News & Events

Layoffs are in the air right now, with corporations like Microsoft, Google, Spotify, IBM, and many others making drastic cuts to their workforces in the name of lowering costs; even Amazon, whose former CEO, billionaire Jeff Bezos, is one of the richest people in the world, has started swinging the axe.

The tech sector has been particularly hard-hit—more than 58,000 U.S.-based tech workers have been laid off since the beginning of 2023—but other industries have been feeling the chill as well, from media to healthcare, and the workers unexpectedly losing their livelihoods are often given little or no notice that anything’s wrong before they get the chop. Some employers got an early start on the layoff wave, managing to ruin thousands of Christmases for autoworkers, factory workers, and healthcare workers around the country.

On January 3, just as the New Year’s bells had barely stopped ringing, 61 workers at a clinic in Chicago lost their jobs. Most of them were workers of color and/or part of the LGBTQ+ community, just like the patients they’d worked so hard to serve. For those laid-off workers at Chicago’s Howard Brown Health Clinic, which provides medical care for queer and trans people as well as HIV-positive people, the timing couldn’t have been worse.

The Howard Brown Health Clinic is the largest LGBTQ+ community health clinic in the entire Midwest: As of early 2020, it had been serving 30,000-plus patients per year at its 11 locations in and around the city, and since then has only grown, undergoing a $30 million expansion. As anti-trans healthcare legislation advances around the country, hubs like Howard Brown Health have seen increased demand for their essential services, and the workers have struggled to keep up.

When the company announced that it would be laying off 15% of its 1,440-person workforce on December 30, it was clear who would be the most impacted. “We’re talking about queer people, Black and brown people, the uninsured, the impoverished,” Shakia Flowers, who had worked for HBH as a behavioral health provider for four years, told The Guardian after the news broke. “It’s so vitally important for these patients to come here and see providers they can relate to, who can understand their plight, and who can be their support system when they don’t have one.”

As Los Angeles Times tech columnist (and former Vice Union member-organizer) Brian Merchant suggested in a recent op-ed, it’s also not a coincidence that many of these surprise layoffs—such as at Vox Media, Buzzfeed, and The Washington Post—keep happening at companies where workers have unionized and begun building greater power to advocate for themselves and improve their working conditions. The idea of using the threat of unemployment as a means to control workers and prevent them from organizing is as old as the labor movement itself, and bosses have been using it to great effect since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution.

At Howard Brown Health, workers had successfully unionized with the Illinois Nurses Association in August 2022, making the timing of the layoffs so soon after feel more than a little suspicious. The company was still engaged in negotiations for the union’s first contract when the layoffs began, and representatives had arrived at the first bargaining session on November 19 with a proposed “voluntary separation” list of more than 100 workers, making its plans clear.

Horrified, the workers held a rally to protest the proposal, after which the company cut the number of layoffs from 100 to 61 but still followed through on the cuts. “Being reduced to a job title on repeated layoff lists instead of being valued as a member of the Howard Brown staff after repeated insistences of being a part of a greater workplace family has been very dehumanizing, and I can see how it negatively impacts my fellow workers who are left in the wake of such reckless layoffs,” says Jon Rosenthal, a laid-off HBH worker who worked on the company’s annual reports.

Ironically, though management has pointed to a $12 million “revenue gap” as a reason for cutting jobs, Howard Brown Health brought in $30 million in profits in 2021. According to ProPublica, CEO David Munar takes home a $300,000 annual salary (after having given himself a $100,000 raise earlier in the pandemic, when the frontline workers fighting COVID-19 and monkeypox were subject to cuts), and is joined in the six-figure club by nine other executives, who each make more than $200,000 per year. Management had promised that no layoffs would occur in 2022 but didn’t say anything about the following year.

After holding a strike vote in mid-December, on January 3 more than 400 workers walked out on a three-day unfair labor practices strike in response to the 19 different violations that the union has filed against Howard Brown Health management. The same day, 61 workers were laid off, bringing the already understaffed clinic down to an even more bare-bones staffing ratio. “Unfair labor practice strikes happen when management breaks the law, which [HBH has] done over and over and over again, specifically to illegally lay off 61 workers immediately after they unionized,” Margo Gislain, a lead organizer for the union, told Block Club Chicago following the strike.

According to the union, those violations include firing workers for union activity and failing to bargain in good faith, and members are confident that the National Labor Relations Board will rule in their favor. If the union does prevail, the laid-off workers will be reinstated with back pay and restored paid time off and health insurance.

Right now, the workers are feeling hopeful. And as this ugly wave of layoffs continues, hopefully more workers in other industries will take a page out of their book, get organized, and fight back. If your workplace isn’t unionized, start there; if you already have a union, work on building power and making contingency plans to be able to swiftly provide aid when it’s needed. A strong union cannot prevent layoffs from happening, but it can soften the blow by providing support, solidarity, and—crucially—legal advice and muscle, to ensure that you or your laid-off coworkers get the best deal they can after the hammer falls.

“I believe that we in Howard Brown Health Workers United will win,” Rosenthal says. “Executives cannot recklessly cut a lifeline to so many folks without experiencing the repercussions, especially after bargaining in bad faith and mismanaging an important place’s finances. We will continue to press the executives at the bargaining table, and our lawyers will fight in the courts while we continue to build power in the workplace and community support in the streets.”