Thank you for signing the petition!
After five and a half years, the Illinois Public Labor Relations Board is meeting in a few days to finally make a decision on this case. If you are in Chicago, please physically attend the monthly meeting this Thursday, October 23, 10am, 160 North Le Salle St., sweet s-401. Please speak up in defense of workers rights during public comment and the rank-and-file speak-out afterwards.
Regardless of where you are at, everyone can immediately help by cutting and pasting the email text below and clicking this hyperlink button to email the Board, the Chicago Mayor and the Governor of Illinois: mailto: governor@illinois.gov, governor@state.il.us, letterforthemayor@cityofchicago.org, ilrb.filing@illinois.gov, Helen.J.Kim@illinois.gov, erek111@yahoo.com
Copy the text below and press the hyperlinked email above then paste it into your email and send it. Please also encourage other supporters to do the same. Feel free to add a few sentences to the top if you wish.
thank you!
Illinois Public Labor Relations Board Voting Members,
Cc: Govenor Pritzker, Mayor Johnson
We are writing to you ahead of your Oct 23, 2025 public board meeting. We understand you are ruling on the case of the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) vs. Erek Slater, a nearly 20 year veteran CTA Bus Operator and a former Executive Board Member and Presidential candidate of the bus workers' union (Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), local 241). We are writing to ask you to overturn the ruling of the Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) and immediately return Erek to work at the CTA.
When we heard that you had postponed your ruling last month, we quickly put together a public petition asking you to defend the Illinois Public Labor Relations Act (IPLRA) [link: https://chng.it/rFfJbwCC7j
We appreciate that you are taking a pause to look over the evidence and read the transcripts and arguments. We understand there is so much evidence, seven days of transcripts and five years of delayed trial. Here are a few important points to help:
In 2020, the CTA fired a union Board Member because they say he led a wildcat strike during the protests against the murder of George Floyd. This is not about a wildcat strike. No wildcat strike occurred nor was one called for. The elected union Board Member was calling for official mass union meetings of workers over the phone on their free time. At the worksites the Board Member read a press statement from the international union President informing workers of their legal safety rights. He asked if his coworkers felt safe.
This case is about a serious and deep discussion going on in society regarding major social issues such as the use of police and National Guard during protests against state violence. This is about freedom of speech and the rights of workers to organize their own opinions.
Please read the transcript of the five active CTA Bus Operators who testified under oath with great risk to themselves personally.
Please review the arguments made by lawyers helping to defend this law. They spent many hundreds of hours organizing over 100 exhibits and over 10,000 pages of evidence.
The senior CTA manager who fired Erek did so immediately after disbanding a workers meeting legally protected by the IPLRA. Just on this basis alone we ask you to defend the law. When the union Board Member, Erek, directly cited the IPLRA and asked the manager to stop and consult CTA lawyers if he didn't know the law, the manager called him an idiot in front of approximately 25 CTA Bus Operators. He then threatened to fire Erek and call the police - all of which he followed through with in close consultation with top CTA managers. Not only does he not deny this - he confidently states it for the record for all to read. The arrogance and vindictiveness of CTA management towards workers and labor law must be checked.
[Erek's account of what happened that day was widely shared by his coworkers and flagged by management in their internal communications in evidence. After seeing this social media post upper management directs lower management - in writing - to remove the Board Member "...if he does it again." https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19wxtYApSr/
The senior manager admits in his testimony that it's common for workers to have discussions on CTA property with their chosen union representatives. The problem for CTA management and the city administration of that time was the subject matter of the protected free speech. We hear on the witness stand from the union president that he was in direct communication with the former Mayor. We read the emails admitted into evidence of the close collaboration between CTA top management and the Office of Emergency Management. They admit that the situation was dangerous for front line Bus Operators, yet they cannot tolerate discussion about safety of workers organized though their union representatives?
If workers were able to hold their democratic discussions free from illegal employer interference, then they very well may have come to conclusions at odds with the closing down of public transportation for political purposes during a pandemic. It's especially ironic that they fired an elected union representative - falsely claiming he was trying to stop the buses - when they themselves stopped the buses! Remember the draw bridges being put up and the trains and buses completely halted for several nights? It is sad that just a few weeks earlier, they refused to heed the requests of transit workers for safe working conditions during the Pandemic - so that front line transit workers could safely take medical workers to hospitals. Erek and other transit workers around the country were demanding voluntary testing by medical professionals at the worksites. [link: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1DTjfuebpe/ Fearful of many millions of dollars of lawsuits tracing the deadly disease to the workplaces, the employers chose to ignore these calls which may have led to many people unnecessarily dying, especially the family members of Bus Operators and passengers.
Illegally stopping organized discussions about safety concerns indicates that they were afraid that the protests touching nearly every town in the country and many around the world may begin to be led effectively by disciplined and responsible workers such as those organized through the powerful bus and rail workers unions of Chicago.
What needs to be understood is what every worker and manager with more than a year with the CTA understands: the bus workers' union has been turned upside down. It is not controlled by its membership, the workers - it is controlled by the employer. This trial shows this very clearly with a shop steward who later became a supervisor for the company testifying for the company against her own coworkers and against her electoral opponent within the union. Her testimony was formally impeached (she was proven to have lied under oath) so often the ALJ cut her off. Then the judge found her "credible" in his ruling? That's the basis of his ruling?
Even more clear is the testimony of the Union President himself who shamefully testified for the company against his own union. While on the stand he admitted to failing to produce documents in response to a subpoena and then read from those same documents and still got dates wrong about alleged phone calls. He and the former shop steward both lied about the events and content of a board meeting that the top union officials secretly audio-recorded and handed over to the employer. The ALJ admitted this recording and certified transcript into public evidence (which anyone can listen to and read for themselves) of that union board meeting held just after George Floyd was murdered. Yet the ALJ couldn't listen to and read the highly relevant evidence, nevermind cite it in his ruling?
Because they knew they had firm control of the top union officials, it is very telling that CTA management were most concerned specifically about a "wildcat strike" of the ranks of the union against the top union officials. There is a history of this at the CTA going back to the 1968 wildcat strike of workers against the racist union officials. It's part of the reason management has this unjust rule against freedom of speech in their employee handbook.
Remember, this same union "witness" for the company (the union President!) stood against the plaintiff in the 2022-23 union election and narrowly avoided a runoff with him. He is holding up Erek's termination grievance inside the union - not letting it go to trial through an arbitrator. Thousands of other CTA workers have been similarly discriminated against for their perceived lack of political support of the officials currently atop the union. This is closely controlled and coordinated by CTA management and its labor relations departments. Backed up with thousands of written grievances not heard for years, the arbitration system has in practice stopped functioning for most workers.
This isn't the first time the CTA illegally went after this union Board Member. In 2012, this same elected union representative filed ULP charges against the CTA for illegally tearing down official union fliers supporting the Chicago Teachers Union. Your Board ruled in favor of the workers and against the CTA. Yet CTA management simply put your documentation on bulletin boards for a while and laughed at any attempt to hold it to the law, or even to its own policies. It illegally fired him for another "behavioral violation" in 2015 when, as an elected union Board Member, he gave a cease and desist order requiring the company to comply with its written contractual promises to workers. He was found innocent [link: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Ck8EN977A/ In 2016 he was returned to work and was made whole after an international campaign supported by dozens of labor organizations and thousands of people around the world. [Link for more information: https://www.facebook.com/share/16E7XD6MyJ/
Long before this same targeted Board Member was elected to three consecutive terms by his coworkers, he and dozens of worker-organizers in the Rider-Driver Alliance and the Chicago Transit Workers Council led many meetings of workers to study and teach each other the IPLRA with the expectation that your board would enforce it.
This same illegally fired Bus Operator ran for President of the Local Union during the last election three years ago (yes, he was still an active, elected Board Member for years after being fired as a CTA Bus Operator- but was not allowed on CTA property through an illegal deal between the incumbent union President and CTA management). CTA management put its full force into supporting "their" incumbent union administration and illegally called the Chicago Police Department dozens of times to have an opposing presidential candidate (who was on the official ballot posted at all the worksites) removed from being able to speak to coworkers at the worker break rooms of the CTA bus garages. Again, he and supporters printed copies of parts of the IPLRA showing what CTA was doing was illegal. On the day before the election, CTA had police put him in jail for eight hours. The next day, in spite of him being taken in a police van in handcuffs right in front of his coworkers in the workers' parking lot, a majority of workers at North Park bus garage voted for their Executive Board member to be the next President. Over 500 workers city-wide voted for the campaign to return control of the workers union to workers and away from CTA and PACE management. Workers nearly forced a run off election with the incumbent union administration.
[Link for more information: https://www.facebook.com/share/1AbtqGLiYL/
In a few days (November 4, 2025), ATU local 241 workers expect to nominate their coworkers for elected positions in their union. Two workers running for Executive Board Member and President, Robert Thomas and Erek Slater, expect to be refused entry to their own union hall in order to be nominated for elected office because of the illegal actions of the CTA in pending cases before your board. Thousands of workers may be disenfranchised if you do not act immediately.
On April 5th of 2024, after a year-long struggle of supporters and coworkers, the Circuit Court of Cook County, 1st Municipal District Judge Clarence Burch threw out CTA's trumped-up trespass charges: "The Court rules as follows, that the Illinois Public Relations Act provides the following: That employees shall provide to exclusive representatives, including their agents and employees, reasonable access to employees and the bargaining units they represent...as a final word, there has been nothing established that Mr. Slater was engaged in any disruptive conduct or any reason for management to have him removed from the property, and he had a lawful right to be there. The State has not introduced any evidence or made any legal argument that said that it's criminal trespass for a person who has a lawful right to be on the property to be there. We have established based on law that he had a lawful right to have access to that property. He was using that property for exactly what the Illinois statute provides for him to do and he was made to leave in violation of the Illinois Public Labor Relations Act..."
To protect the law you are designated to protect, a bus driver and workers' three times elected Board Member was fired twice and was sent to jail. He was repeatedly exonerated in several trials. You must do the same - you must protect him and others like him.
On October 23rd, members of the Illinois Public Labor Relations Board have the chance to defend the Illinois Public Labor Relations Act by publicly and officially directing the CTA to stop breaking the law. We hope that you will consider the facts and enforce the protections provided to workers by the IPLRA.