The Warehouse Archipelago

(Image: The American Prospect)

Beth Gutelius, research director for the Center for Urban Economic Development at UIC and senior research specialist with the Great Cities Institute at UIC, is a featured expert in an article from The American Prospect magazine that looks at the current state of staffing in the warehouse industry.

“People like to talk about warehousing as a replacement for manufacturing,” says Beth Gutelius, a researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “But it’s not a production function like a factory; it’s a circulation function. It doesn’t create goods, it moves them.”

“The profit margins in warehousing as a circulation activity are very tight, so employers look for ways to cut costs, and labor cost is often the first place they look,” Gutelius continues. “Without power, like the unions that were built in manufacturing, frontline workers are forced to absorb this pressure on profit margins by accepting lower wages and worse working conditions.”

Full Story from The American Prospect

 

2020 census: Chicago’s population grows slightly, but suburbs stall to slowest rate in decades

(Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)

In a story from the Chicago Tribune, Rob Paral, senior research specialist with UIC’s Great Cities Institute, addresses Chicago and suburban population rates from the 2020 census.

Rob Paral, a researcher with the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois Chicago, called the results showing Chicago’s population gain a “good census” for the city, noting that it bucked expectations from previous surveys that predicted population losses.

“Some of the narratives we have of decline haven’t really been that accurate,” Paral said. “The suburban portion grew too — barely — but it held its own.”

Full Story from the Chicago Tribune »

Urban Controversies – Students from Paris and Chicago discuss the future of our cities

Initiated by the City of Paris within the framework of the citizen consultation organized for its new local urbanism plan, French and American students in urban planning, architecture and political science are following the call for “urban controversies” to brainstorm together on the Paris of tomorrow. They will present their work to a panel of experts on June 15, 2021 between 11.00 am and 12.30 am (CST).

What definition should be given to density? Is it necessarily to be avoided, or on the contrary desirable? These questions often come up when we talk about city building and land use planning, with significant environmental, social and economic issues at stake.

“Is there an ideal density?” Six groups of students from four French schools (Sorbonne University, Sciences Po, École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, École des Ingénieurs de la Ville de Paris) and two American universities (Illinois Institute of Technology and University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign) will share and debate their thoughts during this event, which will be broadcast live : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkDER4O83qlhxR0kzPJvElQ

This conference is part of City/Cité, an initiative of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in Chicago that explores, through exchange programs between French and US Midwestern cities in partnership with the Great Cities Institute from the University of Illinois in Chicago.

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Corporations Are Trying to Co-opt Mindfulness to Avoid Meeting Workers’ Needs

JOHN M LUND PHOTOGRAPHY INC VIA GETTY IMAGES

Truthout interviewed Beth Gutelius, research director for the Center for Urban Economic Development and senior researcher at the Great Cities Institute at UIC, in a story about Amazon’s new WorkingWell program, which is designed to address worker’s health issues.

“It’s sort of like lipstick on a pig, or a Band-Aid over a gaping wound,” Beth Gutelius, research director at the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told Truthout. “If you listen to workers, the root cause of their psychological stress is the pace of work, it’s the feeling of an algorithm sitting on your shoulder constantly and surveilling your every movement.”

Full Story from Truthout

 

Pritzker Won’t Cut Enhanced COVID Unemployment Benefits As Employers Claim Workforce Shortage

(Image: AP)

NPR Illinois interviewed Beth Gutelius, research director for the Center for Urban Economic Development at UIC, in a story about Illinois maintaining pandemic-enhanced weekly unemployment benefits as business leaders point to a labor shortage. Gutelius addresses the argument that heightened unemployment benefits keep people from pursuing jobs.

Beth Gutelius, research director of the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois – Chicago, said the argument about generous unemployment benefits preventing people from getting jobs is “thinly veiled” sentiment similar to long-debunked theories that individuals on welfare are “lazy.”

Gutelius, who has spent years researching warehouse workers in particular, says people are running up against long-running systemic problems in the American economy. Gutelius told NPR Illinois she believes workers from all backgrounds in recent years — but especially during the pandemic — have opened their eyes to three issues: jobs that offer wages so low they’re unlivable, lack of affordable childcare and lack of paid leave at many jobs, especially low-wage employment.

Full Story from NPR Illinois »

Report Release: Climate Justice Meets Global Health in the Time of COVID-19

The discussion of the intersection of climate justice and global health is an urgent one, all the more so in the time of COVID-19. In May 2020, the UIC Great Cities Institute and the Center for Global Health convened a panel of experts, including academics, practitioners, and activists across fields and geographies to shed light on the circumstances of COVID-19 and to present solutions for a better, just world after the pandemic. Crises also create windows of opportunity, and as we move forward in a world with or without COVID-19, we must seize any and all opportunities to create the future that we want to live and have, moving past previous constraints.  

So many of us in this past year, since the first reports in January of the emergence of a virus in Wuhan, China, have experienced time in surprising ways. As COVID-19 traveled across the globe and arrived in our communities and homes, time has moved both at light speed and at a snail’s pace. In May 2020, many Americans had just received $1,200 stimulus checks from the federal government. For many low-income families, those checks were not enough. Many working families in the United States, particularly immigrant families, did not qualify to receive them. Also in May 2020, the federal government announced Operation Warp Speed, a public-private initiative with the sole focus of COVID-19 vaccine development and distribution. In May 2020 we had just adjusted perhaps to our new vocabulary of quarantine and shutdown, flattening the curve, social distancing, and masking. At the time of this conversation, more than 74,000 people in the United States had died of COVID-19, and 255,000 people worldwide. 

When this report is being put together in May 2021, more than 582,037 people had died of COVID-19 in the United States, and more than 3.3 million people worldwide. Doctors, nurses, and hospital staff were among the first to have been vaccinated starting in January, as well as many people in long-term care facilities, and seniors and front-line essential workers—teachers, caregivers, delivery people—were eligible as well. Since then, many more in the population have been vaccinated. Despite vaccine advances, COVID-19 is still in our midst. Various strains of the virus have emerged in the past months, ones that are more contagious and possibly more devastating. COVID-19 is likely to be with us far into the foreseeable future. So even though scientists around the world have come together to make such impressive advances, we still find ourselves in very difficult, very tough times.

When Great Cities Institute and the Center for Global Health convened the panel, “Climate Justice Meets Global Health in the Time of COVID-19” in May 2020, they very intentionally invited a diversity of experts and experiences. In exploring the intersections of the global public health and climate justice in the time of COVID-19, we heard about the healthcare workforce and other essential workers, about water and climate justice from front-line and fence-line organizations, about local resilience and local economies, and about the need to address fair and just solutions to systemic issues that embrace interdependence—the only way that we will ensure that we move forward together without leaving any single person behind. 

This interconnectedness, this interdependence, was expressed across solutions proposed by our panelists. According to keynote speaker Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “This pandemic completely reminds us of the interdependence between the natural world and society. . . . [I]t is a perfect time for big opportunities. But if the solutions are not fair or just, they’re not going to work and they’re not going to last. We need brilliant, encompassing, strategic solution generation that embraces interdependence. You can’t have a healthy population on a sick planet.” 

With the release of this report we encourage you to circulate it and use it in your classes. The recording of the panel discussion is also available on our website here. So much of the information is just as urgent and relevant today as it was a year ago.

Climate Justice Meets Global Health in the Time of COVID-19

Authors

  • Teresa Córdova, PhD UIC Great Cities Institute
  • Janet Lin, MD, MPH, MBA UIC College of Medicine
  • Jonathan Patz, MD, MPH Global Health Institute, UW-Madison
  • Juliana Pino, Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO)
  • Warren Lavey, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • Rachel Havrelock, PhD UIC Freshwater Lab
  • Pam Tau Lee, Center for Occupational and Environmental Health, UC Berkeley
  • Dallas Goldtooth, Indigenous Environmental Network
  • Jerry A. Krishnan, MD, PhD Population Health Services, UI Health
  • José Bravo, Just Transition Alliance
  • Michele Roberts, Environmental Justice and Health Alliance for Chemical Policy Reform

Abstract
The discussion of the intersection of climate justice and global health is an urgent one, all the more so in the time of COVID-19. In May 2020, the UIC Great Cities Institute and the Center for Global Health convened a panel of experts, including academics, practitioners, and activists across fields and geographies to shed light on the circumstances of COVID-19 and to present solutions for a better, just world after the pandemic. Crises also create windows of opportunity, and as we move forward in a world with or without COVID-19, we must seize any and all opportunities to create the future that we want to live and have, moving past previous constraints.

So many of us in this past year, since the first reports in January of the emergence of a virus in Wuhan, China, have experienced time in surprising ways. As COVID-19 traveled across the globe and arrived in our communities and homes, time has moved both at light speed and at a snail’s pace. In May 2020, many Americans had just received $1,200 stimulus checks from the federal government. For many low-income families, those checks were not enough. Many working families in the United States, particularly immigrant families, did not qualify to receive them. Also in May 2020, the federal government announced Operation Warp Speed, a public-private initiative with the sole focus of COVID-19 vaccine development and distribution. In May 2020 we had just adjusted perhaps to our new vocabulary of quarantine and shutdown, flattening the curve, social distancing, and masking. At the time of this conversation, more than 74,000 people in the United States had died of COVID-19, and 255,000 people worldwide.

Full Text (PDF) »

The American Prospect: Worker Centers and Unions

Worker centers sprang up independently, sometimes not even knowing that kindred groups of workers in other cities had established similar centers. Image: The American Prospect

Nik Theodore, UIC professor and head of urban planning and policy, director of the Center for Urban Economic Development and fellow at the Great Cities Institute, is quoted in two recent articles from The American Prospect magazine.

Nik Theodore, a labor expert and professor of urban policy at the University of Illinois, Chicago, has followed the worker center movement for nearly two decades. “I don’t know if we have many real shining examples of worker center–union cooperation,” he admits. “Even though it feels that there is so much relationship-building and broader experimentation, it feels like we’re still in the beginning, not even in the middle.”

The Alt-Labor Chronicles: America’s Worker Centers

Embracing and Resisting: The Variable Relationships Between Worker Centers and Unions