The Long Fights for Labor Rights

 

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Labor educator Cassie Williams, the associate director of Labor Education Service (LES) at the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management, wants Minnesotans to understand the history of the state’s extensive labor movements. “When people know that history, and know where we have come from, it gives a sense that we have the ability to make change,” she says. “We wouldn’t have any of what we have if folks didn’t come together, if people didn’t take care of one another, and if people didn’t fight.”

Labor unions and organizing have always been a critical part of Minnesota’s history. In 1884, less than three decades after Minnesota was admitted as a state, it was already home to 73 unions, including 29 outside of the Twin Cities. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the state had 356,000 union members in 2023 — representing 13.3 percent of workers. While down from 14.2 percent the year prior, Minnesota has had higher union member rates than the national average since at least 1989, when state data started to be published.

Williams says she’s seen an increase in people who are getting involved in the state’s labor movement. LES offers programs, workshops, and classes for workers across Minnesota to ensure they know their rights and are equipped with the resources needed to create healthy and fair workplaces.

“I do feel like things are progressing. Of course, there’s always an attack on the labor movement and on workers in general. Family, mental health, and all those [focal points of labor organizing] are not always put in the forefront [by business owners],” says Williams.

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Protecting Marginalized Workers

Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (CTUL) is a long-time center for protecting marginalized workers. The center, says Lupe Diaz, currently has three main campaigns:

• Supporting workers downtown, particularly in low wage sectors, in advocating for a labor standards board that would ensure that they have a voice in setting industry specific standards.
• Establishing the Leaders in Growth program, which focuses on building worker power through training and speaking engagements so that “folks who come to us for help have the tools to then seek the answers that they need themselves.”
• Pushing for major construction developers to sign onto the Building Dignity and Respect Program, which would guarantee more protection and third-party monitoring for non-unionized construction workers. Many of these non-unionized workers are at increased risk of wage theft and sexual, verbal, and physical abuse. Says Diaz, “We have a group of women at the forefront, talking about their experience as single mothers, as women in construction, and what it would look like to be able to have these protections in place for them.”

Nursing

The Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA) represents more than 22,000 people in Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and Iowa, and has been around since 1905 to promote better working conditions for nurses. Minnesota has been the location of some of the largest nurse strikes in the country, including in 1984 and 2010. Most recently, in September 2022, 15,000 nurses went on a three-day strike for contracts to address working conditions caused by understaffing.

Elaina Hane is interim executive director of the MNA. She was a nurse at the Children’s Hospital of Saint Paul for 17 years. One of Hane’s priorities is to improve the culture of corporate health care.

“Even though we’ve been able to get more contract protection with the hospitals, they are eroding our rights in different ways,” she says. She indicates that a tendency to put profits over patients has led to nurses having to take care of more patients in less time, less autonomy to make decisions for their patients, and staff turnover rates increasing “exponentially.”

However, there have been some successes. MNA pushed for a new law that requires health care systems to prove through data and other evidence that it is in the public’s best interest before merging. The law took effect last year and has been used twice since. MNA also has worked on legislation that requires health systems to notify the public and local governments at least 182 days before an attempt to close hospitals or units, or restrict or relocate certain services. Closures and reductions in services can overwhelm neighboring hospitals, Hane says.

In MNA’s 2023 Nursing Workforce Report, a survey of 2,403 Minnesota nurses who left the profession over the course of one year reported stress and burnout, chronic understaffing, poor working conditions, and management issues as the top reasons why they quit.

Women make up 89.8 percent of Minnesota’s licensed nurses, according to the Minnesota Board of Nursing. “If nursing was 90 percent men, we probably would already have staffing legislation to help protect us, but we don’t,” says Hane.

Education

Teaching also is primarily female, with 78 percent of Minnesota educators identifying as women, according to the Minnesota Professional Educator Licensing and Standards Board. Louise Sundin, a former ninth-grade English teacher — who served as president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) Local 59 for 22 years — says women have long been at the forefront of pushing for teachers’ rights.

Sundin started teaching in 1967. Both of her parents were teachers, who met while working in Willmar; they married in private because of the concern that Sundin’s mother would be fired if she got pregnant. In 1970, Sundin, then in her third year of teaching, went on strike for better wages and smaller class sizes. “The rookies felt more empowered to strike, because we didn’t have a lot of investment in our career yet.”

After the strike ended, Sundin and her colleagues lost their jobs and fought to get them back through a negotiated settlement. They got their back pay and tenure back through legislation sponsored by Rep. James I. Rice, and their pensions were restored years later through another separate bill. The strike led to the passage of the Public Employment Labor Relations Act (PELRA), which gives public-sector workers the ability to collectively bargain without fear of retribution.

Greta Callahan, who is now a candidate for the Minneapolis School Board, was president of MFT Local 59 during the 2022 Minneapolis Public Schools strike. She said the primary reason for the strike “was to fight for our mostly Black female hourly workers,” who were generally working as education support professionals (ESPs).

“These are some of the most important humans in the school building,” Callahan says. “They’re often the first ones kids see, and the last people kids say goodbye to, because they’ll ride buses or do after-school. This group, so incredibly important to making our schools run and thrive, were paid poverty wages.”

Callahan said some ESPs had been living out of their cars due to low wages.

She said the strike led to ESPs getting the highest raise they had ever seen in their careers, as well as caps on class sizes, and increased numbers of nurses, librarians, and mental health support workers for students.

A few months ago, Callahan says, the union secured the largest raise for Minneapolis teachers in 25 years, which will ideally prevent educators from leaving for neighboring districts with higher pay.

Politics and Labor Rights

Aaron Brown, a writer in the Iron Range, says miners in the North began to organize around 1900 due to low pay and exploitative working conditions. “That early history really laid the groundwork that would become, a generation later, the United Steelworkers of America,” Brown says.

The fight for better working conditions continues, mirroring what was happening 100 years ago, Brown says. “Companies … tell people they’ll lose jobs if people join the unions.”

The repeating cycle of history is accompanied by the more recent shift in Iron Range political leanings. A few decades ago, Brown says, the Range was strongly DFL. “The people who had the personal experience of how the mining companies were in the bad old days started to pass away. Their children had less perspective on that, and had more of a present perspective on what they liked or didn’t like,” Brown says.

A March story by In These Times, which is focused on grassroots organizing and labor efforts, was titled “The Most Important Labor Story Right Now Is in Minnesota.” It described the strategic alignment of networks of unions and community groups that have been working together for more than a decade to leverage collective power.

Brown believes this is the direction that might make the most impact. If people recognized “that your neighbor, and the person who checks you out at the grocery store, are in the same boat as you — and if people started working together a little more in the labor movement — you might see some real change.”

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