Sam Altman Discovers the Four-Day Workweek

It has been a week. A few things I cannot stop thinking about: Snelling at the CCPSA, the tipped wage override vote in 8 days, the Bears doing the Indiana bit again, the sudden pivot of OpenAI Sam Altman to socialism, and Waymo mapping Chicago's streets.

Let’s get into it…

3 Headlines

1. The Snelling CCPSA Meeting Was Not What You’d Think

Block Club: Last Thursday, after three months of public pressure, 2,000 petition signatures, two hearings he skipped, and one hearing he agreed to attend only after dictating the panel, CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling sat down at Kelly High School in Brighton Park and answered questions about CPD's interactions with ICE during Operation Midway Blitz.

Snelling told the commission that the city's sanctuary policies "weren't designed for the level of immigration enforcement" Chicago saw last fall, and he's not wrong about that. When CBP and ICE started running door-to-door operations in Little Village, when masked agents started pulling people out of cars in front of bystanders, when rapid responders started showing up to scenes within minutes and crowds gathered around armed agents who were ignoring Illinois law — the existing rules for what CPD officers were supposed to do in those moments did not anticipate any of that. Snelling's defense, that in some real number of incidents his officers were genuinely trying to prevent civilians from being shot in chaotic situations involving armed federal agents, is probably, in some real number of incidents, true.

Why It Matters: What Snelling did was demand to dictate the panel. Forty district council members had asked the commission to include immigration attorneys, constitutional law professors, and police reform researchers — Lori Lightfoot, Leah Litman from Michigan, NYU's Barry Friedman. Snelling's office sent a memo saying he would not participate if those people were on the panel. The commission folded.

The commission did vote to ask the city's IG to audit CPD's compliance with the Welcoming City Ordinance — a vote they tried to take the previous week but couldn't, because not enough commissioners showed up to that meeting. We will see if the IG opens it and how long it takes.

2. The Tipped Wage Vote

WTTW: Mayor Johnson vetoed the City Council's attempt to freeze the phase-out of Chicago's tipped minimum wage on March 25. Then, the Council voted 30-18 to freeze it, and now they need 34 votes to override that veto. The override vote happens April 15.

Refresher: in 2023, Council passed the One Fair Wage ordinance, which gradually phases out the subminimum wage for tipped workers and brings them up to the full Chicago minimum ($16.60/hour) by July 1, 2028. Right now tipped workers are at 76% of full minimum wage. On July 1, 2026, they're scheduled to step up to 84%. Ald. Samantha Nugent (39th), backed by the Illinois Restaurant Association and Sam Toia, wants to freeze the whole thing where it sits.

While the Council fight plays out, the Illinois Restaurant Association is running a parallel play in Springfield. State Rep. Curtis Tarver (D-Chicago) is sponsoring a preemption bill that would strip Chicago of the authority to set its own tipped wage rules at all and hand that power to the state — where the tipped wage is currently $9/hour, a 30% pay cut. The bill cleared House Labor and Commerce 22-4. Sam Toia testified that the average restaurant worker already makes "nearly $29 an hour," which, if you've ever set foot in a Chicago restaurant, may strike you as uh, an invented fact.

Why It Matters: The IRA is running a two-front campaign: kill it in Council on April 15, and if that fails, kill it in Springfield by preempting Chicago's authority forever. Even if Johnson holds the veto, if Tarver's bill passes the General Assembly, Chicago loses the ability to set its own tipped wage, period.

3. Waymo Is Mapping Chicago

Capitol News Illinois / WTTW: Waymo, Alphabet's autonomous vehicle company, has been driving and mapping the streets of downtown Chicago since at least mid-March, with a fleet of vehicles parked in a garage on North Wells in the Loop. The cars currently have safety drivers. The stated goal is to eventually run robotaxis without them.

The bill that would allow that — Rep. Kam Buckner's Autonomous Vehicle Pilot Project Act — is currently in the Rules Committee in Springfield. Buckner says it has "a long road ahead" because of constituent concerns about safety, insurance, and job loss for the estimated 100,000 rideshare drivers in Illinois.

Worth knowing: Waymo is currently under multiple federal investigations for traffic violations including illegally passing stopped school buses, has had vehicles block emergency responders, and has hit a child near an elementary school. Their cars are also untested in extended cold weather of the kind Chicago has approximately 17 months a year.

Labor groups, including the International Association of Machinists and the Illinois Drivers Alliance, are organizing against it.

Why It Matters: The thing to track is the labor fight. As Local 150's Marc Poulos told the press, this is "on a bigger scale than just driverless taxis." Once Waymo gets operational AV authorization, the same authorization is the legal precedent for Class 8 trucks, delivery vehicles, transit buses, and every other commercial driving job in the state.

1 Big Question:

Last Monday, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz published a 14,000-word New Yorker investigation of Sam Altman and OpenAI. A year and a half of reporting, 100+ interviews, and access to two sets of documents that had never been public before: a roughly 70-page memo compiled in fall 2023 by then-chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and over 200 pages of internal notes from Dario Amodei before he left OpenAI to found Anthropic. Confronted by the board after his 2023 firing, Altman reportedly said "I can't change my nature." OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit explicitly because the founders thought AI was too dangerous to be left to ordinary corporate incentives. The board, the safety team, the charter, the independent investigation, the public commitments — every one of those structures gradually got

But then Open AI made it even weirder….

Six and a half hours after the New Yorker investigation went live, OpenAI announced a new "OpenAI Safety Fellowship" — $3,850 a week, less than five months long, light on specifics — to support outside research on AI safety. This is really just weeks after OpenAI’s representative responded to Farrow's interview request about existential AI safety with "What do you mean by 'existential safety'? That's not, like, a thing."

But, funnier to me, that same week, OpenAI handed Axios a paper called "Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First." It proposes a four-day workweek, stronger worker protections, higher capital gains and corporate income taxes. This is the company is racing to automate every white-collar job in the country, who has spent the last year publicly comparing the energy cost of training a model to the energy cost of raising a child, and stepped into a Department of Defense contract during a war that has killed hundreds of children in the last six weeks.

When Mike Allen asked Altman in the accompanying interview how any of his proposals would actually pass Congress, Altman's answer was "I assume we'll figure it out."

Why is Sam Altman cosplaying as the labor movement in this weird PR move? Hopefully it won’t stop people continuing to organize against the technology he’s racing to build.

2 Red Flags

🚨 Gabriella Zutrau on David Plouffe: Tactics They Can Buy

David Plouffe — the guy who ran Obama's 2008 campaign and Kamala Harris's 2024 campaign — published a New York Times op-ed back in January arguing that Democrats need to operate as "full-time production studios" if they want to win in 2028, with several hours of filming a day and tailored content for each platform. He name-checks AOC, Mamdani, and James Talarico as Democrats who get it. Then he acknowledges that most Democrats "don't have the range or talent" — and moves on.

Gabriella Zutrau, the digital strategist who built Mamdani's Manychat operation during the NYC mayoral race, published a response on LinkedIn this week. You should go read the whole thing:

You cannot purchase "we will fight for you against the people who own everything," because that requires actually being willing to fight people who own things.

Go read the whole thing, and know this conversation will keep happening every six months, in the same publications, by the same people, for the rest of our lives.

🚨 The Bears Are Doing a Bit and We Should Stop Falling for It

Sun-Times: George McCaskey, whose family owns an $8.2 billion football team, told reporters at the NFL owners meetings last week that he is "comfortable" moving the Bears to Hammond, Indiana, where the legislature has already offered roughly $4 billion in subsidies. He has not taken the offer. He will not take the offer. He is using the offer to extract $2 billion in property tax breaks plus $855 million in infrastructure spending from the state of Illinois. As Field of Schemes' Neil deMause pointed out yesterday, if McCaskey were actually moving the team, he'd have already taken Indiana's bigger check.

The lease at Soldier Field runs through 2033 and the early termination penalty is $11 million a year — a number small enough that the team's property tax break alone would cover it for two centuries.

Why It Matters: $2.85 billion could: fund the CTA's entire capital backlog twice. Build affordable housing on every TIF-funded vacant lot the city owns. Fully cover the cost of one fair wage for tipped workers, with a few hundred million left over for, I don't know, books.

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Finally: Iran is still being bombed, in spite of the ceasefire, and I do not have anything smart to say about it. What I have is Margaret Killjoy's piece from this week, about why none of us feels like we have any agency right now and what to do about it. Her answer — that we rebuild agency by accomplishing things, with the people around us, in small concrete ways — felt meaningful. Read it if you have twenty minutes.

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