Trades-backed alliance ramps up recruitment as MN’s construction industry booms

May 16, 2018 by

A union-backed initiative to recruit more women and people of color into construction careers is hoping a new website will amplify its marketing push and help ease the industry’s stubborn labor shortage.

The Construction Careers Pathways Alliance, which brings together Building Trades unions, contractors, apprenticeship programs and other groups, revamped its website, constructioncareers.org, last month, adding dynamic photos, videos and graphics that designers hope will stand out on social media platforms popular with millennials.

The aim is to get young people “to really start looking at construction as a very viable career choice, with good wages and good benefits to sustain themselves and their family members,” said Pat Wagner, founding executive director of the Construction Careers Foundation, which oversees the initiative.

The website touts year-round opportunities available to young people looking to explore a career in the trades, including two summer programs on the horizon.

  • The MN Trades Academy is a paid internship available to selected Twin Cities high schoolers, who visit apprenticeship training centers and complete projects related to specific crafts.
  • Kids at Work, a summer program for students in grades 4 through 9, offers a crash course in STEM activities, presented within the context of the construction industry.

These summer programs complement the Career Pathways initiative’s year-round work with school districts across the state to bring construction concepts back into the classroom. Thirteen school districts have partnered with the alliance to add the “multi-craft curriculum,” a Building Trades-endorsed program, to their tech-ed courses.

Construction classes “have been lost from the high school curriculum, whether it’s due to financial constraints or a shift in focus to four-year college degrees,” Wagner said.

Sparking a student’s interest in construction is just the first step, she added. The adults in a student’s life often turn out to be the tougher sell.

Pat Wagner

“You can see the light in their eyes when they get hooked,” Wagner said. “But we need to reach young people early on so the discussions can start at home concerning their future.”

The construction industry in Minnesota, however, is ripe with career opportunities.

In a survey taken last year by the Associated General Contractors, 90 percent of Minnesota contractors who responded said they anticipated hiring craftspeople in the next 12 months. Three-quarters said they expected it to be as hard or harder to find qualified applicants.

Recognizing the need to restock the pipeline of tradespeople, state lawmakers allotted funds two years ago to support Construction Career Pathways’ work to bring people from non-traditional backgrounds into the trades.

Unions, too, have been critical in supporting the initiative. It’s not often labor and management groups wholeheartedly agree on anything, which indicates just how serious the industry is about preparing the next generation of tradespeople for work.

“We’re really looking at a changing workforce, an aging workforce,” Wagner said. “We are in need of educating individuals of color, the immigrant population and young women. That is our future workforce, and we are reaching out to them.”

Change will take time, but the foundation’s work already has had an impact. Since 2017 over 7,000 students from 170 schools statewide attended or participated in a program sponsored by alliance. Female students accounted for 32 percent of those participants; 74 percent came from underrepresented communities.

“We need to provide young people with exposure and hands-on experiences,” Wagner said. “If young people have that experience, they tend to learn that it’s not their hands, it’s their minds and their passion and creativity that they are using.”

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Restaurant industry pushes tip penalty; unions and tipped workers push back

April 25, 2018 by

You might not have noticed the sky falling in Minnesota’s restaurant industry – unless, that is, you’ve been hanging out in meetings of the House Committee on Job Growth and Energy Affordability Policy and Finance.

The Republican-controlled committee has tucked a measure into its Omnibus Jobs and Energy Bill that would allow restaurants to pay servers and bartenders less than minimum wage. In hearings last month, industry lobbyists claimed the concession is necessary to shield establishments from annual, inflationary increases to the state’s minimum wage.

Minnesota is one of just seven states where employers may not pay a lower, sub-minimum wage to workers on the basis that their income includes tips. Lawmakers removed the “tipped tier” from Minnesota’s minimum-wage rules three decades ago.

But time hasn’t exactly softened the restaurant industry’s opposition.

The state’s minimum wage has increased from $7.25 to $9.65 for large employers over the last four years, and restaurant owners – and some workers – claim the increased labor costs have upended their industry, forcing layoffs, increasing automation and threatening the vibrancy of the local dining scene.

“The goal of this is to keep jobs intact and to keep our businesses open,” Minneapolis bartender Adam Borgen told committee members April 16.

But employment data collected by the state doesn’t back up the industry’s claims. An analysis by the JOBS NOW Coalition found that job openings in Minnesota’s restaurant industry have increased by 200 percent since 2014, when the minimum wage began to climb.

“Restaurants literally can’t get anyone to fill these jobs in the first place,” JOBS NOW’s Kevin Ristau said. “But they say that by raising the minimum wage, you’re going to hurt the very people you’re trying to help, that those opportunities for workers will no longer exist. Well, we raised the minimum wage, and there are more ‘opportunities’ than ever.”

Minnesota’s restaurant scene, meanwhile, remains hot. Ten local chefs and two restaurants were named semifinalists for the prestigious James Beard Foundation awards earlier this year.

So if a political push to make it legal for restaurants to pay workers less than minimum wage sounds like a solution in search of a problem, that’s because it is, UNITE HERE Local 17 Political Director Wade Luneberg said.

“My industry’s obsession with removing income from employees’ pockets has always stumped me,” Luneberg, a former server and longtime officer in the Twin Cities hospitality union, told committee members.

“This is not an industry in crisis,” he added. “Instead, it keeps expanding and diversifying to find more ways of doing business.”

Although most people who testified for or against the measure last month were from the Twin Cities, the bill’s chief author, Rep. Joe McDonald (R-Delano), stressed it was not his intention to preempt local minimum-wage rules.

Minneapolis did not carve out a sub-minimum wage for tipped workers in its $15 ordinance last year, meaning even if McDonald’s bill were to become law, Minneapolis restaurants would have to raise servers’ wages annually in accordance with the ordinance.

Still, St. Paul Regional Labor Federation President Bobby Kasper warned the tip penalty is just one piece of a broader corporate agenda Republicans are pushing at the Capitol. Another piece of the agenda: preempting local control.

“We’re going to fight any effort to put a tip penalty into St. Paul’s minimum wage ordinance because workers in the hospitality industry deserve one fair wage,” Kasper said. “But we can’t ignore what’s happening at the Capitol. These politicians are only listening to their corporate donors, and they could wipe out everything we’ve been working for.”

That’s exactly the feeling Desiree King had when she heard tip penalty legislation was alive in the House. A longtime server who now waits tables in St. Paul, King testified in favor of scrapping the lower minimum wage for tipped workers 30 years ago, and she never imagined she’d have to come back, King told lawmakers last month.

“To say that we, as a group of people because we earn tips, are not valuable enough to make the minimum wage is insulting,” King said. “We are worth more than that.”

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Construction jobs get bipartisan support at Capitol rally

April 10, 2018 by

State lawmakers from both parties touted their proposals to put union tradespeople to work during a rally today on the Capitol steps, organized by the Minnesota State Building and Construction Trades Council.

The rally capped the council’s annual lobbying day, which saw Carpenters, Laborers, Operating Engineers and other union tradespeople meeting with their elected officials and urging support for jobs-creating investments, including Gov. Mark Dayton’s proposed $1.5 billion public works bill.

The governor’s bonding proposal would put an estimated 22,950 people to work on more than 200 projects statewide, investing in public colleges and universities, housing, water-treatment facilities and more.

But Dayton warned tradespeople that opponents will try to scale back his jobs bill.

“They’re going to try to pare it back,” he said. “They’re going to pick a number … and say we can’t go above that. They’re going to leave jobs on the table. So ask them to justify why a number is more important than putting people to work.”

Building Trades unions rally on the Capitol steps, with semi trailers from Laborers Local 563 and Operating Engineers Local 49 serving as a backdrop.

 

While Dayton and other DFLers called for investments in infrastructure and transportation, Republican leaders remained mostly silent on those issues. Instead, they offered support for legislation that would shift jobs-creating projects in the private sector, stalled over environmental concerns, out of neutral.

House Speaker Kurt Daudt and Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka pledged to send the governor a bill approving Enbridge’s Line 3 oil pipeline and another that would ease environmental hurdles faced by mining companies on the state’s Iron Range.

“My hope is that this is bipartisan,” Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka, a Republican from Nisswa, said. “At the end of the day, frankly, for Minnesota to be successful, Republicans and Democrats have got to figure out a way to work together, focus on the things that everybody benefits from. If we do that, we all win.”

Although most lawmakers talked jobs, Senate Minority Leader Tom Bakk, a carpenter from Cook, held up his union card and urged tradespeople to stay vigilant against attacks on their wages and collective bargaining rights.

“You don’t have to look too far … to see what happened in Wisconsin when labor got a little complacent,” Bakk said, pointing to Republican-backed legislation that eliminated prevailing wage and project labor agreements in the state, as well as a “right-to-work” law that weakened unions’ bargaining power. “We’ve got to keep the heat on, keep building relationships with those people who represent us.”

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Anti-union ‘paycheck deception’ bill advances in Minnesota House

March 26, 2018 by

Legislation that would make it harder for working people in Minnesota to join together cleared its first hurdle Thursday night, as the House Government Operations Committee voted to advance a paycheck deception bill.

Authored by notoriously anti-union lawmaker Steve Drazkowski, a House Republican, the bill would ban public employees from using payroll deduction to pay their union dues, if those dues fund political activities.

Drazkowski claimed his intent was to protect public workers who don’t agree with their union’s political agenda from being forced to pay for it. But in testimony before the committee, Minnesota AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Julie Blaha said the bill’s true motive is far less noble.

Paycheck deception “really has one purpose: to make it harder for working people to join together in common purpose,” Blaha said.

At best, Drazkowski’s bill is a solution in search of a problem. Whether they work in the public or private sector, union members already have a choice when it comes to paying for political activities.

No worker in the U.S. can be forced to join a union. In Minnesota, workers covered by a collective bargaining agreement may opt out of membership dues and pay agency fees, which cover only the cost of representation but do not fund political advocacy.

At worst, the bill is a cynical ploy to make it harder for working people to engage in politics through their unions. Blaha called it an unnecessary “hoop” through which unions would be forced to jump, rigging the system even more for corporations and the super-rich.

“People that push paycheck deception laws want you to think these laws protect workers,” Blaha said. “They don’t. Paycheck deception bills only protect billionaires and CEO’s who want to chip away at the freedoms people in unions have won for all of us.”

Rep. Mike Nelson, a union carpenter and the DFL party’s leading member on the committee, offered an amendment to Drazkowski’s bill that would have forced corporations to jump through the same hoops. Any corporation that spends more than $10,000 on political activity in Minnesota, Nelson said, should have to poll their shareholders first.

“I’m a stockholder in many corporations,” Nelson said, adding that “corporate boards are able to spend money on political purposes” he doesn’t always agree with – and do it without his consent.

The amendment failed.

Union members packed the hearing room at 10:15 a.m. for the start of the committee meeting to show their opposition to paycheck deception. But the committee adjourned after roughly two hours without considering the bill, then reconvened more than five hours later.

Drazkowski’s was the final bill the committee considered before adjourning for the night.

 

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As momentum for $15 builds in St. Paul, so does concern over corporate interference

March 23, 2018 by

Earlier this month Kiara Ivy stepped outside the hardware store in St. Paul where she works as a cashier, and found an organizer waiting for her with a clipboard and a question.

Would she support raising St. Paul’s minimum wage to $15?

Ivy, who earns $9.65 an hour, didn’t hesitate to say yes.

“I had heard a lot of talk about raising the minimum wage, but didn’t know it was happening here,” she said. “I tend not to get my hopes up a lot, but it sounds so nice.”

Ivy was one of 539 low-wage workers who signed up to support a $15 minimum wage during a five-day organizing blitz earlier this month. It’s given the 15 Now campaign a jolt of momentum – and an even deeper well of public support – as the issue moves up the city’s agenda.

Working America’s Alisa Tennessen, who coordinated the blitz, said it also provided a glimpse of who is working for poverty wages in the capital city, as many supporters filled out surveys on what $15 would mean for themselves and their families.

“The answers are heartbreaking,” Tennessen said, noting “an astonishingly high number of people who talked about food – healthier food, more food, more food for their families.”

Ivy, in fact, met with a reporter on her way home from the food shelf. The 18-year-old shares a one-bedroom apartment in St. Paul with her mom and a roommate, chipping in $100 a month for rent and $50 each week for food, despite working only 25 hours per week.

Raising the wage to $15 in St. Paul, she said, would “mean I could finally move out on my own and still be able to help my mom out.”

Local elected officials in St. Paul, including Mayor Melvin Carter, have signaled support for giving workers like Ivy a raise. City Council President Amy Brendmoen said in February the plan is to “have an ordinance in front of us by fall.”

By that time, however, St. Paul may no longer have the authority to pass its own minimum-wage law.

As they did last year, corporate special interests and Republicans in the Legislature are trying to pull the rug out from under Ivy and other workers fighting for $15, pushing a bill that would bar local governments from raising employment standards in their communities – and strip newly won earned sick and safe time benefits from 150,000 working people in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Gov. Mark Dayton vetoed the local preemption measure last year, but Republican majorities in the House and Senate have quietly brought it back to life this legislative session.

Brad Lehto, chief of staff for the Minnesota AFL-CIO, said one of Republicans’ first moves after the 2018 session began was to send the preemption bill (House File 600) back into conference committee.

“Whenever they see fit, they will convene the committee and pass it back to the House and Senate, where it already passed once,” he said. “Will they do that? I would think so. When? I think late in the session.”

Lehto and other Capitol observers anticipate the GOP will try to use preemption as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the governor.

Earlier this month, as 15 Now activists fanned out across the city during the organizing blitz, union groups like the St. Paul Regional Labor Federation began holding phone banks, connecting union members statewide with Gov. Dayton to urge him to stand firm on protecting local control again this year. [Click here to find a phone bank near you.]

Unions aren’t alone in the fight, either. Lehto said nearly 80 Minnesota cities have passed resolutions supporting local control.

“We’ve told (lawmakers) over and over, if you would pass a higher minimum wage, if you would pass paid family leave, if you would pass earned sick and safe time, then we wouldn’t have to do this on the local level,” he added.

As debate over the minimum wage and local control plays out this spring, Ivy will begin work at a second job as a personal-care attendant, earning about $12 per hour. (Roughly a quarter of St. Paul workers surveyed by 15 Now work two jobs to make ends meet.)

For Ivy, it means more money to help pay the bills, but less time to pursue her long-term goals – a car of her own, a college degree and a life in New York.

“I want to be in New York, and I want to be a psychiatrist,” she said. “I dream about it, but I haven’t started anything yet.” Earning $15, she added, “would help me to save more to get there.”

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Smith hits the ground running in fight to save pensions

March 15, 2018 by

U.S. Senator Tina Smith met with retirees in St. Paul about her recent appointment to a congressional super-committee on pension reform.

When a Twin Cities-based trucking company abruptly closed three days before Thanksgiving 2016, Tina Smith, then Minnesota’s lieutenant governor, was among the first elected officials to respond.

Owners of Lakeville Motor Express, a union employer, had allegedly siphoned off the firm’s resources into a separate, non-union firm. LME drew public ire for failing to pay many of the 95 Teamsters left jobless.

But Smith also saw signs of what appeared to be a long game. Lakeville Motor Express’ “ability to go out of business on the one hand and start a new business on the other hand,” she said, “allowed it to evade its responsibilities around pensions.”

In fact, LME had followed “a roadmap for escaping pension liabilities,” Teamsters Local 120’s Paul Slattery said, that is “bankrupting” multi-employer pension funds nationwide.

Nearly 18 months later, Lakeville Motor Express’ owners face a state lawsuit alleging fraud, and Smith, who played a critical role in the Dayton administration’s LME investigation, is taking on the fight to protect working people’s hard-earned pension benefits in the U.S. Senate.

The newly appointed senator landed one of eight seats on a congressional “super-committee” formed last month to address the looming pension crisis, as underfunded multi-employer funds providing benefits to over 1 million retirees spiral further toward bankruptcy.

The newly formed committee has until Nov. 30 to agree on a plan to address the crisis. Any legislation that advances from the committee is guaranteed a vote on the Senate floor.

“This is like getting the rug pulled out from underneath you,” Local 120 retiree Chuck Justice (L) told Smith.

‘I’m terrified’

Before digging into the committee’s work, Smith met last week in St. Paul with some of the 22,000 Minnesota retirees covered by the Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund. It’s the fund Lakeville Motor Express weaseled out of, and it’s on track to run out of money within 10 years.

Andrea Hovdestad of Andover attended the meeting with her father, Verlyn, who retired after 35 years as a Teamster driver. She listed the sacrifices her father made to keep contributing to his pension: missing birthday parties, working holidays, sometimes standing on picket lines in the freezing cold.

“This feels like an attack on labor, an attack on the working class,” Hovdestad told Smith, adding that her husband is vested the Central States fund as well. “I’m worried. I’m terrified.”

Smith stressed her opposition to cutting current retirees’ benefits as a part of a pension fix.

“These are people who did everything right,” Smith said. “They paid in, they sacrificed, they worked long hours and they worked many, many years for the promise that when they were done there was going to be a pension there so that they could take care of themselves.”

Smith’s preference: the Butch Lewis Act, legislation introduced last year and backed by the Teamsters. The bill would lend cash to Central States and other troubled funds, helping them meet their obligations to current retirees and regain the financial footing necessary to survive over the long haul.

Local retiree organization Save Our Pensions-Minnesota mobilized hundreds of people to rally in support of the Butch Lewis Act last December, and Smith’s support for the measure was met with a round of applause from retirees around the table in St. Paul.

“If we can figure out a way to bail out Wall Street when they need help, I just can’t believe that we can’t figure out a way to do this,” Smith said, adding that the Butch Lewis Act would be “way less expensive” than the bank bailout.

Too big to fail

The cost of federal inaction, retirees warned, would be far greater than the cost of shoring up their pension funds.

For starters, pension benefits are a major driver of consumer spending. A 2016 report by the nonpartisan National Institute on Retirement Security found that every dollar paid out in benefits supported $2.21 in total economic output nationwide.

Many retirees told Smith said they have no “Plan B” if their pension benefits disappear. Dave Erickson, a retired truck driver from Isanti, said 15 percent of his wages – sometimes more – went into the Central States fund, with little left over for individual retirement savings.

“I stayed in a job I didn’t always like because I had that carrot,” he said. “I wanted my pension… That was a promise.”

Without their pensions, many retirees would be left to rely on Social Security retirement benefits, which currently average $1,362 per month – or just over $16,300 annually. Not only would it severely undercut retirees’ standard of living, Central States pensioner Chuck Justice said, it would force many to access public assistance for food, housing and other needs.

“I take pride in the fact I am able to take care of myself,” Justice, a retired truck driver from Woodbury, told Smith. “This is like someone pulling the rug out from underneath you. It’s just not right.”

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Four takeaways from the new report on raising St. Paul’s minimum wage

February 22, 2018 by

Jess Manthe, a longtime retail worker in St. Paul, speaks at a rally outside council chambers, calling poverty wages a barrier to the middle class for too many people in the city.

Low-wage workers listened as the author of a report on raising St. Paul’s minimum wage summarized her findings at yesterday’s City Council meeting. Then they put council members on notice.

“Now is the time for the city to take a stand and get us the wages we need,” personal care attendant Daniel Maddox, a member of the low-wage worker center CTUL, said during a brief rally outside council chambers.

Council members at the meeting indicated they plan to move at a more deliberate pace. Council President Amy Brendmoen said the plan is to “have an ordinance in front of us by fall.”

What that ordinance should look like is already the subject of a heated debate, as the report presented yesterday confirmed.

The nonpartisan Citizens League prepared the report to give council members an overview of available data and research on the topic, and to identify which constituencies are likely to be impacted by a higher minimum wage. It’s available on the Citizen League’s website.

Here are four takeaways from the report and Citizen League Executive Director Pahoua Yang Hoffman’s presentation to the Council yesterday.

1. Despite an unemployment rate of 3.1 percent, too many working people and families in St. Paul live in poverty.

The Met Council’s most recent analysis of census data shows 40.8 percent of St. Paul residents live in poverty, a higher rate than any other metro-area community. And areas of concentrated poverty are spreading within the city, a trend Ward 7’s Jane Prince called “disturbing.”

Jess Manthe, a longtime retail worker in St. Paul, called poverty wages a barrier to the middle class.

“I have huge amounts of (student) debt that I’ll carry with me for the next 25 years,” she said. “Our unlivable wages mean my husband and I aren’t going to be able to buy a house, and having kids is completely off the table. I think it’s time for St. Paul to invest in its workers.”

2. People working for poverty wages know their paychecks don’t get bigger by accident or their bosses’ goodwill.

In preparing the Citizens League’s report, Hoffman met with more than 100 “stakeholders.” In her presentation to the Council, she singled out the story of a retail janitor who, after 14 years on the job, has seen her wages increase from $7.25 to $10.75 per hour.

The state minimum wage has increased from $6.15 to $9.65 over the same time frame. “She wanted me to let you know that if not for a mandate, she may never get to $15,” Hoffman said.

3. The janitor working for $10.75 after 14 years on the job is not a statistical outlier. In St. Paul poverty wages affect workers of all ages.

Stereotypes that cast minimum-wage earners as students working around classes or retirees keeping themselves busy are bogus. The Citizens League report cites a 2016 study by the Roy Wilkins Center for Human Relations and Social Justice, which considered the impacts of a minimum-wage increase in Minneapolis and in Hennepin and Ramsey counties.

“There is no distinction between ages where there might be in other cities, where low-wage workers might be younger or older,” Hoffman said.

Tipped workers packed council chambers to hear the report on raising St. Paul’s minimum wage.

4. Whether it’s a tip penalty or a training wage, interest groups will attempt to poke holes in St. Paul’s minimum wage.

The Citizens League report reflects a split within the restaurant industry over the tip penalty, which allows employers to pay a sub-minimum wage as long as workers make up the difference in tips. Working people on both sides of the issue showed up in council chambers yesterday.

Servers who support a tip penalty say a lower minimum wage is vital to their employers’ profitability, as well as preservation of a tipping culture. Opponents argue the tip penalty opens the door to wage theft, as some employers fail to make up the difference between workers’ tips and the minimum wage.

Research also shows tip penalties contribute to a culture of sexual harassment in the restaurant industry. A study released earlier this month found female tipped workers in states like Minnesota experience report sexual harassment at half the rate of their counterparts in states with a lower minimum wage for tipped workers.

Catherine Olsen, a tipped worker at a small business in St. Paul, called on city officials to pass an ordinance lifting all workers to $15 per hour, with no tip penalty and no youth wage. “St. Paul has an opportunity to act now and act fast – and to not leave anybody behind,” she said.

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Candidates for governor vie for labor support at state AFL-CIO forum

February 16, 2018 by

The four leading DFL candidates for governor made their pitch to union activists from across Minnesota today at a forum in St. Paul, promising to support working people and their organizations if elected.

State Reps. Erin Murphy and Tina Liebling, U.S. Rep. Tim Walz and State Auditor Rebecca Otto were united in their opposition to right-to-work legislation and support for union organizing and collective bargaining.

[Watch the full debate on the Minnesota AFL-CIO’s Facebook page.]

Bargaining rights and professional standards would be off the table in Capitol negotiations with Republicans under her administration, Murphy said. Otto pledged to be the “most pro-labor governor since Floyd B. Olson.” Walz cast himself as an “organizer in chief.” Liebling spoke of finding inspiration in the iconic photos of Memphis sanitation workers carrying “I am a man” signs.

Unions, Liebling added, are “about human dignity and freedom, about being able to stand together and fight to have a decent life.”

The candidates also brandished their union credentials. Murphy is a member and past executive director of the Minnesota Nurses Association, Otto and Walz are former members of Education Minnesota, and Liebling was a steward in her union when she worked as a public defender. All four said they had walked a picket line in the last year – “in heels,” Murphy quipped.

When it came to issues, the candidates frequently agreed. They supported raising the minimum wage, expanding free access to higher education and protecting public pensions. Minnesota’s next governor, they agreed, should get the state on track to a single-payer health care system, crack down on wage theft and make needed investments in infrastructure and public schools.

The candidates differed, of course, over who among them could best sell a bold, progressive vision for shared prosperity to Minnesota voters.

Otto, the only candidate on stage who has won a statewide election, said her focus on “bread and butter issues” would resonate best. “The DFL should never be afraid to run on an economic populism message,” she added.

Walz and Liebling touted their success winning in traditionally conservative areas, flipping red districts to blue. Voters are anxious about their economic security, Walz said, but in 2016 they didn’t hear a message from labor-endorsed candidates that spoke to their concerns.

“This is about us taking a message beyond the four walls that we’re in,” he said. “As much as having the right idea, it’s being able to articulate it to those very people who are casting votes and are going to be impacted by it.”

Instead of taking shots at each other, the candidates targeted their criticism at President Trump, likely GOP gubernatorial nominee Tim Pawlenty and Wisconsin’s anti-worker governor, Scott Walker.

Murphy said her administration would take action where the federal government is failing to lead, on issues like immigration and rising student debt loads, which are “inhibiting young people’s ability to participate fully in our economy,” she said.

Otto said she would “clean Pawlenty’s clock” in a general election matchup. Walz said he would aggressively recruit teachers and high-road businesses from Wisconsin, where Walker’s anti-union agenda has driven educators away from the profession and left wages stagnant.

“If the states are the laboratories of democracies … that laboratory’s on fire right now,” Walz said of Wisconsin.

The debate capped the Minnesota AFL-CIO’s 2018 Campaigns Conference, two days of workshops, panel discussions and trainings for political activists and organizers.

The event kicked off labor’s statewide political campaign, Labor 2018. Minnesota AFL-CIO President Bill McCarthy, the state’s highest-ranking labor leader, said electing a labor-endorsed governor will be labor’s No. 1 goal in a busy election season. The state House of Representatives is up for election, as are both of Minnesota’s U.S. Senate seats.

“It’s going to be up to all of us to get the word out to fellow union members why this election is so important,” McCarthy said. “I think you heard (why) from the candidates here today.”

Marcia Avner, a nonprofit leader and longtime progressive voice, moderated the forum. She did not mince words about the stakes for 2018.

“We need to elect a governor whose values and actions serve the working people of Minnesota,” Avner said. “We cannot afford to lose.”

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Labor-endorsed Karla Bigham fights ‘for an economy that works for everyone’

February 7, 2018 by

Karla Bigham

Working people have stood with Karla Bigham since her first campaign for the Legislature more than a decade ago. Bigham never took that support for granted, and she isn’t about to start now.

Bigham, a DFLer and longtime resident of Cottage Grove, is the labor-endorsed candidate in a Feb. 12 special election in Senate District 54, which includes Afton, Cottage Grove, Hastings, Newport, South St. Paul, St. Paul Park and surrounding townships.

“We’re excited to support Karla Bigham’s campaign for Senate,” St. Paul Regional Labor Federation President Bobby Kasper said. “She will be a strong advocate for working families in the southeast metro.”

As a two-term former legislator and current Washington County commissioner, Bigham has taken a hands-on approach to understanding the issues working people face. She’s gone on “ride-alongs” with local cops and probation officers, and observed public health nurses and teachers at work.

“I want to understand how the job actually gets done,” Bigham said. “That’s where we get good feedback so we can make the right policy decisions.”

Listening to workers is what collective bargaining is all about, and Bigham is a staunch supporter of unions and collective bargaining rights. She is a former member of two unions, the Teamsters and United Food and Commercial Workers.

Working people across the Mississippi River from District 54 have seen their bargaining rights stripped away by Gov. Scott Walker and Wisconsin Republicans. Bigham pledged to fight any attempt to put our state on the same path.

“As close as the Senate is, we have to defend against Right to Work laws, to make sure folks have the right to collectively bargain, to protect prevailing wage and stand up for economic equality,” Bigham said. “I’m fighting for a Minnesota economy that works for everyone. That’s what’s at stake.”

If elected to the Senate, Bigham said she will immediately focus on passing a robust infrastructure jobs bill, and she will support efforts already underway to address sexual harassment in the workplace, including state agencies. She also backs finalizing state employees’ union contracts, currently being held up by a legislative subcommittee.

Whether she’s elected to the Senate or not, though, working people can continue to count on Bigham being in their corner. “Any time you can stand with workers to lend your voice to their voice, it’s louder,” she said. “We have strength in numbers.”

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Dave Zirin: The ‘megaphone of sports’ is more global, powerful than ever

January 31, 2018 by

As the NFL staged its Opening Night Party in St. Paul Monday, protesters shut down streets downtown, calling on Super Bowl sponsors to support local schools and racial equity.

Donald Trump has made politics part of nearly every reporter’s beat. The president’s policy proposals and inflammatory public comments spark reaction and resistance that spill beyond the Beltway, outside the traditional spaces reserved for political debate.

Nowhere, perhaps, has the spillover been more apparent – or uncomfortable – than in the world of sports.

When Colin Kaepernick chose not to stand during the national anthem at a preseason game in 2016, the “take a knee” movement against police brutality in communities of color caught fire. TV networks squirmed over the impact on their ratings, shock jocks lit up sports radio with hot takes, and sports reporters started asking questions that went beyond X’s and O’s.

Dave Zirin has been asking those questions for a long time. A former student at Macalester College, he is the author of “A People’s History of Sports” and other books on how sports and progressive movements intersect. Zirin is at work on a book with Seattle Seahawks defensive end Michael Bennett, and he writes and podcasts regularly at edgeofsports.com. He offered up his thoughts on what Minnesotans can expect during – and after – Super Bowl week in this interview, which has been edited (albeit lightly) for length (he had lots of good things to say).

UA: Teachers, low-wage workers and progressive groups here are using the Super Bowl spotlight to lift up their own campaigns, and some of their messages are obviously inspired by the way pro athletes have used their platform lately. This isn’t a new phenomenon in sports, but to what degree are we witnessing something historic?

Dave Zirin (photo credit: Jen Maler)

DZ: We’re certainly looking at a massive uptick in what is a historical continuum. Sports has always been this very powerful place. We’re taught that sports is this level playing field, this epitome of America, where anybody who’s good can make it. Yet the reality of sports is it’s a very unlevel playing field. It’s also one of the few places that if you come from a working-class or poor background, you have this immense cultural capital to tell your story – and to speak about what’s happening in the world.

I would argue that events like the Super Bowl become more and more these kind of global political events, almost like an economic Trojan horse in these communities. The spotlight is so bright. We’ve never been at a point where the megaphone of sports is more global and more powerful.

UA: What would you say to local activists looking to divert that spotlight into the streets?

DZ: I would say that they are doing the right kind of work. They are part of a tradition that’s really fired up recently in Olympic host cities, World Cup host countries and Super Bowl host cities, where people use the fact the world is watching this particular space to speak about everyday injustices in that space – and also how those injustices are aggravated by hosting these mega-events. People who are homeless find themselves under attack, sex workers find themselves under attack, union workers who might want to exercise their rights for the next week find themselves under attack. It’s not just about leveraging the spotlight, it’s about mounting a very real defense campaign against what these mega-events bring.

We’re talking about an increased police presence, the privatization of public space. We’re talking about the fact that the city is bending over backward to almost create a Potemkin village for the 1 percent that’s coming in. They seek to create this fake veneer of what the city actually is… And then as soon as those people leave and the media leaves, it all gets torn down. And when it all gets torn down, that’s also when it gets really dangerous for people because there’s this push to try to keep some of what’s been in there, whether you’re talking about stepped up police presence or closed-circuit TV cameras. I’ve been to so many Super Bowl host cities and Olympic or World Cup host cities, and that’s what they always say, that there becomes this mission creep…

UA: Twin Cities corporations spent $52 million to lure the Super Bowl to town, and the NFL won’t pay for much of anything this week as a result. What’s the local cost of this willingness to bend over backwards for the NFL and other pro sports leagues?

DZ: We have to suss through this. The actual cost, tragically, is not something that we’re going to be able to know until weeks, if not months, after the event itself. There should be an economic forensic exam, and the unions should take the lead on that. We can’t expect Democrats to do it for us… When they say they don’t have enough money for schools, for health care – this isn’t a question of having enough money, it’s about priorities.

UA: Are attitudes toward mega-events changing?

DZ: You are seeing changes. Cities are rejecting the Olympics, from Boston to Krakow. Cities have stood up to hosting these games because of the economic costs and political costs. Cities have started demanding concessions from the NFL and from local officials, like offsets so that every dollar that goes to the Super Bowl also goes to our schools, or goes to health care. Until that happens, we’re going to keep having this privatization of public wealth, which is really what the Super Bowl is once all the smoke and glitter clears.

UA: Going back to the player protests, how vital have players’ collective bargaining agreements been to this movement?

DZ: The collective bargaining agreement in the NFL has meant everything to these protests. While I would certainly argue that they have the First Amendment right to protest during the anthem, I really do think a lot of NFL players would have just been fired outright if it wasn’t for the fact that the CBA in the NFL has very specific language about whether players have to stand at attention. To compare and contrast, the NBA, which has much more political foment in it, has different language in their CBA that actually directs players to stand at attention. I think that’s one of the reasons you haven’t seen those kinds of protests in the National Basketball Association. They’re just not protected.

If the NFL had just started firing players left and right, they would have been at dire risk of invalidating the entire collective bargaining agreement. They would have given the union, which is already setting up in the next year for contract negotiations, an unfathomable amount of leverage …

As someone who’s interviewed a lot of these players, something that makes me really angry is that the players who are political also tend to be the players who are most community minded, bighearted and down to earth. There’s something so repellent to me that they’re the ones who are demonized by Trump and by certain members of the NFL ownership community. They’re the ones who really do represent the best – not just among NFL players, but among trade unionists in general.

UA: Trump’s use of the NFL – from tweeting about players who kneel to picking on the league at rallies – is remarkable. Why do you think it strikes such a chord with his supporters?

DZ: Like so much with Trump, while it strikes a chord with his base, it has not expanded his base. The polls I see show as many as three-fourths of people do not agree with how he has dealt with this issue. More people, after Trump got involved, were actually on the side of the players than before because he is so toxic.

But this is rank racism. There’s no other way to say it. These are players who are trying to start a conversation – not about the anthem or patriotism, but about racism and police violence. You think Donald Trump wants to have that conversation? Of course not. So he demonizes and attacks these players for being ‘ungrateful.’ One player said to me that ‘ungrateful’ is like Trump’s n-word, something he reserves for only black athletes. This is a very old script, and it resonates because you tap into envy. As if these ‘ungrateful’ athletes … haven’t worked their entire lives to make their way in the world.

UA: But you see backlash against this script?

DZ: Let’s talk about the No. 1 way we can tell that it didn’t work. When he called players SOB’s and used profanity before a rapturous crowd, where was he? He was in Huntsville, Alabama. What happened in Alabama? Somehow the Republicans lost a Senate race…

UA: Are you the guy no one wants to sit next to at the Super Bowl party?

DZ: No, people like sitting next to me. I always bring out the good food. I clean my house so I give people a nice place to sit. I usually spend the first 30 minutes of the Super Bowl in my own personal protest, live tweeting an episode of the “Facts of Life.” People on Twitter tend to go crazy. I lose a couple hundred followers, but I find it funny. I call it the Tootie Bowl.

UA: Who wins? Who are you rooting for?

DZ: I hate the New England Patriots because they always win and they’re arrogant and they’re obnoxious. But I’m sure you’ve heard people say that when the Patriots win it feels like Trump wins all over again. Slow your roll. They’re not Team Trump. Don’t take it that seriously please.

But I’m rooting for the Eagles, and I’ll pick the Eagles. I’ll never root for the Patriots. Ever.

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