Buses leave from the Hyatt Regency at 8:15 a.m. on Thursday and Friday, May 17 and 18, and return by 11 a.m.  Information is at thegrassrootscollaborative.org.

Thursday’s tour will cover Little Village, one of the city’s largest Latino neighborhoods, where community groups are working to address youth violence; and Back of the Yards, where one of six mental health centers recently closed by the city is located.

(The two clinics primarily serving Latino communities were closed, as were four of six South Side clinics; all bilingual staff was laid off, to save $3 million.  Having been repeatedly rebuffed in attempts to hold meetings with city officials – including a City Council hearing blocked by the mayor– the Mental Health Movement is planning to march on Mayor Emanuel’s home on Saturday morning.)

Friday morning’s tour will cover Englewood, a poor African-American community hard hit by foreclosures and violence, and Brighton Park, where low-income Latino residents are developing community schools.

Grassroots Collaborative, a citywide coalition of labor and community organizations, is questioning the priorities of spending millions of dollars to host the NATO summit while the city shuts down clinics and schools, said Eric Tellez.

On another level, he said, NATO spends billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars while poverty and unemployment “devastates communities across the country” and “the global poor fall deeper into poverty.”

Party fund

Last month the coalition called on World Business Chicago, which is raising money to host NATO, to donate comparable sums to establish a Neighborhood Jobs Trust.  In recent statements, the group is focusing on the $14 million being spent on parties for the summit.

“Spending $14 million on food and wine and music just seems evil and sinful when you have kids in this neighborhood who have no place to play, when you have parents keeping their children inside after school because they’re afraid of gun violence,” said Pastor Victor Rodriguez of La Villita Church in Little Village, a leader in Enlace Chicago.

To visiting journalists he says, “I would ask them to ask somebody if it’s fair to spend $14 million on parties when organizations are looking for $600 to buy new equipment so that 120 kids can stay off the streets for a year.”

Emanuel has “cut the head tax for the corporations and then the corporations turn back around in a deal and donate to support NATO coming here,” says Charles Brown, a 43-year resident of Englewood and a leader with Action Now.  “Well the people that are going to profit from NATO coming here…it’s going to be the corporations.

“Will you treat us the way that you’re treating NATO, spend $14 million on us and put forth a program to help the people that are struggling and suffering?  So that we won’t tear down any more homes, so that we’ll start preserving them, so that the banks will start paying their fair share and giving back to the 99 percent that made all of this possible?”

“Our elected officials time and time again take the podium and pound their fists and say it’s about the kids, it’s about the kids,” said Rodriguez.  “I think that about 10 percent of that $14 million would do so much good here in our community.”

 
Pastor Victor Rodriguez, Enlace Chicago, Little Village:

Charles Brown, Action Now, Englewood:

Sonovia Petty, Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, Austin:

A series of events is commemorating what would have been Studs Terkel’s 100th birthday, including two events Wednesday, and a concert on Saturday marks Woody Guthrie’s centennial.

Studs and Woody had a lot in common.  Both were products of the Great Depression, Studs first finding his voice writing and acting for the WPA; Woody, having hitchhiked and ridden the rails to California, hosting and performing on a radio show for fellow Okie refugees from the Dust Bowl.

Both were prolific, Studs hosting a daily radio show on WFMT for 45 years and writing 18 books, many of them bestsellers, the final one at age 96; Woody writing thousands of songs.  Each created a body of work reflecting their close identification with ordinary people.  And both lent their talents to countless progressive causes, speaking and performing at innumerable protest rallies.

As a disc jockey in the 1940s, Studs was “one of the first to promote artists like Mahalia Jackson, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Big Bill Broonzy,” according to his New York Times obituary.

And a Woody Guthrie song helped catalyze Studs’ career as an interviewer.  According to the Times, Studs contacted WFMT and began working there after hearing the station broadcast Woody Guthrie in 1952 and wondering, “Who plays Guthrie records besides me?”

Fittingly, Terkel’s signature sign-off on his radio show came from “Talking Union Blues,” by Guthrie’s Almanac Singers: “Take it easy, but take it.”

The Studs Terkel Centennial Committee holds a 100th birthday party at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, May 16, at the Newberry Library (60 W. Walton), blocks from the Grand-Wells Hotel where Studs grew up, and across the street from Bughouse Square, where he was schooled by soap-box oraters.  Writers, activists, journalists and historians will share Terkel stories.  It’s free, and there’s cake.

Also Wednesday, at 6:30 p.m., the Chicago History Museum (1601 N. Clark) hosts WFMT critic-at-large Andrew Patner exploring Terkel’s life and legacy through radio and TV clips from his 75-year broadcasting career (from the Terkel tapes archived at CHM, now being digitized by the Library of Congress).  It’s $15, $10 for members.  (Patner’s interview with Terkel is available here.)

There’s more, too: Steppenwolf Theater features a free reading form Terkel’s “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” Monday, May 21, 7 p.m. (1650 N. Halsted), and a Studs Terkel Film Festival will feature clips from “Studs’ Place,” his early-1950s live TV show set in a Chicago diner, at CHM on June 2 and the Cultural Center on June 17.

To honor the pioneer oral historian, the Jane Addams Hull House Museum  has set up a hotline where you can call and record your own Studs Terkel story.  WFMT (98.7 FM), which broadcasts “The Best of Studs Terkel” every Friday at 10 p.m., will feature highlights from his shows on Wednesday from 1 to 7 p.m.

Portoluz is presenting a centennial celebration of Woody Guthrie on Saturday, May 18 at 7 p.m. at Metro, 3730 N. Clark; tickets are $25-$55.  It’s headlined by Tom Morello, of Rage Against the Machine fame, who has often performed to support progressive causes (his appearance Thursday at the National Nurses Union rally in Daley Plaza has already caused some stir).

He’ll be joined by Holly Near, a major figure in the women’s music movement that emerged in the 1970s, whose anthemic songs include “No More Genocide in my Name,” “Hoy Una Mujera Desaparecida,” and “Singing for our Lives,” written after Harvey Milk was assassinated; the Klezmatics, who recorded Guthrie’s little-known Hanukkah songs and songs about Jewish tradition, written while he lived in Coney Island in the 1940s; and Toshi Reagon, who continues and updates the civil rights Freedom Singers music of her mother, Bernice Johnson Reagon.

Also Jon Langford of the Waco Brothers and the Mekons, which performed to support the 1984 UK miners’ strike; Son del Viento, which performs jarocho music, often appearing in support of progressive causes; Bucky Halter, songwriter and historian who performs labor and working-class protest music, including programs of Guthrie’s music; and Kevin Coval, local hip-hop spoken word artist and founder of Louder Than A Bomb, Chicago’s youth poetry festival.

It’s one of dozens of points that came up in several wide-ranging talks with Rozoff, a Chicagoan who for 13 years has edited the Stop NATO blog, almost certainly the most comprehensive source for news and critical analysis of the alliance in the world.

On Thursday, Rozoff and a representative of Iraq Veterans Against the War will take the anti-NATO position in a debate with former Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns and NATO Deputy Assistant Secretary James Appathurai at the Pritzker Military Library.

Making war around the world

Stop NATO started in 1999, a watershed year according to Rozoff, when NATO launched its first war, a 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.  That’s the point at which NATO moved beyond its posture as a strictly defensive organization protecting its members’ territories to become “an active war-making organization” – and when promises of post-Cold War demilitarization and a “peace dividend” were betrayed, he says.

Since then NATO has conducted wars in Asia and Africa – a brutal ten-year slog with heavy civilian casulaties in Afghanistan, NATO’s first ground war, and a six-month bombing campaign in Libya.

Despite the unprecedented presence of 150,000 troops from 50 nations (including NATO members and partners) waging war in a single, relatively small country, Afghanistan is widely viewed as a defeat for the alliance. NATO claims Libya as a victory, though the nation is now dominated by fundamentalists and riven by clan wars, with instability spreading to other African nations, Rozoff points out.

Global expeditionary force

A major function of these wars, he argues, is to integrate the  militaries of NATO members and scores of partner nations into a “global expeditionary force,” with small countries enlisted in efforts to ensure Western access to resources and hem in nations with independent foreign policies –notably Russia, China, and Iran.

NATO’s expanded military alliance “puts smaller countries in the position of having to respond when the major powers call for assistance,” obliges them to accept U.S. and NATO bases on their territory, and requires them to purchase advanced weaponry – which they don’t need and can’t afford – from Western nations, Rozoff says.

The Chicago summit will deal with transitioning to a new phase of involvement in Afghanistan, further integrating the forty NATO partner states that participate in the alliance’s wars, and upgrading the alliance’s military capabilities.  NATO is expected to announce that its European interceptor missile system has achieved initial operational capability.

Nuclear tensions

While touted as a defense against attacks from North Korea or Iran, the missile system seems to be aimed at Russia, destabilizing the continent’s nuclear balance and ratcheting up tensions.  Indeed, Rozoff says the system “is not to be construed as a defensive project whatsoever,” and ultimately could be part of a first-strike nuclear system.

Rozoff notes other developments to watch, including U.S. plans to spend $4 billion to modernize its European-based nuclear weapons, NATO’s first move to acquire drone technology, and calls for NATO to intervene in Syria and Mali.  It’s all covered in detail at Stop NATO, a compilation of international news reports along with Rozoff’s trenchant commentary.

The Chicago summit “leaves us face to face with the most burning question of our era,” Rozoff told interviewer Allen Ruff on WORT-FM in Madison earlier this month. “Which is that 21 years after the end of the Cold War, we have lived through incessant warfare, there have been wars after wars after wars, in Iraq and Somalia and Bosnia and Kosovo and Afghanistan, in Iraq again, in Libya, we’re seeing bombing and missile attacks into Pakistan and Somalia and Yemen, and on and on and on.

“And it is about time that the people of Chicago, of the United States and the world, say look: there was a promise 21 years ago when the Cold War ended, that we would have peace, that we would have disarmament, we would have a peace dividend that directed funds from killing to fund human needs and human development.”

He points out that the United States spent $729 billion last year for the Defense Department — $2,400 for every person living in the country.  “There are better things to do with that money than to kill people.”

NATO will review the strategic agreement between the U.S. and Afghanistan, which will allow drone attacks to continue, despite Afghanistan’s attempt to negotiate an end to them. NATO will also review a deal reached earlier this year for members to kick in $1.4 billion to start building its own drone force.

Drone war is also behind the decision not to invite Pakistan to the Chicago summit, although the nation is one of dozens of NATO “partners,” and an important one. The U.S. reportedly pressed for its exclusion because Pakistan refused to reopen NATO supply routes closed after a U.S. drone attack killed 24 Pakistani soldiers last November.

Pakistan, previously in tacit support of the drone war, has now demanded it be ended, to no avail.

Farce

Pakistan’s exclusion from the summit “makes the whole thing a farce,” said Pakistani-American human rights activist Rafia Zakaria. “You’re supposed to be figuring out the future of the Afghanistan mission and the negotiations with the Taliban, and you don’t have the country that’s integral to all of that.”

Zakaria will be speaking along with Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, author of the new book, “Drone Wars,” at the Heartland Cafe, 7000 N. Glenwood, on Monday, May 14 at 7 p.m.

The book is an attempt “to make the American people aware of how counterproductive drone warfare is, how many innocent civilians it kills, how it creates blowback and anti-U.S. sentiment – and to get more people involved in calling for an end to it,” Benjamin said.

Code Pink has protested at drone bases, as has the locally-based group Voices for Creative Nonviolence. Last month VCNV and grassroots peace groups in Missouri, upstate New York, and Wisconsin held protests and committed civil disobedience at air bases where drones are maintained and deployed.

Killing civilians

They delivered a war crimes indictment charging the U.S. chain of command, from the president on down, with violations of U.S. and international law including “extrajudicial killings, violation of due process, wars of aggression, violation of national sovereignty, and the killing of innocent civilians.”

Kathy Kelly of VCNV said she and colleagues “have been in Pakistan and Afghanistan and become aware of how much fear and mistrust the drone attacks have caused. We’ve talked to people who’ve lost loved ones” in drone attacks. One young girl she met in an Afghan refugee camp lost an arm in a drone attack; her brother was seriously injured; her uncle lost his wife and five daughters.

Given the secrecy in which the program is cloaked, it’s hard to know how many civilians have been killed, Kelly said. According to a VCNV pamphlet, “The vast majority of victims of drone strikes through the history of drone warfare have been innocent civilians.”

An extensive effort by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, based at City University in London, has identified the names of 317 civilians killed in U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan, including 174 children. Out of up to 3,000 or more people killed in about 300 attacks, BIJ was able to identify 171 named militants.

The actual numbers are almost certainly higher. One “precision” targeted assassination in 2009 killed the leader of the Pakistan Taliban, along with his wife and her father. But according to Rolling Stone, it was the fourth attempt on the man’s life; 45 civilians were killed in one earlier attempt, and 35 more, including an 8-year-old boy, in another.

A game of odds

The Obama administration has dramatically stepped up drone attacks (they’re carried out by the U.S. military in Afghanistan and by the CIA in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen). After being coy about it for a couple of years, in January the president defended the program as “very precise,” saying drone strikes “have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties.”

The program appeals to the administration as “a more targeted way of waging war,” one without the political costs associated with troop casualties, according to RS. “From the moment Obama took office, according to Washington insiders, the new commander in chief evinced a ‘love’ of drones” – an enthusiasm shared by top aides including then-chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who “would routinely arrive at the White House and demand, ‘Who did we get today?’”

The expansion involved moving beyond targeted assassinations of top Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders to selecting targets based on suspicious activity observed by drone surveillance. When it comes to these kinds of attacks, “the decision to launch a drone assault is essentially an odds game,” according to RS. “If the agency think’s it’s likely that the group of individuals are insurgents, it will take a shot.”

A former official tells Rolling Stone: “The CIA is doing a lot more targeting on a percentage basis.”

In one case RS reports, a well-known, pro-U.S. human rights advocate was killed because the CIA confused his cell-phone number with that of a Taliban leader.

Fighting terrorism

Zakaria uses words like “absurd” and “ludicrous” to describe the program. Based in Indiana, she’s a board member of Amnesty International, a columnist at Dawn, Pakistan’s major English-language newspaper, and author of the forthcoming book, “Silence in Karachi: An Intimate History of Pakistan” (Beacon).

“You would never put people on a remotely-piloted aircraft, but we’re willing to use the same thing to kill people,” she says. (Clearly, it’s only feasible in areas where we have little concern for the welfare of the general population.)

One problem is that drone warfare is presented as a tactic against terrorism. “If you put terrorism on one side of a scale and anything on the other side, you can make anything seem defensible – torture, indefinite detention, drones,” says Zakaria.

“Drones are not a solution to terrorism,” she says. Refugees consistently say that after every drone attack, “the first people on the scene are Taliban who recruit family members of the victims,” she says. “What [drones are] doing is really providing a replacement supply of recruits for whomever is killed in a strike.”

She points out that 5,000 Pakistanis were killed in nearly 500 terrorist attacks last year. “If drones are working so well – if they’re really crippling the capacity of Al Qaeda and the Taliban – how in the world are they possibly doing 500 attacks in one year?”

Reuters’ David Rohde, arguing that Obama’s drone strategy is “backfiring,” points to Yemen as another case. Twenty drone strikes were carried out there in the months after a Yemeni-trained militant tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner in December 2009.

“In addition to killing Al Qaeda-linked militants, the strikes killed dozens of civilians, according to Yemenis. Instead of decimating the organization, the Obama strikes have increased the ranks of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula from 300 fighters in 2009 to more than 1,000 today, according to Gregory Johnsen, a leading Yemen expert at Princeton University. In January, the group briefly seized control of Radda, a town only 100 miles from the capital, Sanaa.”

Destroying Pakistan

Zakaria also raises the “secondary effects” of the drone war, with camps and cities – already lacking infrastructure and jobs — swollen by hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing areas where drone strikes are common and the hovering presence of the weapons is constant.

“Pakistan is being destroyed by the effects of the drones,” she said. “They’re supposed to be ‘surgical strikes’ excising a cancer, but the whole body is dying.”

Kelly has similar stories about swollen refugee camps in Afghanistan, where 40 people froze to death last winter, and of Kabul, where 5 million now live in a city built for 500,000.

Why do people flee areas where drones are in use? What’s it like to live under the protection of these things?

“From the ground, drones are terrifying weapons that can be heard circling overhead for hours at a time,” writes Rohde, who was held captive by the Taliban from November 2008 until he escaped in June 2009. “They are a potent, unnerving symbol of unchecked American power.”

A Pakistani attorney for 80 families of drone victims says that in the province of Waziristan, there are four or five drones in the air at any given time.

Kelly and VCNV are currently on a 170-mile peace walk from Madison to Chicago to protest the NATO summit. They bring with them an alternative agenda for the summit: immediately end drone strikes, dismantle the NATO mission in Afghanistan, end diplomatic and financial support for Hamid Karzai “and the warlords in the National Assembly,” and provide reparations commensurate to the destruction caused by the U.S./NATO war.

In addition to their own stories, they offer valuable perspectives on the crucial issue of women’s rights in Afghanistan.  That’s also the subject of a Shadow Summit for Afghan Women’s Rights being held by Amnesty International at the Swissotel, 325 E. Wacker, on Sunday, May 20, the opening day of the NATO summit – where, Amnesty notes, Afghan women won’t be represented, though their interests will be seriously impacted.

Kathy Kelly, Malalai Joya, and Medea Benjamin are each speaking at the People’s Summit, Saturday and Sunday, May 12 and 13, at 500 W. Cermak (schedule here) and at the No to NATO rally Sunday, May 20 at noon in Grant Park.

Kathy Kelly

Born and raised on Chicago’s Southwest Side, Kathy Kelly became an anti-war activist through the Uptown Catholic Worker House in the late 1970s.  She’s been arrested in peace actions over 60 times and been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times, once by Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire.  She co-founded Voices in the Wilderness in 1995, which sent medical supplies to Iraq in defiance of the U.S. embargo.

With VITW and its successor, Voices for Creative Nonviolence, founded in 2005, Kelly has travelled countless times to war zones; she was in Baghdad for the U.S. invasion in 2003, Lebanon during the 2006 invasion, and Gaza during the Israeli attack in 2008; she and her colleagues have visited Iraq and Afghanistan extensively.

“We try to live in poor neighborhoods, alongside people who can’t escape the war zones, and listen to ordinary people whose voices are never heard,” she said.  She frequently reports on the experiences and views of the people she lives among.  She talks about the 250 Afghan children dying of starvation every day, while the U.S. spends $2 billion a week on the war.

“She’s an inspirational leader,” said Rev. Bob Bossie, who co-founded VITW and is now retired. “She’s radically committed to nonviolence.”  VCVN “is known across the country as an organization that’s not sitting on its heels, that’s taking risks in a nonviolent way to say we won’t be compliant, we will speak out again and again and stand with the people who are being oppressed,” he said.

The group “challenges us all to see what we more can do – what next step can I take,” he said.  “We can’t all go to war zones, but we can all do more.”

The announcement that the U.S. is withdrawing from Afghanistan is “very misleading,” Kellly said.  “It’s simply not true.  The Joint Special Operations forces, the most intimidating and fearsome warriors on the planet, will remain till 2024 and beyond.

“Our bases will be turned over the to Afghan government, which will lease them back to us.  We’re building the world’s largest embassy in Kabul – it’s really a huge base – and we’re building three prisons.  The night raids will continue at the insistence of the U.S.

“All these things are going to continue, so how can we say the U.S. is withdrawing from Afghanistan?  It’s hypocritical.

“And all these things mean the Taliban will keep fighting, and the people of Afghanistan will be subjected to another decade of warfare.”

Kathy Kelly is currently taking part in a VCNV march from Madison to Chicago.  She’s also on a panel on “How does war end” (3:15 p.m., Friday, May 18) at the Counter-Summit for Peace and Economic Justice at People’s Church, 941 W. Lawrence.

Malalai Joya

Born in Western Afghanistan in 1978, shortly before the Soviet invasion, Malalai Joya is of a generation that has “only known bloodshed, displacement, and occupation,” she writes in her book, “A Woman Among Warlords.”

Her father lost a leg fighting the Soviets, and she grew up in refugee camps.  She was not yet 20 when a women’s rights group sent her back to Afghanistan to start an underground school for girls, illegal under the Taliban.  She was 25 when, as a delegate to the Loya Jirga, she denounced the warlords who had taken over from the Tablian. She was accosted and insulted and finally removed from the assembly (see video below).

But her speech won widespread popular favor, and she was elected to the national assembly in 2005 – and then expelled in 2007 for making remarks deemed disrespectful.

She continues to campaign for peace, democracy, and women’s rights, though after several assassination attempts, she moves constantly between safehouses, attended by bodyguards.

In “A Woman Among Warlords,” Joya writes:  “The situation in Afghanistan is getting progressively worse. And not just for women, but for all Afghans. We are caught between two enemies — the Taliban on one side and the U.S./ NATO forces and their warlord friends on the other. And the dark-minded forces in our country are gaining power with every allied air strike that kills civilians, with every corrupt government official who grows fat on bribes and thievery, and with every criminal who escapes justice…

“In Afghanistan, democratic-minded people have been struggling for human and women’s rights for decades. Our history proves that these values cannot be imposed by foreign troops. As I never tire of telling my audiences, no nation can donate liberation to another nation. These values must be fought for and won by the people themselves. They can only grow and flourish when they are planted by the people in their own soil and watered by their own blood and tears.”

From a recent speech: “We need security and a helping hand from  friends around the world, not this endless U.S.-led ‘war on terror,’ which is in fact a war on the Afghan people….Today the soil of Afghanistan is full of land mines, bullets, and bombs – when what we really need is an invasion of hospitals, clinics, and schools for boys and girls.”

Medea Benjamin

Before she co-founded Code Pink, Medea Benjamin co-founded Global Exchange, an international human rights organization that helped force Nike to address sweatshop issues in the 1990s.

Code Pink – named for the Bush administration’s color-coded security alerts – has disrupted speeches by George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, Hillary Clinton, Benjamin Netanyahu and others, and has organized delegations to Iraq and Afghanistan.  Benjamin has a new book out on “Drone Warfare.”

“There’s no easy solution” to the problem of women’s rights in Afghanistan, she said. She notes that women she’s met with there have a range of opinions on how to proceed – and that, contrary to perceptions here, women outside cities find themselves in “pretty much the same situation” they were in under the Taliban. “They’re still going around in burqas.”

“Whether the U.S. pulls out this year or next year or the year after, there are still going to be fundamentalists, and women are still going to have to fight for their rights,” Benjamin said. “It’s going to have to be an indigenous solution.”

Many women there say “there will be no peace without a negotiated solution, and Afghan women must br at the table where negotiations are going on,” Benjamin said.  But with secret talks now going on between the U.S. the Taliban, she points out, that isn’t happening.

Medea Benjamin joins human rights activist Rafia Zakaria to discuss “Drone Wars,” Monday, May 14, 7 p.m. at the Heartland Cafe, 7000 N. Glenwood.  She’s also joining with colleagues from Code Pink in a panel of “creative tactics for peace and justice” at the Counter-Summit (Friday, May 18, 3:15 p.m.)

Confronting power

 
Malalai Joya’s speech to the Loya Jirga, December 17, 2003

Medea Benjamin confronts John Brennan, Special Assistant to the President on Counterterrorism, April 30, 2012, Washington DC

Kathy Kelly speaks to Missouri riot police at an anti-drone protest at Whiteman Air Force Base on April 15; three people seeking to present a war crimes indictment were arrested. (Seven more were arrested at an anti-drone protest at Volk Field in Camp Douglas, Wisconsin on April 24.)

Hundreds of airport workers will convene at 9:45 a.m. on Thursday, May 10, at the departure area of Chicago O’Hare Terminal 1, according to UNITE-HERE Local 1, which represents concessions workers.

It’s the first labor action at the airport in recent memory, according to a union spokesperson.

The union says the jobs and wages of  2,400 concessions workers at O’Hare and Midway are threatened by the redevelopment. It’s backing the Stable Jobs, Stable Airports Ordinance, introduced by Ald. Jason Ervin with 31 cosponsors last October.

The ordinance would end a loophoole for airport contractors in the 1998 living wage ordinance, and would require that new contractors retain incumbent workers for a probationary period.  It would also ban work stoppages and picketing.

The ordinance would boost pay for about two-thirds of the workers to $11.18 an hour – an average of 22 percent or $4,000 a year, according to In These Times.

Other cities have similar measures, but Ervin’s ordinance is stuck in the Workforce Development and Audit Committee, chaired by Mayor Emanuel’s floor leader, Ald. Patrick O’Connor.  The Department of Aviation opposes the measure, according to Progress Illinois.

There’s a rally and press conference Wednesday, May 9 at 6:30 a.m. at 225 W. Chicago.  Speakers include Elce Redmond of the South Austin Coalition, where Chicago’s first Walmart was built; Suzanne Keers of Local First Chicago, an organization of small business owners; Larry Born of Organization United for Respect at Walmart, a national group of Walmart associates; and Leticia Rodriguez of Warehouse Workers for Justice, which has sued Walmart warehouse operators near Elgin for wage theft.