The voice of Saint Paul's working families since 1897
A worker on the Viking Lakes project in Eagan came forward last week with allegations that she was raped and harassed while working for a drywall subcontractor on the troubled job site, developed by NFL owners Zygmunt, Mark and Leonard Wilf’s MV Ventures firm. Unions and worker advocacy groups decried the alleged assault and, in […]
Efforts to stop worker exploitation in the Twin Cities construction industry continued to gain momentum today, as construction unions called out Royal Credit Union for using an out-of-state masonry contractor accused by watchdog groups of underpaying immigrant laborers. As the credit union cut the ribbon inside a newly acquired and refurbished branch in Inver Grove […]
Notorious wage broker Ricardo Batres, who pleaded guilty to felony charges of labor trafficking and insurance fraud in November, received a nine-month sentence in Hennepin County district court Wednesday. The sentencing brought to a close the first labor trafficking case to emerge from Minnesota’s construction industry. But worker advocates, armed with the findings of an […]
Workers organizing with CTUL kicked off the campaign with a march down Lake Street in Minneapolis.
The Hardman Avenue Workers Center, located at the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1189 hall in South St. Paul, opened with a celebration and free citizenship workshops for immigrant workers last week. The goal of the initiative, Local 1189 organizing director Abraham Wangnoo said, is to “start teaching people what their rights are,” particularly […]
Workers have unveiled plans to strike, rally and march May 1 for better wages, safe working conditions and respect on the job. At a press conference last week outside a Minneapolis Home Depot, local organizers said International Workers’ Day takes on added urgency this year, given the “current political climate and mass mobilization of communities […]
Dressed in hard hats and union colors, union members were among the estimated 100,000 people who joined the Women’s March in Minnesota one day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, capping three days of protests – locally and nationally – that put the new administration on notice of popular opposition to his policy objectives and governing […]
We’re a week away from seeing former reality-TV boss Donald Trump – a megalomaniac with a track record of not paying his employees, fanning the flames of bigotry and making “locker-room talk” about sexual assault – assume the highest office in the land. Whether the impending Trump presidency scares the hell out of you or […]
This summer, the East Side Freedom Library is celebrating its second anniversary. Our roots lie in the vision that Dave Roe and Rudy Perpich had in the 1990s of a Labor History Center to tell the stories of the state’s workers and their labor movement, and our branches grow far and wide, reaching out to […]
Union employers, apprenticeship programs and community service agencies set up shop on St. Paul’s East Side last night, recruiting talent from the distinctly working-class neighborhood and beyond at the Union Jobs and Resource Fair. Many Latino, Hmong, Karen and East African families call the East Side home, and the job fair, organized by the St. […]
Union Advocate 