Progress Illinois

Community benefits for community residents – a straightforward concept, right?  It’s the idea that large-scale development projects must actually meet the needs of local communities.  Vancouver Winter Olympics planners understand this, and have been negotiating with community stakeholders to protect local residents’ needs in advance of the 2010 games.  In the U.S., however, no Olympic host city has ever entered into a legally-binding agreement with community members aimed at negating the detrimental impact of the event.  

The result of that neglect is clear.  In 1996, the homeless got one-way bus tickets out of Atlanta.  In 1984, jobs in Los Angeles communities consisted of two-week gigs as street sweepers.  Folks in Chicago know that if we do end up hosting the summer games eight years from now, there must be a community-driven effort to ensure that low-income areas and residents of color gain real benefits from this monumental event.

Communities for an Equitable Olympics 2016 (CEO 2016) is a newly-formed coalition of community and labor organizations, working together to win enforceable community benefits in conjunction with Chicago’s Olympics  bid.  The Grassroots Collaborative, a coalition of organizations dedicated to issues of economic and racial justice, has joined with organizations such as the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization (KOCO), Centers for New Horizons, and MAGIC, to form a broad and deep coalition of South Side and city-wide groups organizing for justice.

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Decent wages. Filling a prescription for your sick child. Not having to choose between paying the rent and buying groceries. Sound like luxuries to you? Well, they don’t to a majority of Chicagoans. Nonetheless, retailers like Wal-Mart, Target, and Lowe’s apparently think that their employees can go without. And thousands of retail workers do go without, at great cost to themselves, their families, and neighborhoods across the city.

The Big Box Living Wage Ordinance sought to improve this situation. But despite a supermajority of residents supporting the ordinance, and despite a majority of alderman voting to pass it, Mayor Daley issued his first veto in 19 years in office against this legislation in September 2006. Today, that veto and the resulting lack of living wages in Chicago continue to reverberate across the city.

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