Peter Rachleff: ‘You Betcha’ art exhibit explores solidarity between MN workers, farmers

February 5, 2025 by

Sculptures by Gita Ghei will be on display at the East Side Freedom Library this spring.

From its founding in the 1920s through its political dominance in the 1930s and its merger with the Democratic Party in 1944, the Farmer-Labor movement united Minnesota workers, farmers and the unemployed, building solidarity across regional, political and racial or ethnic divides. Combining electoral politics, year-round organizing and political education toward a vision of a “cooperative commonwealth,” this movement created a model for progressive change still relevant today.

Lost to history by political repression and the Cold War ideology of the 1950s, the Farmer-Labor tradition was rediscovered by a group of labor activists and educators in the 1970s. They formed the Farmer-Labor Education Committee (FLEC),  a non-profit organization with a mission to educate members of the public about the history and continued relevance of the progressive Farmer-Labor tradition. Like the movement they study, FLEC’s members are diverse and multi-generational, with rural and urban roots.

In 2022, FLEC produced “The Farmer-Labor Movement: A Minnesota Story,” a documentary about the history of the movement that has screened widely and prompted passionate conversations. There has been particular interest in the film’s contention that the Farmer Labor Party is best understood as part of a broader social movement that included co-operatives, educational institutions, newspapers and libraries, and cultural groups.

Now, FLEC has launched a new project, centered on art and artists.  FLEC’s activists write: “Today, as much as ever, our desire to rekindle the solidarity of the Farmer-Labor movement is profound. In honor of the 100th anniversary of the Farmer-Labor Party and the remarkable movement of solidarity that supported it, FLEC, with financial support from  Monument Lab’s Re-Generation initiative, commissioned public artist and teacher Gita Ghei to create a permanent traveling art exhibit commemorating the movement. FLEC and her team of artists have been working on the concept over much of last year and participating in a community engagement process that connects with the history and with Minnesotans throughout the state.”

Their work has been informed by their participation in community discussions following screenings of “The Farmer-Labor Movement.” Their goal is to promote further conversations not only between rural and urban residents, and members of different generations, but also between the past and present.

FLEC envisions the new exhibit, “You Betcha,” as a project of hope in challenging times. “Over the past decade, we have witnessed the resurgence of fascism and ultra-conservative organizing extending across the state,” they write. “At the same time, a divisive and reductive characterization of state political divisions has emerged, framing the Twin Cities as a progressive haven pitted against a white, conservative, and ‘backwards’ rural  monolith. ‘You Betcha’ uses history as a way to trouble those narratives and engage … in dialogue that might both build and unearth solidarity across differences.”

“You Betcha” will make its first public appearance Feb. 20, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., at the East Side Freedom Library, 1105 Greenbrier Street, St. Paul. Artists and FLEC members will be present to engage audience members in conversation. The exhibit will be on display at ESFL until May 4.  All are welcome to join in this conversation between past and present.

– Peter Rachleff is co-executive director emeritus of the East Side Freedom Library in St. Paul.

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Peter Rachleff: Minneapolis Teamsters’ strikes resonate 90 years later

June 10, 2024 by

The Remember 1934 Committee plans a series of events to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the strikes, beginning in June and culminating July 27 with a picnic in Minnehaha Park.

This year marks the 90th anniversary of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters’ strikes. These strikes changed the course of history and the lives of tens of thousands of working people. They transformed Minneapolis from one of the country’s most notorious anti-union citadels into a “union town,” and they inspired labor organization from Fargo to Omaha, and Duluth to St. Louis. The story still resonates with the challenges faced by working people in 2024.

In the late 19th century a vibrant and diverse labor movement surged across Minnesota. Its ranks included native-born and immigrant workers employed as flour millers and barrel makers, railroad engineers, firemen, brakemen and track workers, garment workers and laundresses, horse and wagon drivers, building trades craftsmen, longshoremen and stevedores, skilled machinists and shop workers. They were affiliated with the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor, the railroad brotherhoods, the Teamsters and the American Railway Union, and they created cooperatives, mutual benefit societies and a broad-based movement for the 8 hour day. These workers participated in the rail strikes of 1894, and they built political alliances with farmers. In the early 20th century, many took part in the creation of the Industrial Workers of the World and the Socialist Party, and they challenged some of the biggest businessmen in the U.S., including James J. Hill, Andrew Carnegie and Charles Pillsbury.

But bankers, businessmen and their political allies launched a powerful counter-offensive, seeking to eliminate unions through a “double-blacklist” – a refusal to hire union members and a refusal to extend loans to employers who bargained with unions. They created a new organization with a slippery rhetorical name, the “Citizens’ Alliance,” not only to implement their strategy but also to spin it as a defense of individual independence. They won accolades of employers’ organizations across the country. Minneapolis became an icon of non-unionism.

The Citizens’ Alliance’s success was devastating not just for unions but also for workers, who were disciplined, fired and blacklisted at the whim of employers. Although productivity rose with the introduction of new modes of work organization and technologies, wages lagged. Workers struggled to find economic security, and when they organized to challenge the Citizens’ Alliance, businessmen trumpeted the ideology of wartime “loyalty” and leveraged state government to limit workers’ gains. The reign of the Citizens’ Alliance seemed untouchable.

And then, in the winter of 1934, a small group of experienced, dedicated labor activists began to change the course of history. Several of them had been working in the city’s coal yards, earning miserable wages to handle and deliver coal to Minneapolis homes and businesses. Teamsters Local 574, with 75 members, initiated a strike on Feb. 7 that spread within three hours to 65 of the city’s 67 coal yards. They organized “inside” workers (warehouse and coal yards) and “outside” workers (drivers and helpers) together in an industrial strategy, and they ignored both the New Deal’s weak labor board system and the cautious advice of the Teamsters’ national leadership. They relied on cruising pickets, which shut the entire industry in the midst of a cold snap. Two days later, the coal employers offered a settlement, and the strike ended. Some 3,000 trucking and warehouse workers signed up to join Local 574. The inspiration was spreading.

In May, Local 574 called a larger strike across the city’s market district. Again, they linked inside and outside workers, ignored the labor board and relied on cruising pickets. Activists built an impressive infrastructure – a rented garage as a strike headquarters for dispatching mobile pickets, a soup kitchen and an infirmary, fully staffed by volunteers, many from the newly organized women’s auxiliary. They formed a “committee of 100,” mostly stewards from individual shops and warehouses, to make key decisions for the union, and a committee of the unemployed, not only to prevent strike-breaking but also to advocate for those without jobs. A network of farmers brought food for strikers and their families. They also secured the support of other unions and the Central Labor Council. The strike, which lasted 10 days, revolved around control of the streets. Despite police violence, the roving pickets were effective, and on May 25, employers offered an agreement, which the union accepted.

The ink had hardly dried on the agreement, however, when employers began to violate its terms. Over 700 complaints of discrimination were logged in June and early July. On July 17, Local 574 renewed its strike, this time with more than 10,000 participants. Another 35,000 workers engaged in a sympathy strike. The union mobilized with a new weapon, a daily strike bulletin (the first ever in the U.S.) called “The Organizer.” Once again, control over the streets was central to the strike, and there was more violence, even deaths, on both sides. A funeral procession for striker Henry Ness drew 100,000 sympathizers. The dispatch of the National Guard and the arrests and imprisonment of many union leaders could not bring the strike to an end. After President Roosevelt exerted pressure through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the Citizens’ Alliance finally yielded on Aug. 21, and employers were ordered to hold union elections, almost all of which ended in victories for Local 574 and new collective bargaining contracts. This broke the more than two decades’ reign of the Citizens’ Alliance.

Here begins the story of Minneapolis’ transformation into a “union town.” Some 10,000 workers not only won large raises, but they also got seniority provisions and a grievance procedure – a promise of justice in the workplace. Their success inspired other workers across the Midwest that they, too, could organize and improve their work lives. Rank-and-file Teamsters’ participation in the strikes – and their continuing participation in the life of the union – gave them a new awareness of their class position and solidarity with other workers. Their experiences also fueled their sense of their own capacity and power. They shared their new consciousness, and they embodied it in expressions of solidarity, supporting women workers in the Strutwear Knitting strike a year later, building of an interstate network of trucking workers and inspiring the unionization of packinghouse workers, timber workers, iron miners and steelworkers from Lake Superior to the Iowa border and beyond. Minneapolis had become a “union town,” and workers’ activism there was becoming a rising tide to lift all boats.

This situation persisted for half a century, for two generations. It became normal for workers throughout Midwest to earn a living wage with health benefits, vacations and pensions; to gain access to easier assignments as their seniority grew; and to expect a safe, respectful workplace. This was especially true in unionized workplaces, but non-union employers felt pressure to offer similar conditions. It was not a labor paradise, but many were able to buy cars and homes, send their children to college and enjoy retirement.

This changed abruptly in the 1980s and 1990s. Employers closed plants and sent manufacturing jobs abroad. They reorganized work via outsourcing and subcontracting. They chipped away at benefits, then wages, then unionization itself. While legislatures and judges weakened workers’ rights to picket, employers threatened those who still dared to strike with permanent replacement. The unionized cohort of the working class no longer enjoyed economic security, their ability to improve their own conditions diminished greatly and, increasingly, their role as trendsetters for all workers faded. By the turn of the 21st century, Minneapolis could no longer be called a “union town.” For that matter, neither could St. Paul or anywhere else in Minnesota and the Midwest.

But workers’ situations have not simply deteriorated; they have changed. Immigrants play an increased role in the economy and are more vocal, visible and significant in the labor movement. Public employees, white collar workers and retail, service, and fast-food workers have come to the fore. Educators and healthcare workers, from doctors and nurses to personal care assistants, see that unionization enables them to provide the care that brought them into their occupations in the first place. Members of Gen Z, struggling for economic security since the Great Recession, are bringing new energy into the labor movement. We are living in exciting times.

Now is a great time to look back at 1934, to learn how a wide range of workers changed the course of history and to consider how today’s workers might change this course themselves. A diverse group of activists, some of them descendants of the 1934 strikers, are organizing a series of events – an art exhibit, a picnic, film screenings and panel discussions – to curate a series of conversations between the past and the present.  For details, visit rem34.ampmpls.com.

– Peter Rachleff is an emeritus professor of history at Macalester College and co-founder of the East Side Freedom Library in St. Paul.

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Peter Rachleff: Looking for History Day help? Check out the East Side Freedom Library

December 9, 2022 by

Students and mentors worked on History Day projects at the ESFL last year.

The East Side Freedom Library invites the middle and high school students in your families to benefit from our rich resources and our experienced mentors.

National History Day is a great program in which students are challenged to develop a project as an illustration of a theme. Students, individually or in small teams, might take months developing their approach, conducting research and shaping their presentation. They take ownership of presenting their project – on a storyboard, in a paper, in a performance, in a video or via an interactive website. They not only present historical materials, but they must also make an argument about how their topic affected individuals, communities, nations or the world, changing the course of human society.

History Day students not only learn new things about history and learn the value of historical thinking, but they also develop their social skills and self-confidence.

The 2023 theme asks young people to think about how engagement with frontiers – in space, among people and in the emergence of new ideas – has shaped our history, in the U.S. and around the world.

This is a great theme within which they might explore labor activism, racial justice, women’s rights, the impact of GLBTQ+ movements, environmental activism and more. A frontier may be geographical – an area thought to be on the edge of a settlement – or a border between countries or peoples. Ideas can also be presented as frontiers.

Students might explore the work of individuals or organizations who have thought of new ways of organizing human life politically, economically, religiously or socially, and assess the impact of these new ideas. Frontiers are crossed by those who challenge conventional thinking. Students may find inspiration in the stories of those who have challenged traditional boundaries of race, class and gender.

Here’s one great example. In 1920, economist Carter L. Goodrich published “The Frontier of Control: A Study of British Workshop Politics.” At the heart of this book was his argument that every workplace has an invisible line dividing where management’s authority ends and workers’ authority begins.

Goodrich argued that these “frontiers of control” moved from the day shift to the night shift, from days with higher absenteeism (e.g., Mondays and Fridays) to fully staffed days. They moved in response to technological change and innovation, and, above all, in response to workers’ organization, in the workplace itself and, especially, in unions.

Today’s young scholars might use the “frontier of control” as a framework within which they can explore the impacts of computers and robots, the strengths or weaknesses of unions, even such contemporary concerns as “the great resignation” or “Striketober.” The concept is just one great door-opener into the dynamics of the world of labor. National History Day is a wonderful opportunity to introduce students to the rich world of labor history.

The East Side Freedom Library has rich resources available to students for their research projects. Our collections include labor newspapers from the 1930s, documentary videos, recordings of labor songsters, photographs of labor-themed visual art, union buttons and posters, and more.

Perhaps even more importantly, students will also find experienced mentors eager to help them shape their project. Our team of mentors include retired public-school teachers, college professors and college students. For eight years now, we have worked with students in the Twin Cities, some of whom have won recognition in local, statewide and even national competition.

Our mentoring team is on hand, now, every Saturday morning from 10 a.m. to noon. We ask that students make an appointment by emailing info [at] eastsidefreedomlibrary [dot] org, that upon their arrival they show proof of vaccination or a negative test within the previous two days, that they wear a mask and that they observe safety precautions while here.

After their initial mentoring consultation, students will be welcome to come at other times to use our resources, and our mentors will be available for one-on-one conversations, in person or remotely.

If you or your students would like to speak with us, call us at 651-207-4926. We look forward to working with them!

– Peter Rachleff is co-executive director emeritus at the East Side Freedom Library, an independent, nonprofit organization located at 1105 Greenbrier St.

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Peter Rachleff: Labor Day roots trace to St. Paul’s East Side

August 31, 2022 by

Most of us, from St. Paul workers and labor activists to labor historians like me, have been unaware of the role that St. Paul workers played in the establishment of the Labor Day holiday.

In April 1894, railroad workers from Montana to Chicago struck the Great Northern Railroad. Owner James J. Hill had cut their wages three times since a depression had begun in the fall of 1893, and, across all the running trades, workers had joined the new American Railway Union under the charismatic leadership of Eugene V. Debs. Debs made the case to workers that, facing the country’s biggest corporations, they were ill-served by belonging to 14 different craft unions rather than coming together in one big union of railroad workers. By spring of 1894, this argument made sense to tens of thousands of engineers, firemen, brakemen, switchmen, trainmen, conductors, maintenance of way workers and more.

The very center of the strike was the East Side of St. Paul. Strikers met in the second-floor meeting room of a mutual benefit society located at 896 Payne Ave. Following their spirited meetings, they would march, singing, to the newly built overpass above the tracks three blocks south on Payne, just north of Minnehaha Avenue. There they dumped garbage on the tracks, seeking to interfere with the scab-operated trains that Hill had funded. Great Northern trains on these tracks ran from the flour mills on the Minneapolis riverfront, through St. Paul’s Swede Hollow, on their way to Duluth. There, barrels of flour would be loaded onto ocean-going ships and sent across Lake Superior, out the Saint Lawrence Seaway and across the Atlantic Ocean. Due to the productivity of midwestern wheat farming, flour milling and transportation, barrels of Minnesota flour undersold European flour in cities across the continent and made the Pillsburys, Washburns and Crosbys oligarchs to rival Hill.

And they were unhappy when “his” workers went on strike and disrupted the shipment of “their” flour. Pillsbury called on Hill and urged him to settle with his workers. Hill agreed to participate in the first ever third-party arbitration of a major strike and to allow Pillsbury to serve as arbitrator. Debs agreed, too.  Lo and behold, Pillsbury ruled in favor of the American Railway Union and ordered Hill to restore the wage cuts!

Word spread among railroad workers that the American Railway Union had defeated Big Jim Hill, and in the next months Debs was deluged with requests for membership.  One of those requests came from the machinists, molders and foundry workers who made Pullman sleeping cars in a company town just outside Chicago. Pullman had not only cut his workers’ wages several times, but he had refused to reduce their rents or the prices charged by his company stores. Workers explained to Debs that, while they did not work on moving trains, they were railroad workers, and he agreed. And when they added that they were already on strikes, Debs called for a nationwide “boycott” of all trains that included Pullman cars. This was tantamount to calling a nationwide railroad strike, since virtually all trains included Pullman cars, and the East Side railroad workers, back on the job only two months, returned to the picket lines.

Pullman hired the former U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney to help him break the strike. Olney argued before a federal judge in Chicago that, because every train included a mail car, the strike was interfering with the shipment of the nation’s mail. The judge agreed and issued the first ever federal injunction against a strike. Debs was hauled into court and told to issue an order ending the strike. When he refused, the judge found him in contempt and ordered him to jail. Debs would spend the next 18 months in prison, refusing to call off the strike.

President Grover Cleveland decided to send the National Guard to break the picket lines in Chicago. There was considerable violence, and the strike began to crumble. But this “success” sullied Cleveland’s political reputation, and the Democrat’s advisors told him he had to do something to win back working class support, which had put him in office. And so, in August 1894, he decreed there would be an annual national holiday called “Labor Day.”

On Saturday, Sept. 10, from 3 to 6 p.m., the East Side Freedom Library will host a Labor Solidarity Picnic on our beautiful front lawn. Come learn other labor history stories that you and your families might not know. And come hear about current labor struggles, from union organizing at Starbucks, Amazon and Half Price Books to the struggles of railroad workers nurses, nurses and other health care workers, and of Building Trades workers today.

Yes, there is history to learn, and there is history to be made. Join us!

– Peter Rachleff is co-executive director of the East Side Freedom Library in St. Paul.

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From the Eight-Hour Day to the $15 Minimum Wage: A conversation between past and present

March 24, 2021 by

By Peter Rachleff and Kristi Wright, East Side Freedom Library

The study of labor history, while rooted in the past, has everything to do with how we envision the future – and how we chart a path to get there. At the East Side Freedom Library, we think that placing the movement for the eight-hour day in conversation with the movement for a $15 minimum wage can help us learn how to shape our future.

Take a trip into labor history with us. At the time of the American Revolution, one journeyman shoemaker out of every two could expect to become a self-employed master shoemaker. Decades of a division of labor and the invention of machines brought a very different world of work into being. By the Civil War, only one journeyman out of twelve became a self-employed master shoemaker. His 11 peers looked forward to a lifetime of wage labor. Facing that future, hours of work and days off altogether became serious issues for individual workers and the unions they organized.

As artisan work structures evolved into structures of permanent wage labor, unions not only bargained over the length of the working day, but also participated in social and political movements seeking to pass laws regulating hours and schedules. The more that individual employers insisted that granting “their” workers shorter hours would leave them at a competitive disadvantage, the more that unions sought city, state and even federal legislation.

The call for “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will” became the rallying cry for the American labor movement after the Civil War, even as most workers put in 10-, 11- and 12-hour days. Skilled building trades workers, railroad workers, miners and factory workers came together with one vision and one voice. In 1886, the country’s two major labor organizations, the Knights of Labor and the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions joined together to call for a nationwide general strike. Their members pledged to walk out on May 1 and not to return to work until every worker was offered a standard eight-hour day.

At the center of the movement was the McCormick Harvester Works in Chicago, the largest factory in the U.S., with a workforce that included unskilled as well as skilled workers, and immigrants and workers of color alongside native-born whites. When police broke up a rally at the factory gates on May 4, there was violence and bloodshed. Strike leaders were arrested; some would be tried for murder and executed. The movement came to a halt for a generation, but workers and their unions revived the movement for an eight-hour day, and, after yet more years of organizing and protesting, finally received it with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938.

It had taken three generations to make the eight-hour day a reality. Many of you might well be thinking how elusive that reality has remained, from Amazon warehouse workers assigned mandatory overtime, to fast food workers assigned “clopen” shifts, closing at night and opening the next morning. But the struggle, especially in the extended periods when it had traction as a movement, enabled the labor movement to reach beyond the boundaries of formal unions and the procedures of collective bargaining, connect workplaces with communities, unite experienced union members with women and men new to labor organization, and bring workers of color and immigrants into conversations, relationships and solidarity with white men. It was also a fertile ground for workers to make art and music, and dream of a better way of life.

Fast food strikers and supporters rallied during a one-day strike in Minneapolis in 2015. (UA file photo)

It is frustrating that a parliamentary maneuver allowed Congress to avoid dealing head-on with the issue of a $15 minimum wage. But that it had to consider raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 suggests the power that this movement – and its core ideas – now manifest. The Fight for $15 began in 2012 when two hundred fast-food workers walked off the job to demand $15 an hour and union rights in New York City. Today, it is a global movement of fast-food workers, home health aides, childcare teachers, airport workers, adjunct professors, retail employees and other underpaid workers in over 300 cities on six continents. Unions are among this movement’s most important supporters and resources, but it also includes workers without union affiliations, members of worker centers, teenagers, seniors and immigrants with and without documentation, encompassing a diverse group of whites and people of color with men, women and individuals across the spectrums of sexual orientation and gender identity.

In its inclusive membership, its vision of broad and sweeping change, and its insistence that all workers should share in the wealth that they produce, we can recognize this movement’s kinship with the movement for the eight-hour day. Organizers of the Fight for $15 proclaim on their website:

“When we first took the streets, the skeptics called us dreamers. They said a $15 wage was ‘unwinnable.’ We didn’t listen. We organized and we fought for what we knew was right. We didn’t win these increases because we elected supportive politicians to office. We won because we made them support us…

“We’ve already won raises for 22 million people across the country – including 10 million who are on their way to $15 – all because workers came together and acted like a union.”

The workers rallying outside the McCormick Harvester Works on May 1, 1886, would have understood them perfectly. As we try to rebuild the U.S. labor movement in the third decade of the 21st century, in the wake of the pandemic and the killing of George Floyd, it is important that we hear this message, too.

– Peter Rachleff is the co-executive director of the East Side Freedom Library in St. Paul. Kristi Wright works with ESFL on developing the library’s relationships with the labor movement. Learn more at eastsidefreedomlibrary.org. 

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Lessons from labor history can inform our labor movement during COVID-19 crisis

May 4, 2020 by

The East Side Freedom Library, in more relaxed times. (submitted photo)

(Peter Rachleff, co-director of the East Side Freedom Library in St. Paul, wrote this essay for The Union Advocate’s May 2020 issue.)

COVID-19 is the biggest crisis of our lives, and workers are on the front lines. Large, profitable employers expect workers deemed “essential” — those in healthcare, grocery stores, food production, and shipping, among others — to risk their health and safety and that of their families, many for meager pay and benefits. Portions of the economy have shut down, leaving millions jobless with a threadbare social safety net. Where do we look for ideas about how to respond?

At the East Side Freedom Library, we believe that studying our past offers valuable lessons for the present. We collect resources and host programs which help us understand how workers developed organizations and strategies to confront the key challenges of their lives. The current situation has led us to reconsider the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934. Their dramatic story shows that the labor movement is strongest when unions boldly organize workers on the job and in the community around a shared vision of fairness and justice.

These strikes changed the course of history, transforming Minneapolis from a notorious anti-labor bastion into a “union town.” In the depths of the Depression and the depths of winter, a group of dedicated activists in the city’s coal yards bypassed the traditional strategy of organizing workers into separate unions depending on the work they did. They organized coal heavers, warehouse workers, truck drivers, and helpers into a single union. With the support of working people and families throughout the city, they won a brief strike in February 1934.

Their success inspired other Minneapolis workers to believe that if they organized together, if they practiced solidarity, and if they involved their families, they, too, could change their lives. Over the spring, activists and organizers built one industrial union of all workers involved in trucking. Five thousand joined. The union built a “Committee of 100,” a network of stewards and rank-and-filers to link workplaces. They organized an Unemployed Committee to advocate for those without work. They started a daily newspaper, The Organizer, to tell their story to the wider community. And they organized a Women’s Auxiliary, which ran a commissary and a soup kitchen.

These steps became critical in May, when, challenged by employers and the fiercely anti-union Citizens’ Alliance, the union struck. They needed all of these innovations to strengthen internal solidarity and gain the solidarity of the community. Their roving pickets challenged scab-driven trucks, and they engaged in physical battles with the local police. In two weeks, they had won many of their demands. When employers tried to undercut their agreements, the union called its members — now 10,000 — back on strike. They held firm for several weeks, and finally won secure contracts, significant raises, and work rules and working conditions that became the model for the industry nationwide.

The Teamsters’ story is instructive for our situation. Their strategy prioritized internal and external organization, linking workers and their families to the union, other unions, and the community. They practiced anti-racism and sought workers of color for membership and leadership roles. The local union’s new constitution even required that every meeting include a presentation on labor history.

No wonder we celebrate this event at the East Side Freedom Library. But the point is not just to celebrate history but to learn from it.

Labor’s crisis did not begin with COVID-19. For decades, employers have evaded labor protections through outsourcing and subcontracting. They have eroded wages and benefits, and through the legislatures and courts attacked the right to picket or have a union at all. This pandemic has laid bare just how far we have slid in terms of work rules, wages, health care, sick pay, and workplace protections. It has also revealed how “essential” workers are to the safety, security, and quality of life enjoyed by our community. Like when those coal yard workers went on strike, the contradictions are clear.

We founded the East Side Freedom Library in 2014 to share stories of the labor movement and to inspire solidarity among unions and with our diverse communities. We are proud to preserve and present our shared history. We have been inspired by recent actions taken by local educators and Amazon workers, and workers elsewhere as well as by the dedication and determination of nurses and healthcare workers to speak up for their rights and for the people who depend upon them. Informed by the lessons of the past, when we fight together, the future is ours to win.

– Peter Rachleff wishes to acknowledge the work of Kristi Wright in conceptualizing and writing this article. Wright was a union organizer among graduate employees at the U of M and is currently working with the library to expand and deepen relationships with labor.

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New labor college launching this spring in St. Paul

February 13, 2019 by

After months of planning, a small group of labor leaders, activists and scholars will open a new college this spring in St. Paul, inspired by the belief that working people can build the labor movement of the future, in part, by looking to the past.

Set to begin classes in April, New Brookwood Labor College is modeled after a school for labor organizers that operated between 1921 and 1937 in Katonah, NY. It attracted over 600 students, who went on to lead major union and civil rights campaigns across the country in the decades to come.

[New Brookwood is currently accepting applications for entry into its first cohort through March 15. Apply at newbrookwood.org/apply.]

The school’s lifespan was brief, said Robyn Gulley, a co-founder of New Brookwood and local labor and human rights organizer. But its impact was great.

“It’s hard to read a book about labor history without coming across Brookwood Labor College,” Gulley said. “Brookwood left behind a tremendous legacy. And it was coed, it was racially diverse, it was ethnically diverse at a time when that was basically unheard of.”

Brookwood’s brand of inclusiveness and forward thinking hasn’t lost its relevance in an era of intense cultural and political divides in the U.S. And the gaps between rich and working people have widened back to the bloated levels of the 1920’s, when the original Brookwood began educating organizers.

If ever there were a time for a reboot, labor historian Peter Rachleff said, this is it.

“The Brookwood Labor College came along at a time when the labor movement needed critical thinking – how to organize when traditional forms of work (skilled manual labor) were being challenged by assembly lines and scientific management; how to organize a workforce that was increasingly diverse by race, gender and ethnicity; how to organize when corporate management was dead-set against negotiating with unions; how to organize when employers were able to use laws and court decisions to undercut workers’ rights,” Rachleff said. “Does this sound familiar?”

New Brookwood classes will take place at the East Side Freedom Library in St. Paul.

A ‘rigorous’ curriculum

Rachleff is co-executive director of the nonprofit, independent East Side Freedom Library, which will host New Brookwood classes on St. Paul’s East Side.

Rachleff and Gulley, who served as an instructor in the University of Minnesota’s undergraduate leadership program, will be among the academics co-leading courses with local organizers. They were part of a planning group that included leaders of roughly a dozen local unions and community groups that often work in partnership with the labor movement. Staff from the U’s Labor Education Service and Metro State’s Advocacy and Political Leadership program also participated.

Together, they developed New Brookwood’s “core curriculum” of four classes, offered two at a time, to cohorts of between 10 and 15 students. Organizers anticipate as many as three cohorts per year.

New Brookwood is intentionally not accredited and offers no grades or diplomas, a structure that keeps tuition costs low and makes the school as accessible as possible.

The curriculum, according to promotional materials, is “rigorous.” Students are expected to produce work that “will advance both the immediate and long-term goals of the labor movement.”

Gulley said the New Brookwood experience won’t end with core classes.

“Our goal is to figure out ways to keep people engaged on a continuing basis, so that we’re building up community and a diverse group of people from different unions who can get together and talk about how to unify on pressing issues,” she said.

Educating a working class

New Brookwood isn’t out to replace existing labor-education programs, organizers say. But it is intended to be something different.

“You can’t throw a stone without hitting a sign advertising an MBA program,” Gulley said. “There’s really not anything like New Brookwood.”

Most existing labor courses or trainings focus on meeting the needs of workers already in unions, whether it’s bargaining better contracts, filing grievances or serving as elected officers.

But the share of the workforce represented by unions has dwindled in recent years, as anti-union politicians, employers and court rulings have made it harder for workers to join together. In response, New Brookwood organizers envision a more outward-looking curriculum.

“We have to think about how we can bring new people into the labor movement,” Gulley said. “We deeply believe that we can’t do that without dealing with oppression and power imbalances.”

Rachleff said New Brookwood “will offer a space, a framework and opportunities for dedicated instructors and workers to come together to find the answers needed for our times,” from how working people push back against corporate and political attacks to how they organize in a changing economy.

At its core, Gulley added, New Brookwood’s mission mirrors the original Brookwood’s mission.

“We’re educating workers into the working class,” she said.

Filed Under: Union Events Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Wage hike shows what’s possible when workers join together, think big

December 19, 2018 by

Working people celebrated at City Hall as Mayor Melvin Carter signed St. Paul’s new $15 minimum wage ordinance Nov. 14.

Six years ago, when fast food workers in New York and, later, cities across the country began striking and rallying in the streets for a $15 minimum wage, the idea was dismissed as too radical.

Today, it’s written into the City of St. Paul’s legislative code.

Members of the City Council voted unanimously Nov. 14 to phase in $15 for all workers – indexed to inflation – over the next nine years. Within minutes of the vote, Mayor Melvin Carter, who made $15 a rallying cry in his bid for office one year ago, had put his signature on the ordinance.

That set off a celebration like few others at City Hall, where many of the working people who led the fight for $15 had gathered to witness the historic moment.

Shalantra Taylor, who works at a McDonald’s in St. Paul and is looking for a second job to make ends meet, was among them. She thanked Carter and council members for “listening to workers, for standing with us.”

“I am homeless, and I’m not the only one,” Taylor said. “Many working people have to work multiple jobs and are still living paycheck to paycheck… This minimum wage law is going to lift up working people and address racial inequalities in our city.”

During a signing ceremony at City Hall, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter showed off the city’s new $15 minimum wage ordinance, which drew unanimous backing from members of the City Council.

Making history

Taylor and other workers never wavered in their demands, and they resisted efforts to divide them along the lines of age, experience or industry.

When the restaurant lobby pushed a subminimum wage for tipped workers, a coalition of worker, faith and community organizations pushed back – both in the streets and in formal meetings with elected officials. As a result, the so-called “tip adjustment” never even came up for a vote before the council, and it is not included in the new ordinance.

By the time the ordinance was introduced this fall, the 15 Now Coalition had gained the influence necessary to go toe-to-toe with powerful lobbying interests like the Minnesota Restaurant Association and big-box retailers. And it did so by fusing the energy of community members fighting entrenched poverty and racial disparities with the power of organized labor.

When those groups share a bold, progressive policy vision, labor historian Peter Rachleff said, it’s a recipe for making history.

“I think the fight for $15 nationally looks more like the fight for the eight-hour day and the fight against child labor than it looks like anything else in American history,” Rachleff, co-director of the East Side Freedom Library, said.

All three movements were initially derided as too ambitious.

“People said it’s too much too fast, but it’s that kind of evocative vision” that inspired the fight for child labor laws and the eight-hour day, Rachleff said. And it’s a similarly bold vision inspiring workers to fight for $15 today.

“We’re not talking about 2 percent a year or a $2 raise,” Rachleff said. “By putting $15 up the flagpole, people felt it was worth fighting for. People could imagine their lives being changed by making that kind of money.”

In 2017, fast food workers went on a Labor Day strike to launch the campaign for $15 in St. Paul.

Labor support ‘essential’

From the earliest stages of the Fight for $15, unions in the Twin Cities have recognized the importance of fighting alongside workers, whether union or non-union, pushing for a higher minimum wage.

Union members marched alongside striking fast food workers in the early days of the campaign, and many labor organizations, including the St. Paul Regional Labor Federation, helped make $15 a litmus test for candidates running for mayor in 2017.

“Raising the minimum wage, without a tip adjustment, was a fight our affiliate unions and delegates realized was essential to who we are,” St. Paul RLF President Bobby Kasper said. “The labor movement won’t remain relevant unless we’re fighting for all working people.”

After Carter announced plans to take on the issue in his first year in office, the St. Paul RLF began hosting weekly meetings with activists and organizers from the 15 Now coalition. Several union members sat on the study group whose recommendations formed the basis of the minimum wage ordinance.

Now that the ordinance has passed, the 15 Now coalition will focus on education and enforcement in St. Paul, with an eye on taking the movement statewide.

“It’s a really ambitious idea,” Rachleff said. “But the beauty of it is it will force people to do the kind of metro-outstate organizing we need so desperately, not just in Minnesota but also in Wisconsin and throughout the Midwest.

“Those conversations don’t happen if there isn’t a focal point.”

Filed Under: Community Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Community Ed offers courses in labor history, construction careers

January 10, 2018 by

Want to learn more about local labor history? Looking to explore career opportunities in the construction trades? These two labor-related courses are among the St. Paul Public Schools’ lineup of Community Ed offerings this winter.

Peter Rachleff, a retired Macalester professor and co-director of the East Side Freedom Library, will teach “The Labor Movement and the Struggle for Democracy in Minnesota” on Tuesday nights, Feb. 13 to March 20, at the historic Carnegie library, located at 1105 Greenbrier St. Registration cost is $53.

The course description promises a survey of how Minnesota workers – “native born and immigrant, women and men, skilled and unskilled, blue collar and white collar, people of color and white” – have organized over the last 150 years for political power and a collective voice on the job.

“Learn how they struggled for citizenship and the right to vote; demanded the right to organize and engage in collective bargaining; organized unions to protect their rights at work; and organized politically to shape public policy.”

People entering the labor force – or considering a career change – will get an overview of opportunities in the construction trades at a one-day course Feb. 27, taught by Don Mullin, executive secretary of the St. Paul Building and Construction Trades Council. The session will cover coursework and skills needed for different trades, expectations, insurance, work cycles and more.

“Choosing a Career in the Trades” will meet from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at the St. Paul Community Ed offices, 1780 W. 7th St. It’s open to ages 16 and up. Cost of registration is $7.

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Peter Rachleff: East Side Freedom Library celebrates second anniversary

June 24, 2016 by
Peter Rachleff is professor of history a President of the East Side Freedom Library.

Peter Rachleff is co-director of the East Side Freedom Library.

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 young people who have not yet entered the workforce and to workers new to our state and our country, new to the labor movement.

Our mission is driven not only by our appreciation of the rich history of the labor movement and our sense that this history is all too rarely recognized in our culture; it is also driven by our awareness of the challenges faced by working people and the labor movement:

  • Since the Reagan era, corporate employers and government have turned away from their cooperative relationships with unions and a willingness to share the benefits of increases in productivity and profits with workers.
  • The place of the United States in the global economy has changed, with millions of manufacturing jobs having been shipped abroad.
  • Working men and women are now more often employed in healthcare, education, retail, public sector and service industries than in manufacturing.
  • As much of the world has been engulfed in the dynamics of change, millions of new immigrants have come to the U.S. (and Minnesota), seeking jobs, security, and a home.
  • Added together, these changes pose great challenges to working people and to the labor movement.

The East Side Freedom Library draws on the rich history of the labor movement in order to incubate ideas, strategies, values and visions that can serve workers and the labor movement now. We are also educating the wider community to better understand how a strong labor movement and fairly compensated workers have been central to the past successes of our national economy and to the establishment of a high quality of life.

While we have a beautiful building and outstanding resources in 15,000 books plus visual art, music, and historical objects, we could not do this work without the partnership of the labor movement. In our two short years, we have:

  • received financial support from the St. Paul Regional Labor Federation and more than a dozen affiliated unions;
  • collaborated with SEIU to bring Ai-Jen Poo, Executive Director of the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance, to discuss the crisis in personal care work;
  • collaborated with a network of public sector unions to bring veteran labor educator Bill Barry to keynote a discussion about the Supreme Court and the Friedrichs case;
  • collaborated with the St. Paul RLF to host AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler for a discussion of the “Raise the Wage” campaign;
  • collaborated with the St. Paul RLF, the Carpenters, Bricklayers, Laborers, AFSCME and the UFCW to organize a host a Union Job Fair in which 125 job seekers met prospective employers with union jobs on offer;
  • collaborated with the St. Paul Federation of Teachers to organize a monthly film series about education and then a summer book discussion group about the crisis in education;
  • collaborated with the Caucus for Change to host several “meet and greets” with candidates for St. Paul School Board;
  • collaborated with AFSCME Local 3800 (University of Minnesota) on a monthly labor film series;
  • hosted meetings for the Newspaper Guild, Teamsters Local 320, SEIU Local 284, AFSCME child-care providers, and Workers United Local 150;
  • organized and hosted celebrations of labor and art, labor musical concerts, labor history classes and walking tours.

As St. Paul RLF President Bobby Kasper has said of us, “This is a Labor Hall for the community!”

It’s been a great two years working with the labor movement and working with our community on the East Side. Together, we can mine the past to find valuable insights and ideas with which to shape the future. Please join us!

– Peter Rachleff is co-executive director of the East Side Freedom Library, located at 1105 Greenbrier Street. For more information about the ESFL’s resources, programs and hours, go to eastsidefreedomlibrary.org or call 651-230-3294.

Filed Under: Labor Voices Tagged With: , , , ,
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