Attorney General Keith Ellison speaks before a door-knock with SEIU President April Verrett in Minneapolis.
Locked in a tight re-election campaign, Attorney General Keith Ellison deserves working Minnesotans’ vote because he puts the power of his office to work for them, union members and labor leaders say.
And they have the receipts to prove it.
Hospitality workers at Target Field, members of UNITE HERE Local 17, have long raised questions about nonprofits that the stadium brings in to operate concession stands, purportedly raising funds for their charitable organizations.
When union members entered contract negotiations with Target Field’s concessionaire, Delaware North, earlier this year, they proposed limits on the practice. The employer showed no interest, Local 17 President Sheigh Freeberg said.
But in July, Ellison announced that his office had reached a civil settlement to shut down one of the nonprofits operating Target Field concession stands, MN Fundraising Initiative (MNFI), after investigating allegations that it was not operated for any charitable purpose. Instead, MNFI was operating as a staffing agency to misclassify hundreds of employees as “volunteers” and deploying them to work in concession stands at venues across the Twin Cities.
Freeberg called it a validating moment for Local 17 members.
“This is a thing that workers have been talking about for years,” Freeberg said. “It’s not right that these sham charities undercut union wages, undercut union labor and take away hours from union workers. It’s hard to overstate how important this settlement was.”
It’s just one of several cases Ellison’s office has built against bad bosses in recent years, seeking justice for victims of wage theft, misclassification or predatory employment practices.
The Attorney General’s Office secured $250,000 in back pay for dairy workers, won $800,000 in restitution for delivery drivers with the gig-economy firm Shipt and, earlier this year, won an important decision that keeps alive efforts to recoup wages allegedly stolen from cleaning workers at Madison Equities’ former holdings in downtown St. Paul.
Fighting back against Trump
Union leaders also point to Ellison’s work since January 2025 to defend Minnesota against attacks from the Trump administration, filing or signing onto over 50 cases against the executive branch.
Ellison’s office filed one of those cases in July, after Trump’s Department of Education abruptly announced it would withhold funding appropriated to local school districts across the country. Minnesota districts stood to lose a combined $74 billion.
“Two months before fall classes, before school was supposed to start, school leaders all over the state scrambled to see what they would have to cut if no one stepped in for students and no one stepped up for the Constitution,” Brian McCarthy, president of the West St. Paul Federation of Teachers, said. “Fortunately, someone did.”
Trump relented, and the federal government released the funding. But McCarthy wondered whether Ellison’s opponent, corporate attorney Ron Schutz, would have sued his own party’s president.
“Lawsuits like that tell me that Keith will continue to work for our kids and our communities,” McCarthy said.
Keeping an eye out for workers
For healthcare workers and advocates, meanwhile, Ellison’s leadership in the Attorney General’s Office is critical to navigating an unprecedented period of upheaval in the sector, with three pairs of health systems seeking the office’s approval for sales or mergers in the last year.
Unions say Ellison understands the importance of maintaining their collective bargaining rights as part of that process.
North Memorial and Sanford made that guarantee as part of a binding community benefits agreement that paved the way for approval of their merger earlier this year, but advocates are still pushing Allina and California-based Sutter Health, as well as HealthPartners and Essentia, for similar agreements.
Allina hospice nurse Susie Smerz said she’s grateful for the work Ellison did to get their newly organized bargaining unit a first contract – without having to go on an open-ended strike. Representatives of the Attorney General’s Office, she said, were directly involved with last-ditch talks to avoid a strike, doing “shuttle diplomacy” to get a tentative agreement between Allina Health and her bargaining unit with SEIU Healthcare Minnesota and Iowa.
“The hospice nurses began feeling like an open-ended strike had become the only tool in our tool belt,” Smerz said. “I don’t know how, but the Attorney General’s Office got wind of it and, I think, was like, ‘Oh no, Allina.’ They really got us to the finish line.
“It really seemed like they cared about us – about the little people. We’re a unit of 55 to 60 nurses, and that’s a drop in the bucket for Allina. They were willing to wear us down. But the Attorney General’s Office wanted to be sure we didn’t get left in the dust.”
UNITE HERE’s Freeberg said he tells people Minnesota has the best Attorney General for workers in the country. But that comes with a target on Ellison’s race each time he’s on the ballot.
“He didn’t have to take on cases like ours,” Freeberg said. “These sham charities exist in all 50 states. But that’s who Keith is. He’s someone that workers can always count on, and his opponent is someone that their bosses can always count on. I really don’t think the stakes could be higher than that.”
– Michael Moore, UA editor
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