Posts tagged Minnesota
Union representing Maryland state employees opens ranks to supervisors
May 7, 2024 // he legislation applies only to front-level supervisors who do daily supervision of staff and perform similar duties to the people they oversee including, for example, nurse supervisors at state hospitals or lieutenants at a state prisons. It does not apply to state employees in managerial positions who have the ability to hire, fire and make departmental decisions.
MPS support professionals vote to authorize strike
April 27, 2024 // Education support professionals working in Minneapolis Public Schools voted to authorize a strike on Friday. Support professionals overwhelmingly approved the potential strike in a vote last night. This comes after the teachers chapter of the union reached a tentative agreement with the district. The union said 92% of members who voted were in favor of the authorization.
Minneapolis Is About To Kill Ride-Sharing
April 18, 2024 // Just last month, Seattle's disastrous attempt to enact a minimum wage for app-based food delivery drivers was in the news. The result was $26 coffees, city residents deleting their delivery apps, and drivers themselves seeing their earnings drop by half. Now, the Minneapolis City Council has decided to join the fray in the multifront progressive war against the gig economy—and this time, the outcome could be even worse.
Penske Truck Rental Employees in Minneapolis and Nashville Seeking Votes to Remove IAM Union Officials
April 18, 2024 // Employees of Penske Truck Rental have submitted petitions seeking votes to remove International Association of Machinists (IAM) union officials from power at Penske locations in the Minneapolis, MN, metro area, and in Nashville, TN. Penske employees Kyle Fulkerson and David Saylor filed the petitions at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with free legal aid from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.
Unionized Science Museum workers await contract as cultural nonprofits face changing labor market
April 1, 2024 // Inspired in part by pandemic-era lay-offs, as well as record inflation, Twin Cities labor movements have seen an uptick in mobilization. Janitors, school teachers, university graduate students, plow truck operators, firefighters, nurses, rideshare drivers and coffeeshop baristas have all recently taken their arguments for better pay and working conditions to the public picket line, or threatened to. Museums have had a lower-profile in those labor efforts, but workers at the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul, Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis and Science Museum all have unionized in the past four years with the goal of collective bargaining for employee-friendly contracts. Most of the Science Museum’s workers were laid off and sent home when the pandemic forced closures in March 2020, only to be gradually called back months later into a climate marked by social distancing and general uncertainty. Hazard pay for frontline staff in visitor services disappeared after a few months. Workers rallied and got it back.
RESEARCH: Minimum Wage Laws and App-Based Workers
March 30, 2024 // Rideshare apps are not too different. They generate revenue by taking a share of the total cost paid by riders to drivers. What is less clear is how large that fee is and how that fee has changed over time and across platforms. Rather than seeking out a rigid wage floor, a fee floor could stand in for the sense of fairness across platforms of different types. If workers on platforms are truly entrepreneurs, picking and choosing when, where, and how to allocate their labor across multiple platforms, doing more to ensure that markets offer a fair share of revenue can get the job done far more efficiently than attempting to mandate any particular amount.
Union workers push for health care and insurance bills following coordinated strikes
March 15, 2024 // After thousands of Twin Cities union workers went on strike last week, workers are pushing for changes at the Capitol — including public health insurance open to all Minnesotans and insurance for striking workers. About 200 unionized health care, education and property service workers with the SEIU Minnesota State Council met with legislators Wednesday for an organized lobby day. “I would make the case that over the last few years here in Minnesota because of the leadership of SEIU and our allied partners, we have maybe made more progress than we have in a generation around workers and union rights,” said Gov. Tim Walz,
Palo Alto Medical Foundation Nurses Vote Union Out at Sunnyvale and Mountain View Facilities
March 14, 2024 // Victory continues string of successful union decertification attempts by healthcare workers across the country Palo Alto Medical Foundation Nurses Vote Union Out at Sunnyvale and Mountain View Facilities
600 Activision QA workers unionize, Microsoft voluntarily recognizes
March 13, 2024 // “Now under Microsoft with the neutrality agreement they signed with CWA, it’s a lot easier,” Fannon said. “We don’t have to be concerned about any form of union-busting tactics. Microsoft made sure all managers were trained on neutrality. We knew that if we encountered union busting, we could bring it up so it’s addressed.” The other positive is that neither Activision’s QA workers nor Microsoft management have to go through the union election process with the National Labor Relations Board, which can sometimes take a while. Instead, Activision QA workers have been voting since Feb. 22 with either a union authorization card (a document, physical or digital, indicating approval of the union) or a confidential vote through an online portal.
Activision QA workers form the largest US video game union yet
March 11, 2024 // Organized with the help of the CWA, Activision Quality Assurance United has 600 members across Texas, California, and Minnesota.