Union musicians locked out on both sides of the Mississippi River

October 29, 2012 by

St. Paul Chamber Orchestra musicians at Ordway Center.

Union musicians in Minneapolis and St. Paul have been locked out of their jobs by the Minneapolis-based Minnesota Orchestra and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra (SPCO), leaving a deafening void in the Twin Cities cultural scene.

SPCO musicians, who had been working under a “talk-and-play” agreement after their contract expired in September, were locked out Oct. 21, when orchestra President and Chair Dobson West posted a statement that concerts had been canceled through Nov. 4.

The musicians, members of Twin Cities Musicians Union Local 30-73, are encouraging fans and supporters to contact SPCO management with an appeal to reconsider a counterproposal the union offered during contract talks Sept. 25. Go to musiciansspco.org to take action.

Rejected by management a day later, the counterproposal offered to cut musicians’ salaries by 10.5 percent across the board over the next two years and by 4 percent in the third year – in exchange for shared sacrifice from SPCO management. According to the union, it would save the SPCO more than $700,000 over the course of the three-year pact.

SPCO management has said it is seeking $1.5 million in cost savings from the musicians’ contract – a figure musicians say is impossible to reach without compromising the SPCO’s artistic quality.

“It is disheartening that management isn’t interested in preserving this historic ensemble,” said Carole Smith, a bassoonist and chair of the union’s Negotiations Committee. “We need the public now more than ever to contact management and ask them to reconsider.”

The counterproposal includes other concessions designed to help the SPCO raise revenue, including free musician performances eight times each year and performances at small gatherings of SPCO donors. Musicians say the SPCO has the money in hand to maintain operations without drastic cuts. The union’s counterproposal, Smith said, would provide management with the savings it needs in the short run in order “to finally put together an effective endowment drive.”

MN Orchestra lockout drags on

In 2010, The New Yorker magazine critic Alex Ross lauded the Minnesota Orchestra as “the greatest orchestra in the world.” The orchestra, founded 110 years ago as the Minneapolis Symphony, tours nationally and internationally, and issues critically-acclaimed symphonic recordings.

The management of the orchestra, however, locked out its 95 musicians Oct. 1, when they failed to ratify a proposed contract. The proposal included pay cuts of 30-50 percent in musicians’ salaries. The proposed contract also included more than 250 changes to the musicians’ current agreement, gutting 40 years of worker protections gained through collective bargaining.

The musicians, also members of the Twin Cities Musicians Union Local 30-73, were ready to continue working and performing while contract issues were resolved. But orchestra management – the Minnesota Orchestral Association – cancelled the entire fall season.

Although the lock-out meant the cancellation of the fall season’s opening night, scheduled for Oct. 18, the musicians were determined to play. Independent of management, they promoted and staged their own sold-out concert the same night with Stanislaw Skrowaczewski conducting.

“From the beginning,”orchestra member Wendy Williams said, “our perception has been a refusal to bargain in good faith by the other side.”

She noted that management recently adopted a new business model and  changed the Minnesota Orchestral Association’s mission statement – even dropping presenting a “symphony orchestra” from the stated mission.

More information is at MinnesotaOrchestraMusicians.org.

– Minneapolis Labor Review Editor Steve Share contributed reporting.

Filed Under: Organizing Tagged With: , , ,

AFL-CIO calls consumer boycott of Crystal Sugar

October 24, 2012 by

It’s finally official: The AFL-CIO has endorsed a nationwide consumer boycott of American Crystal Sugar products in response to the company’s 15-month lockout of 1,300 workers at facilities in Iowa, Minnesota and North Dakota.

The boycott, which began Oct. 15,  is part of the broader labor movement’s continued support for locked-out members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union at Crystal Sugar, where management has blocked workers from their jobs, denying them of their incomes and healthcare benefits.

In addition to bags of sugar labeled Crystal Sugar, the boycott extends to several brands that sell Crystal’s product under a different label, including “Market Pantry” sugar sold in Target stores. The easiest way to avoid buying Crystal Sugar is to buy cane sugar instead, like the C&H label.

Click here for more information about the boycott, and to sign a petition pledging your support.

The national labor movement endorses boycotts cautiously and only in instances of grave injustice, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka noted.

“The 12 million union families of the AFL-CIO are proud to stand with the courageous locked-out workers who are responsible for American Crystal Sugar’s profitability and previously strong reputation,” Trumka said. “As we saw with the lock out of the NFL referees, locking out skilled workers who do important, unglamorous work hurts not only the workers, but the bottom line. We hope that this boycott will encourage Crystal Sugar to finally respect its workers, who worked so hard every day to make Crystal Sugar a highly profitable industry leader.”

Trumka added that Crystal Sugar CEO Dave Berg, after rewarding himself with a 50 percent pay increase for his union workers’ productivity, has obviously “decided to try to break the workers’ union.”

Supporters are asked to call Berg at 218-236-4400 and let him know they are not buying Crystal Sugar products until he ends the lockout and bargains a fair contract with workers.

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October 2012: Remember when farmers and union members worked together?

September 27, 2012 by

With families across the Midwest struggling to keep their farms out of bank foreclosure, union members rallied with farmers Oct. 10, 1987, at the Heartland Jobs with Justice rally on the Iowa State Fairgrounds.

About 40 Minnesotans were among the estimated 1,500 to 1,700 union members at the rally, Union Advocate Editor Barb Kucera reported from Des Moines, Iowa. And with 1988 caucuses just around the corner, presidential candidates Bruce Babbitt, Richard Gephardt and Paul Simon made the rounds.

Helen Waller, president of the National Save the Family Farm Coalition, thanked union members for working “shoulder to shoulder” in Washington to advance farm credit reform to help family farmers avoid foreclosure – a partnership sugar-beet farmers in Minnesota and North Dakota appear to have since forgotten.

“We appreciate so much having labor help us in our way toward just farm credit reform,” Waller said. “This underscores my belief that farmers and laborers are critically dependent on each other… Neither of us can prosper unless we prosper together.”

[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.]

• 50 Years Ago: Support for Hastings strikers. In October 1962 Twin Cities-area members of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union rallied around their sisters and brothers – but mostly sisters – of OCAW Local 6-717, on strike at Smead Manufacturing in Hastings since Aug. 27.

Supporters packed hundreds of cases of canned food and shipped them to striking workers and their families – so much food that it overflowed the double garage of Local 6-717 Secretary Helen Herrmann.

Between 450 and 500 workers at the office-products manufacturer went on strike after Smead refused to bargain in good faith on a first contract with their newly elected union representatives, according to the Oct. 11 Union Advocate.

More than a month after the strike began, Smead employees were still “standing fast, adhering to their principles, despite the threats of discharge for continuing a lawful strike, despite the economic pressures, despite the company’s efforts to resume operations with scabs who sulk through the picket lines,” The Advocate reported.

“Most of the strikers are women, but they don’t act like members of any so-called ‘weaker sex’ when it comes to standing up for their rights pertaining to job security and other issues which the company had declined to negotiate.”

The strike dragged on into December 1962, when union members narrowly voted to accept a two-year contract ending the strike. The contract called for a 13-cent wage increase retroactive to March 28.

• 75 Years Ago: St. Paul Airport expansion. The St. Paul Trades and Labor Assembly rolled out a special committee in October 1937 to direct a “vigorous campaign of education” against a proposed bond issue to improve and expand the city’s airport. Notably, the opposition included the St. Paul Building and Construction Trades Council.

A front-page editorial in the Nov. 4 Advocate opposed the airport development as “a private utility at public expense for the benefit of wealthy, gouging air transportation lines.”

Labor opponents pointed out that St. Paul – already “rated as one of the most over-bonded cities” in the nation – had more pressing priorities than airport expansion, a project many considered a real estate boondoggle.

“Labor is suspicious of this whole proposition,” The Advocate reported. “The property adjacent to the present airport is largely delinquent and this bond issue is being used to bolster the owners’ hope of selling lands to the city which otherwise will be taken over by the state.”

The bond issue passed in a special election Nov. 16. The Assembly later censured two labor-endorsed elected officials for championing the airport proposal, and appointed a committee to monitor the airport project and publish its findings in The Advocate.

• 100 Years Ago: ALEC didn’t invent ‘model legislation.’ A committee of state senators, appointed to “carefully examine the subject of compensation for workers injured in the line of their employment,” held its first meeting in October 1912. Interested parties in attendance included representatives of the Minnesota Employers’ Association and liability insurance companies – but not organized labor.

The idea that union leaders would be left out of drafting Minnesota’s first workers’ compensation law didn’t sit well with The Advocate, which ran an indignant, front-page report in its Oct. 25 edition.

“So far as we have been able to learn, no notification was sent to any of the labor unions of the state or any of their representatives but E. G. Hall, president, and W. E. McEwen, secretary, of the State Federation of Labor,” The Advocate reported. “These gentlemen will, in all probability, attend the next meeting of the committee.”

With labor absent, George M. Gillette of the Employers’ Association “occupied the greater part of the time of the meeting,” The Advocate noted. The Employers’ Association presented committee members with a model bill they might use as a template in crafting the state’s workers’ compensation law. (Sound familiar?)

The Advocate picked through Gillette’s model bill, pointed out several concerns and offered this warning to union leaders:

“It is of the greatest importance that the labor unions of the state have persons present at [the next committee] meeting to present their views. Otherwise, they are likely to have to put up with a law not at all agreeable or helpful to them in any large measure. And they ought to get to work at once in the matter, in order that their views may be fully and clearly presented to the committee and pressed on its attention in the most forcible and emphatic way.”

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Farm Bill stalls, McCollum and Ellison join call for Crystal Sugar to end lockout

September 26, 2012 by

American Crystal Sugar appears to be losing favor in Congress at a time when the company needs it most.

With the federal Farm Bill stalled in the House of Representatives, 37 members of Congress, including Minnesota Reps. Betty McCollum and Keith Ellison, advised Crystal Sugar CEO Dave Berg to get serious about finding “common ground” with the 1,300 union workers locked out of their jobs for nearly 14 months.

In a letter addressed to Berg and union negotiator Steve Bertelli (download as PDF), federal lawmakers noted the union’s “willingness to meet and discuss the issues,” and called Crystal Sugar’s take-it-or-leave-it approach to negotiations “troubling.”

“A final agreement requires negotiation,” the letter says. “It is incumbent upon the parties to bargain in good faith and genuinely seek to find common ground so that a final agreement can be reached.”

Minnesota Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken and Reps. Collin Peterson and Tim Walz sent a similar letter to Berg and Bertelli last month.

Moorhead-based Crystal Sugar locked out its workers Aug. 1, 2011, after members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union voted overwhelmingly to reject the company’s final contract offer.

The two sides have met occasionally since then, and union negotiators have agreed to meet most of the company’s demands for economic concessions, including higher health care premiums.

Rather than meet workers in the middle, Crystal Sugar countered with no notable changes to its offer, and workers have voted twice to reject it since the lockout began. They say Crystal Sugar insists on contract language that will give management the authority to contract out union members’ jobs, ignore seniority in personnel decisions and bypass hard-fought grievance procedures.

Although Crystal Sugar is seeking to strip its workers of their safety net, the farmer-owned cooperative is lobbying fiercely in Washington D.C. to protect a safety net of its own.

Provisions in the federal Farm Bill known as the Sugar Program keep sugar prices artificially high by limiting domestic producers’ exposure to foreign competition. Many in Congress view the Sugar Program as an unnecessary intervention in the free market, but supporters call it a necessary boost for rural economies.

Those supporters include many urban, pro-labor lawmakers like Ellison and McCollum. But with the current Farm Bill likely to expire at the end of the month, Crystal Sugar’s lockout isn’t helping efforts to get a new Farm Bill passed into law.

Locked-out Crystal Sugar workers picket outside a Crystal Sugar shareholder’s home in Crookston.

The lockout “isn’t in the best interests of working people, and it’s not in the best interests of the Sugar Program,” said Bill Harper, McCollum’s chief of staff.

Ellison said the labor dispute is “pulling apart the building blocks of a good relationship” that has served workers and farmers well in the past.

“The company and the workers have always been supportive of the Sugar Program because it’s made the company profitable and, historically, has allowed the company to pay the workers in a way that’s fair,” Ellison said. “If they want to break that arrangement, it’s not going to help anyone.”

Perhaps with an eye toward going it alone on Capitol Hill, Crystal Sugar has spent more than $1.8 million on federal campaign contributions this election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

In a letter sent Aug. 21, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka called on labor-endorsed members of Congress who received Crystal Sugar cash to use their “influence and stature to insist that the company resolve this dispute immediately and end the lockout” – and to return the donation if Crystal Sugar refuses.

McCollum is among a handful of lawmakers who have returned the cash, Harper said.

Ellison, meanwhile, holds out hope that continued pressure from members of Congress who have worked with the company in the past will prod Berg and Crystal Sugar’s farmer-shareholders toward the middle ground in negotiations.

“Why would they not want to do the right thing by the union?” Ellison said, recalling two speeches he made on the House floor about the lockout. “This is a question I’ve raised and I’m going to continue to raise.”

Take Action:

For more information on the lockout and how to support locked-out workers and their families, go to www.CrystalGreed.com.

For more information on the toll Crystal Sugar’s lockout is taking on the company’s productivity and efforts to pass the Farm Bill, go to www.CrystalSugarFacts.com.

Click here to thank Rep. Betty McColllum for her continued support of Crystal Sugar’s locked-out union workers.

Click here to thank Rep. Keith Ellison for his continued support of Crystal sugar’s locked-out union workers.

Filed Under: Politics Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Singing for a settlement: Labor Chorus plans benefit for Crystal Sugar workers

July 12, 2012 by

Members of the Twin Cities Labor Chorus perform “songs of protest, resistance, justice, and a vision for a better world.”

On the eve of the one-year anniversary of American Crystal Sugar’s decision to lock out its 1,300 union workers at facilities in Minnesota, North Dakota and Iowa, the Twin Cities Labor Chorus and the Lex-Ham Community Theater will present an evening of songs and words of action in support of the locked-out workers – and, hopefully, raise money for their hardship fund.

The concert and reading at the Minnesota AFL-CIO Labor Pavilion on the State Fairgrounds, located at the corner of Dan Patch Avenue and Cooper Street, will begin at 7 p.m. July 31.

Admission is free, but donations are encouraged. Money raised will support locked-out members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union, as well as the Labor Chorus and the Lex-Ham Community Theater.

American Crystal Sugar’s union workers have voted three times since the lockout began last year to reject the company’s “final offer.” The company has refused any real negotiations with the union and is proceeding with the process of hiring replacement workers.

The mission of the Twin Cities Labor Chorus is “to empower the labor movement and reclaim protest and social justice music from the forces that would commodify it for profit. Also, to promote singing amongst union members and the public as a tool for building community and magnifying our collective power.”

Click here to view the event page on Facebook.

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