Cook Board president, officials back efforts to unionize at Chicago Botanic Garden

In a press conference Tuesday, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle expressed support Tuesday for union efforts among employees of Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

Some Garden employees are organizing efforts to join CMRJB Workers United, a labor union that represents various industries around the country. Preckwinkle, some county commissioners and other elected officials complained of “union-busting and retaliatory activity against workers” in the news conference held at the County Building in downtown Chicago.

In an interview later on Tuesday, Workers United organizing director Matt Muchowski said, “(There’s been) a lot of intimidating talk, telling workers that they should be afraid for their jobs if they talk about the union. They've been called into these one-on-one meetings to kind of dissuade them from supporting a union.”

Chicago Botanic Garden fired an employee named Kai Shin in October, who was a facilities assistant at Windy City Harvest, the Garden’s urban agriculture program in Chicago. Shin is helping organize the union, and he was terminated a week after speaking about the effort at a Cook County Forest Preserve hearing.

At the hearing, Shin and others pushed for passage of a resolution calling on the Garden to stop interfering with union formation.

For Workers United, the next step is to get the majority of employees to sign union cards, a process that Garden officials oppose.

Muchowski said that under a “card-check neutrality agreement,” the employer would have to respect the union if more than half its workers signed a union card.

But Garden officials said in a statement following Preckwinkle’s press conference that they will not agree to card-check neutrality and instead want to engage in a more formal process.

“Federal labor law establishes a process for employees to exercise their rights in this regard by making their choice for or against representation in a secret ballot election administered and supervised by the National Labor Relations Board,” the statement said. “Were the Garden to recognize a labor union based solely on ‘card check neutrality,’ — i.e., without giving our employees a chance to be informed and have the ability to hold a secret ballot election on the issue — we would, in our view, be depriving our workers of their rights on this important issue.”