MISSION
VISION
Centro de Trabajadores Unidos: United Workers’ Center is a grassroots member-led community organization and worker center serving Chicago’s southeast side and south suburbs. CTU strives to build immigrant and worker power by working to advance systemic change that promotes racial, gender and economic justice and stabilizes low-income immigrant communities and communities of color.
We believe healthy workplaces support healthy individuals and families, the building blocks of a strong community. Our vision is to have a healthy and thriving local economy free from exploitation and oppression in which our community members’ rights are respected, their dignity is upheld, and their labor justly compensated.
HISTORY
Beginning in the 1970s, the steel mills and many of the industrial factories around Southeast Chicago and Northwest Indiana began to close their doors. Along with the closing of their doors, went many of the union jobs that working class families throughout the Southeast Side depended on. Almost overnight, thousands of workers were left without jobs, unable to support themselves and their families. Decades later, the effects of many of these large businesses leaving the area are still felt deeply by the community on the Southeast Side. The area currently experiences a high rate of unemployment coupled with a lack of available jobs.
Centro de Trabajadores Unidos: United Workers’ Center was founded in 2008 by a group of low-wage immigrant workers on Chicago’s under-served southeast side after experiencing labor abuses at a local factory and organizing in their defense. These leaders were determined to build an organization that would serve as a resource for others workers to organize against labor exploitation and address the injustices they experienced in their communities.
After years of organizing against a climate of exploitation that has left many low-wage workers to fight to reclaim stolen wages and improve workplace conditions, we recognized that what our community needed most is jobs. More importantly, good quality jobs, where workers can have a say in how they and their coworkers are treated and paid. We realized that the pathway out of poverty and into sustainable community wealth building is entrepreneurship through local worker cooperative movements. Cooperatives lead to future sustainable employment opportunities, fostering a culture of high road business practices, fair wages, safe working conditions and serve as an alternative for workers who are typically excluded from the economic system.
Our long term vision is to build neighborhood institutions that represent the interests of working people. To begin working towards that vision, we are developing worker-led cooperatives founded and run by community members.