Our Story & Legacy
My family has dedicated over 80 years to industrial labor and building the trade show infrastructure of Chicago. Following World War II, my grandfather immigrated to the United States from Germany and immediately joined Central Steel & Wire, where he worked with pride until the day he died. My father carried that exact work ethic forward starting in 1985, and I followed in their footsteps in 2009, dedicating 17 continuous years of unblemished service to the trade show industry under Local 17.
Recently, I stood up as a rank-and-file member to formally challenge entrenched contract manipulation, structural favoritism on the show floor, and non-compliant referral practices that actively harm honest workers, among several other things.
Specifically, my disclosures protect the membership by exposing:
Hiring Hall Bypasses: Bypassing strict seniority lists to award premium show-floor assignments and steward positions to a preferred circle.
Hour Shuffling: Arbitrarily moving and crediting hours across separate general contractors to protect benefits for select insiders, which raises severe compliance red flags under Section 302 of the Taft-Hartley Act.
Disparate Treatment: Operating unmapped, off-the-books paid-vacation benefit systems for favored personnel through primary contractors like Freeman Expositions, while freezing out regular journeyman labor performing identical duties.
The response to my whistleblowing was swift and devastating. Local leadership subjected my family to an immediate job referral freeze and an absolute 105-day administrative blackout—completely ignoring my formal internal grievances and refusing all communication.
Escalating this pattern of hostility, the Local President summarily suspended me over the phone with zero written evidence, no formal charges, and an absolute denial of the basic due process rights guaranteed to union members under federal law. This administrative lockout and phone suspension were deliberately timed to break our financial resolve and strip away our livelihood. I am fighting every day to support my wife, Cinthya, our two-year-old son, and our second baby boy who is due to arrive very soon.
We refused to be starved out or intimidated into silence. Because of the hard evidence and digital logs I maintained, our case has successfully broken through and is now the subject of active, concurrent federal enforcement proceedings:
The National Labor Relations Board (Region 13): Actively investigating an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) case regarding systemic hiring hall discrimination.
The U.S. Department of Labor (OLMS/OIG): Actively investigating severe Title I and Title VI violations under the LMRDA, specifically focusing on the coercion and hostility used by officials to suppress member rights.
Congressional Casework Escalation: A formal request for congressional casework intervention has been officially submitted to the office of U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth to track and monitor the handling of these parallel agency investigations.
To ensure this institutional retaliation is fully exposed to the public, I have officially submitted our case files, digital logs, and federal investigation numbers to major local and national media outlets. We are actively seeking investigative coverage from journalists who specialize in labor rights, corporate accountability, and institutional corruption, including:
NBC News & WGN News (Targeting Chicago’s leading local and national investigative news teams)
The Chicago Tribune & Chicago Sun-Times (Tracking local infrastructure and trade show hall dynamics)
The Guardian (Working with national labor reporters tracking whistleblower retaliation)
ProPublica (Targeting structural and institutional compliance failures)
Labor Notes & Independent Labor News Outlets (Documenting rank-and-file member rights)
This administrative lockout has hit us at a time when we were already facing severe personal and financial strain. Completely separate from this battle with the hall, I have been dealing with a fractured hand from a car accident that occurred on February 27th & totaled our only working vehicle. Due to the injury, I have been under strict hand specialists orders to stay out of work since April 21st so my hand can properly heal. Navigating this recovery while fighting for my union rights has put our family in an incredibly vulnerable position.
Why We Urgently Need Your Help:
Federal investigations take months to grind out final rulings, and the opposing institutions are counting on their ability to drag this out until my family faces financial ruin. Every dollar raised through this fund will go entirely to basic survival/securing legal aid: securing medical coverage for my pregnant wife, covering immediate household rent and utilities, protecting our children while I stand my ground against institutional retaliation, finding outside council to further protect the further violations of my rights protected by law.
Thank you for standing with an independent working family fighting for truth, transparency, and accountability in American labor.