Labor-endorsed Craig fighting to make sure everyone gets a ‘fair shot’

October 30, 2018 by

Angie Craig, the labor-endorsed candidate in Minnesota’s 2nd Congressional District, speaks at a rally with labor volunteers in South St. Paul.

Angie Craig learned the value of a union early in life.

Craig was 9 years old when her mother became the sole provider for Angie and her two siblings. To help them make ends meet, Craig’s grandmother gave up retirement, moved into the mobile-home court where Craig’s family lived, and went back to work.

Angie’s grandmother was 50 at the time. The job she found was in a unionized shoe factory. She was able to keep that job as she grew older, Angie believes, because of the protections of her union contract.

“I can remember on two occasions that her union rep went in with her and talked to management, and it saved her job,” Craig said. “I grew up with a very distinct feeling that a union had helped my family survive.”

Now, as Craig makes her second bid for Congress in Minnesota’s 2nd District, unions have her back again. She has earned the endorsement of the state’s largest labor federation, the Minnesota AFL-CIO, as someone who will stick up for working people and protect their freedom to join together.

UA: What can Congress do to get more people into union jobs?

AC: What businesses tell me they are lacking are people with career skills and technical skills. I want to see us rethink vocational-technical education in this country, and that would include these first-class apprenticeship programs that labor unions and their employers have developed. I’d like to make sure that young people understand these apprenticeship programs are available to everyone.

The other thing that I think the Congress should do – and this is what really differentiates me from my opponent massively – is I think we should amend Taft-Hartley to make right-to-work laws illegal in this country.

UA: Income inequality is already at historic levels, and it’s only rising, thanks to the $1.5 trillion tax cut for corporations and the wealthy, which your opponent, Jason Lewis, backed. If you could go back do things differently, what would you do?

AC: I want to go back and do what we should have done in the first place, and that is focus on giving the middle class and working Americans a tax break. We’ve given over a trillion dollars away to large corporations – and at the same time we didn’t close tax loopholes that allow them to send jobs overseas. And now they’re talking about cutting Medicare and Social Security to pay for it.

UA: When it comes to health care, President Trump and Congressional Republicans, including your opponent, seem interested only in creating chaos and uncertainty for families seeking coverage. What approach would you take to health care policy?

AC: The first thing we need to do is to take on big drug companies and take on these health insurance companies. If we really wanted to control costs, we would be negotiating drug prices with Medicare. We would offer more competition into the marketplace, and we’d give consumers another choice by allowing them to choose to buy into a program like Medicare and compete with the large health insurance companies. But instead of taking on any of these special interests, the Republican-controlled Congress and the President have continued to just chip away at the current health care law for political purposes…

UA: Women voters appear to be especially energized this year. How can Congress make sure women who speak up about harassment, including at work, are heard?

AC: As the head of human resources for a Minnesota manufacturer, my team and I carried out investigations of harassment in the work place. In order for this moment to last, it’s important to strike the right balance between due process – including full, fair, and thorough investigations for the accused – with equal protection for everyone. Labor has led the way forward on forging the workplace protections Americans enjoy today, and I will work with our union brothers and sisters to continue strengthening them for everyone.

UA: It’s your second run in a district that hasn’t elected a DFLer in nearly two decades. What gives you hope this year is different? What keeps you in this fight?

AC: At the end of the day, I grew up in a family that had to work our ass off to get ahead, and that’s what I want to go fight for – to make sure that if you’re willing to work hard in this country, this country is fair to you and you have a fair shot to get ahead. That’s going to be my focus as a member of Congress. I grew up in a mobile home court, worked two jobs to put myself through school. I’ve got four boys, three of them are out of the house, two in college, one in trade school. I’m going to be fighting so that no matter how much money you were born into, you get a fair shot.

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Bobby Kasper: Solidarity is alive and thriving in St. Paul

October 6, 2016 by
allina-rlf-group

Delegates to the St. Paul Regional Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, adjourned their meeting early Sept. 14 to join striking Allina nurses on the picket line outside United Hospital.

 

Last month at the East Side Freedom Library, I joined a roundtable discussion with historians, artists, trade unionists and community activists on the subject of solidarity. It was a lively, challenging and essential dialogue, and it served as another reminder of how fortunate we are in St. Paul to have a space like the Freedom Library – a union hall for the whole community.

Our conversation that night reflected on struggles from our past in which working people used solidarity to get justice. There have been many examples, as any history buff knows, including the 1934 Teamsters strikes in Minneapolis, which saw union, non-union and unemployed workers standing together on the picket line. Using solidarity, they broke the powerful alliance of employers that had so effectively blocked workers in a range of industries from bargaining for a better life.

We’ve seen solidarity work in a global context, too. When NAFTA unleashed a race to the bottom among manufacturers in the mid-1990s, Autoworkers from St. Paul reached out across the border to workers inside Ford Motor Company’s Mexico assembly plants, building a unique relationship and bearing witness to the poverty wages and poor working conditions there.

But we don’t need to look backward to see the power of solidarity. It’s thriving right here, right now in St. Paul.

Our City Council last month passed an ordinance to guarantee all workers access to earned sick and safe time – the strongest and most progressive of any municipality in the country. It was a victory for working people – in particular, working people of color – but it didn’t happen by accident. Labor unions and small businesses teamed up with worker centers, community groups like Neighborhoods Organizing for Change and religious organizations like ISAIAH. We worked together, in solidarity, to make earned sick time a priority, to make our voices heard and, eventually, to make history.

Solidarity is alive and well on Allina nurses’ picket lines as well. The St. Paul Labor Center serves as a strike hub for nurses at United Hospital, and every day I come into work, I’m inspired by the members of the Minnesota Nurses Association – young and old, from a wide range of backgrounds – who are standing together and refusing to give in as Allina attempts to break their union. And it warms my heart to see so many members of other unions joining these courageous nurses on the picket line and supporting their strike fund financially.

As long as it takes to get the contract they deserve, that’s how long we’ll stand with nurses in their fight. It’s the right thing to do. It’s what nurses would do if it were any of us out on a picket line. It’s what solidarity is all about.

– Bobby Kasper is president of the St. Paul Regional Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, which unites more than 100 affiliate unions representing 50,000 working people – and publishes The St. Paul Union Advocate.

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Outside John Kline’s office, minimum-wage workers rally for a raise

July 24, 2012 by

Workers ask John Kline to consider living on $290 per week, the gross pay of a full-time, minimum-wage worker in Minnesota.

Could John Kline live on $290 per week?

That’s the question several constituents from the 2nd Congressional District asked their Republican representative in the weeks leading up to today’s three-year anniversary of the last federal minimum-wage increase.

When Kline failed to provide his constituents with an answer, they decided to deliver a letter to his Burnsville office – and bring along about 50 of their friends and supporters. Together, they rallied in support of efforts to give the country’s lowest-paid workers a raise – efforts Rep. Kline says he continues to oppose.

“The economy is getting worse, and people need help,” said Dezirai Jones, a Savage resident who works for minimum wage at a local restaurant. “(Kline) doesn’t know what it’s like to make minimum wage. Even if he tried he would find it hard and a real eye-opener.”

Jones and other minimum-wage workers at the event, staged by the union-backed organization Minnesotans for a Fair Economy, talked about their struggle to make ends meet for themselves and their families.

“Minimum wage is basically impossible to live off of,” said Mallory Curran of Lakeville, a single mother who is separated from her husband but unable to afford a divorce.

A Minnesotan working 40 hours a week at minimum wage grosses about $290. Kline, by contrast, averages a salary of about $3,300 per week.

James L. Peng of Inver Grove Heights asked Kline to consider agreeing to live on $290 a week.

“Perhaps it’s difficult to imagine what $290 a week might look like,” Peng wrote in a letter to Kline. “We’d like to encourage you to consider trying to live on that amount for one week. After all, it isn’t easy to understand one’s personal experience if you haven’t encountered that experience yourself.”

Kline, who chairs the House Education and Workforce Committee, voted against the last minimum-wage increase, passed in 2007.

Without an increase over the last three years, the minimum wage has failed to keep up with inflation – let alone skyrocketing executive pay.

Workers in the 2nd Congressional District weren’t the only ones pushing a minimum-wage hike today. A team of prominent economists, including a Nobel laureate and a former Secretary of Labor, released a letter to President Obama and congressional leaders today.

The letter, sent from the Economic Policy Institute, argues “a higher minimum wage at this juncture will not only provide raises for low-wage workers but would provide some help on the jobs front as well.”

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