MELROSE PARK, Ill.—Four years ago, Miguel Reyes, one of the 21 workers at SureBuilt, Inc., a construction parts factory in the Chicago suburb of Melrose Park, Ill., got badly hurt on the job. A year later, Reyes got hurt again.
Both times, SureBuilt bosses did virtually nothing.
It’s injuries like Reyes’s that led the SureBuilt workers to seek help from the Arise Chicago workers’ center. It specializes in helping Spanish-speaking workers, and it linked them up with Painters District 14.
SureBuilt began paying a union buster hundreds of dollars a day to “persuade” the workers not to unionize, there will be a union recognition election at the plant on July 23.
To publicize it and draw more public support, Reyes and other workers held a final sun-splashed outdoor rally and press conference on July 21 to tell their stories and why they want a union.
It’s a familiar tale for exploited workers nationwide, whether they’re in big cities such as metropolitan Chicago or toiling in a factory or in rural areas, such as Nebraska and Texas, working in farm fields or food plants.
Employers use every trick in the book they can to low-ball the workers, including exploiting their limited English wherever that is possible. Pay is low, benefits even lower, and workers who speak up for themselves are intimidated or fired.
Under the current GOP Trump regime, the bosses may even call ICE on them, with its agents nabbing them and carting them off to prison camps here or abroad.
That hasn’t happened at the Surebuilt plant in Melrose Park, yet. Lots of injuries have, however, workers told reporters and supportive politicians. SureBuilt also operates ten other plants nationwide.
“I’m a machine operator for six years,” Reyes explained. “Four years ago, an 80-pound bar fell on my foot. Despite the pain, my supervisor told me to go back to work—on my crutches.” Reyes finally saw an independent M.D., who certified him for workers’ comp.
“But just a year later, I hurt my waist doing some heavy lifting. The company sent me to their doctor and he only gave me Tylenol and water.
“We need safety and safe jobs. That’s why we need a union.”
Witnessed many injuries
A worker who identified herself as Maribel added: “In my three years at SureBuilt I’ve witnessed many preventable injuries. I’ve seen a coworker’s fingers cut through. In the last year alone, there were 23 injuries at SureBuilt,” according to records provided to Arise Chicago “This is why we are organizing–for safer jobs, with better wages and access to benefits.”
Ricardo Castanon seconded her last point. Like many of the other SureBuilt workers, he’s been at the Melrose Park plant and its predecessor elsewhere in the area for years. He’s not young.
“We want a union and we need a union because we are aging. We need health insurance, pensions, and how to prove our working conditions,” he said.
Conditions at the Melrose Park plant didn’t surprise Arise Chicago organizer Moises Zavala. Neither did SureBuilt’s hiring of a pair of union-busters. Arise Chicago has tangled with—and beaten—that pair of “persuaders” during two prior organizing drives elsewhere in the area, Zavalas said.
The union busters also used “captive audience” meetings, where workers are forced to listen to anti-union harangues, to issue illegal threats to close the plant if the workers unionized. They illegally “polled” workers to discover union support. The Painters filed unfair labor practices charges.
“The #1 problem here is safety. There are a lot of preventable injuries,” Zavala said. That includes workers’ fingers being cut off and broken arms—and Reyes’s smashed foot. “But if this company has enough money to pay the union-buster, it has enough money to pay their workers.”
The conditions also didn’t surprise Al Barraza, Painters District 14’s organizing director. “The injuries and hazards we heard about at SureBuilt are the kind of things from pre-union days: Many workers with severed fingers, a recent fire where no smoke detectors went off.” SureBuilt didn’t call the fire department, either, Arise Chicago notes.
The fire was on March 13, 2025. The workers had approached Arise Chicago months before and it linked them with the Painters. The organizing drive was publicly announced six days after the blaze.
The workers also picked up community support, symbolized by both honking horns from passing drivers during their outdoor press conference and by remarks from Cook County Commissioners Jessica Vasquez and Frank Aguilar.
“Do not ever believe the bosses are going to be working in your interests,” Vasquez warned. “The bosses are worrying only about their bottom line, not their workers.”
Aguilar emphasized how “very important it is that you’re fighting for your rights” and setting an example for other low-paid workers, especially migrant workers, in the Chicago area. He also brought national politics into the struggle at SureBuilt.
“You have the right to organize, regardless of your [immigration] status,” he said. “And what’s going on in Washington”—GOP Trump regime orders for violent ICE roundups of immigrants nationwide—“shows your only hope seems to be to join unions.”
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