Select Aldermanic Fair Workweek Emails (Chicago Assets, Information and Services)

To Whom It May Concern:

Pursuant to the Illinois Freedom of Information Act., I hereby request the following records:

All emails and attachments sent or received during the period 1/1/2018–12/31/2019 by Aldermen John Arena, Patrick O'Connor, Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, Susan Sadlowski-Garza, or Tom Tunney that contain the (non-case-sensitive) phrases "fair workweek", "fair work week", or "fair scheduling." I have attached a list of 29 email addresses pertinent to this request, including aliases and Ward addresses. Please search for responsive records associated with any of these 29 addresses.

I am requesting these records for non-commercial research purposes. The records will be made available to the general public.

In the event that there are fees, I would be grateful if you would inform me of the total charges in advance of fulfilling my request. I would prefer that the request be filled electronically, if possible, by e-mail attachment.

Note that, in order to obtain all responsive records regardless of which public body holds them, I am submitting this request concurrently to the Chicago City Council; City Clerk; Mayor's Office; and Department of Assets, Information, and Services.

Thank you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter. I look forward to receiving your response within 5 business days, as the statute requires.

Sincerely,

Peter Fugiel
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations

Dear Ms. Miranda,

Thank you for your letter dated October 30. I recognize the need to weigh the burden of fulfilling the request against the public interest in the information. I am surprised that your search returned 3,710 pages of responsive records. That figure is 7 times greater than the number of pages returned by a similar search conducted by the Mayor's Office (509 pages) and 9 times greater than the responsive records returned by the City Council Committee on Workforce Development (392 pages).

Before I narrow my request, could you please confirm that your office conducted a search for the exact, compound phrases "fair workweek", "fair work week", or "fair scheduling"? If the initial search did not use quotation marks or Boolean operators to filter out partial matches containing only one key word (e.g. "scheduling"), it likely returned many irrelevant results. For example, a Google search of the key words (fair workweek fair scheduling) without quotation marks yields more than 5.5 million results (https://www.google.com/search?q=fair+scheduling+fair+workweek). By contrast, enclosing the relevant phrases in quotation marks ("fair workweek" "fair scheduling") yields only 1,390 results (https://www.google.com/search?q=%22fair+scheduling%22+%22fair+workweek%22).

I appreciate your offer to share an index of the emails. Assuming the index includes the date of each email, it would shed light on the relevance of the initial search results. Most of the public discussion and legislative action around the Chicago Fair Workweek Ordinance occurred between June 2018 and July 2019 with a peak around June or July 2019. The date distribution of search results should reflect this, with relatively few results from earlier in 2018 or later in 2019. If that is not the case in your initial search, it likely contains irrelevant results that can be filtered out through more precise specification of the search parameters.

If the initial search was conducted using the exact parameters requested, then I would be willing to narrow my request. I am most interested in emails and attachments sent or received by Aldermen John Arena, Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, and Tom Tunney, since they were not included in the records previously provided to me. According to my list (Aldermanic_addresses_to_search.xlsx), there are 18 email addresses or aliases associated with these 3 Aldermen. To be clear, I am requesting all emails and attachments sent or received during the period 1/1/2018–12/31/2019 by Aldermen John Arena, Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, or Tom Tunney that contain one or more of the non-case-sensitive, compound phrases "fair workweek", "fair work week", or "fair scheduling."

As you review my request, I ask that you take into account the considerable public interest in this information. The Chicago Fair Workweek Ordinance establishes the most expansive set of working time regulations since the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. While similar scheduling legislation has passed in a dozen other cities, Chicago is the only jurisdiction in the country to cover manufacturing, warehouse, and health care as well as retail and hospitality workers with comparable protections. My assessment of the public interest in this matter is informed by my expertise as an academic researcher who specializes in labor standards and scheduling practices. I have requested these records as part of the first systematic study of scheduling legislation, a project in which the National Science Foundation found sufficient intellectual merit and public interest to award me a competitive Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (#2203815).

I look forward to your clarification of the initial search results and continued assistance with my request.

Sincerely,

Peter Fugiel, PhD

Good morning Ms. Miranda,

Thank you for clarifying the search query construction. I would like an index of the 380 email items that resulted from the initial search.

I am narrowing my request to the 18 email addresses or aliases associated with Aldermen John Arena, Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, and Tom Tunney (see Aldermanic_addresses_to_search.xlsx). I am now requesting all emails and attachments sent or received during the period 1/1/2018–12/31/2019 by these three Aldermen that contain one or more of the non-case-sensitive, compound phrases "fair workweek", "fair work week", or "fair scheduling."

Please let me know when I can expect a response to my narrowed request.

Best regards,
Peter Fugiel

Dear Ms. Miranda,

I am writing to inquire into the status of my request. I have not received a response since narrowing the search parameters earlier this month.

Thank you,
Peter Fugiel