Bree Halverson: Minnesota’s clean economy should power good-paying, safe jobs

March 1, 2023 by

Gov. Walz signed the 2040 clean energy standard into law during a ceremony at the St. Paul Labor Center in February 2023. (Minneapolis Labor Review photo)

Minnesota has a new law that puts us on a path to 100% clean energy by 2040. That’s indisputably good for the environment. Thanks to the strong labor standards and equity provisions in the bill, it will also be great for all workers in our state, specifically union workers.

Our nation has been struggling with economic inequality for decades, and it has only worsened over the years. The U.S. Census Bureau reported that income inequality in 2018 – the gap between the wealthiest Americans and the average worker – had reached the highest level recorded since the bureau started tracking the gap. According to the Economic Policy Institute, CEOs in 2020 were paid over 350 times more than the typical worker.

This is also a problem facing Minnesotans. The income gap here is significant, particularly for people of color, who are 300% more likely to be in poverty than white people. Unionization is a key pathway to fixing this growing problem facing our state.

There is a major reason why the 100% clean energy bill had such strong support from unions and why it was signed by Gov. Tim Walz at the St. Paul Labor Center. The measure rightfully tied specific labor and equity standards to the implementation of the bill.

For example, there is an emphasis on creating local, high-quality jobs in Minnesota. The bill encourages new energy generating facilities to be sited in communities where fossil-fuel generating plants have been retired or are scheduled for retirement. It also says that emissions reductions that clean up our air should also make the air cleaner for communities that are facing environmental injustice, and that all workers and communities should see the benefits of this law.

Perhaps the most important provision is a requirement to recognize the rights of workers to organize.

Kevin Pranis of LIUNA Minnesota spoke during the bill signing ceremony.

Unions matter. There is a direct correlation between the increase in income inequality and the decrease of worker power, as the share of workers in a union has fallen from 24% in 1979 to under 11% now. Unions also make job sites safer. Unionized workers are better trained and better protected to blow the whistle if they see something dangerous going on, without fear for retribution from management because the union has their back. Finally, unions can help overcome long-standing inequities for people of color in our state.

Clean energy has been great for our economy. Workers around the state are making buildings more energy efficient, constructing wind turbines and more. There are an estimated 57,000 jobs in clean energy, energy efficiency, advanced transportation and other clean sectors in our state. Now, as we grow those jobs, more and more of them will be good-paying, safe, union jobs.

Our environment also matters. Climate change is already here and impacting us all. The action we take now will determine the future of our state. We should be fixing what was broken and leaving future generations a cleaner environment than the one we inherited from previous generations. This bill will reduce the emissions driving climate change. That’s a good thing for everyone.

The future is bright for workers and our climate. The federal investments in the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law, coupled with Minnesota’s own investments and policies like 100% Clean Energy, will ensure we are installing utility-scale solar with well-trained, local labor. We will expand the number of local wind jobs, keep workers safe on the job and build the technology of the future – like geothermal – here in Minnesota with union labor.

Thank you to the House and Senate DFL majorities and Gov. Walz for delivering this victory for workers and the environment.

– Bree Halverson is the Midwest States Director for the BlueGreen Alliance, a national partnership of labor unions and environmental organizations.

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Workers: Fair scheduling measure would restore work-life balance

February 20, 2015 by
Hourly workers listen as Rep. Rena Moran (second from left) describes her bill to bring balance to the state's work scheduling laws.

Hourly workers listen as Rep. Rena Moran (second from left) explains her bill to bring balance to the state’s work scheduling laws.

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 their work schedules 21 days in advance, compensate workers whose shifts are cancelled within a 24-hour window and guarantee workers have access to adequate rest between shifts.

“This bill would make sure that employees who are forced to make themselves available to an employer’s scheduling needs are compensated accordingly and able to count on at least a minimum income every payday,” Moran said at a press conference in St. Paul earlier this week.

[Click here to take action in support the fair scheduling bill by e-mailing your state lawmaker.]

Several low-wage, hourly workers who stand to benefit from the legislation joined Moran, including members of the Twin Cities-based worker center CTUL, Minneapolis-based Neighborhoods Organizing for Change and Working America, the AFL-CIO’s outreach initiative to non-union workers with more than 280,000 members in Minnesota.

Andy Barno-Iversen, a member of Working America, explains the toll "clopening" – working consecutive closing and opening shifts – takes on workers and their families.

Andy Barno-Iversen describes the toll “clopening” – working consecutive closing and opening shifts – takes on workers and their families.

Scrambling to get hours

Workers took turns at the podium venting their frustrations with practices gaining popularity among fast-food, retail and other service-sector employers, from “just-in-time” scheduling that allows managers to call in staff on a moment’s notice to “clopening,” Andy Barno-Iversen’s term for back-to-back shifts that ended late and began early the next morning.

Barno-Iversen described working full-time at a Minneapolis co-op grocery while also studying at the University of Minnesota. Twice each week, he would get home from work at 10 p.m. after closing the store, then go back to work by 4:30 a.m. the next day to open.

“I was exhausted,” the Working America member said. “I ended up dropping out of class because my academic performance suffered so badly. My work performance suffered.”

His department has since eliminated “clopening,” Barno-Iversen said, “but thousands of Minnesota retail workers, students and families do have to deal with those scheduling issues… To amend that is just a simple act of consideration.”

Other hourly workers recalled watching their paychecks shrink after their employers switched from conventional scheduling to on-call, “flex,” or “just-in-time” scheduling.

CTUL member Bobby Brown said his hours at a McDonald’s in Bloomington have dried up to the point where his last paycheck was $14. Ronda Jama, a wheelchair agent at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, used to work four days per week; now she works two – and waits “on call” in case AirServ, her employer, makes more hours available.

“It changed the cycle of our life,” Jama said. “It’s hard because we are on call right now. They call you whenever they want you.”

Bobby Brown's last paycheck from McDonald's amounted to $14.

Bobby Brown’s last paycheck from McDonald’s amounted to $14.

Both Jama and Brown earn minimum wage, $8 per hour. The employers most likely to utilize aggressive scheduling practices, Working America State Director Bree Halverson said, are also most likely to pay low wages.

“Unpredictable hours make economic mobility and achieving the American Dream even harder, especially if you’re already struggling to get by,” Halverson said. “Minnesota families need 21st-century scheduling policies that keep up with the changing nature of today’s workplace.”

‘Freedom and stability’

Moran’s proposal to bring fairness to workers’ schedules is another variation on an encouraging theme at the Capitol this session, with lawmakers looking to provide workers – and their families – with the stability and security they need to ensure a healthy work-life balance.

The day after advocates unveiled the scheduling bill, House DFLers rolled out their Working Parents Act, pulling together earned sick and safe time, wage theft, paid family leave and scheduling bills into an all-inclusive measure.

Moran called scheduling fairness “one brick in a road to a better life.”

“This bill is an important first step toward bringing more freedom and stability to employees who work hard, who want to receive hourly wages and who need to plan for their future and the future of (their) families,” Moran said.

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How do your wages stack up? New analysis pinpoints cost of living in Minnesota

January 29, 2015 by

cost_of_livingAs 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, the Legislature charged the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development with conducting a study.

DEED’s Labor Market Information Office devised a plan to break down the cost of living not only statewide, but by county and region, taking into account geographic disparities in seven cost categories: transportation, housing, child care, health care, food, taxes and other necessities.

Now the results are in, and DEED’s new Cost of Living tool, available on the department’s website, sheds light on the challenges and difficult decisions Minnesota’s working families face.

The results, said John Clay, a research analysis specialist for DEED who devised the study’s methodology, don’t “represent a middle-class income. It also does not represent a poverty-level income. Rather, it’s a basic income that meets health and safety needs.”

The annual cost of meeting those needs in the seven-county Metro Area is $25,932 for a single worker without children, according to the new tool. Given a 40-hour workweek and year-round employment, a worker would require wages of $12.47 per hour to reach that annual income level.

In other words, even with the scheduled increases in the state’s minimum wage – up to $9.50 per hour next year for most workers – the Metro Area’s lowest-paid jobs are leaving workers without the resources necessary to meet their basic costs.

Those costs go up, of course, with family size. A single parent of one child in the Metro Area requires full-time wages of $24.97. For a two-parent family raising one child, the living-wage breakdown looks like this:

  • $21.16 with one full-time worker in the family.
  • $15.69 with two full-time workers.
  • $17.92 with one full-time worker and one part-time worker.

Not surprisingly, DEED’s analysis found the state’s highest cost of living in the Metro Area.

But there’s good news for Twin Cities workers: the median hourly wage paid by metro employers in the second quarter of 2013 (the most recent wage data available) was $19.92, almost $2 higher than the statewide median wage. Basically, that means half of Metro Area workers earn more than $19.92 per hour, and the other half earn less.

“At first look, it’s a good sign for the Twin Cities labor market that the median wage is above the cost of living for most families,” Clay said. “But is that enough that most people should be meeting their basic needs? That’s an open question.”

It’s an open question, in part, because for many workers – particularly in low-wage sectors heavy on part-time jobs – wages are just one factor determining their income. Increasingly, these workers report difficulty getting the hours necessary to piece together an income that will meet their basic needs.

Bree Halverson is statewide director of Working America, an organization of workers without the benefit of a union on their jobs.

Bree Halverson is statewide director of Working America.

Bree Halverson, statewide director of Working America, an organization of workers without the benefit of a union at their jobs, said with minimum wage in the rear-view mirror, a “fair scheduling bill” is the next challenge for lawmakers looking to ensure the state’s economic recovery benefits all workers.

Working America members, Halverson said, report “getting called as few as two or three hours before their shift and told, ‘Don’t come in.’ Or it’s the opposite, and they’re called that day and asked, ‘Can you come in?’

“That leaves the worker to scramble to find child care at the last minute, or to try making up the hours they were counting on with another job.”

More than 250 employees of AirServ who work at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport signed a petition earlier this month asking their employer for more reliable scheduling. Halverson said “flex” and “standby” scheduling have long been practices used by employers in the hospitality industry, but are on the rise now in the retail and service sectors.

Halverson recounted one member’s story of being required to work later than usual at his job, which pays $8.50 per hour. By the time he finished work, the bus that took him there had stopped running, and he faced a $20 cab ride home.

“We need employers to start scheduling more people full time, for 40 hours per week,” Halverson said. “And part-time workers deserve a schedule that they can depend on.”

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Minimum-wage victory showcases potential of labor-community partnerships

April 29, 2014 by
Surrounded by legislative supporters and members of the Raise the Wage Coalition, Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton signed a bill increasing the minimum wage to $9.50 by 2016 – and indexing it to inflation.

Surrounded by legislative supporters and members of the Raise the Wage Coalition, Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton signed a bill increasing the minimum wage to $9.50 by 2016 – and indexing it to inflation.

On April 14, Gov. Mark Dayton signed a bill gradually raising Minnesota’s minimum wage to $9.50 per hour by 2016 and indexing the wage so that it keeps pace with inflation beginning in 2018.

The bill signing was a victory for more than 350,000 workers statewide who are expected to see a raise as a result of the bill. But it also marked a victory for the coalition of unions, religious groups and other non-profits that united to push the minimum-wage hike across the finish line.

“We’ve seen what an impact we can make when we come together,” Minnesota AFL-CIO President Shar Knutson said after the bill-signing ceremony in the Capitol rotunda. “It felt good.”

The Minnesota AFL-CIO, the state’s largest labor federation, was one of several union groups that took a leadership role in the Raise the Wage Coalition, which united more than 70 diverse organizations behind a minimum-wage increase.

After DFL majorities in the House and Senate failed to agree on a minimum-wage bill last spring, unions and labor federations pledged to invest energy, resources and political capital into seeing a meaningful increase pass before the 2014 session gaveled to a close. They made the commitment despite the fact, as Knutson pointed out, “the vast majority of Minnesota’s union workforce makes well above the minimum wage.”

“The labor movement is committed to improving the lives of all working people,” Knutson said. “Like Paul Wellstone said, ‘We all do better when we all do better.’”

RaisetheWageWeb_0A step toward ‘enduring partnerships’

Unions’ leadership role in the Raise the Wage Coalition reflected local action on a nationwide directive put forth at the AFL-CIO Convention in Los Angeles last year. Known as “Resolution 16,” the directive calls on state and local labor federations to build “enduring partnerships” with community groups that share values and goals with the labor movement.

With the minimum-wage campaign, Minnesota unions backed up the AFL-CIO’s talk with action, said St. Paul Regional Labor Federation President Bobby Kasper, whose office coordinated 96 volunteer shifts on behalf of the minimum-wage push this year.

“Building a movement for economic justice isn’t possible unless we look beyond our own unions and reach out to our allies in that struggle,” Kasper said. “Whether it’s fighting Right to Work or defending prevailing wage, our position will only be stronger if we have members of the broader community behind us, but we can’t expect their support if we don’t step up when they need us.”

‘Speaking with a collective voice’

Labor’s role in the minimum-wage victory was not lost on the non-profit and faith-based organizations that joined the Capitol celebration April 14.

“It’s really inspiring seeing labor behind a broad, social justice issue like the minimum wage of concern to the community, not just their own members,” said Doran Schrantz, executive director of ISAIAH, a faith-based member of the Raise the Wage Coalition. “Seeing labor really throw everything, all their political might and muscle, behind this was really inspiring.”

The non-profit group A Minnesota Without Poverty had been organizing in support of a minimum-wage increase since 2008, coordinating events like one last year in which activists handed out ketchup bottles at the Capitol, urging lawmakers to “catch up to the cost of living.”

“We were doing our own thing,” Executive Director Nancy Maeker said. “We knew there were others working on the issue, and we were appreciative. But it didn’t seem like there was a lot of coordination among those groups.”

That changed last fall, when A Minnesota Without Poverty accepted an invitation to join the Raise the Wage Coalition. Maeker said she quickly realized the power of “speaking with a collective voice,” and she appreciated the “organizational wherewithal” union groups lent to the campaign.

“I was pretty positive toward labor to begin with, but I didn’t know labor would be interested in collaborating on an issue like minimum wage,” Maeker said. “That’s the part I was most appreciative of.”

Organizers of the Raise the Wage Coalition held a press conference before delivering thousands of postcards to state senators from supporters of a $9.50 minimum wage.

The Raise the Wage Coalition held a press conference before delivering thousands of postcards to state senators from supporters of a $9.50 minimum wage earlier this year.

Doing what labor does best

After lawmakers failed to pass a wage hike in 2013, Raise the Wage Coalition members realized they needed to engage the public to make their campaign successful in 2014. “It wasn’t just a campaign that could happen here under the (Capitol) dome,” Schrantz said. “We really needed to engage the wider community.”

Grassroots campaigning – knocking on doors, phone banking – is labor’s strong suit, and labor federations like the St. Paul RLF joined Working America, the AFL-CIO’s outreach initiative to non-union workers, in a leading role.

“We came out of last session knowing we needed to mobilize and mobilize big,” Working America State Director Bree Halverson said. “At Working America in Minnesota, we kept the conversation going all year-round.”

Working America began door-to-door canvasses across the state around the minimum wage June 1, 2013, Halverson said. By April 4, canvassers had knocked on 100,239 doors, engaged 43,172 Minnesotans in conversations about the issue and generated 4,000 letters or phone calls to lawmakers asking them to support the coalition’s bill.

As it turned out, Halverson said, it wasn’t a tough sell for most Minnesotans.

“People got it,” she said. “Even if minimum wage didn’t affect them directly, it was important to their kids who were struggling to find good employment after college, or it was important for their community because if people were making better wages, then their whole community would be stronger.”

Working America and other coalition members, like Jewish Community Action, proved critical in generating support in areas where unions don’t have a lot of membership or haven’t been traditionally active politically.

“Some of the senators that needed to be moved, that needed to hear a strong voice for social justice were from areas that Jewish Community Action had a base,” JCA organizer Rachel English said. “JCA played an important role in making sure more of the suburban senators heard from their constituents that this is an important social justice issue to them.”

Toward a economic justice for all

While lawmakers, union leaders and other coalition members celebrated the minimum-wage victory, they were also quick to point out that work remains in building a more economically just Minnesota.

“Our work is not done,” Speaker of the House Paul Thissen said. “There are still lots and lots of Minnesotans struggling to remain in or get into the middle class.”

Are there initiatives members of the Raise the Wage Coalition can unite around in the future? Some members think so.

“I would love for this coalition to keep working,” English said. “You can see the kind of impact it had up on Capitol Hill.”

English pointed to provisions left out of the minimum-wage bill – language to strengthen the 40-hour workweek and protect guest workers – and the inclusion of a “training wage” that, she fears, could incentivize employing teenagers at a lower wage than adult workers.

Halverson agreed: “Minimum wage is just the first step, I feel, to some really great stuff going forward,” she said. “It’s exciting.

“Hopefully, we’ll be able to work on issues together in the future that are going to help workers in Minnesota. It may not be the Raise the Wage Coalition, but there are relationships we’ve as a labor movement made that we’re going to have for a very long time.”

“I’m proud of the work we did to pass minimum wage,” St. Paul RLF President Kasper said. “I’m even more excited about the prospect of continuing to build a better Minnesota with the new friends and allies we gained during the campaign.”

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