Unions, employers reach out to St. Paul’s East Side at job fair

April 15, 2016 by
St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman and Regional Labor Federation Bobby Kasper welcome job seekers and employers to the Union Job & Resource Fair at the East Side Freedom Library.

St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman and Regional Labor Federation Bobby Kasper welcome job seekers and employers to the Union Job & Resource Fair at the East Side Freedom Library.

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. Paul Regional Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, shows local unions are serious about reaching out to communities – particularly minorities and immigrants – underrepresented in their ranks.

“This is only the beginning,” St. Paul RLF President Bobby Kasper said. “Too many members of our community don’t know what unions do, or aren’t aware of opportunities for employment in a good, union job.

“Unions built the middle class in St. Paul, but we won’t survive as a labor movement unless we reflect our communities as a whole. That’s what this job fair is about.”

St. Paul Regional Labor Federation President Bobby Kasper welcomes people to the job fair.
IBEW Local 110’s Jim Grim (R) offers information about a career as an electrical worker.
Jody Paulson offers information on an apprenticeship with Bricklayers and Allied Crafts Local 1.
Gary Larsen, a native East-Sider and representative of the Laborers Training Center in Lino Lakes, talks with jobseekers.
Mayor Chris Coleman’s remarks open the Union Job and Resource Fair.
Interpreters fluent in several languages, including Karen, help jobseekers confer with representatives like Rick Dushaw of the Carpenters union.
Matt Ryder of BCTGM Local 22 talks about employment opportunities in St. Paul’s industrial bakeries.
Jose Marrero of the North Central States Regional Council of Carpenters talks with jobseekers.
Dua Thao (L) talks about resources available to jobseekers at St. Paul’s public libraries.
Gerone Hamilton, chief of community relations, represents the St. Paul Fire Department.

During the fair, held at the independent East Side Freedom Library, jobseekers ducked in and out of booths staffed by representatives of about 20 union employers and eight local agencies, which provided resources on everything from resume writing to record expungement.

Ebba Benti, a resident of Frogtown, took home a business card from one of the St. Paul Public Schools’ maintenance managers, who said Benti’s skills sounded like a match for several openings in the district. “I told him what skills I have, what I know, and he liked me, I guess,” Benti said.

Ebba Benti (R) talks with a representative of the St. Paul Public Schools, who told Benti his skills made him a good fit for several openings in the district's maintenance department.

Ebba Benti (R) talks with a representative of the St. Paul Public Schools, who told Benti his skills made him a good fit for several openings in the district’s maintenance department.

An immigrant from East Africa, Benti said a job at a school sounded appealing. “I like seeing kids doing stuff, having fun,” he added. “Where I’m from, you don’t see that enough.”

The St. Paul school district was among several public-sector employers represented at the job fair. Others included the city’s fire department and water services, as well as the City of Minneapolis. Private-sector employers at the fair included several nursing homes, industrial bakers and Eureka Recycling.

“Jobs are good, good jobs are better and union jobs are the best of all,” St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman told jobseekers and employers during a brief program to kick off the event.

Gary Larsen, an East-Sider since birth, was one of several Building Trades representatives at the job fair promoting their apprenticeship programs. Larsen, a member of the Laborers union, said he was proud to be promoting good, union jobs in his own neighborhood.

“This is awesome for me,” said Larsen, a member of the Laborers union. “As a kid I used to ride my bike to this library.”

Apprenticeships in the trades offer workers the potential to earn as they learn, with middle-class wages and good health and pension benefits. Jobs like that were a lot more common on the East-Side when Larsen was growing up, before Whirlpool, 3M and Hamm’s shut down their production plants.

“Hopefully, we’re making some good connections here today that lead to not just jobs for East-Siders, but careers,” Larsen said. “We want to keep the East Side prospering the way it should be.”

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‘Untold Stories’ series to celebrate labor history with free public events

April 2, 2014 by

untold-stories-header12Untold Stories, the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library’s annual labor-history series, will focus this year on the struggles facing workers in the past and how they influence the issues of today.

The free, public programs begin April 22 and wrap up May 14. A full programming guide is available on the Friends’ website.

April events include:

• “Pete Daniel – Dispossession.” April 22, 7 p.m. Minnesota History Center, 345 W. Kellogg Blvd.

Pete Daniel, a past president of the Organization of American Historians and a retired curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, will speak about his recent book “Dispossession: Discrimination Against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights.”

Between 1940 and 1974, the number of African American farmers fell from 681,790 to just 45,594 – a drop of 93 percent. Daniel analyzes this decline and chronicles black farmers’ fierce struggles to remain on the land in the face of discrimination.

After Daniel’s presentation, Pakou Hang of the Hmong American Farmers Association and Dale Wiehoff from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy will talk about current struggles of small farmers to keep their land.

• “From Low Wage to Middle Class?” April 28, 7 p.m. St. Paul Labor Centre, 411 Main St.

Workers in retail, home care, warehousing, the restaurant industry and other parts of the modern economy are only the latest in a long line of employees rising up to claim that “working” and “poor” should never be in the same sentence. This program will examine how today’s workers are fighting to make a living in their service-sector jobs. It also will consider how fields such as nursing and teaching turned their professions from low-wage jobs into middle-class careers.

Panelists will include representatives from the Department of Employment and Economic Development, Working America, Child Care Providers Together, the St. Paul Federation of Teachers and the Minnesota Nurses Association.

• “Bdote Memory Map” April 30, 7 p.m. Rondo Community Outreach Library, 461 N. Dale St.

Mona Smith, a Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota storyteller and media artist, will discuss her creation of a “memory map” of the bdote area of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. This bdote, a place where two waters come together, is central to Dakota spirituality and history.

Her online map is viewable online. It contains a series of sites that have special meaning to the Dakota people.

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Union agenda includes minimum-wage hike, privacy protections for Minnesota workers

January 29, 2013 by
Meslissa Tesora, a physical therapist and member of the AFL-CIO community affiliate Working America, supports raising the state minimum wage to $10.55 to make the middle class more accessible to people in low-skilled jobs. “People want to work, but the current minimum wage makes it prohibitive for less-skilled workers to support their families and attend school – and ultimately attain higher-skilled jobs," the St. Paul resident said.

Meslissa Tesoro, a physical therapist and member of the AFL-CIO community affiliate Working America, supports raising the state minimum wage to $10.55. “People want to work, but the current minimum wage makes it prohibitive for less-skilled workers to support their families and attend school,” the St. Paul resident said.

Emboldened by victories won at the polls in November, the state’s largest labor federation will push an ambitious legislative agenda that calls for hiking the state’s minimum wage, extending unemployment benefits for locked-out workers and expanding the freedoms and protections Minnesotans enjoy in the workplace.

The Minnesota AFL-CIO, which represents more than 1,000 affiliate unions and more than 300,000 members statewide, unveiled its “Agenda for Middle Class Dignity and Fairness” at a Capitol press conference today.

Minnesota AFL-CIO President Shar Knutson said the agenda’s “common-sense proposals” – along with the proposed state budget outlined by Gov. Mark Dayton earlier this month – represent a positive alternative to the attacks on workers that marked the previous 2011-12 legislative sessions.

Dayton’s budget “puts middle class families first by recognizing the need for new investments, but also raising revenue fairly to pay for those investments,” Knutson said. But, she added, there are other steps lawmakers should take to “level the playing field” for middle class workers. Those steps include:

• Raising the minimum wage to $10.55 per hour and “indexing” it, so that the rate is adjusted for inflation in the future.

Minnesota has the “unfortunate distinction,” Minnesota AFL-CIO Secretary Treasurer Steve Hunter said, of being one of four states with minimum wage rates lower than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. (Five southern states have no minimum wage laws at all.)

Workers in Minnesota can be paid as little as $5.25 per hour, according to the Department of Labor.

Raising minimum wage to $10.55 per hour would restore the buying power it had in 1968.

“Hard work should be supported with a wage that can support a family, and it’s ridiculous to think that someone can support a family at $7.25 an hour,” Hunter said.

• Extending workers’ unemployment benefits for the duration of a lockout – and adding a penalty to the unemployment tax paid by employers who lock out their workers.

“As long as the clock ticks, an employer has an incentive to lock workers out, while also putting a strain on the state’s Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund,” Knutson said. “This is what’s happened to the 1,300 employees of American Crystal Sugar.”

Becki Jacobson, who has been locked out of her job by the Moorhead-based sugar beet cooperative since Aug. 1, 2011, said many of her fellow union members opted to leave the region or take early retirement after their unemployment benefits ran out last year.

Knutson said the Minnesota AFL-CIO is working with lawmakers on a bill to hold accountable employers, like Crystal Sugar, that choose to force workers onto unemployment rather than engage in contract negotiations – and also “give employers pause” before they engage in such a war of attrition.

• Protecting Minnesota workers’ credit privacy and workplace freedoms.

Knutson and Hunter said they hope to see two bills introduced in the coming weeks: the Worker Freedom Act, which would give employees the right to walk out of workplace meetings aimed at changing their vote, religion or union affiliation; and the Credit Privacy in Employment Act, which would ban the use of credit checks in employment-related decisions.

“This is really a fundamental workplace protection that all Minnesotans should have,” Knutson said.

Several examples of bosses telling their employees how to vote emerged during the 2012 presidential campaign, most notably the case of a Florida timeshare company CEO, who warned his 7,000 workers via e-mail that layoffs would be the result of a victory for President Obama.

The use of credit checks in employment decisions – from hirings and firings to promotions – is also on the rise. A July 2012 survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management found that 47 percent of U.S. employers run credit checks on their job candidates.

The practice creates a catch 22 for job seekers who have faced financial crisis.

“This recession forced many people into financial situations that have impacted their credit scores,” Hunter said. “That credit score can sometimes be the only reason somebody is not a hired for a job that would return him or her back to the middle class.”

Click here to read the full Agenda for Middle Class Dignity and Fairness.

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Labor 2012 Endorsed: Eagan deserves better than Doug Wardlow

October 31, 2012 by

Laurie Halverson is the labor-endorsed candidate in House District 51B.

Laurie Halverson is seeking to unseat Republican Rep. Doug Wardlow in House District 51B (map). For union members in the district, the two candidates should need no further introduction.

In his first term at the Capitol, Wardlow took up anti-worker Right to Work legislation as his personal pet cause, pushing a constitutional amendment on the measure last year even after leaders in his own party had moved on to other business.

It helped earn Wardlow a reputation as his party’s ideological warrior – one Halverson believes is out of step with the community of Eagan that he represents.

“He has taken extreme party-line positions, even extreme for his own party,” Halverson said. “That kind of extremism doesn’t fit our community. Eagan isn’t being represented as we deserve to be.”

A stay-at-home mother, Halverson, whose husband is a member of the Air Line Pilots Association, has taken up various civic causes in Eagan, including service on the Parks and Recreation Commission and the Eagan Foundation, which supports educational opportunities for area students.

She believes her neighbors are less interested in ideology and more concerned about their schools, which she lists as her top priority.

“Borrowing from our schools has had a real impact on students in our community and their families, who pay more and more out of pocket. The school district has had to borrow money for the first time in its history, so instead of paying money into schools, taxpayers are paying interest.

“The people of Eagan are so civically engaged. They’re really involved in this community, and they’re tired of people taking these hard-line positions. They want to see people get the job done.”

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Letter to the Editor: In this election, union members must keep their eyes on the prize

September 24, 2012 by

Mike Mazurkiewicz

I’ve been retired for a few years now. Although I don’t always know (or care) what day of the week it is, I do try to stay informed, and I brush up on national, local and postal issues – especially those affecting seniors and retirees. That leads me to some thoughts on something I do care about – the important 2012 presidential election. We have one political party saying government is the problem. The other says it’s the solution. It’s that simple, right?

I’m not so sure.

I see it this way: While government will sometimes be a problem and other times a solution, it will always be the prize. Why else would candidates and political parties spend millions upon millions of dollars on a job that doesn’t pay much? Because with the prize comes enormous power and control. The party winning the prize will have a dramatic impact on your jobs, your family, your retirements – and the future of our country.

Will they be a solution or a problem? Who deserves the prize? Cynics will say this election is a question of the lesser of two evils. Others will say it’s the evil of two lessers.

Maybe, but maybe not. I have voted in every election since I was 21, and over the years cast my vote for different political parties based on what I felt was important. But during the last few decades or so I have become increasingly disgusted with and opposed to the party that calls itself “conservative.”

Their policies turned our country’s budget surplus into a multi-trillion dollar deficit. What’s conservative about that? They continue to say that tax cuts for the wealthy will have a positive, “trickle down” effect for the middle class. But have they? No, they haven’t.

Now these “conservatives” want to double down on trickle down. I cannot simply stand by and let them run our nation into the ground and turn us into a third-world country.

I watched with disgust as “conservatives” approved (but didn’t fund) an unnecessary war, voted for wealthy tax cuts and sent American jobs to foreign countries via the passage of NAFTA and CAFTA. They warn us about their opposition party’s “socialist” policies, but they willingly sold the debts their policies created to Communists in China, and actually made socialists out of us all by using taxpayers to bail out Wall Street and the Banks. (Apparently profits belong to capitalism, but socialism is OK for losses).

“Conservatives” really stuck it to postal workers with “Postal Reform,” which put the only government agency that regularly made money into bankruptcy.

Oh sure, they say they care about us middle class people – while we’re in the womb! But after that – well, you’re on your own. Forget about supporting education, good jobs, social services, health care and a clean environment; you have to use your own personal responsibility and care for your own needs, until you’re needed for the next war.

I won’t allow the same political party most responsible for the declining state of our union try to tell me that they are the solution. And I won’t let its “Tea Party” faction try to convince me that their outdated and failed ideologies are a “new direction.” I’m not even going to listen to them anymore.

Well, maybe just a little bit. I did watch some of the Republican National Convention. What a joke! They accuse the president of not doing his job when they have done nothing but obstruct every piece of progressive legislation he proposed. They condemn the president for proposing a plan that is identical to a plan their own candidate proposed while governor of Massachusetts. They’re not just clueless; they’re shameless.

The fact is that our Congress hasn’t been doing its job – unless you think supporting an oligarchy while dissolving a democracy is their job. I’m done putting up with them.

– Michael Mazurkiewicz, St. Paul Area American Postal Workers Union retiree

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