Workers at the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, Illinois, are fed up with how they have allegedly been treated by the project’s leadership and are taking action.
The workers are organizing a union while claiming their workload has increased and benefits have been rolled back, the Chicago Sun-Times reported Wednesday.
The outlet continued:
In a letter distributed to colleagues on Wednesday morning, the workers allege that foundation leadership has met their concerns with “vague responses.” As a result, the letter states the Obama Foundation and Obama Presidential Center have a “high turnover rate” and workers “continue to leave, taking with them their institutional knowledge and expertise.”
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The letter, signed by 68 workers, announced that they are organizing a union with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31. Obama Workers United will represent more than 250 workers across the presidential center campus in Chicago, at the Obama Foundation’s offices in Washington, D.C. and remote workers around the U.S. Addressed to colleagues, the letter invites employees to sign their union cards to push for senior leadership to recognize the group’s right to organize “and not waste resources on anti-union messaging, anti-union lawyers, or anti-union meetings.”
“We are the workers who spend our days fulfilling the vision and values of the Obama Foundation. We strongly believe in the mission to ‘inspire, empower, and connect people to change their world,’ and now we’d like to change ours,” the group wrote in their message.
During a meeting with the center’s workers in June, former President Barack Obama shared a video of himself talking with the group.
One woman told him, “Every day I wake up and I come here, I feel like I’m living a dream. I still haven’t woke up yet.”
The Sun-Times‘ report is the latest drama surrounding the library.
The center’s leaders put out a call in March for unpaid volunteers even though its chief executive, Valerie Jarrett, would be paid a salary of $740,000, Breitbart News reported.
In addition, tenants of a Chicago apartment building formed a union due to possible rent hikes as the center was under construction and an investor hoped to buy the building where they lived. Another report said taxpayers could face a huge bill if the center experienced financial trouble because its foundation “has not yet established a promised $470 million safety net to guard against a public bailout,” according to a Breitbart News article from June.
The center opened in mid June, and a subcontractor who worked on it later reportedly shut down operations and laid off workers due to a $4 million non-payment dispute.