AFSCME members restock Neighbors Inc. food shelf

September 18, 2014 by
Jen Guertin of AFSCME St. Paul Clerical Local 2508 loads food donations bound for Neighbors Inc. (AFSCME Council 5 photo)

Jen Guertin of AFSCME St. Paul Clerical Local 2508 loads food donations bound for Neighbors Inc. (AFSCME Council 5 photo)

AFSCME members helped restock a Dakota County food shelf during Council 5’s annual convention in Bloomington Sept. 11-13, raising $11,271 and collecting 539 pounds of groceries for Neighbors Inc.

The food shelf assists more than 600 families each month in Inver Grove Heights, South St. Paul and West St. Paul.

Food shelf director John Kemp said AFSCME members’ donations are timely, as they will help union members who are out of work after the Rainbow Foods sell-off and the Dakota Premium meatpacking plant closure. Kemp said the food shelf is serving 25 percent more people than it did a year ago.

The collection surpassed the amount donated to a local food shelf in Duluth – two tons of food and $2,000 – during Council 5’s convention last year, organizers said.

AFSCME Council 5 is a union of 43,000 workers who advocate for excellence in public services, dignity in the workplace, and opportunity and prosperity for all working families.

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Fundraiser for displaced food workers Sept. 8

August 18, 2014 by

ufcw1189merge2smallUnited Food and Commercial Workers Local 1189 will hold a fundraiser to benefit members who lost their jobs when two large employers, Dakota Premium and Rainbow Foods, closed earlier this summer.

The Fundraiser for Food Workers will run from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. Sept. 8 at Local 1189’s union hall, located at 266 Hardman Ave. N. in South St. Paul. Union members, allies and their families are invited to attend.

Dakota Premium suspended production indefinitely at its South St. Paul packinghouse in July, displacing 275 UFCW members. Roundy’s Inc. sold off or closed all of its Rainbow properties in the Twin Cities in July as well, displacing 125 UFCW members in the East Metro.

Funds raised will provide emergency assistance for those workers and their families, administered by the St. Paul Regional Labor Federation’s AFL-CIO Community Services program. To contribute by mail, send a check made out to “LSRC” to Labor Studies Resource Center, 411 Main St., Room 202, St. Paul, MN 55102.

Click here to download a flier for the fundraiser.

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Dakota Premium, last packinghouse in South St. Paul, shuts down ‘indefinitely’

July 23, 2014 by

ufcw1189merge2smallDakota Premium, the only meatpacking plant still operating in South St. Paul, idled production July 2, leaving 300 workers, including 275 members of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1189, out of work indefinitely.

Local 1189 President Don Seaquist thinks the closure is more definite than indefinite.

“The company’s public statement is that this is a temporary ceasing of operations due to a lack of cattle,” Seaquist said. “The cattle part is true.

“The temporary part I am suspect about because they can project the cattle herds out almost three years. So they know there isn’t going to be any more cattle. I’m not sure why they’re saying it’s temporary as opposed to a permanent closure.”

Before closing, Dakota Premium had been slaughtering about 500 head of cattle per day, down from a capacity of 900 to 1,000 at the plant’s peak, Seaquist said. Drought across the country in recent years, particularly in the Midwest, has reduced the number of cattle ranchers are raising.

If Seaquist is right – if Dakota Premium is closed for good in South St. Paul – it marks the end of an era in the city that was home to more than 5,000 meatpacking jobs in its prime. South St. Paul High School’s nickname, the Packers, is a nod to that legacy, one the city’s residents have not been too eager to preserve, Seaquist said

“This is the last packing plant in South St. Paul, but I don’t think it hurts the city’s feelings to see it go,” he said. “They’ve been after this packing plant for a while now anyway because they’re looking for clean industry, not food processing and packing.”

Companies like Hormel and Dakota Premium have been gradually moving operations from urban to rural communities since the 1970s, Seaquist said.

Dakota Premium held a job fair for idled workers after the announcement. Seaquist said about 70 members will transfer to plants in Long Prairie, Yankton, S.D, and Green Bay, Wis.

The company, which gave workers two days’ notice of the idling, will continue health insurance coverage for Local 1189 members through August. The local held meetings for affected members last month with the state’s Dislocated Worker Program.

The impact of the plant shutdown is a blow to several immigrant communities in the Twin Cities. Dakota Premium’s workforce was “largely minority,” Seaquist said, filling the local’s ranks with Somali, Burmese and Latino members.

“We had third-generation family members working in that plant,” he said. “Whole families – fathers, grandfathers, sons, wives and mothers – of folks that are going to have to go elsewhere for work.”

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September 2012: CIO sympathizers routed at statewide AFL convention in ‘37

September 12, 2012 by

Delegates to the Minnesota AFL-CIO’s 51st Constitutional Convention will gather in Rochester Sept. 16-18. It is certain to be a much more harmonious affair than the statewide labor convention held in Hibbing 75 years ago, when AFL delegates snuffed out an attempt by “CIO sympathizers” to gain a foothold in the organization.

“Minnesota Labor took a definite stand on the side of the American Federation of Labor” at the statewide convention in September 1937, the Minnesota Union Advocate reported in its Sept. 30 edition.

[The Union Advocate’s “This Month in the Archives” feature offers a look back at what our newspaper was reporting from 5 to 100 years ago. Our digital archives are online, searchable and free to anyone. Click here for access.]

Over accusations of “steamroller tactics,” four delegations “known to be either affiliated or openly partisan to the CIO” were denied credentials via a voice vote from the convention floor. Delegates proceeded to elect an executive council “that is 100 percent loyal to the A. F. of L.,” and they voted to prevent U.S. Rep. John Bernard, a member of the Farmer-Labor Party representing the Iron Range, from addressing the convention because of his work as an organizer for the CIO.

The upstart Committee for Industrial Organization had been founded from within the AFL two years earlier by unionists who favored increased organizing among industrial workers. At the 1937 state convention, CIO supporters called themselves “progressives,” but the AFL establishment branded them “sympathizers.”

“Every effort of those sympathetic to the CIO to get at least a luke-warm reception for their proposals was met by a united front that left no question as to the temper of the majority,” The Advocate reported.

Gov. Elmer Benson “made an eloquent plea for harmony” in his address to the convention, broadcast over several radio stations statewide.

“Divide and rule was the slogan of the Roman emperors. A division within the ranks of labor is the hope of those who seek the destruction of labor,” Benson said.

“The dark cloud on labor’s horizon today is the division which has developed within the ranks of the American labor movement. It is a division which comes from the top and not from the bottom – not from the rank and file. The rank and file will never permit a permanently divided labor movement.”

The CIO formalized its break with the AFL in 1938, holding its first convention and renaming itself the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The two bodies merged as the AFL-CIO in 1955.

• 100 Years Ago. A union member looking to wet his whistle probably avoided the Schwabel Bros. saloons downtown St. Paul. According to the report of a delegate to the St. Paul Trades and Labor Assembly during the body’s September 1912 meeting, Schwabel Bros had employed non-union bartenders.

That wasn’t the only tavern-related issue to come before the Assembly during the meeting. The Cabinet Makers’ delegate “reported three saloons in the city which were fitted up with non-union fixtures.” The matter was referred to the executive board for consideration.

• 50 Years Ago. Martin J. O’Donnell, president of St. Paul-based Building Laborers Local 132, urged the city’s unions to send a representative to the St. Paul Housing Clinic at St. Thomas College in September 1962. The clinic tackled the issue of affordable and safe housing for residents of St. Paul.

The interest of Building Trades unions in such a project “can be taken for granted,” O’Donnell said. “But it would be short-sighted indeed for officers and members of unions engaged in other lines of business or industry to take the position that they don’t have an equally important stake in this matter.”

Working families, he said, should be concerned about the quality of housing facilities a community offers its citizens, particularly for young families and the elderly.

• 25 Years Ago. With President Ronald Reagan seeking approval from Congress to funnel more aid to rebels in war-torn Nicaragua, delegates to the Minnesota AFL-CIO convention in September 1987 approved a resolution urging peace in Central America – and calling on the national AFL-CIO to lobby Congress to reject Reagan’s request.

The resolution passed after delegates challenged the ruling of the convention chair, Minnesota AFL-CIO President Dan Gustafson, that the resolution ran contrary to national AFL-CIO policy, Union Advocate Editor Barb Kucera reported.

“The AFL-CIO does not support an end to U.S. aid to the Contras unless the Soviet Union and Cuba end their aid to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, Gustafson said.

“After the ruling of the chair was challenged, Secretary-Treasurer Bernard Brommer took the gavel. The challenge to the chair was upheld on a voice vote of the delegates, and the resolution was passed on a voice vote.”

• 10 Years Ago. Two years after workers at Dakota Premium Foods voted to form a union, the workers’ bargaining committee finally reached a tentative agreement with the South St. Paul meatpacking plant Sept. 30, 2002.

The contract included pay raises ranging from $2 to $4.50 an hour, raising hourly wages at the plant to between $10 and $13.50. It also included a $1,000 signing bonus, a grievance and arbitration process and seniority rights.

But the difficult process Dakota Premium workers endured to get their first contract provided an “example of what is wrong with U.S. labor law,” Advocate Editor Michael Kuchta wrote.

“The company tried to overturn election results, then continually delayed bargaining by filing multiple legal appeals of rulings that went against the company. Company negotiators finally began bargaining with workers on Aug. 15.”

St. Paul’s newest union went into action at “A Fair of the Heart” Sept. 13, 1987. Members of International Cornhuskers of America Local 1987 shucked thousands of ears of corn for the crowd of 45,000 at the annual United Way event. Pictured above are Steelworker Nyals Kittel (left) and Minnesota AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Bernard Brommer. At right, AFSCME member Lucille Robinson and Minnesota AFL-CIO Community Service and Education Director Christine Matuzek.

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