folks who make less than $25/hour
This was the first issue brought up to @SSadlowskiGarza following her explanation of moving the vote to tomorrow. One hospital worker said this ordinance needs to include every single worker.
Hospital employees who have achieved a pay grade that exceeds $25/hour shouldn’t be punished by not being included in this ordinance, she went on to say.
“You tell me that if I make $25/hour and now all of the sudden I get cut early...then I’m now only working part-time hours,” the worker said. “Don’t cut me when you have CEOs, making billions of dollars, who do not do my work and will not do my work.”
. @SSadlowskiGarza says the woman is “preaching to the choir.” “The $25/hour [cap] should not be in there as far as I’m concerned.”
. @SSadlowskiGarza cites her experience as a labor leader for the Chicago Teachers’ Union as she tells these workers that she knows labor better than anyone in the building.
She goes on to say that her allegiance is to the working class, and that she’s made sure these workers’ union leaders have a seat at the table. She instructed people there to email her if they had any more questions
Immediately afterward I spoke with Marrie Ogunleye, a registered nurse at Mount Sinai
Ogunleye, a nurse of 15 years, says she feels bad at the moment. “I was so ready to talk to the council and let them know what we go through.” She’s scheduled to work tomorrow, so she probably won’t be able to make it to the rescheduled meeting
“I could call in sick,” she said, “But if my bosses see me on TV, well, obviously they’d know I lied to them.”
Ogunleye says she thinks @SSadlowskiGarza knows what they are going through. In general it seemed that most of the workers who stayed to listen were impressed with the chairwoman
She came to today’s meeting hopeful, Ogunleye said. If she had been able to give her public comment at the meeting today, she would’ve spoken about the low on-call pay nurses receive at her hospital
Ogunleye said that at her hospital, nurses are on-call for six hours. She usually gets up at 5 a.m. and is on-call from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. She’s paid $2/hour for her time on-call
“I can’t even imagine telling people that I make $2/hour,” she said. “It’s a disgrace.”
This means she makes her living on the times she is called in to work. Problem is, she said, they only call you in if they need you.
Often times, she added, you don’t get called in b/c the hospital doesn’t need you. Most of the time, she said, is a lie. “They are tripling up other nurses because they don’t want to pay me.”
Not calling in nurses means the folks who /are/ present are overworked. Ogunleye, who works in ICU, says she is supposed to to work with only two people at a time. When no help comes, though, she is forced to take on an extra person, or two.
On when she’s tasked with more than two patients: “Mentally, you don’t know what you’re doing, and it leads to mistakes. You can kill somebody.”
Next I spoke with Greg Kelley. He’s been president of the Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, and Kansas SEIU Healthcare Union chapters since April 2017. It represents tens of thousands of workers.
Coming into today, Kelley’s expected to give testimony in support of the fair workweek ordinance. He says his team has been adamant that there should be no $25/hour threshold (or any threshold at all). The hospital industry, and others, argue that there should be a threshold
If he had been given the chance to speak today, Kelley says he would’ve spoken to how this ordinance is necessary to folks who work in hospitals. These folks, he says, are often sent home when the hospital says they don’t have a certain number of patients
This complicates workers lives’ in at least a couple of ways, he said. One of them being that you go to work expecting to work a full day, and you don’t get paid for a full day.
“Many of these hospitals have the resources to do it,” he says. “The unpredictability of these schedules makes for a very difficult situation.”
On @SSadlowskiGarza , and whether he’s confident in her leadership through this process: “Sue is a champion of ours, and I trust her judgment. I think at the end of the day, we’ll get an ordinance, and it will be in large part b/c of her leadership.”
We’ll find out whether Kelley’s faith, and the faith of the other workers present at today’s meeting, will pay off tomorrow at noon. That’s when the Committee on Workforce Development is scheduled to return from recess and vote on this proposal.
Until then, I’m signing off. @CHIdocumenters will have the scoop on tomorrow’s meeting—along with so much more that’s going on in the city and the county—so follow us there if you’d like to stay in the know. Thanks for reading!!
Here are shots of the crowd, of @SSadlowskiGarza speaking to hospital workers, and the chairwoman surrounded by media following the recess
Attachments
4 attachments
Agency Information
Chicago City Council
The Chicago City Council is the legislative branch of the government of the City of Chicago and consists of the Mayor and Aldermen elected from each of the City’s fifty wards. Source
If you attend a meeting in person, be prepared to go through a security checkpoint and show photo ID.
Meetings are also livestreamed at https://www.chicityclerk.com/.
At this link, scroll down to “Meeting Notices.” Look for “Watch now” and click on the link with the meeting title to go to a livestream page. If you don’t see a link for the meeting, you may be early or the meeting may be starting late. Wait a few moments and try refreshing your Internet tab.
Recordings of past City Council meetings may be found here: https://vimeo.com/user100351763/videos/sort:date.
See also: “What to Expect at a Meeting of Chicago’s City Council” via the Better Government Association.
More from this agency
Committee on Education and Child Development
Chicago City Council
Monday, April 14, 2025
10:00 a.m. CDT
Committee on Education and Child Development
Chicago City Council
Monday, April 14, 2025
11:00 a.m. CDT
Joint Committee: Finance; Housing & Real Estate
Chicago City Council
Monday, April 14, 2025
12:30 p.m. CDT