Minnesota unions grew by 23,000 members last year

February 3, 2025 by

Minnesota unions made membership gains in 2024, according to an annual report released last month by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nationally, union density remained about the same.

The agency’s survey results estimate that Minnesota’s labor movement welcomed about 23,000 union members last year, increasing the total number of union members to 379,000. Minnesota’s union density increased from 13.3% of the total workforce to 14.2%.

The results reflect increased organizing activity in recent years among local health care, retail, cultural and hospitality workers, as well as public-sector employees.

Minnesota-based AFSCME Council 5 recently announced that the public-service union welcomed over 5,000 new members in 2024, and the Minnesota Nurses Association said it has added 1,400 new members in the last year.

Notable organizing victories last year included workers at First Avenue’s clubs in the Twin Cities joining UNITE HERE Local 17. Front-of-house workers at two prominent Minneapolis theater companies voted to join IATSE Local 13. Grocery workers at Mississippi Market stores in St. Paul joined United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1189. And over 4,000 graduate workers in the University of Minnesota system ratified their first union contract in December.

Those gains kept Minnesota on the opposite path of its neighbor to the east.

In Wisconsin, where lawmakers have passed a right-to-work law and severely curtailed public-sector bargaining rights over the last 15 years, union density slipped by a full percentage point, to 6.4% last year.

Minnesota also outperformed the national trend.

The nation’s union membership rate was 9.9% in 2024, little changed from the prior year, and the number of workers who belong to unions fell slightly to 14.3 million.

The BLS report notes that the number of union members when it first began collecting comparable data, in 1983, was 17.7 million, and 20.1% of American workers were union members then.

But union members continued to earn more than their non-union peers in 2024. Non-union workers’ median weekly earnings were 85% of earnings reported by union workers last year, a weekly union advantage of nearly $200.

AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said the BLS statistics “don’t begin to tell the real story of the desire workers have to join a union,” pointing to a surge in petitions for union elections filed with the National Labor Relations Board since 2021.

Successful organizing campaigns at Starbucks, Whole Foods and Amazon – and at foreign-owned automakers like Volkswagen in the South – show Americans have an appetite for collective bargaining. But too often, Shuler said, union-busting employers exploit toothless labor laws to stifle their workers’ voice.

“There are 60 million workers who would join a union today if given the opportunity, but between broken labor law and corporate bosses like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos engaging in often illegal union-busting every year with little consequence, far too few get that chance. It’s time for change,” Shuler said, citing an AFL-CIO survey taken last year.

Unions have called on federal lawmakers to pass measures like the PRO Act that would make it easier for workers to form unions and stiffen the penalties employers face for breaking labor law.

“We call on the Trump administration to live up to its campaign promises to support workers by prioritizing fixing America’s broken labor law through the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act,” Shuler said. “These bills would finally update our archaic, broken laws and give workers what we so desperately want: a free and fair shot at joining a union on the job.”

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Kera Peterson: Unions are having a resurgence, and every member can be part of it

May 1, 2023 by

St. Paul Regional Labor Federation President Kera Peterson is pictured speaking at the 2022 MN AFL-CIO Convention.

At the AFL-CIO Convention last summer, the nation’s largest labor federation set an ambitious goal to bring 1 million new members into our unions over the next 10 years. Since then, the federation has made a strategic investment in creating the Center for Transformational Organizing (CTO), which will bring together a broad coalition of union members to work on movement-wide campaigns related to growing our movement.

The CTO is a key part of a renewed push by our labor federations – at both the national and the local level – to prioritize organizing in all our work. It’s never a bad time to organize in the workplace, but this is an opportunity unlike any we’ve seen in decades. Gallup polling last year found 71% of Americans approve of labor unions, the highest mark since 1965. A separate survey found 70% of “skilled and hourly workers” would join a union if given the opportunity. And broad majorities agree that the decline in union participation has been bad for working people. That’s a big reason why we recently saw Michigan become the first state ever to repeal its ‘right-to-work’ law.

Momentum is on our side. It’s critical that we, as a labor movement, take advantage of this moment and build worker power at scale. That means passing the PRO Act, which will restore workers’ right to join together and form a union – free from harassment and intimidation – and to bargain better wages, benefits and working conditions. The PRO Act would finally put teeth into our nation’s labor laws, stiffening penalties on bosses who threaten, retaliate against or fire workers who exercise their right to collective action. We’re taking action here in Minnesota, too, by lobbying in support of legislation that would ban captive audience meetings, in which bosses force their workers to listen to anti-union speech, intimidation and, too often, outright lies.

Even with the deck stacked against them, many Americans have succeeded in organizing their workplace in recent years, seizing this moment of labor resurgence to lock down a more powerful voice over their working conditions. Last month, baristas at a Starbucks in Sacramento became the 300th store to unionize with Workers United, and ice-cream scoopers at Ben & Jerry’s flagship store in Vermont announced their plans to form a union, “Scoopers United.” Bookstore clerks, craft beverage workers, and museum staff are also successfully organizing in sectors of the economy where unions have not traditionally had a presence.

Elsewhere, unions are organizing to increase workers’ representation and raise standards in industries like health care, construction and arts and entertainment. Over 2,000 Twin Cities health care workers have joined unions since 2001. Building Trades unions continue to shine a light on wage theft and other labor abuses that happen too frequently on local multifamily residential construction sites. And 45,000 workers at Delta Air Lines, which maintains a hub of operations at Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport, are engaged in the world’s largest private-sector union drive at any single company. That campaign held a rally here last month, which the Saint Paul Regional Labor Federation was proud to host at our union hall.

Our union family is positioned well for historic growth, but it won’t happen without all of us pulling together in solidarity. It won’t happen unless those of us doing our movement’s work on the local level take on the AFL-CIO’s challenge to put organizing at the center of all our work. That could mean talking to friends and family about the union advantage – higher wages, job security and better health and retirement benefits – or talking to your elected officials about the importance of strengthening labor laws. It also could mean showing up in solidarity with workers in an organizing or contract campaign. We’re posting updates and opportunities regularly on the Regional Labor Federation’s Facebook page. We all can play a part in this historic union resurgence. Together, we can meet the moment and revitalize our movement.

– Kera Peterson is president of the Saint Paul Regional Labor Federation, AFL-CIO. Learn more about the SPRLF and its work at stpaulunions.org.

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General counsel will urge NLRB to deem captive audience meetings illegal

April 25, 2022 by

After learning its booksellers were forming a union, management at Half Price Books in St. Louis Park called Lindsey Dorsey and her co-workers into a meeting, hoping to snuff out the organizing drive.

“When you’re scheduled to do it, you do it,” Dorsey said. “But it was really clear why they were there and what they were doing and what they were talking about.”

Such mandatory meetings – known by union organizers as “captive audience meetings” – could soon become a violation of federal labor law, after the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel announced April 7 that she will ask board members to overturn a longstanding precedent allowing the practice.

Jennifer Abruzzo, appointed general counsel by President Joe Biden last summer, said employees organizing a union on the job have a right to listen to – or refrain from listening to – employer speech concerning their rights to act collectively to improve their workplace. And it falls on the NLRB to protect that right.

For over 70 years the NLRB has allowed employers to use captive audience meetings to stifle organizing drives and take disciplinary action against any employee who refuses to attend. Abruzzo said that’s inconsistent with the National Labor Relations Act, which the board is charged with upholding.

“This license to coerce is an anomaly in labor law, inconsistent with the Act’s protection of employees’ free choice,” Abruzzo wrote. “It is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of employers’ speech rights.

“I believe that the NLRB case precedent, which has tolerated such meetings, is at odds with fundamental labor-law principles, our statutory language and our congressional mandate. Because of this, I plan to urge the board to reconsider such precedent and find mandatory meetings of this sort unlawful.”

That’s good news for working people looking to gain a say over their wages, benefits and working conditions, union organizers said.

“Ending captive audience meetings puts decisions about organizing back in workers’ hands,” Minnesota AFL-CIO Organizing and Growth Director Todd Dahlstrom said. “Working people need the freedom to decide whether to join together in union without a boss putting their finger on the scale with threats or misinformation.”

Captive audience meetings are a mainstay of the anti-union playbook, utilized by human resources departments and the high-priced, union-busting consultants they call on to squelch organizing drives. In a 2009 study, the Economic Policy Institute found that 89% of employers held captive audience meetings in advance of union elections between 1999 and 2003.

In Abruzzo’s opinion, those meetings should have been voluntary and, moving forward, employers should be held responsible for making it clear that attendance is optional. “Such an approach will appropriately protect employers’ free-speech rights to express views, arguments, or opinions concerning the employees’ exercise of their protected labor rights without unduly infringing on the rights of employees to refrain, or not, from listening to such expressions,” her statement said.

“This is a big step in returning power back to working people,” Dahlstrom said.

Whether workers at the Half Price Books in St. Louis Park could have opted out of their meeting with management without facing discipline is unclear. No one thought to ask, Dorsey said.

Either way, the move backfired, as workers later voted nearly unanimously to form a union with Local 663 of the United Food and Commercial Workers. Several workers, Dorsey said, signed union cards shortly after the meeting with management.

“We knew when they were being misleading because we had been communicating with workers at other stores,” Dorsey said. “So when we were talking about our staffing issues and we were told that it’s our store’s problem and no other store has that problem, we knew it was a lie.

“That’s the best defense against anything, just communicating and knowing the truth.”

Half Price Books unions in St. Louis Park and three other metro stores – Arden Hills, Roseville and St. Paul – are currently bargaining first contracts with the bookseller.

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Minnesota AFL-CIO wraps 55th convention with call for solidarity

September 21, 2021 by

During a pandemic-shortened convention that gaveled to a close this morning, delegates from the Minnesota AFL-CIO’s affiliate unions reflected on the importance of solidarity during times of crisis, and reaffirmed their commitment to building a just, inclusive labor movement capable of fighting for all working Minnesotans.

“No matter what we look like or where we come from, we all should have the freedom to come together and negotiate,” Secretary-Treasurer Brad Lehto said in opening remarks Monday.

Held virtually, the statewide federation’s 55th convention featured guest speakers, resolutions and reports on local unions’ organizing and political work.

During a special presentation, frontline workers discussed their experiences keeping the state running during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ryan Ellison, a grocery store worker and member of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1189, recalled tense interactions with customers about masks and widespread fear about coming into contact with the virus.

“None of us signed up for what we had to go through,” Ellison, a shop steward, said. “This isn’t something that was ever included in the job description.”

In a live address to the convention Monday, Gov. Tim Walz praised essential union members for “incredible acts of selfless service to others.”

“What’s been asked of you has not been asked of a generation,” Walz said. “I’m incredibly proud of you and the work you’ve done.”

Walz also credited unions for pushing employers, lawmakers and regulators to make workers’ health and safety a top priority after the pandemic hit, noting that “workers who were in unions felt safer in their positions, felt better respected.”

“More Minnesotans are alive today because union workers forced us to treat COVID as it should have been treated – as a life-threatening pandemic,” Walz said.

Looking forward

Convention business also included a series of resolutions that advanced out of committees and onto the convention floor, offering delegates the opportunity to shape their federation’s priorities.

Resolutions ranged from opposing the corporatization of health care to supporting union members in a fight to stop AT&T from outsourcing union jobs. Another put the federation on record supporting truth in education – a response to right-wing hysteria around the teaching of “critical race theory” in schools.

Delegates also celebrated steady growth in the local labor movement’s ranks. Spokespeople from new bargaining units at two charters schools, Fair State Brewing Cooperative and Augsburg University offered insights into their successful organizing drives, which took place in unprecedented times.

“We were organizing virtually,” Augsburg staff member Katie Asfeld said. “We didn’t have an opportunity to bump into colleagues after meetings or get together and have coffee…

“We developed different ways for staff to be able to show their support, and at the end of the day we saw that whether we are virtual or in person, there is power in our collective voices.”

Seizing an opportunity

Recent polling suggests more workers would like to join together and bargain for better wages, benefits and working conditions.

A Gallup survey of U.S. public opinion of labor unions, released annually around Labor Day, this year recorded the highest favorability rating – 68%, since 1965. Support is relatively bipartisan, and a whopping 77% of young people view unions favorably.

“As long as I can remember, our opponents have been saying, ‘Unions will die, unions are obsolete,’” Lehto said. “Don’t you believe it.”

Passing the PRO Act into federal law, he added, would give unions a greater opportunity to capitalize on their surging popularity. The measure, which has passed the House, would hold corporations accountable for union-busting, strengthen workers’ rights to form and join unions and repeal right-to-work laws.

Minnesota’s senators assured delegates they are working to advance the bill to President Biden’s desk. Sen. Tina Smith said the PRO Act is necessary to undo the “concerted campaign” by big corporations “to undermine organizing rights.”

Sen. Amy Klobuchar added, “I believe in my heart that when unions are strong, our economy is strong, and when our economy is strong, our country is strong.”

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Kera Peterson: To build back better, pass the PRO Act

February 4, 2021 by

Kera Peterson is president of the St. Paul Regional Labor Federation, AFL-CIO.

Millions of working people and their families are hurting in America right now. We’ve seen it firsthand at the St. Paul Regional Labor Federation, as our nonprofit Labor Studies and Resource Center has begun coordinating free food-distribution events with local unions. At four events so far, union volunteers have distributed thousands of packages of fresh food to families in need. During events at the Labor Center, the line of vehicles often spilled out of our parking lot and into West 7th Street.

These were families bearing the brunt of multiple crises facing our country right now: the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic collapse, chronic income inequality and systemic racism. While working Americans worry about eviction notices, job losses and exhausting their paid time off, U.S. billionaires are amassing even more wealth – over $1 trillion, combined, during the pandemic so far.

From Day 1 our federal government’s pandemic response has been bungled. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned on a promise that we, as one nation, will build back even better than before.

At a time when working people are holding our country together, we have to do better than building back an economy where the rules are still rigged against us. The new administration understands that. The American people, who voted decisively and in record numbers to reject the politics of darkness and division, understand that too.

So what does building back better look like? It starts with direct and significant economic relief for workers and small businesses on Main Street, not Wall Street. Our local governments need aid too, as revenue shortfalls caused by the pandemic could force many to make steep cuts to services more essential than ever right now, like public health and public safety. And job losses resulting from cuts to public services would only deepen our economic crisis.

Building back better also means restoring fairness to our economy. It means leveling the playing field and giving working people more power to join together and bargain better wages, benefits and working conditions. Congress can do that by sending the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act to President-elect Biden’s desk in the coming months.

The most significant labor legislation in 80 years, the PRO Act would address several weaknesses in our federal labor laws, giving workers more bargaining power on the job. It would put teeth into rules prohibiting employers from retaliating against workers who try to form a union. It would require employers to disclose payments they make to union-busting law firms and consultants brought in to stifle workers’ voices. It would speed up the organizing-election process and establish a mechanism for workers and employers to arrive at a first contract quickly after an organizing drive.

House Democrats passed the PRO Act last February, but it never stood a chance in Mitch McConnell’s Senate. Today, members of Congress introduced the PRO Act again, and President Biden, who has said he wants his to be “the most significant pro-labor, pro-worker administration” ever, has pledged support for the measure. It’s encouraging to see that two congresswomen from our area, Reps. Betty McCollum and Angie Craig, are co-sponsors of the bill.

But the ideals behind the PRO Act – collective bargaining, a voice on the job, the belief that all work has dignity – are not Democratic or Republican. They are American ideals. It’s time for our leaders to put politics aside, to think big and to act boldly. Click here to tell your representatives to make the PRO Act a reality.

Our labor movement stands ready to build back better, together.

– Kera Peterson is president of the St. Paul Regional Labor Federation, AFL-CIO.

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Smith earned labor endorsement in Senate race with hard work

October 28, 2020 by

Terry Nelson (L), Painters and Allied Trades District Council 82’s business manager, leads Sen. Tina Smith and Susan Kent, the Minnesota Senate’s minority leader, on a tour of the union’s apprenticeship center in Little Canada.

During Tina Smith’s first week as a U.S. senator, after Gov. Mark Dayton appointed her to the seat in December 2017, Smith traveled to Duluth, where she met with workers and retirees fighting to save their pension fund.

The Central States Pension Fund, with some 400,000 participants, had recently announced it would run out of money in the next 10 years, putting at risk the earned benefits of 273,000 retirees, mostly former Teamsters.

Smith remembers meeting one union member at the event who said she didn’t think she could afford to retire without her pension. “I don’t have a Plan B,” she told Smith. “That’s my only plan for making sure I can stay in my house, that I can pay my bills.”

Smith was officially sworn into office a month later. Since then she has made pension reform one of her top priorities, signing on as a supporter of the union-backed Butch Lewis Act. And from her seat on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Smith has raised awareness of the looming crisis Central States and other funds face without federal action.

But the encounter in Duluth stuck with Smith, she said, both as an example of the “deep economic inequity” plaguing our country and as a reminder of what the junior senator from Minnesota tries to prioritize in Washington, D.C.

“It was so motivating to me,” Smith said. “Here are people who did everything they were supposed to do. They paid into the pension, and their employers did, too. And yet there were members of Congress … trying to shirk the responsibility we have to protect people’s pensions.”

Smith has been on working people’s side throughout her career in politics, and working people are on her side as she seeks re-election – with the labor endorsement – to her first full term in the Senate.

Minnesota AFL-CIO President Bill McCarthy said Smith shares union values, like “dignity, justice and freedom for working people.” Jessica Looman, executive director of the Minnesota Building and Construction Trades Council, called Smith an ally of union tradespeople and all working people.

“As the former lieutenant governor of Minnesota, she understands what the workers in our state need, and has been an effective voice for Minnesota in Washington,” Looman added.

Being on labor’s side is “everything to me,” Smith said.

Sticking up for workers

Growing up in a politically active family, Smith said, she developed an early respect for the powerful role unions play in advocating for all working people. And after graduating from high school, she learned firsthand the benefits of carrying a union card.

Smith worked that summer as a bull cook on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Crews had to be flown into Prudhoe Bay, where they worked 12-hour days for six weeks straight before getting two weeks off.

“That was how the contract was negotiated,” Smith said. “Everybody wanted to go up there and just work like hell and then come home again. But because of that experience, because of being a member of a labor union, I was able to help put myself through college.”

Smith hasn’t stopped working hard since entering politics. As former Gov. Dayton’s chief of staff and, later, lieutenant governor, Smith has focused on leveling the playing field for working people – the same way unions do, she said.

“Certainly, labor unions stick up for their members, as well they should. But they stick up for regular folks doing jobs that are not organized too,” Smith said. “It’s that advocacy for a higher minimum wage, for paid family leave, for health care people can count on.”

Tina Smith meets with postal employees outside the Eagan distribution center.

A record of trust

Union leaders are quick to point out highlights of Smith’s work since Minnesotans voted to keep her in office two years ago.

• Weeks after that election, the federal government shut down. When it reopened in January 2019, following the longest shutdown in history, lawmakers agreed to repay federal employees for their lost wages.

But they left out federal contract workers, including many people in low-wage jobs like food service, custodial and security work. Smith authored a bill to make those forgotten workers whole, but the Republican majority refused to take it up.

• Later in 2019, Smith introduced the 21st Century Workforce Partnerships Act, which would encourage relationships between businesses and high schools to provide students the skills they need to find good-paying jobs and careers, including work in the union construction trades.

• This summer, when members of postal unions approached Smith with concerns that President Trump’s new postmaster general was making drastic changes that slowed down mail delivery, Smith used her position to sound the alarm. She and other elected officials questioned the postmaster about the impact his moves would have on election integrity. And it helped generate enough public outcry to get the administration to back off on further reforms for now.

More challenges await

But Smith wants to see Congress do more for working families, particularly with no end to the COVID-19 pandemic in sight. “We still have work to do,” she said, to keep workers, businesses, schools and local governments afloat.

After hearing from working parents and employers in Minnesota that a shortage of child care has only gotten worse during the pandemic, Smith teamed up with Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to write a bill that would invest $50 billion in expanding access nationwide.

“Child care is like the infrastructure we need in our communities for families to really be able to function,” Smith said, noting that the measure would also boost pay for child-care providers. “These are predominantly women, often women of color, and they often are making barely $20,000 a year. That’s not even enough to take care of their own families.”

Smith also believes Congress should craft an “industrial and manufacturing strategy” that puts the nation in a position to address the climate crisis – and, in the process, create jobs that are “clean and green and strong.”

And to make sure those jobs guarantee workers the right to join together, Smith supports the union-backed PRO Act, which would add teeth to nation’s outdated labor laws.

In it for the long haul

That’s a long to-do list, but union members who have worked closely with Smith don’t see her backing down.

Just ask members of Teamsters Local 120 who worked at Lakeville Motor Express. When the local trucking company closed abruptly in 2016, stiffing workers out of two weeks’ worth of wages, Smith, lieutenant governor at the time, blasted the company publicly and helped launch an official investigation.

“In my experience if Tina Smith does not say, ‘This is just like stealing from these workers, and I am paying attention to what is happening here,’ then Lakeville may have succeeded,” Local 120’s Paul Slattery said.

It took two and a half years, but Lakeville Motor Express agreed last year to a $1.25 million settlement that provided lost compensation to its former workers.

“Sometimes you have to be in the fight for a long time,” Smith said. “You don’t get immediate gratification, but you have to keep on fighting.”

And Smith said she is still fighting for that pensioner she met three years ago in Duluth, doing it the only way she knows how.

“I put my head down, I get the work done and I get results,” she said.

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Building a clean economy ‘on the high road’

March 5, 2020 by

When the U.S. House of Representatives passed the PRO Act last month, the labor movement celebrated – and for good reason. The measure would give working people a fairer shot at organizing unions, bargaining better wages and fighting back against rising income inequality.

But the PRO Act would be a win for the planet, too. That’s according to the BlueGreen Alliance (BGA), which lobbied for the PRO Act on behalf of 13 labor and environmental organizations.

Why? To address the climate crisis, the U.S. and other countries will need to replace fossil fuels with clean energy, and they will need to do it quickly. Mustering public support for that kind of massive political effort won’t happen, BGA Executive Director Jason Walsh said, unless there’s something in it for working people.

“We have to rebuild our infrastructure, we have to retool our manufacturing and we have to repower our grid with clean sources,” Walsh said in an interview for the March 2020 issue of the The Union Advocate. “That’s daunting, but it’s also an opportunity. And if we do it right, if we build this clean-energy economy on the high road, we have the ability to make this a more just and equal country and economy.”

Jason Walsh is executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance.

UA: The BGA works to advance policies that protect workers and the environment. That seems like divisive terrain right now. Where do you see potential to cut through the tension?

JW: Environmentalists and labor activists agree on much more than we disagree on. There have certainly been fights and disagreements. I’m not ignoring that. Those are hard, and they’re hard right now in places like Minnesota. But fundamentally, our labor partners and our environmental partners understand the interconnectedness of the fight for workers’ rights and environmental protection.

The PRO Act is an example of that. It’s obvious why our labor partners would support the PRO Act. Our environmental partners understand workers who are organized and empowered fight not only for their wages and benefits and job security, they also fight for things like making sure their plants don’t blow up, making sure that industries are not egregious polluters. Unions like the Steelworkers were some of the most important supporters of our bedrock environmental laws, like the Clean Air Act, because their members lived it and worked it.

UA: What does the clean-energy economy look like, and how do those jobs need to change?

JW: Not enough of the jobs created or promised are family-sustaining jobs. In 2019 only 4% of workers in solar electric power generation were union members, and only 5% of workers in wind power generation were union members. Obviously, the clean economy is much bigger than that, but those are the two fastest-growing sectors within it.

Companies within the clean-energy economy have just flat-out violated their employees’ rights to unionize. There’s Tesla, of course. There was also a solar company, Bright Power, in New York City, where workers were trying to join IBEW and were fired. And last year we saw at a company called Gestamp Wind in Texas, the company unlawfully firing and suspending employees, making threats, engaging in surveillance… It was so egregious that the National Labor Relations Board under the Trump administration ordered them to bargain with (Plumbers and Pipefitters) Local 404.

Why do those companies do that? They do it because they can, because our existing labor laws are completely toothless. That is why the PRO Act is so important as we make this monumental shift to a clean-energy economy.

UA: What’s the scope of this change our economy will need to go through?

JW: We’ve barely scratched the surface. We’ve seen a shift in the last 10 years within the power sector to renewable sources, but zero-emission power is still below 20% of the total. We have a transportation sector that is now the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country. And we’ve got an industrial sector that is the fastest-growing source of emissions.

We’re going to have to shift all of them to zero-emissions sources by 2050, and we’ve never done anything at that scale before in this country.

UA: What potential is there for working people?

JW: To give a taste, just take the offshore wind industry, which is potentially enormous. There is, at this point, one offshore wind facility in this country, off of Block Island, Rhode Island, and it was built with union labor. This was just five turbines, but it created 300 jobs – electricians, welders, ironworkers, pile drivers, backhoe operators. That wind farm is now producing enough clean, local electricity to power 17,000 homes. We’ve got to do that by orders of magnitude more across the country.

There is a ton of work here, but we’re at this inflection point as to whether we’re going to continue what we’ve seen – mostly low-road, often low-quality jobs, almost exclusively nonunion – or build this economy along the high road.

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House votes to restore worker voice on the job

February 6, 2020 by

Dee Ann Christensen and Mike Landers, both retired union members who attended the Minnesota AFL-CIO’s campaigns conference today, call their representatives in support of the PRO Act.

The U.S. House of Representatives tonight passed a bill to strengthen protections for workers trying to join together in a union.

The Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act would create new penalties for employers who illegally intimidate or fire workers for organizing a union. It would repeal state right-to-work laws, protect the right to strike and give workers new tools for bargaining a first contract swiftly.

A top legislative priority for organized labor since Democrats took control of the House a year ago, the PRO Act would be the most consequential labor-law reform in 80 years – if it weren’t dead on arrival in the Republican-controlled Senate.

Still, the House vote affirms that labor-law reform remains a key piece of Democrats’ election-year agenda.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka called the PRO Act “the most significant piece of legislation that will come before Congress this year,” and said the nation’s largest labor federation would use today’s vote to draw a line in the sand.

“Those who would oppose, derail or delay this important legislation, do not ask us for a dollar or a door-knock. We won’t be coming,” Trumka said during a Capitol press conference. “But stand with us today, and we’ll stand with you tomorrow.”

Trumka’s message echoed loud and clear with federal lawmakers from Minnesota, who received calls from over 100 union members and retirees gathered for a conference in Minneapolis today.

“Our outdated labor laws are no longer effective to make sure working people have their voices heard,” the Minnesota AFL-CIO’s Melissa Hysing told activists attending the federation’s two-day campaigns conference. “The PRO Act restores fairness to the economy and ensures working people share in the massive wealth we have helped create.”

Four DFLers co-sponsored the PRO Act: Reps. Angie Craig, Betty McCollum, Ilhan Omar and Collin Peterson. Rep. Dean Phillips also voted in favor of the bill.

McCollum, who represents Minnesota’s 4th Congressional District, said the PRO Act would restore fairness to the economy and help curb rising income inequality.

“The PRO Act strengthens workers’ power to stand together and negotiate for higher pay and better benefits,” she said. “For women who are part of a union, the gender pay gap is nearly eliminated, and union members of color have nearly five times the median wealth of their non-union counterparts.

“Anti-union and anti-worker attacks have led to the decline of the middle class. It’s time we pass the PRO Act and restore the constitutional right to organize, putting power back into the hands of American workers.”

Despite polls showing historically high public support for unions last year, the percentage of U.S. workers who belong to unions continued a four-decade decline. An MIT survey from 2018 found about half of private-sector workers, or 60 million people, wanted a union. Only 6.4% actually have one.

The disconnect, union organizers say, stems from bosses’ increasing disregard for laws meant to protect workers during union organizing drives. Employers broke the law in 41.5% of union elections overseen by the National Labor Relations Board in 2016 and 2017.

“They just view it as a cost of doing business,” Jeff Lachler, a Minneapolis-based organizer with the Communications Workers of America, said. “There’s every incentive in the world to break the law, and there’s no real downside as long as you succeed in keeping the union out.”

While federal law prohibits employers from harassing, threatening or firing workers for supporting a union drive, the penalties for breaking those laws lack teeth.

In many cases, employers found guilty of breaking the law must post a notice acknowledging their misdeeds or making workers aware of their rights. In the case of workers fired for union activity, employers have to reinstate them with back pay, if they haven’t already moved on to another job.

But the process, which includes board filings, hearings and appeals, is lengthy, and that works to employers’ benefit, Lachler said.

“Even if they have to bring the worker back, there are no punitive damages,” he said. “In the meantime, they’ve succeeded in scaring everybody else from going through with an organizing drive.”

In addition to giving the NLRB authority to fine employers who break labor law, the PRO Act allows workers to seek justice in court. That would be key for workers who can’t afford to wait for the lengthy NLRB process to run its course.

Other provisions of the bill would prohibit employers from permanently replacing workers who strike, and make so-called “secondary strikes” legal, allowing workers to strike in solidarity with their co-workers.

The PRO Act would make mediation and arbitration mandatory to settle lengthy disputes over first contracts. Nearly half of newly formed unions fail to reach a contract with the employers.

The bill also includes provisions to stop employers from misclassifying workers as “independent contractors” in order to avoid workers comp and other liabilities. It would make fast-food companies and other franchising corporations more responsible for labor practices throughout their chain.

And it would require employers to disclose whether they are paying an outside firm to help defeat a union organizing campaign. A recent analysis found employers pay about $340 million annually to outside firms for “union avoidance.”

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