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After hundreds marched together outside Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis yesterday, the picket line shifted to United Hospital in St. Paul today, as health care workers kept the pressure on Allina Health to get serious about contract negotiations with their union, SEIU Healthcare Minnesota. Workers like Dave Young, a nursing assistant at United, want Allina […]
“Everyone in this room is an expert in public service,” AFSCME Council 5 Executive Director Eliot Seide told nearly 1,000 members of the union during its Day on the Hill rally yesterday. “You’ve forgotten more than (politicians) will ever know.” After the rally, held at a downtown St. Paul hotel, union members bused to […]
Maplewood Police Chief Paul Schnell warned senators on the Health, Human Services and Housing Committee that the video footage he would show in their hearing yesterday, taken during a patient’s attack on nurses at St. John’s Hospital last year, was disturbing and violent. The footage showed a typical hospital workstation that, in an instant and […]
Minnesota’s largest labor federation today added its voice to the chorus of community, faith and progressive groups calling on Bloomington City Attorney Sandra Johnson to drop criminal charges against 11 Black Lives Matter members arrested at the Mall of America in December. The Minnesota AFL-CIO, which represents more than 1,000 local unions with 300,000 members […]
Activists picketed outside Target Corp.’s headquarters downtown Minneapolis yesterday, calling on CEO Brian Cornell to make raising wages for frontline workers a part of the company’s massive restructuring effort. Organizers of 15 Now, a grassroots movement working to raise the minimum wage in Minneapolis, looked to pressure Target into following the lead of its primary […]
Unions are joining a national day of action to stop fast track March 4, and two members of Congress from Minnesota got an earful as to why last week at a field hearing in Richfield. DFL Reps. Keith Ellison and Rick Nolan heard testimony from trade experts, union leaders, business owners and advocates for family […]
After another third-grade teacher at the Community School of Excellence in St. Paul “got fed up with some of the disrespect” and resigned last October, Eric Johnson saw the number of students in his classroom swell from 22 to 31. “The third-grade teachers, we agreed we’d absorb the kids,” Johnson said. “It’s better than the […]
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 […]
For many of the 1,800 Delta flight attendants based at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, the upcoming vote to form a union is about more than wages, benefits and work rules. It’s about getting back what they lost after Delta’s merger with MSP-based Northwest Airlines four years ago. “I’ve lived with a contract and without a […]
A series of five public hearings on a proposed oil pipeline through Minnesota opened in St. Paul yesterday, and members of several Building Trades unions stepped forward to support the $2.5 billion venture, projected to create 1,500 construction jobs. The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission is collecting public testimony at sites across the state this week […]
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