May Day Housing Spotlight
Around the world, May 1st (popularly known as May Day) marks a decades-long tradition of collective action in support of workers rights. Protests, marches, and community building are common staples that bring communities together to celebrate the collective power of workers while continuing to advance the fight for dignity and justice. Today, the fight for workers’ rights is not a siloed issue; it extends into multiple facets of modern life, especially housing justice. Our world maintains a glaring reality: to maintain steady, consistent employment, a worker must first have access to safe, dependable housing. Without safe living conditions, a worker's ability to provide for their families is placed at risk. When issues arise, workers have access to a variety of resources to assert their rights, especially organizing. One Beyond community partner continues to work at the nexus of worker power and housing justice.
The All Chicago Tenant Alliance (ACTA) partners with Beyond in ensuring that organizing and legal power work hand in hand to support working class communities across Chicagoland. This May Day, Beyond and ACTA honor the tradition of collaborative action by reflecting on our work together at this critical nexus through our activism partnership. For tenants in the city suffering under negligent landlords, the prospect of organizing alone can be daunting and unfamiliar. But, education, community, and action can quickly address those concerns: enter, ACTA.
As ACTA organizer Maya Azul shares, “ACTA will help a tenant union kind of go step by step in the process of making an action successful”. From defining goals to approaches, tenants are encouraged to steer the response. Through their work in tandem with Beyond’s staff, ACTA then empowers tenants with the knowledge they need to fully exercise their rights and make informed legal decisions. For ACTA, this support can look like preparing tenants for their day in court. Azul gives a glimpse into this process: “This is your case number, this is what they’re going to ask you…Very basic stuff, but it’s stuff that a lot of people don't know.”
Organizing tenants is only one half of the battle. Through our activism partnership, Beyond strengthens ACTA’s work with tenants by providing legal backing through case support, legal trainings, and organizational advice as the activism and community empowerment work unfolds. As Azul underscores, “[Beyond] gives ACTA legitimacy to the tenants because we do have some basis for legal knowledge that we can lean on when tenants ask.” This helps ensure that organizing efforts are backed by real legal expertise with legal staff who have worked on similar cases before.
Beyond’s role in the partnership also bolsters the position of tenant unions as a whole. Legal representation signals to landlords that tenants are not isolated. “Having legal representation [through Beyond] legitimizes the union more in the eyes of the landlord,” Azul explains. This becomes especially important when landlords attempt to intimidate tenants or deny hard-won tenant rights enshrined across Chicagoland.
Retaliation is often one of the biggest barriers tenants face when trying to organize. Some landlords stop maintaining buildings altogether, while others focus on enforcing every minor building code rule possible in an effort to silence tenants. “You have a potted plant on your patio? You’re in trouble,” Azul says. “People put stuff on their porches all the time in Chicago, and landlords more or less don’t really care, until tenants start organizing.” These sudden code crackdowns are often less about safety and more about creating fear and the threat of displacement.
Beyond works with ACTA to fight back against these deceitful tactics that are meant to coerce tenants into foregoing their rights to dignity and justice in the safety of their own homes. “A lot of landlords don’t really want to talk to tenants,” Azul explains. “They’ll try and scare the tenants with legalese… just stuff that sounds legal. Beyond’s legal team can very quickly see that’s not true.”
This is exactly why partnerships between activist groups like ACTA and Beyond matter. While Beyond helps challenge retaliation and protect rights through the legal process, ACTA ensures that tenants remain connected and prepared for the realities of organized action. Together, great possibilities abound for working class tenants. “There are multiple lanes of work that can be happening,” Azul says. Together, both organizations are able to provide full support throughout the unionizing process.
This May Day, we invite our readers to join in the fight for workers rights alongside ACTA and Fuerzas Activas De La Damen at a rally in Pottowattamie Park at 11am. If you cannot make it out, we encourage you to show support through a monetary donation so that our work continues. With your donation, Beyond is able to continue the fight against legal inequities and provide holistic support to activist communities throughout the state.