Latest news with #MayDayRallyForImmigrantandWorkers'Rights
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Labor fights to preserve recent gains at Minnesota Legislature — and other labor news
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.'
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
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.'
