Twin Cities Labor Report 6/30
State workers and Cub workers win contracts, Mac workers win union, Duluth nurses set to strike
Hello and welcome to another edition of the Twin Cities Labor Report! This past week, we finally ratified a new contract at my employer, Cub, after six long months of negotiations. Looking back, it was a pretty crazy amount of work to both do this every week and go to negotiations, not to mention doing my actual job. Thanks to all the people who supported all of us during this time, it was a really tough fight! I will write more later on the whole story, but it was quite the battle to turn this from a concessionary contract into something worth recommending. We had some good moments, including a climactic packed bargaining session and some really great info pickets, as well as multiple companies rejecting a final contract for the first time in our union’s long history! This all happened right after a pretty bruising internal fight in our local, and I’m in total awe of the work people put in to mend fences and forge some unity against the boss. Anyway, on to regularly scheduled programming…
Upcoming Labor Events
MNA- Essentia Health + Aspirus St Luke’s- 2,000 nurses in Duluth and Superior working for Essentia and Aspirus Health hospitals and clinics are set to walk off on an open-ended ULP strike starting July 8, after strike votes at all major Twin Cities and Duluth hospitals. This strike will include three Essentia hospitals and the Aspirus St Luke's hospital, where contracts are up for renegotiation, and at six Essentia sites where nurses are seeking a first contract (four clinics, a surgery center, and a hospice facility). MNA hasn’t gone on an open-ended strike since the 2016 Allina strike, though SEIU Healthcare went on a long open-ended strike this winter at the Essentia Deer River hospital. No Twin Cities hospitals will be going on strike at this time. Essentia’s Advanced Practice Practitioners, whose unionization is still being contested by the company, also voted to strike but they will not be going out yet either. The company has taken a hard-line approach to negotiations this year, with MNA stating that they have filed “dozens” of ULP charges.
SEIU HCMNIA- Health Partners- Workers at the Health Partners Stillwater Clinic filed a 10-day notice to commence a four day ULP strike from July 8-12. Wages sound like the biggest item left on the table- Health Partners is currently paying temp employees more than current employees. There was one remaining bargaining session last Friday, we’ll see this week if the needle has moved at all.
Recent Labor Events
AFSCME, MAPE- State of Minnesota- After months of contentious negotiations, MAPE and AFSCME won tentative agreements on new contracts for state workers last Friday. This came after a week of bargaining and actions, with rallies across the state on Monday and a huge crowd of workers forming a gauntlet before negotiations began on Wednesday. According to both unions, the state’s demands for huge premium increases on health insurance were defeated, as were proposals that would have frozen step increases. The paid parental leave plan for MAPE members was saved as well. Wages are higher than the state’s initial 0.5% increases, with 3% over two years being the number, but that is still below inflation. MAPE had a large focus on telework protection at the beginning of negotiations, and appears to have made less progress on that. Voting for both unions will take place later this summer, and I am interested in what members think of the TAs right now. This was the first time that both unions bargained together, a big step forward considering that MAPE originated as a split from AFSCME back in 1980.
MAPE- Macalester College- After a couple weeks of delays, ballots were finally counted in the Macalester staff union election, and the staff prevailed, winning their union 99-84 after a nasty union-busting campaign by the college. This is a big election result, with over two hundred workers represented by the unit. Mac workers are now the second private college clerical and technical staff in Minnesota to unionize, after Augsburg. I’m interested in seeing if this spreads to other private schools, or to Mac adjunct faculty.
SEIU Local 26- FirstService Residential- An SEIU effort to organize seven desk attendants at Riverview Tower in Cedar-Riverside, Minneapolis remains up in the air as the employees split 3-3, with the one tie-breaking ballot challenged!
UFCW Local 663- UNFI Cub Foods + Haug Cub Foods- After six months of negotiations, we finally have a contract at UNFI and Haug’s Cub Foods, the last two companies without settled contracts in grocery negotiations. As a bit of a summary, the grocery companies basically forced us into pattern bargaining, and refused for a long time to move off of some big takeaways. After rejecting their final offer, we went back to the table and finally got some movement. At UNFI Cub, the corporate-owned stores, we’re getting a much better wage offer than before, as well as big improvements to minimum hour requirements for part-time workers that should boost their pay by a ton. The one thing that we didn’t get was a better ESST policy- we dropped an arbitration over their implementation of the state law as part of the settlement. Haug’s is a franchise company that owns two Cubs, their big demand was to reach the same pay as us. They are now 15 cents closer to that goal, the company increased their wage offer by 5 cents each year for full time workers. They also won much better language around pension payments, before the company was demanding the right to unilaterally garnish wages if pension costs went up.
UFCW Local 663- Lunds Fresh Kitchen- Workers at Lunds & Byerlys’ production facility in Eden Prairie bargain separately from the grocery contract, and also ratified a new contract this weekend. Highlights are “$3 over 3 years, better time off policies, $500 bonus, creation of a safety & ergonomics committee, and comprehensive immigrant rights language.” L&B has its production bakery here too, but those workers are in BCTGM Local 22.
USW Local 9349- Chisholm Health Center- Chisholm nursing home workers protested against delays in bargaining last Friday . Management is proposing cutbacks in vacation and holiday pay, and to slow down wage step progressions. Families and patients joined in the rally, too.
Public Employee Card Checks
AFSCME Council 5- Robbinsdale School District- Program Assistants employed by Robbinsdale Public Schools unionized with AFSCME (who already represent office staff)
AFSCME Council 65- Dassel-Cokato School District- Special Ed bus drivers for this rural Wright County school district unionized with AFSCME.
Teamsters Local 346- City of Crosby- Some supervisory Crosby city employees unionized with the Teamsters.
What was the final wage settlement that was TA'd at UNFI and Haug's?
Second, I dug into the archives on this when I was at MAPE, and it turns out that MAPE didn't really originate as a split from AFSCME. When PELRA was passed in 1973, it had NLRA-style rules about forming bargaining units, and the result was there were soon dozens or even hundreds of state employee bargaining units. Some were geography based, some were agency based, some were occupational-category based. AFSCME had many of these, but a great many were independent, or part of MFT, or other unions. One was GRAPE - the Greater Rochester Association of Professional Employees - which represented only state professional workers. This plethora of units made negotiations very challenging for the state, especially after a unit of forensic scientists at the BCA won a court case that said MMB couldn't just impose the health insurance deal they negotiated with AFSCME on everyone else.
This led the legislature to amend PELRA in 1981 to create the statutorily-defined bargaining units we have today. BMS was empowered, by this change, to assign each bargaining unit to a union, in order that there was SOMEONE they could negotiate with right away, but it was made easy for the workers in that unit to change it. BMS had to move quickly, and AFSCME was assigned cover unit 14, the state professional unit. More or less immediately, GRAPE, allied with several other independent professional employee units, filed to challenge AFSCME as the bargaining agent, and won the election and became MAPE.
So while it is technically true that MAPE's bargaining unit was once an AFSCME unit, it was only the latter in a technical sense, for a very short period of time. MAPE already existed in an independent form in SE Minnesota, and most state professional workers had not been represented by AFSCME before 1981.
It's a messy history, but it's important for present circumstances for the two unions to understand that MAPE didn't originate in opposition to AFSCME.