Laid-off miners will receive year of unemployment under legislative deal — and other labor news

Yahoo

23-05-2025

The Hull Rust Mine View in Hibbing that overlooks Hibbing Taconite. Photo by Jerry Burnes/Iron Range Today.
Take a seat in the Break Room, our weekly round-up of labor news in Minnesota and beyond. This week: laid off miners likely to receive a year of unemployment; lawmakers still deadlocked over noncompete agreements; nurses union accuses health systems of skimping on charity care; and Colorado governor blocks repeal of right-to-work-style law.
Some 630 idled workers at two northern Minnesota mines will be eligible for a full year of unemployment benefits under a bipartisan agreement between the House and Senate announced on Thursday.
Workers are typically only eligible for 26 weeks of unemployment benefits, which cover about half their earnings while they look for new jobs. But six-figure mining jobs won't be easy to find in the area until Cleveland Cliffs restarts operations at Minorca Mine in Virginia and Hibbing Taconite, raising the prospect that workers would have to move out-of-state.
'We have to make sure that the steelworkers that are laid off at our mines stay in our communities on the Iron Range … for when our mines are ready to get back up and operational,' bill author Sen. Grant Hauschild, DFL-Hermantown, said on the Senate floor last month.
Doubling unemployment benefits for miners was never in doubt even as Republicans looked to repeal all unemployment benefits for bus drivers, cafeteria workers and other hourly school workers. Republicans championed their own bill extending benefits to laid off miners, and the Democratic version passed off the House floor on Monday 132-0.
That underscores the importance of miners as much to the local Iron Range economy as the state's identity as the country's largest producer of iron ore and taconite. It also reflects the rightward shift of the Iron Range, which now sends mostly Republicans to St. Paul to represent its interests.
The number of mining jobs have been steadily eroded by automation, but those that remain are some of the highest paid in the region and support numerous adjacent industries.
Mining giant Cleveland Cliffs announced in March that it would temporarily layoff about 630 workers, who are unionized with the United Steelworkers, as demand for steel in the auto industry cratered under worsening consumer sentiment, high interest rates and tariffs from the Trump administration.
Trump's trade war has not seemed to dent enthusiasm for tariffs among the laid off steelworkers or Cleveland Cliffs CEO Lourenco Gonclaves.
The Department of Employment and Economic Development estimates the additional benefits will cost the state about $15 million, assuming 630 workers receive $914 a week on average.
Unemployment benefits for hourly school workers cost around $57 million in 2024, helping workers who earn around $17 an hour on average make ends meet through the summer. The state Legislature passed a bill this year that would give school districts an additional $100 million to pay for the benefits, while a Republican effort to repeal the benefits in 2029 failed.
Democrats also hope to extend unemployment benefits to federal employees who are laid off as part of the Trump administration's assault on the federal workforce. There were only about 200 federal jobs lost in Minnesota last month — many of Trump's layoffs have been reversed or paused — but state officials said they expect to see a large drop at some point.
Lawmakers deadlocked, again, on Thursday over a Republican push to roll back the state's 2023 ban on noncompete agreements.
Repealing the ban for white collar workers is a top priority for the Minnesota Business Partnership, which includes more than 100 executives of the state's largest companies. They argue the ban undermines companies' right to protect valuable trade secrets, even though proprietary information is already protected under the Uniform Trade Secrets Act.
The ban's author Rep. Emma Greenman, DFL-Minneapolis, said large companies are pushing to restore noncompetes to stifle competition and push down wages.
'It gives them power to restrict their employees from leaving, from going to a competitor, from starting a small business … Trade secrets are actually very well protected,' Greenman said during a meeting between House and Senate members of the jobs 'working group' on Thursday.
About one in five American workers — in jobs ranging from medicine to child care — are bound by a noncompete agreement, which costs workers more than $250 billion per year by decreasing competition, according to the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC proposed a national ban on noncompetes under the Biden administration.
Workers in California have famously been able to hop from employer to employer because the state doesn't enforce noncompete agreements, which Berkeley political scientist AnnaLee Saxenian and other experts have cited as a key factor that fueled the immense, wealth-creating innovation of Silicon Valley.
Rep. Dave Baker, R-Willmar, proposed the working group adopt a proposal in their larger jobs bill that would allow companies to enforce noncompete agreements for employees making more than $120,000 and whose primary duties include 'research and development or the creation, analysis, or modification of confidential, proprietary, or trade secret information.'
Greenman said the proposal's vague language was 'trojan horse' that would effectively allow companies to require any worker earning more than $120,000 a year to sign a non-compete agreement.
She asked Baker if he could define 'confidential' and 'proprietary.' Baker said it was 'extremely technical,' and then called for a recess, during which he conferred with a lobbyist from the Minnesota Business Partnership in the hallway.
The proposal failed to get enough support to be adopted, as did a Democratic proposal that would have raised the income threshold and required companies to pay the full salary of employees during the enforcement period of the noncompete.
Without a deal, the issue will likely be sent to legislative leaders and the governor to find a compromise; lawmakers are already working past Monday's adjournment to pass a two-year budget. Without a budget by July 1, swathes of the government shutter.
The largest hospital systems in the Twin Cities and Duluth areas receive tens of millions more in tax exemptions than they give back through charity care, according to a report released this week by the Minnesota Nurses Association.
The union estimates seven hospital systems — Allina, Children's, Essentia, Fairview, HealthPartners, North Memorial and St. Luke's — received $3.9 billion in federal, state and local tax exemptions between 2018 and 2022 but only spent $607 million in free or reduced cost care for poor patients. The union also estimates hospitals' spending on charity care relative to their overall budgets has fallen by nearly half on average over the past decade, from .78% in 2013 to .41% in 2022.
'The nation's earliest hospitals were founded principally by religious and charitable organizations to tend to the sick and poor. Today's not-for-profit hospitals and systems, often monumentally wealthy and glittering institutions, are their distant cousins,' the report says.
The union is currently negotiating new labor contracts on behalf of some 15,000 nurses with the seven large hospital systems scrutinized in the report. The nurses are seeking higher pay and staffing levels ,and the report serves as a response to health leader's assertions that their demands are unaffordable. As during the last round of negotiations, the union also takes aim at sky-high hospital executive compensation.
Hospitals will point out that charity care represents just a small fraction of the community benefits they provide, including research, education, contributions to community groups, and losing money on Medicaid patients.
Earlier this year, the state Office of the Legislative Auditor released a report finding that Minnesota's 104 nonprofit general hospitals appear to give back more to their communities than they receive in tax breaks, although it depends on what is counted as a community benefit, and with the caveat that tax benefits are difficult to estimate.
The OLA report looked at individual hospitals' finances, whereas MNA analyzed health systems as a whole, which include many hospitals in addition to clinics, pharmacies, assisted living facilities and more. Unlike the MNA report, the OLA report does not account for indirect benefits of hospitals' tax exempt statuses like being able to issue bonds and receive charitable gifts.
The health care reform think tank Lown Institute used a more limited definition of community benefit when it estimated that 90% of Minnesota's hospitals receive more in tax breaks than they give back to the community, adding up to a $1.1 billion loss for the state.
Nonprofit hospitals are exempt from taxes on income, property and sales with the expectation that they reinvest those savings back into the community. Minnesota and the federal government require hospitals to report this spending, at least in vague terms, but don't require a minimum amount of spending in exchange for their tax-exempt status.
The nurses union has sought legislation requiring greater disclosure and more restrictions on community benefits from hospitals.
Colorado's Democratic Gov. Jared Polis vetoed a bill this month that would have repealed the state's unique anti-union law that effectively makes it a right-to-work state.
Under Colorado's 80-year-old Labor Peace Act, unions must win a second election with 75% support in order to collect dues from all represented workers. The law was passed before the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which enabled states to pass right-to-work laws banning unions from collecting mandatory dues from all workers represented by their collective bargaining agreements.
Repealing the requirement was a key priority for unions in Colorado, and it passed with wide margins along party lines in the state Legislature. Polis said he wanted unions and businesses to find common ground, and that there should be a 'high threshold of worker participation' for mandatory dues.
The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute noted that Colorado's union density of 7.7% is closer to the 6.2% average for right-to-work states than the 15.8% in non-right-to-work states. In Minnesota, which does not have a right-to-work law, 14.2% of workers are union members.
Minnesota state lawmakers have made it easier in recent years for public sector workers to join a union. Under a 2023 law, a public union may be certified once a majority of workers sign cards in support of unionizing without the need for an election as required in the private sector.
Resident physicians at Hennepin Healthcare and the University of Minnesota were able to quickly unionize using this 'card check' process. Those workers may not be required to pay union dues, however, because of a 2018 Supreme Court ruling that bars public-sector unions from collecting mandatory fees from workers they represent.