Good morning, buenos dias.
Good morning.
Welcome.
Bienvenidos a la Casa de Arise Chicago.
Welcome to Arise Chicago.
For all the elected officials, our community partners,
and of course our dynamic mayor, the workers' mayor,
un aplauso para nuestro alcalde.
Good morning.
My name is Laura Garza, the executive director of Arise Chicago.
For 35 years, we've organized the collective power
of working-class immigrants in partnership with faith communities
to uplift all workers.
Today, we stand proudly with our mayor, the mayor of the workers, Brandon Johnson,
as he signs an historic ethical procurement executive order.
All Right Chicago has a long history of organizing workers to fight unscrupulous employers.
We back workers to recover millions in stolen wages,
unionize their worksites and discriminatory practices, stop sexual harassment,
eliminate health and safety hazards, and more.
We've always looked to our allies at City Hall to join us in our mission.
In 2023, we led the efforts to pass the Anti-Wage Deaf Ordinance,
which said to businesses that they must comply with the wages, the laws, to receive operating licenses.
In 2018, we expanded upon that by leading the efforts to pass the ordinance to create the Office of Labor Standards, the city's very own Labor Department, to enforce a growing list of worker city-based worker protections.
We've been recognized for our innovative co-enforcement policies and practices, and in 2014, we were proud to participate in the co-governor steering committee.
Our members helped the city develop its co-governance framework so that historically marginalized communities play an important role in the policies and practices of the city agencies.
Today, Executive Order builds on those past victories and expands worker power by holding city contractors responsible to higher standards of accountability.
And it's about time.
That's right. It's about time. I've had my share of experience as a contractor to the city.
These standards will ensure that businesses who seek to profit from workplace exportation, corrupt businesses' practices,
or deal with entities that are enemies of working class workers will not receive any public money.
By signing this executive order, the mayor is showing once again, as he always has, is showing workers that the city has their back.
The city will provide public oversight of the contractor's practices,
ensure workers are knowledgeable of their rights,
create meaningful consequences for employer violators.
Amidst a grave national political climate,
we mustn't relent on our local actions toward an economy that works for all of us,
all of our communities, for every single worker.
Let this legislation, this is a typo, let this executive order,
be an opportunity for us to renew our commitment to advancing worker power,
equitable workplaces, and ethical investments to benefit all of Chicago's communities.
Thank you for being here today, and I want to now introduce Dorian Warren,
the co-president of Community Change, and the spokesperson with Not With Our Money.
Thank you.
Good morning, and thank you, Laura, for that welcome.
Good morning.
Thank you.
Good morning.
Thank you, Mr. Mayor.
Thank you to Arise Chicago for 35 years of proving that when workers organize, this city changes.
Millions in stolen wages recovered.
An office of labor standards that exists because workers demanded it.
That is the foundation today's order is built on.
So my name is Dorian Warren.
I'm a spokesperson for Not With Our Money and co-president of Community Change Action.
And Laura told you what this order means for workers.
I want to tell you what it means for the money, because these are not two different fights.
The company that shortchanges workers on payday and the company that builds the tools to raid our neighborhoods.
Too often that is the same company, same playbook, they just send a different invoice.
Nobody has to explain this to Chicago.
Operation Midway Blitz launched almost exactly one year ago.
Neighbors seized off the streets, chemical agents in residential neighborhoods,
families afraid to walk to school.
And Chicagoans did not just watch.
Nearly one in four residents of this city took part in neighborhood protests against ICE over the past year,
even more marched in the No Kings demonstrations.
So the people of this city have passed judgment on those raids a long time ago.
Today, the city's money catches up with the people's judgment.
because cruelty on this scale does not pay for itself.
It runs on money.
It runs on contracts.
Every raid has vendors.
The surveillance software, the data systems, the logistics,
corporations provide all of it.
And many of those same corporations also do business with our cities and states,
collecting public money from the very communities
that their federal contracts help to target.
Follow the money and you find the same pattern in city after city.
Companies enriching this White House's political operation or underwriting the president's pet construction projects, winning lucrative federal contracts in return, and then showing up a municipal vendor list for the cities they helped attack.
Palantir, Motorola, Clark Construction, Amazon Web Services.
This is not a hypothetical.
We have mapped it. And in city after city, taxpayer dollars meant to serve the public are subsidizing the public's own harm.
Think about it this way. If your money manager kept investing your savings in the company that robbed your house, you wouldn't call that a strategy.
You would fire them. When a government keeps writing checks to corporations that profit from a tax on its own residence, that is not fiscal responsibility.
That is a fiduciary failure. And it is fixable. So this is what today's executive order begins to fix. Because the people's checkbook is not a getaway car. If you want the privilege of doing business with the city of Chicago, you have to do business the right way.
Commit a public integrity violation, bribery, pay-to-play, corrupt payments to officials,
or steal wages, or discriminate against your workers, and you can be disqualified from city contracts.
And the biggest contractors will have to tell the public who else is paying them,
including law enforcement agencies, and answer for their record on civil rights.
So let me give you the simplest version of what this order does.
It turns the lights on.
Bad deals get made in the dark, in back rooms and lately in ballrooms.
This order puts those deals into the daylight, where all of us can see who is getting the people's money and what they did to get it.
That is the oldest idea in democracy.
And today, Chicago puts it back to work.
The people decide what is done with the people's money.
The people of this city are clear about whose government this is.
Seventy-four percent of Chicagoans say that Chicago's leaders
should not take direction from billionaires who do not live here.
Seventy-nine percent say they trust leaders more
when they prioritize working families over wealthy corporations.
So, Mayor Johnson, today you are doing exactly
what the people of Chicago have asked their government to do.
And it is right that this begins in Chicago
because Chicago goes first.
The eight-hour day was fought on these streets.
Modern community organizing was born in back of the yards.
The Pullman Porters organized in this city's rail yards
and helped lay the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement.
And 60 years ago, a young Reverend Jesse Jackson
stood on the south side of this city
and built Operation Breadbasket on a simple premise.
No company should profit from a community it disrespects,
and organized dollars can make that stick.
Now, we lost Reverend Jackson this year,
but his playbook did not die.
He organized consumers, congregation by congregation,
and today Mayor Johnson is applying that same lesson
at the scale of the city itself.
Billions in public dollars spent on the public's terms.
Reverend Jackson wrote the first chapter
and today Chicago writes the next one.
So in closing...
Not what our money exists to carry that tradition to every city, county, and state in this country.
We have built the tools, including a checklist that any government can use to determine whether
its vendors are profiting from corruption or cashing in on the targeting of the very people
footing the bill. Chicago is the first to put teeth behind that commitment. It will not be the
last. So thank you, Mayor Johnson. Thank you to Chicago's elected officials. Thank you to Arise
Chicago, and to the advocates and organizers in the room, thanks to all of you for insisting that
the people's money serves the people. It is now my honor to introduce my friend and colleague,
D'Angelo Bester, Executive Director of the Workers' Center for Racial Justice.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Good morning. I like to thank my good friend
Dorian Warren and the Not Without Our Money campaign for their great work to make this all
happen. And of course, I'd like to thank Laura Garza and our comrades at Arise Chicago for
welcoming us into this space. My name is D'Angelo Bester, and I work for an organization called the
Workers Center for Racial Justice. We organize unemployed, low-wage, and formerly incarcerated
black workers and their families to fight for dignified work, economic security, and to create
a society where everyone belongs and all families can thrive. And so with this executive order, I
started thinking about something. All doctors in this country have to take the Hippocratic Oath,
And the core principle of that oath is, first, do no harm.
Unfortunately, most corporations take a vastly different oath.
That oath is to first make a profit no matter who you harm.
Well, I'm glad to say that the days of corporations making a profit off of harming our communities is coming to an end.
This executive order will allow the people of Chicago to see which corporations have been making money harming our communities
and eventually end any and all contracts with those same companies.
So for those companies out there that are profiting from imprisoning our immigrant brothers and sisters,
surveilling and policing black communities, and hoping to strip away our civil rights,
your days of doing business with the state of Chicago are coming to an end.
We refuse to continue giving our hard-earned tax dollars to companies that do us harm.
The people of Chicago will no longer be complicit in our own demise.
And I, for one, am very happy and proud to be working with the Not With Our Money campaign
and, of course, the city of Chicago to make this happen.
So now I'd like to turn it over to our esteemed mayor and my brother, Brandon Johnson.
Okay, D'Angelo, you swole, brother.
You're going to have to scoot over.
If you're going to turn it over, you're going to have to move back.
Good morning, everyone.
Good morning.
Thank you, D'Angelo, Dorian, and Laura for you all's leadership.
to all of our elected leaders and community advocates that are here.
This is truly the dream and the hope of our ancestors.
You know, Dorian invoked the legacy of the late, great Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.
He talked about a rainbow coalition that stood up for workers' rights and civil rights and voting rights.
You have aerial capital and urban league and labor, faith leaders.
I mean, this is truly the vision that those who have come before us spoke into existence.
And so in their honor, we celebrate every single ancestor that made sure that a coalition like this would not just simply exist,
but we would be empowered to transform this very city and this country.
So long live the legacy of our great ancestors.
And in that tradition, there's a verse from Matthew that I often quote time and time again as mayor.
And I believe it really embodies this executive action that we've come together to celebrate today.
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
It's Matthew 6, 21.
Chicago spends billions of dollars every year purchasing goods and services.
That is our treasure, and today we're making it very clear where our heart is.
Our heart is with the immigrant families who have endured the fear and intimidation
of the Trump administration's midway blitz assault, which launched almost a year ago.
Our heart is with workers who deserve fair wages, a safe workplace, and the empowerment to organize.
Our heart is with people who have been formerly incarcerated and deserve a real opportunity to work, build a career, and support their families and contribute to their communities.
Our heart is with Chicago's diverse communities and with the generations who fought to make civil rights more than just words on a page.
Our heart is with the taxpayers of Chicago, who have every right to expect that their money will not be used to reward corruption and subsidize corporations whose conduct undermines our communities.
Our heart is with our democracy, and with every Chicagoan whose right to participate in it is under attack.
We are seeing those attacks from every direction.
And just this week, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court sided with Donald Trump's effort to restrict access to voting by mail.
At the same time, we have watched powerful corporations use their money and influence to enable an administration that is attacking immigrants,
weakening civil rights and voting rights protections, and undermining the very institutions that protect our democracy.
And whether it's education, whether it's housing, transportation, health care, good-paying jobs, environmental justice,
all of the demands of those of us who are descendants of the formerly enslaved, that is what this administration has attacked.
And though we cannot control the decisions that are made in Washington,
we can control what we do with the people's money right here in Chicago.
We are using the enormous purchasing power of the city of Chicago to put our values into practice, strengthening protections against corruption, workplace discrimination and wage theft, demanding greater transparency from the corporations that receive our tax dollars, examining what those companies are doing to create opportunities for the formerly incarcerated,
and making sure workers know the rights that they have fought for and that Chicago guarantees for them.
There was a time when companies avoided just the appearance of buying favor from public officials,
and that norm has now collapsed at the federal level.
We're seeing very powerful examples that we are confronting every single day.
There are companies that have played a central role in expanding the federal government's immigration enforcement
and surveillance capabilities.
And the very machinery that has threatened the safety of our communities,
they are profiting from the torment and the torture that they are causing.
Individuals associated with these big companies contributed millions of dollars
to Trump-aligned political organizations at his inauguration,
while the companies itself contribute to his White House ballroom project.
At the same time, the federal contracting with these businesses, these contracts are approaching a billion dollars.
And its CEOs, their personal wealth has grown approximately to $11 billion.
When corporations pour millions into political influence and then reap enormous benefits from the government that they helped empower,
Taxpayers have every right to demand transparency and accountability.
For 60 years, the federal government has collected basic information about who is getting hired and who is getting ahead in America's workplaces.
And there's a simple reason for that.
You can't combat discrimination if you refuse to measure it.
But now, the Trump administration wants to stop collecting that information.
Think about that for a moment.
At a moment when companies are walking away from their commitments to diversity,
the federal government wants us to know less about who is getting these opportunities
and who is being left behind.
Well, not in Chicago.
If you want to do business with this city,
we want to know whether the people leading your company reflect the diversity of the communities
whose tax dollars are paying your contracts.
Now, Washington may be choosing to look away.
But Chicago, our eyes are wide open.
Nothing obliges our city to reward the collapse of good governance and common decency.
Because every contract we sign and every public dollar we spend,
it's a choice about what we value and whose side that we are on.
And I'm calling on all of Chicago to choose the righteous side.
And today, Chicago is putting our treasure where our heart is.
with working people, with immigrant families, with those seeking a second chance,
and with democracy from generations before us that fought to build and to determine how to protect what is righteous.
With this executive order in closing, Chicago joins a growing national movement with the activist coalition, not with our money.
We're holding corporations accountable, and we're making sure that every dollar that belongs to the people of Chicago is used to protect our communities, uphold our values, and serve our people.
I want to thank them for their leadership and sustained advocacy on this important issue.
And by this same measure, I want to thank John Rogers, again, of Ariel Investment, this firm, for their contributions to the work to dispel discrimination and welcome inclusivity in the workplace.
Thank you, John. I have just one last paragraph I want to write, but I do want to lift up John Rogers because there's not been a clear executive in this country who understood the assignment, but he also recognized the person who gave him the assignment.
He never forgets how Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. made sure that John Rogers will not be the last of his kind.
And John made sure that for generations to come, black executives not only deserve a seat at the table, we get to set the menu that's on the table.
Thank you, John.
Now, truthfully, I'm being a little selfish because my son is a freshman at Eastern Illinois,
and he's studying accounting and finance, so I just, in the Chicago way, just look out for a brother.
But I want to thank all of you for being here.
This is how we build the safest, most affordable big city in America,
by making sure that every public dollar strengthens our communities,
creates opportunity, protects working people, and reflects the value of the people that we serve.
Black, brown, Asian, white, young, old, this is truly the greatest, most diverse, freaking city in the world,
the city of Chicago. Thank you very much.
Make sure they spelled my name right.
All right, let's get it, you all. Let's make history, Chicago.
I'm going to hold it up.
How's it going, Mayor Johnson?
It's going very well.
Thank you.
Have you or your team taken a look at how this executive order may affect companies that are presently doing business with the city of Chicago?
Do you anticipate changes in vendors, increases in costs, sir?
Well, I mean, look, I think Dorian offered up a salient point.
The first step is to turn the light off.
It's about creating more of a transparent, open process for discovery.
In terms of its ramifications, I believe ultimately the goal is to make sure that we are protecting taxpayers.
And the impact that this could have long term, look, I mean, I think we could imagine the impact is that business will do better in terms of how they interact with government.
But quickly, are there any specific companies in mind that may end up not getting business,
that are currently doing business with the city that may have to stop doing business with the city under this executive order?
Well, what the executive order does is it raises the bar on the standards.
And as we ensure that there's more of a transparent process, then businesses will have to make a decision, right?
If they wish to carry on doing business with the city of Chicago, they're going to have to revisit their practices.
One of the reasons why I just looked up John Rogers is because, again, he is one of those first generation of executives that benefited from Reverend Jackson pushing for more accountability and transparency.
Reverend always said, listen, if the rules are transparent and the playing field is level, we can compete, right?
And we're talking about families who have been formerly incarcerated.
We're talking about immigrant families.
This touches black, brown, white, Asian.
It touches the entire scope of the city of Chicago.
And people doing business with the city of Chicago should have a higher standard based upon the tax dollars that they are essentially benefiting from.
I think the last thing that I'll say is, think about the level of scrutiny that working people have to do with their finances.
I was talking to a family recently in Rogers Park, $1,800 a month for rent.
By the time he and his wife pay rent, they barely have enough for their two daughters.
You understand?
And so there is greater scrutiny on working class families than these multi-billion dollar corporations.
and so in the words of Reverend Jackson
we're going to make the rules transparent
we're going to level the playing field and then people
can make a decision of whether or not they want to continue
to play in the game of life
off topic if you don't mind
in the school board race there have been some
serious allegations that have come up against one of the
candidates Victor Henderson from a divorce
file from a number of years ago that made
significant allegations
no charges ever brought about
abuse of one of his children
And I'm wondering if you have concerns whether somebody with that kind of background should be running for school board president.
Does this disqualify them?
Should Victor Henderson drop out?
Well, look, I don't know the circumstances around, you know, what has been reported.
What I can say is I think as leaders, we all have to hold ourselves to a righteous standard.
You know, again, you know, I don't try to stay out of people's personal life and business.
But, you know, my hope is that, you know, whatever his family went through, I hope that the family is healing and getting the support that they need.
And whether or not, you know, this individual is qualified or not, the voters have to determine that.
You know, ultimately, I don't think that's left up to one person.
In fact, I think we have to get away from one person rule.
I think that's what's going on at the federal level.
We need to knock that off.
Now, I will say, the President of the United States of America, it's clear what his background is, and he certainly is disqualifying.
But I'm going to stay on topic until you're off topic.
I don't know those circumstances, and the voters have to make that decision, and I hope their family is healing.
Is that everyone?
All right, very good.
Thank you all very much.
Thank you.