Workday Magazine (https://workdayminnesota.flywheelsites.com/author/tsuperadmin/page/277/)
Members of the Inter Faculty Organization, which represents more than 3,000 faculty members at Minnesota’s seven state universities, have approved a tentative agreement on a two-year contract with the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system.
In late January, International Paper, the world’s largest pulp and paper company, announced plans to shutter its Roseville plant. At the time, the container-board production facility employed 106 workers, including 88 members of United Steelworkers Local 264.
University of Minnesota students are celebrating the university’s decision to drop its contract with a company accused of union-busting, but they also want the administration to go farther in promoting worker rights.
Pledging tougher enforcement of the nation’s labor laws and more emphasis on training workers for “jobs that will stay here,” new Labor Secretary Hilda Solis set those principles as her immediate top priorities in the Obama administration.
They can sing. They can run contract campaigns. And they may just inject some new vitality into labor-management relations in the Twin Cities’ troubled airline industry.
An AFL-CIO statement has given the green light to ongoing talks designed to reunify the nation’s competing union federations. As approved by the AFL-CIO Executive Council in Miami Wednesday, the statement says “now is the time to bring the union movement back together.”
On Wednesday, Feb. 25, a “very disturbing” hearing took place in the Minnesota Senate’s Economic Development and Housing Budget Division committee chaired by Senator Dave Tomassoni, DFL-Chisholm.
An infusion of federal stimulus dollars will trim the state’s projected biennial deficit from $6.4 billion to $4.57 billion, but lawmakers still face a daunting task in balancing the budget.
Sheet Metal Workers Local 10 honored a special retiree — Bill Stille, who 70 years ago became the first indentured building trades apprentice in Minnesota. The occasion of Stille’s 90th birthday prompted the celebration, which drew about 30 well-wishers to the Sheet Metal Training Center in White Bear Lake on Feb. 13.
The Workers Compensation Advisory Council on Monday tabled drastic changes to the workers’ compensation system proposed by Commissioner Steve Sviggum and adopted modest legislative recommendations that have the support of both labor and business.
