02-05-2025
May Day demonstrations draw thousands in protest of Trump — and other labor news
Thousands rally at 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: May Day demonstrations decry Trump; unemployment benefits hang over state budget deal; strike averted at HealthPartners; governor exempts more workers from return-to-office order; and labor market proves resilient amid economic turmoil.
Fury at the Trump administration's assault on unions and immigrants fueled annual May Day demonstrations across the country and in Minnesota, where thousands of people filled the Capitol lawn in St. Paul on Thursday with simultaneous rallies in Duluth, Rochester, St. Peter, Northfield and Brainerd.
'Immigrant rights and labor rights are human rights, and it's really important to stand up with what's happening in D.C.,' said Shari Wojtowicz, an AT&T employee and president of the state council of the Communication Workers of America union, in an interview before the rally in St. Paul.
Union leaders and immigrant rights activists decried Trump's moves to deport undocumented immigrants, hamstring the National Labor Relations Board and rescind collective bargaining rights for federal employees.
They urged the crowd to remember their power in speeches inflected with references to significant historical events: the Delano Grape Strike and Boycott; Martin Luther King Jr.'s final speech to the striking sanitation workers in Memphis; President Reagan firing the air traffic controllers; and the Haymarket massacre in Chicago in 1886 during a protest for an 8-hour workday, which May Day commemorates.
The event featured Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants, who became a celebrity of the labor movement in 2019 when she called for a general strike and was credited with helping end the 35-day government shutdown.
She began her speech by belting out a stanza from the old labor song, 'Solidarity Forever.'
'It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade; Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid; Now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made; But the union makes us strong.'
Nelson renewed her call for a general strike. Like the 1934 Minneapolis general strike, she reminded the crowd.
'That's the working class power that had corporations begging for labor law,' Nelson said. 'Musk and the oligarchs have money and control, but we have the power. Nothing can move without our labor. And it's time that we exercise our power in a united working class.'
Earlier in the day, Nelson met with workers at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport and said the union is closer than it's ever been to filing for a union election for Delta flight attendants.
Marching with the crowd from the Capitol, Alison Jones, a union English Language Learner teacher in the Minneapolis Public Schools, said she came to show her support for workers' rights and her students, some of whom have stopped coming to class out of fear of deportations.
'People should be able to go to school and not worry,' Jones said.
Unemployment benefits for bus drivers, teachers' aides and other hourly school employees is becoming a major sticking point in budget negotiations at the state Capitol.
In 2023, Minnesota became the first state to offer unemployment to hourly school workers in the summer months, providing a financial cushion that has long been available to other seasonal workers like those in construction. But the $135 million the state set aside for the benefits in 2023 is running dry, meaning school districts could soon be on the hook for the added expense.
On Monday, the Democratic and Republican co-chairs of the House Education Finance Committee unveiled an agreement that would set aside an additional $30 million for unemployment benefits to carry school districts through this summer and then repeal the benefit in 2029.
But House Democrats in the Rules Committee showed they weren't willing to go along with the deal from leadership when they voted against advancing the education budget bill to the House floor for a full vote, so long as it included the provision stripping hourly school employees of the benefit.
Meanwhile, the Senate passed a bill extending unemployment benefits for more than 600 steelworkers at two northern mines from 26 weeks to 52 weeks. The proposal sailed through the narrowly divided Senate with support from Republicans, who are increasingly sensitive to the needs of miners on the now reliably red Iron Range.
That raises the possibility that miners — predominantly white men earning upwards of $100,000 a year — could receive a full year of unemployment benefits while hourly school workers — predominantly women and people of color earning around $17 an hour on average — would be stripped of all benefits. Beyond the issue of fairness, Democrats who vote to repeal benefits for hourly school workers would be running afoul of the Service Employees International Union, an important ally that represents school workers.
'What our caucus has clearly said is we are not going to pit workers against each other. We believe everyone should have the economic security of unemployment insurance,' said Emma Greenman, DFL-Minneapolis, who authored the bill in 2023 extending unemployment to hourly school workers.
Ahead of a 10-day strike set to begin on Monday, HealthPartners and the union representing about 1,000 front-desk and office support workers reached a tentative agreement on a new labor contract that raises wages and preserves health insurance benefits.
The workers, who are represented by OPEIU Local 12, voted to authorize a strike in January for the first time in decades over the company's proposals to increase health insurance premiums and introduce co-pays for the first time, while offering wage increases that didn't match inflation.
'The tradeoff for many years was being able to have a gold standard health plan meant taking less in wages,' said Devin Hogan, president of OPEIU Local 12. 'Wages have fallen so far behind that people can't make a living.'
The details of the tentative agreement were not immediately public, but Hogan said the union was pushing for raises that restored the $3.50 per hour in buying power that inflation ate away since the pandemic. The starting wage for OPEIU workers is around $19 an hour.
Gov. Tim Walz's administration exempted more state employees from his order that most employees return to the office 50% of the time beginning June 1.
In a memo published this week, Minnesota Management and Budget said workers who live more than 50 miles from the office — instead of the previous 75 — can work from home.
The order has faced intense backlash from the state's largest union, Minnesota Association of Professional Employees, which has raised the possibility of a strike and compared Walz to billionaire Elon Musk, who has championed full-time return-to-office at the federal government.
The Walz administration says the move will improve collaboration and communication, while MAPE argues the order will only hurt retention and recruitment without improving productivity.
'We view this as a cosmetic adjustment to an inherently flawed policy that continues to disrupt state operations, require unnecessary costs, and destabilize the workforce without addressing any clear operational need,' MAPE President Megan Dayton said in a statement to the Reformer.
MAPE is currently negotiating a new labor contract with state leaders and has proposed that they be entitled to work remotely unless the state can 'clearly and convincingly demonstrate that essential job functions of the position cannot be completed when telecommuting.'
The U.S. economy added 177,000 jobs in April and unemployment remained unchanged at 4.2%, two closely watched metrics as the Trump administration's trade war, federal funding cuts and reduction of the federal workforce roil the economy.
The better-than-expected jobs report on Friday suggests the labor market has remained strong so far despite worrying signs elsewhere. The U.S. economy shrank 0.3% in the first quarter of the year, the stock market has been on a rollercoaster ride, and retailers are cancelling orders from overseas, raising the specter of a return to empty store shelves from the COVID-19 era.
'The 'R' word that the labor market is demonstrating in this report is resilience, certainly not recession,' Olu Sonola, head of US economic research at Fitch Ratings, said in Bloomberg. 'For now, we should curb our enthusiasm going forward given the backdrop of trade policies that will likely be a drag on the economy.'
