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TURNING THE TABLES IN MINNESOTA  
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Harold Meyerson
March 13, 2024
The American Prospect
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_ An enduring union-community alliance in the Twin Cities may be a
model for progressive victories. The Twin Cities saw a series of labor
actions, premised on the belief-the more disparate groups of workers
unite in common cause, the more they can win. _

Nursing home workers rally at the State Capitol in St. Paul,
Minnesota, March 5, 2024., Nursing home workers rally at the State
Capitol in St. Paul, Minnesota, March 5, 2024.

 

Ninety years ago this spring, Minneapolis shuddered to a halt as
workers and employers fought a bloody battle in the streets. The 1934
general strike was one of three that wracked the nation that year,
with worker uprisings also springing forth in San Francisco and
Toledo. The Minneapolis strike began when one Teamster local began
organizing and striking all across town—behavior not then
characteristic of the Teamsters, which was siloed at the time into
discrete trade locals (milk bottle deliverers, beer barrel trundlers,
and such), with few if any expansive impulses.

But one small Teamster local believed that by organizing drivers
throughout the city, it could actually win a modicum of power for its
workers. Led by three brothers who belonged to the Trotskyist
Communist League of America, the local began to win support from other
unions (notably, the building trades, which were among the few unions
that then had a non-negligible number of members). After an attack by
the cops and the hired thugs of the local business establishment that
killed two workers and injured 67, virtually every other local union
and just plain citizens joined the cause.

In the end, the employers recognized the expanded union. The Teamsters
(including a young Jimmy Hoffa) learned that a region-wide trucking
strike was far more effective than a strike of the neighborhood beer
transporters. And the federal government realized that a law was
needed to regularize collective bargaining and ensure that workers
didn’t need to shut down entire cities to win wage increases. The
following year, the feds enacted the National Labor Relations Act to
do just that.

Last week, the Twin Cities saw a series of labor actions, premised
like the 1934 general strike on the sound belief that the more
disparate groups of workers unite in common cause, the more they can
win. The key difference between 1934 and 2024 was that this year, the
workers could build on the support they’d won in both city and state
government, and use that support to build sectoral power in industries
both unionized and not.

For the past 11 years, a number of local unions have been meeting
regularly with themselves and with a range of community-based
organizations (renters’ groups, environmental justice organizations,
and such) to develop a broad common agenda and to coordinate their
actions. (I reported on the beginnings of this process in a 2014
article [[link removed]] for
the _Prospect_.) At a rally last October, members of these various
unions and their community allies gave notice that they planned joint
actions in early March. Last week saw this “table,” as its members
call it, stage a host of coordinated strikes: janitors, nursing home
and home care workers, laborers, teachers, airport workers, park
groundskeepers, and more. They were joined by other workers (most
prominently, registered nurses) who weren’t on strike but took part
in common cause, to rally for legislation that would better the lot of
the health care industry’s workers and patients. 

Last week, the Twin Cities saw a series of labor actions, premised on
the sound belief that the more disparate groups of workers unite in
common cause, the more they can win.

Some of these workers won new contracts on the eve of the strikes, and
some during the course of the week. Some of them, like the janitors
who clean the office buildings of downtown Minneapolis, the teachers
in St. Paul, and the laborers working for the Minneapolis parks
district, threatened real strikes; some spent the week promoting city
ordinances and state laws that gave them more power to have a say in
their working conditions. But most of them showed up for all their
fellow unions’ rallies and demonstrations, and all the public
hearings. While some threatened to walk off their jobs until a
settlement was reached, none of them actually did so. Instead, they
staged what are called “ULPs”—unfair labor practice
strikes—which lasted from one to three days (not an action available
to their 1934 forebears, who would have been summarily fired for
taking what was then a legally unprotected action).

The week began with a picket line outside the high-rise office of one
leading local corporation, conducted by Local 26 of SEIU—the
city’s historically militant janitors’ union—in conjunction with
CTUL (the Centro De Trabajadores Unidos En La Lucha), an organization
of immigrant workers who clean buildings, work on construction, and do
other jobs in which immigrants are frequently exploited by low-road
employers and contractors. When I wrote about the emerging Minneapolis
table a decade ago, CTUL, in tandem with Local 26, was organizing the
night crews who cleaned the city’s Target stores, a battle they won
when Target told its cleaning-company contractors to treat those
workers with some respect. Those crews thereby joined and were covered
under a Local 26 contract, and the two organizations have worked
together ever since.

By midday, picketers had relocated to a government building where a
number of them gave testimony at a hearing convened by the Minneapolis
City Council. At issue was a proposed ordinance establishing a Labor
Standards Board that would bring together workers and their
representatives with employers and city officials, to recommend
minimum-wage and work standards in the city’s downtown area. The
council could then enact an ordinance based on their recommendation.

For CTUL members who clean those downtown office buildings and hotels
without union contracts, such an ordinance would mandate wage, hour,
and working conditions; for Local 26, it would mean that their own
standards, won through collective bargaining, would likely become the
model for janitorial work across the sector. “As we work to
redevelop what the city looks like,” said City Council vice
president Aisha Chughtai, who chaired the hearing, “we need to make
clear just who it works for. This will make sure that high-road
employers are not at a comparative disadvantage” for paying their
cleaning crews adequately. (That standardization of working
conditions, in turn, would presumably reduce non-union employers’
resistance to having Local 26 unionize their workers.)

Chughtai was hardly alone in her support for mandating higher
standards. Four councilmembers attended the hearing, including the
president, Elliot Payne. Mayor Jacob Frey had also signaled his
support for such a measure. In the course of the hearing,
workers—chiefly, but not entirely, CTUL members—told about what
they’d experienced from low-road employers, including being fired
for becoming pregnant and being cheated out of their wages on
construction sites. Speaking in Spanish, one victim of wage theft,
CTUL member Lisa Guerra, told the councilmembers, “We build this
city. We are not expendable. We need this board _now_: We don’t
want to pass this fight down to our children.”

 
“The state gave $300 million to nursing homes,” said one worker,
“now it’s time that workers got their fair share of that.”
 (Photo Amie Stager / Workday Magazine  //  The American Prospect)
The ordinance, if enacted, would be one of the various Plan B concepts
that unions have developed in the absence of a Plan A: a reform of
federal labor law to enable private-sector workers to organize into
unions. For decades, employers have illegally violated the NLRA (since
there are no serious penalties for doing so) by firing workers in
organizing drives, thereby killing those drives in their tracks. In
recent years, SEIU in particular has promoted worker boards at the
state and city level, and had one established last year in California
for fast-food workers, whom SEIU had been trying and failing to
organize into unions over the past decade. The precondition for such
councils, which exist in New York as well as California, is SEIU’s
political clout in blue cities and states—particularly states, since
Republican-run states now routinely pass laws
[[link removed]] prohibiting
Democratic-run cities from enacting pro-worker ordinances.

In the 2022 elections, Minnesota became a blue state, too, with
Democrats winning control of both houses of the legislature, as well
as the governor’s office. In 2023, newly blue Minnesota enacted a
range of laws
[[link removed]] empowering
workers’ organizations. One groundbreaking law forbids employers
from compelling workers to attend anti-union meetings; others laid the
groundwork for labor standard boards that bring together workers,
employers, and government officials (a table, if you will) in a range
of industries.

The long-standing labor-community table paved the way for these new
labor-management tables, and much else. “Ten years ago, that table
set an agenda for a Democratic trifecta [control of the House, Senate
and governor’s office] which we only got in the 2022 midterms,”
says Dan McGrath, who, as the then-leader of TakeAction Minnesota, a
statewide community-based group, played a key role in the operation.
“That’s one reason why state government was able to act so
decisively in 2023.”

The convergence between SEIU and CTUL that began a decade ago has
extended beyond the building services sector to a more encompassing
alliance. Members, says CTUL co-director Merle Payne, work together in
advocating for better public schools and community services. CTUL
members show up for union (not just SEIU) picket lines; unions (not
just SEIU) are pushing for standard-setting boards in several
industries.

Last Tuesday, nearly a thousand union and community-group activists
rallied on the steps of the State Capitol in St. Paul for yet one more
table: one that sets standards for the state’s nursing home workers.
In this case, that table is already established and has considerable
power. By state law, all nursing homes in Minnesota are paid by the
state at set Medicaid rates, and by a new state law, wages and working
standards at nursing homes are set by a tripartite board chaired by
Jamie Gulley, who heads a union of 55,000 SEIU nursing home and home
care workers in both Minnesota and Iowa. The rulings of that board are
binding; they only have to go before the legislature if the dollar
amounts exceed the Medicaid appropriations that the state has already
made. 

The long-standing labor-community table paved the way for these new
labor-management tables, and much else.

Not that the current legislature isn’t friendly. In the course of
the rally, both the Senate and House majority leaders came down the
Capitol steps to speak in favor of the board’s pending decisions,
which include raising the hourly wages of the workers to $25 and will
almost certainly be approved later this month. “The state gave $300
million to nursing homes,” said one worker, “now it’s time that
workers got their fair share of that.”

In addition to elected officials, other unions lent their support,
including the Minnesota Nurses Association (MNA), an affiliate of
National Nurses United, which at various occasions in the
not-too-distant past had been at war with SEIU. No such tensions were
visible at the rally. MNA leaders spoke in favor of the nursing home
rules, while pointing out that their own priority—increasing
nurses’ pay and improving working conditions to alleviate
short-staffing at state hospitals—was the subject of separate
pending legislation. “A healthy Minnesota,” one MNA member said,
“requires the state to step up to ensure standards are met both in
hospitals and nursing homes.”

Amid the various picket lines and rallies, the table also sponsored
daily leadership classes for union and community activists. On
Wednesday, I sat in on one of those classes, held, as many such
activities have long been held, in a church basement. Roughly 250
activists from a range of groups—among them SEIU, CTUL, the Laborers
Union, and several renters’ organizations—were arrayed around the
room, before breaking into several classes. I chose to attend the one
on political theater, which was really a dress rehearsal for a
performance at the Solhem Companies, one of the city’s premiere
apartment building developers, set for the following day.

Backed by the other groups at the table, CTUL members who work in
residential construction (an almost entirely non-union industry in the
United States) and members of low-income renters’ groups want
developers to empower an independent monitor to survey working
conditions in the industry. Modeled after the program that non-union
farmworkers were able to win in Immokalee, Florida, CTUL hopes to
pressure companies like Solhem to agree to abide by a monitor’s
rulings as they build new housing in the Twin Cities.

The players engaged in the rehearsal consisted of CTUL members and
activists in renters’ rights groups. They moved in circles, one
group carrying cardboard likenesses of red fish, the other of blue
fish. Initially, I assumed the reds were workers and the blues were
management. As with many of my assumptions, I was wrong. The reds were
indeed workers, but the blues were renters; they were opposed in this
instance because companies like Solhem have told them that if they pay
their construction workers more, rents will rise and the renters
won’t be able to afford them.

But the workers are the same people who want to rent. And so, even as
the two groups warily circled each other and occasionally sparred, one
worker fish and one renter fish began a fishy colloquy, and
recognizing their commonality of interest, turned their cardboard
placards inside out to reveal two purple fishes, combining red and
blue.

The director of this pageant, whose job required combining
choreography and method acting in the manner of Jerome Robbins or Lee
Strasberg, was the leader of CTUL’s construction campaign, Carlos
Garcia Velasco. He came by his multiple callings honestly; his parents
were leaders of California’s legendary Teatro Campesino in the days
of Cesar Chavez.

Throughout the week, strikes were settled and wages won. SEIU janitors
won immediate hourly raises to $20. St. Paul’s teachers won a
substantial wage increase, as did Minneapolis’s snow-plow
maintenance crews and other city-employed laborers. Wage increases for
the state’s nursing home workers looked to be a sure thing, and the
immigrant men and women of CTUL who work in downtown Minneapolis’s
offices and hotels looked forward to the creation of yet another
table: a Labor Standards Board that will give them a voice in the
conditions of their work.

“This is a beautiful country that we’ve come to,” Paulina, an
immigrant from Ecuador who cleans office buildings in the Twin Cities,
told Minneapolis City Council members at last week’s hearing.
“We’re asking you to let us have our voices heard in the decisions
that affect us and our families. And,” she paused, gesturing to a
roomful of workers and activists, “we’re here as a bigger team.
That’s how we hope to make this happen.”

Not a general strike, to be sure, but general enough to get results.

_[HAROLD MEYERSON is editor at large of The American Prospect
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_Read the original article at Prospect.org.
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_Used with the permission. © The American Prospect
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All rights reserved.  _

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