Nurses throughout northern Illinois are organizing in historical proportions. This spring, registered nurses at Saint Mary of Nazareth Hospital in Chicago petitioned the National Labor Relations Board for a union election, seeking representation by the National Nurses Organizing Committee/National Nurses United, and they held a one-day strike June 11. Elsewhere, the NLRB on May 18 verified that 1,190 nurses at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago voted to unionize with an affiliate of National Nurses United, and almost 3,000 nurses at Endeavor Health’s Chicago-area hospitals in Evanston, Skokie, Glenbrook and Highland Park are organizing with Teamsters Local 743, arguing that recent pay cuts and chronic understaffing have threatened nurses’ economic well-being and patients’ safety.
“Health-care unions drove 29.4% of all strikes and 12 out of the 31 major strikes (those involving more than one thousand workers) in 2025,” said Sofia Guimarães Cutler, who writes about labor at Yale University. “Much of this activity was led by nurses. Thanks to their leverage … many nurses won impressive improvements to patient care through safe staffing as well as workplace safety measures, income increases, and other gains.”
Rivian cuts hundreds of jobs after launching new model
A week after Rivian introduced its new, cheaper vehicle, the R2 SUV, the Bloomington-Normal corporation cut hundreds
of jobs, mostly in sales and marketing. Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe said the company has about 17,000
employees, so the 300 layoffs amount to some 2% of the work force. Meanwhile, Rivian is spend-
ing more than ever on autonomous driving — now its largest research area — as part of a robotaxi partnership with Uber Technologies.
WIU broke contract by laying off unionized librarians
An arbitrator has ruled that Western Illinois University’s 2025 layoff of all nine of its academic librarian faculty and two other bargaining-unit professionals was illegal, and ordered that affected employees, represented by the University Professionals of Illinois (UPI) Local 4100 (an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers), must be made whole financially and restored to their positions if they choose to return.
Elsewhere: Technicians at Proper Cannabis in St. Louis filed for a union election, represented by United Food & Commercial Workers Local 655 after a federal NLRB decision cleared the path for new Missouri law which states employees in cannabis-related businesses “shall have the right to organize, form, join, and assist labor organizations and to bargain collectively with their employers.” … Members of Higher Education Labor United (HELU) have drafted a document, the Amherst Compact, committing them to solidarity across job titles, even on campuses where multiple unions represent workers in different employment categories. The compact covers nine states — Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont — and includes public, private, and post-high school technical training programs.
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