The voice of Saint Paul's working families since 1897
A bipartisan group of Minnesota legislators lined up on the Capitol steps today to show support for a bill to ratify and fully fund home care workers’ first contract with the state. Winning legislative approval for the contract, ratified by members of the newly organized unit in voting last month, is one of a […]
video via The Uptake U.S. Sen. Al Franken took a stand Tuesday against a Republican-led effort to block reforms poised to streamline and modernize the process for determining union representation in most workplaces. In a speech on the Senate floor, the Minnesota DFLer defended new rules approved by the National Labor Relations Board last year. […]
Minnesota’s projected $1.9 billion state budget surplus, announced today by Minnesota Management and Budget Commissioner Myron Frans, is proof that progressive policies pushed by DFL lawmakers over the last two years have helped foster economic growth, the state’s unions said. The Minnesota AFL-CIO, the state’s largest labor federation, representing more than 300,000 union members, said […]
After relentless pressure from workers and the community, Walmart announced last month it will raise minimum pay for its workers to $9 an hour in April and $10 an hour by February 2016. Now, one Minnesota lawmaker is calling on Minneapolis-based Target to follow Walmart’s lead. Rep. Joe Atkins, lead DFLer on the Minnesota House […]
Pushing back against an upswing in reports of Minnesota workers struggling to meet their employers’ increasingly irregular scheduling demands, a coalition of worker-advocacy groups today unveiled legislation to bring fairness to the state’s workplace scheduling laws. The House bill, authored by DFL Rep. Rena Moran of St. Paul, would require employers to provide hourly employees with […]
Low-wage workers at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport now have a voice on the airport’s governing body, thanks to Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton. Last week Dayton filled two vacancies on the Metropolitan Airports Commission, which owns MSP and six smaller airports in the Metro. One of Dayton’s appointees, Ibrahim Mohamed, works as a cart driver for […]
As debate swirled at the State Capitol in recent years over whether – and how much – to raise Minnesota’s minimum wage, lawmakers found themselves confronted with a question their own experts could not easily answer. How much do workers need to earn to meet their most basic costs? To zero in on an answer, […]
Lynn Barten stood up in a conference room Sunday morning in St. Paul and gave a stump speech for a campaign she isn’t running – not yet, anyway – before a roomful of people who couldn’t vote for her anyway. Barten, an AFSCME member from Alexandria, was one of more than 70 people who enrolled […]
Five candidates for St. Paul City Council, including one in the contested Ward 2 race, will take labor endorsements from the East Metro’s largest union federation into precinct caucuses Feb. 3. Delegates to the St. Paul Regional Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, voted Jan. 14 to endorse Darren Tobolt in Ward 2, where Council Member Dave Thune […]
Minnesota’s tax structure is among the fairest in the country, according to the results of an annual analysis of state and local tax systems released today by the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. The report, “Who Pays,” looks at how states generate tax revenue – and how much it costs taxpayers at different […]
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