
Union negotiators cited two factors as key to securing a contract they could recommend: a visible, vocal pool of support from rank-and-file members and unshakable solidarity between AFSCME Council 5 and MAPE.
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Union negotiators cited two factors as key to securing a contract they could recommend: a visible, vocal pool of support from rank-and-file members and unshakable solidarity between AFSCME Council 5 and MAPE.

Four local unions representing over 2,000 Ramsey County employees are holding firm to their key demands as bargaining with the county inches closer to their contracts’ Dec. 31 expiration date.

The county has become notorious in recent years, Local 8 Vice President Anna Christie said, for “balancing its budget on the backs of its employees.”

Public-sector workers aren’t cowering from the Janus decision. And they aren’t standing alone, either.
Eliot Seide was even more fired up than usual when he sat down for a Thursday-morning interview at AFSCME Council 5’s South St. Paul offices last month. News had just broken that the U.S. Supreme Court would hear a case with the potential to weaken public-sector workers’ collective bargaining power, and it had Seide and […]

State Rep. John Lesch, a prosecutor in St. Paul for 15 years, can recite the address from memory: 1450 University Avenue West. That’s Walmart’s Midway location, and it is a magnet for shoplifting and other petty crime that, like several other Walmart stores in Minnesota and across the country, absorbs a disproportionate amount of attention […]

Labor History Month kicked off in St. Paul last night with a discussion of history in the making, as panelists offered insight into public-sector workers’ recent push to breath new life into their unions and defend their right to a voice on the job. The public forum, titled “The Friedrichs Case and the Future […]

No one knows more about public services in Minnesota than the workers who deliver them, and state lawmakers had access to an abundance of wisdom today during AFSCME Council 5’s annual lobbying blitz. “The experts in public service are coming to the Capitol,” Council 5 Director Eliot Seide said at the close of a […]

They may no longer be on the brink of a Supreme Court-imposed Right-to-Work rule, but Minnesota’s public-sector union members aren’t celebrating. They’re organizing. “What we got was a reprieve, not clemency – and surely not a pardon,” Education Minnesota attorney Meg Luger-Nikolai warned a standing-room-only audience of activists last night at the East Side Freedom […]

The Supreme Court will hear arguments Monday in a case with big implications for Minnesota firefighters, teachers and other public-sector workers who benefit from the collective bargaining process. At a press conference inside the Firefighters Hall and Museum in Minneapolis today, public workers warned that the case, Friedrichs v. CTA, is an attempt by corporate […]