The voice of Saint Paul's working families since 1897
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 […]
“GOP tightens grip on white working class,” read the headline on an Oct. 31 Wall Street Journal story datelined Aitkin, Minn. The story reported how Democrats have been losing their hold on rural Congressional districts with largely white populations, where incomes lag the national average and college graduates are relatively sparse. The authors quoted men […]
Almost no one in America is satisfied with the imbalance of our economy. We’re working harder and harder for less and less. This isn’t a partisan opinion. All across this country, in poll after poll after poll, we hear self-described Democrats, independents and Republicans say, “We want an economy that works for everyone, not just […]
The St. Paul Union Advocate, official publication of the St. Paul Regional Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, won two honors for General Excellence and one for Best Analysis in the International Labor Communications Association’s 2014 awards contest. ILCA awards recognize the best in labor communications and promote high standards in labor journalism. Judges recognized The Advocate in […]
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 […]
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 […]
In the early 1990s, Doug Williams was serving as president of Local 1140 of the International Union of Electrical Workers, an industrial union that has since folded into the Communications Workers. Williams and other union activists, particularly in the industrial sector, were in full campaign mode at the time, handing out fliers during shift changes, […]
The 40th anniversary of iconic civil rights leader Martin Luther King’s assassination April 4 was marked with vigils locally and across the country in support of the most pressing civil rights issue of today, immigration reform. The MLK vigils and the “Two Million Too Many National Day of Action” a day later drew support from […]
Union members did more than just build The Penfield, the comprehensive, mixed-use development downtown St. Paul that celebrated its grand opening Feb. 6. They financed the project as well. The Penfield is the latest local investment by the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust (HIT), which backs union-build construction jobs across the country with capital from union […]
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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