Community organizing was born in Chicago, so it’s a surprise that it took so long for an organizer to become mayor.
“I’m struck by how much work it took to bring us to this moment and how many decades of slow grinding progress,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said toward the beginning of Monday’s inaugural address in the Credit Union 1 Arena on the University of Illinois-Chicago campus. “Think about the labor movement, which produced luminaries like my mentor and dear sister Karen Lewis, who mattered through social justice unionism and helped lead the multiracial, multicultural working class movement that organized its way to this moment. The same labor movement that raised wages, established the 40-hour workweek, and built the middle class in this city.”
Brandon Johnson’s mayoralty is seen as the culmination of teachers union militancy that began in 2012, when his predecessor Rahm Emanuel closed 50 schools. But as Johnson pointed out, the union movement that produced him has such a long history in Chicago that yes, it is striking that we’ve waited so long for one of its members to become mayor.
Chicago is home to a tradition of worker activism that goes back to the 19th Century, and has been central to the development of the American labor movement. The movement for an eight-hour day began here, in the 1860s. In 1867, the city’s Trades Assembly called a general strike to protest the state’s new eight-hour day law, which allowed employers to contract with workers for longer...
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