Labor fights to preserve recent gains at Minnesota Legislature — and other labor news

Yahoo

09-05-2025

Thousands march from the Minnesota State Capitol for the May Day Rally For Immigrant and Workers' Rights Thursday, May 1, 2025. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)
Take a seat in the Break Room, our weekly round-up of labor news in Minnesota and beyond. This week: Labor fights to preserve gains at the Capitol; U.S. Rep. Angie Craig racks up labor endorsements; truckers brace for tariff slowdown; Macalester staff file for union election; and Pope Leo XIV's pro-labor predecessor.
Two years ago, Minnesota Democrats were basking in the national spotlight after passing a sweeping progressive agenda — with a one-seat Senate majority no less — that created a paid family leave program; guaranteed all workers paid sick leave; banned noncompete agreements; and extended government health insurance to undocumented residents.
Now, labor unions and their Democratic allies are just trying to hold the line after a bruising election ended their unified control of government and will force them to make concessions to Republicans to pass a two-year budget.
But even some Senate Democrats in swing districts are pushing to sand down policies they previously voted for as they face ongoing pressure from the business groups to ease up on regulations.
Six Senate Democrats voted with Republicans on Tuesday to pass a bill that exempts small farms and micro-businesses from the 2023 law requiring employers to provide paid sick and safe leave per year.
Sen. Nick Frentz, DFL-North Mankato, an author of the sick leave bill, also introduced a bill with Republicans to water down the paid family leave program slated to start next year. The bill would exempt businesses with 15 or fewer employees and reduce the total number of weeks employees could take off in a year from 20 to 14.
'We have a saying down in Mankato that you can't have good jobs without good employers,' Frentz said in an interview. 'Small businesses are clamoring for us to revisit those two programs.'
The paid leave bill didn't get a committee hearing, showing there's little appetite among his Democratic colleagues to discuss changing the program, but it could find new life in last minute budget negotiations.
In the evenly divided House, Democrats have remained largely unified, though that isn't enough to pass bills.
The House labor bill, which will be debated on Friday, includes a provision that would exempt workers who make more than $200,000 a year from the ban on noncompete agreements passed in 2023.
Rep. Emma Greenman, DFL-Minneapolis, said Democrats resoundingly rejected changes to paid family leave, sick leave and a proposal to weaken the Nursing Home Workforce Standards Board. But they had to give up something to reach a budget deal.
'This year Republicans have spent all their time working to take away protections and benefits that Minnesota workers won last session, while DFLers have been fighting to pass a budget that protects them,' Greenman said.
House Democratic leaders also agreed to roll back unemployment insurance for bus drivers, teachers' aids and other hourly school workers in 2029 as part of an education budget deal. But rank-and-file Democrats refused to send the bill to the floor with that provision, forcing more negotiations.
And a final sticking point will be over whether to continue allowing undocumented residents to buy into MinnesotaCare, the state's health insurance for low-income working people.
U.S. Rep. Angie Craig had a chummy conversation with Teamster President Sean O'Brien on his podcast 'Better Bad Ideas' on Wednesday as she courts labor unions in her campaign for U.S. Senate.
Craig gave her assessment of the 2024 election. Like many moderate Democrats and O'Brien, she says the party suffered because they stopped focusing on pocketbook issues.
O'Brien is both cause and effect of the Republican Party seeking to win over working class voters, which President Donald Trump has done to great effect and in the process transformed America's politics during the past decade.
O'Brien was the first Teamster president to speak at the Republican National Convention in 2024, and the international union declined to endorse a presidential ticket after releasing polling showing nearly 60% of their members supported Trump.
(Still smarting from Gov. Tim Walz's jab that union leaders who didn't endorse in the race lacked courage, O'Brien said on the episode that Walz looks like a 'creepy wrestling coach for junior high.')
Craig committed to winning support from these Trump-supporting workers, which means sometimes alienating party loyalists by supporting some of Trump's policies.
'If you take the opposite position every time the administration acts, you lose the ability to reach back and win the people (Trump) won the national election with,' Craig told O'Brien.
And she checked the boxes on O'Brien's agenda: reining in Big Tech; going after Amazon; banning autonomous vehicles; supporting energy infrastructure projects; and implementing 'strategic' tariffs.
Craig has already won the endorsement of the Teamsters Local 32 in Minnesota, along with nine other local labor unions representing more than 150,000 workers. The endorsements landed just two days after she launched her campaign and included the more moderate building trades — carpenters, operating engineers, painters and sheet metal workers — but also the local union of federal employees, whom Craig has defended against indiscriminate cuts by the Trump administration.
Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, the other major contender in the Senate race, hasn't announced any labor endorsements yet, but the far larger, more progressive unions like SEIU and Education Minnesota haven't weighed in.
Truckers in Minnesota are bracing for a massing slowdown in work as businesses suspend orders from overseas because of Trump's tariffs. Ocean carriers have canceled trips at a faster rate than during the COVID-19 pandemic, and cargo at the massive Port of Los Angeles is down 35% in early May.
New Brighton-based shipping company Big Blue Box Vice President Ted Longbella said truckers in Minnesota will feel the effects of the tariffs around June, when the surge of goods that were panic-ordered before Trump's 'Liberation Day' tariffs announcement turns into a trickle.
There are more than 56,000 semi-truck drivers and another 18,000 light truck drivers in Minnesota, according to the state Department of Employment and Economic Development, meaning widespread layoffs and reductions in income could ripple throughout the greater economy.
More than 270 Macalester College employees could unionize with the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees, the largest union of state employees.
Workers filed a petition on Monday with the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees private sector unions, to hold an election after the college declined to voluntarily recognize their union. If successful, the union would represent non-managerial staff across campus, from athletics to alumni relations and library services.
'Macalester staff built a thoughtful, disciplined organizing effort and they didn't back down when management refused recognition,' said MAPE President Megan Dayton in a statement announcing the union filing. 'Now, we're ready to win this election.'
The union drive is more than two years in the making, according to the Mac Weekly, and comes on the heels of undergraduate student workers voting to unionize, the first effort of its kind in Minnesota.
Macalester spokesman Joe Linstroth said the scope of the union is 'yet to be determined.'
'Should there be an election, we plan to encourage all eligible employees to vote so that they are able to have a say in whether they wish to be represented by a bargaining unit,' he wrote in an email.
In taking the name Leo on Thursday, the new pope signaled his intention to continue his predecessor Pope Francis' zealous advocacy for the poor.
Pope Leo XIV's name honors the previous Pope Leo, who led the Catholic Church from 1878 to 1903, when workers were fighting back against ruthless industrial capitalism of the Gilded Age.
Pope Leo XIII wrote the encyclical Rerum Novarum — sometimes titled 'On the Condition of the Working Classes' — in 1891, in which he praised unions and sharply criticized unchecked greed and the exploitation of the working poor.
'A small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself,' he wrote. 'To misuse men as though they were things in the pursuit of gain, or to value them solely for their physical powers — that is truly shameful and inhuman.'
He also shunned the socialist aim to eliminate private property altogether, saying it would unjustly deprive workers of the 'liberty of disposing of his wages, and thereby of all hope and possibility of increasing his resources and of bettering his condition in life.'