The voice of Saint Paul's working families since 1897
Sam Walton famously required that Walmart employees flash a smile and offer a greeting to anyone coming within 10 feet of their path. Moronica Owens this week discovered a few exceptions to the “10-foot rule” at Walmart’s annual shareholder meetings in Fayetteville, Ark. “I’m a Walmart associate; I know the 10-foot rule,” Owens said. “But […]
The boycott of Staples is official. The AFL-CIO last Friday approved the American Postal Workers Union’s request to add the office-supply retailer to the national federation’s list of endorsed boycotts. The APWU and other postal unions launched the “Stop Staples” campaign earlier this year, after the U.S. Postal Service announced plans to expand a pilot […]
There’s no substitute for the professional judgment and personalized care nurses provide to their patients. That’s the message behind radio and online ads airing across the country, including in Minnesota, that advise the public to “insist on a registered nurse.” National Nurses United, the nation’s largest union of nurses (the Minnesota Nurses Association is a […]
Good news: Downtown St. Paul finally has the full-service grocery store residents have been clamoring for. Even better news: It’s a union shop. After years of planning and waiting, Lunds opened a 27,000-square-foot store on the ground floor of the Penfield Apartments at 10th and Robert streets May 15. The store’s 80 workers are members […]
After waging a public campaign to gain parity with nurses at other Allina Health facilities in the Twin Cities, members of the Minnesota Nurses Association at Regina Medical Center in Hastings voted May 1 to accept a contract that comes up short in the areas of pension and health insurance – with a vow to […]
Cantaré Davunt nodded her head as Anne Winkler-Morey talked about struggling to make ends meet as an adjunct professor. To Davunt, the challenges adjunct faculty face – low wages, unreliable hours, few opportunities for advancement – sounded all too familiar to her experience as an associate at Walmart. Davunt and Winkler-Morey joined a panel discussion […]
Union nurses are keeping the pressure on Allina Health to do right by their colleagues at Regina Medical Center in Hastings, where nurses voted yesterday to authorize their leadership to call a strike if contract talks break down. Meanwhile, about 100 nurses and supporters from the labor community staged informational picketing outside Allina-owned United Hospital […]
Registered nurses at WestHealth Emergency Department and Urgent Care voted Feb. 13 in favor of joining the Minnesota Nurses Association, a health care facility based in Plymouth and operated by Abbott Northwestern. In the unit of 32 nurses, 92 percent voted in favor of joining MNA in balloting conducted by the National Labor Relations Board. […]
Three days before members of the St. Paul Federation of Teachers were scheduled to take a strike-authorization vote, negotiators for the school district and the teachers’ union reached a tentative agreement on a two-year contract that will run through the 2014-15 school year. Teachers planned a ratification vote for March 4, and the union’s executive […]
Seeking to hasten an organizing process ripe for obstruction and fraught with delays, the National Labor Relations Board today proposed changes to the rules governing elections that determine union representation in most U.S. workplaces. The NLRB, the federal agency that oversees union-organizing elections, voted 3-2 in favor of pursuing the rule change. In a press […]
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