Update: Upcoming Events--Saturday, 5pm: "Bike against the boss" event starting in Loring Park at 5pm and ending in Uptown around 7pm. Monday, 3pm: Labor Day rally at University and Pleasant (U of M Knoll area), featuring performance artists Guante and I Self Devine.
Fast Food Chain Rocked by Work Stoppages in Sign of Mounting Economic Frustration among US Workers
Press Conference and Rally: 4pm September 2, Block E Jimmy Johns, Minneapolis
Tom Emmer, the endorsed Republican candidate for MN Governor made a stab a damage control Wednesday. Last weekend Emmer emerged from a restaurant in St. Paul with tales of restaurant servers making $100,000 a year while the owners scrape by on leftovers. The problem he pointed to on Saturday was minimum wage laws. While he didn’t actually say the words: “ I want to cut minimum wages for servers”, he argued that minimum wages interfere with the “market” and presumably make things harder for owners who are the gooses with the golden eggs. (You can see the video here.)
By Barb Kucera, Workday Minnesota editor--10 June 2010
MINNEAPOLIS - The largest nurses’ strike in U.S. history is underway, with members of the Minnesota Nurses Association walking picketlines at 14 Twin Cities hospitals.
The walkout by 12,000 nurses started at 7 a.m. at facilities owned by six hospital systems: Health East, Allina, Methodist, Children’s, North Memorial and Fairview. It is scheduled to last one day, concluding at 7 a.m. Friday.
In a series of protests at the Uptown restaurant, SEIU Local 26 members and organizers rallied to call attention to a critical contradiction – Baja Sol is a fast food restaurant that sells Mexican food and employs Latino and Latina workers yet owner Tony Sutton openly supports politically extreme anti-Mexican legislation.
As Local 26 highlights, this blatant hypocrisy means that enthusiasm for one popular facet of Mexican American culture is financing the politics of Mexican-American exclusion and criminalization. Baja Sol did not respond to a request for comment on these allegations.
