Chicago Workers Protest Closed Factory

Laid-off workers peer through the doors of their abruptly shuttered factory where they're staging a sit-in, demanding that the bank, which cut off credit to the Chicago company, free up financing so they can be paid their final wages.

(MIRA OBERMAN/AFP/Getty Images)

Illinois Gov. Calls for Pressure on Bank

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich today called for a boycott to pressure the bank to provide credit and lend support to the workers.

"We have contacted all our agencies across state government and, as of now, every agency has been ordered to suspend doing any business with the Bank of America," Blagojevich said. "We hope this kind of leverage and pressure to do the right thing for this business -- take some of the federal tax money that they've received and invest it -- by providing the necessary credit to this company so these workers can keep their jobs."

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The dispute is caught up in the tangle of the bailout money, hundreds of billions, handed over to big banks with few strings attached.

"Companies are failing now because they can't get bank lending, despite the fact that the government has handed out so much of the bailout money," said Lynn Lopucki, law professor at UCLA and Harvard. "The Treasury should have extracted from the banks, as a condition of this money, a promise that they were going to lend."

At Bank of America's Chicago offices, officials met today to hammer out some kind of deal. Meanwhile, protests spilled over to some of the bank's branches and, back at the factory, workers insist that the drama will continue until they get the money they say they are owed.