A view of McCormick Place during the Chicago Auto Show. (Phil Velasquez/ Chicago Tribune)

By Kathy Bergen | Trade
show customers’ voices will be among the first heard by a legislative panel
opening hearings on McCormick Place operations Thursday morning.

The high-profile restaurant and housewares shows will provide testimony
as will representatives of major print and metal-forming shows and a
surgeons’ convention. Individual exhibitors also will speak at the 10 a.m. hearing at the Thompson Center.

Those five events alone drew 179,873 people to McCormick Place last year and generated an estimated $291.7 million in local spending, according to the Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau.

These customers and others hire show contractors to mount the shows, and those companies are expected to testify next week, as are representatives of the labor unions that do the work.

Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan (D-Chicago) pushed through legislation forming the 16-member House-Senate panel after a couple of major shows exited Chicago, citing high costs.

The panel will be advised by Regional Transportation Authority Chairman Jim Reilly, a former chief executive of the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition authority, the agency known as McPier that owns and operates McCormick Place and Navy Pier. Reilly went head-to-head with the convention hall labor unions in 1997, and the unions won that legislative battle, though they agreed to some work-rule concessions later.

At the time, Reilly asked the General Assembly to cut the number of unions working the hall and to make the workers public employees without the right to strike — a proposal very similar to what Mayor Richard Daley and Gov. Pat Quinn floated this year.

Attempts to gain greater leverage over the unions, to negotiate changes in work rules that could cut exhibitors’ costs, is just one part of the equation. Exhibitors’ bills also reflect charges from contractors and the organizations that sponsor the shows, as well as costs for travel, hotel and food.

But union work rules and labor costs have been a lightning rod. So Reilly must guide the legislative panel through the thicket.

This time around, “it’s a different political environment,” said Ill. Rep. Julie Hamos (D-Evanston), noting the push for change is coming from the state’s top political leaders and  Daley.

A separate analysis of McCormick Place operations will be undertaken by a newly named interim board for McPier, which will meet for the first time Tuesday.  

Both panels are aiming to get recommendations to the General Assembly by April 30.