When big companies or institutions change contractors, workers can suddenly lose their jobs. But Evanston now is the first municipality in Illinois to give them some protections.
The Evanston City Council passed the Workers’ Retention Ordinance Monday, requiring hotels, restaurants, cafeterias and educational institutions with at least 200 contracted positions to take steps to retain existing workforce.
Currently, only Northwestern University meets the threshold.
The law can help people like Rosa Villaseñor, who has worked at Northwestern for 15 years.
In 2018, while she was working as a housekeeper at the Kellogg School of Management’s James L. Allen Center, Villaseñor and her colleagues found their jobs in limbo. Northwestern, which contracts with outside companies to provide food service, hospitality and cleaning services, had changed contractors from Sodexo and Aramark to Compass Group.
The workers’ future was uncertain during the transition, and Villaseñor fretted about how to put her eldest son through college and provide for her two younger children.
“We were all worried that we had to reapply for our jobs and lose our seniority and benefits,” she says.
She and her colleagues, along with their union, Unite Here Local 1, banded together and were able to keep their jobs. This year, Villaseñor faced uncertainty again and had her hours reduced after the university started demolishing the Allen Center to make way for a new facility. These two episodes led her to join an effort to push for legislation to protect workers.
Under the ordinance, if an institution like Northwestern changes contractors, the new contractor must keep the existing workforce for 90 days at the same wages and benefits. After three months, the workers must be offered continued employment if their performance during the 90-day period is “satisfactory.”
“[The ordinance] is about understanding that if you continue to do your job well, your employment is not going to vanish one day for some sort of bureaucratic reason — whether you’re the president of the university or somebody who serves food to undergraduates,” said Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss.
Northwestern spokesperson Jon Yates says the university supports “policies that promote stability and fairness in employment,” but that it has serious concerns about how the legislation would affect costs.
The ordinance will “impose restrictions on our ability to engage in competitive contracting, limit hiring autonomy for new service providers and potentially increase costs that could impact the broader university community,“ Yates says.
He did not respond to a WBEZ question about how many workers would be affected by the ordinance. Unite Here Local 1 says about 500 of its members are covered by the policy. An SEIU Local 1 spokesperson says roughly 300 of its janitors would be protected by the ordinance.
Compass Group, the current contractor providing food and hospitality services for Northwestern, did not respond to a request for comment.
Liza Roberson-Young, Evanston’s chief legislative policy advisor, said the legislation does not simply protect workers and their families but also considers the “economic ripple effects across a community,” she said. “If you have 200 or more people who lose their job all at once, that has big downstream economic impacts — especially in a community the size of Evanston.”
“One of the values of having kind of groundbreaking legislation in a place like Evanston is that it provides a roadmap for other communities around the state or for the state itself,” she says.
Several other U.S. cities have laws that protect workers in case of new ownership or contractor changes, including San Francisco, Baltimore, New York and Washington, D.C.
The passage of the Workers’ Retention Ordinance is a big win for Villaseñor, who lives in Evanston.
“I feel really proud to be a part of making this law happen,” she says. “This ordinance is helpful for us because we can sleep at night knowing we’ll have jobs even if the contractors change.”