A Chicago bus driver is filing a lawsuit against the city’s transit authority, alleging that the CTA called the police on him and slapped him with a rule-violation notice in retaliation for holding discussions with coworkers about transporting police to demonstrations against police brutality and racism. The lawsuit comes amid mounting police violence in Chicago, where between 240 and 1,000 people have been arrested at uprisings touched off by the Minneapolis police murder of George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old black man.

Erek Slater, who is forty years old and has worked as a bus operator for CTA for fourteen years, is a union steward and elected executive board member of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 241. According to a draft lawsuit viewed by Jacobin, CTA management has repeatedly and illegally disrupted Slater’s attempts to hold conversations with off-duty coworkers “regarding the concerns and rights of bus operators relative to orders” to transport police to demonstrations and potential orders to take “arrested demonstrators away from communities where many of these drivers live.”

Slater’s attorney, labor and employment lawyer Nick Kreitman, says that upon arriving at Chicago’s North Park Bus Garage Friday morning, Slater was “taken out of service” and given a “violation notice” related to an off-duty discussion he held on May 31 about the “safety, political and moral concerns of fellow bus operators.” When the CTA allegedly ordered Slater removed from the premises on Friday, management “subsequently called the Chicago Police Department,” Kreitman says. Slater, Kreitman emphasized to Jacobin, “is authorized to be on the premises of the North Park Bus Garage as the elected union official outside of operating a bus.”