Star Tribune
Tensions rise between restaurant owners, worker advocates over proposed Minneapolis Labor Standards Board
Restaurant owners and labor unions are squaring off as the city of Minneapolis moves closer to establishing an advisory committee with the power to recommend new business regulations.
More than two years ago, Mayor Jacob Frey and a Minneapolis City Council majority announced they would create a “Labor Standards Board” that would bring workers and employers together to identify workforce problems in specific industries as they come up and recommend solutions.
A draft ordinance was expected to be released to the public last month, but wasn’t. Council members say they expect the ordinance to be revealed by the end of the month.
Frustrated representatives of the Service Employees International Union and Centro De Trabajadores Unidos En La Lucha brought petitions to the City Attorney’s Office requesting answers from City Attorney Kristyn Anderson. They encountered a locked door.
Brian Elliott, SEIU Minnesota State Council executive director, said the four months since council members referred the matter to the city attorney is the longest it has taken to draft a labor ordinance in his memory, including previous years’ minimum wage and sick leave ordinances.
Elliott is also perturbed that the City Attorney’s Office won’t talk directly with them, instead communicating through the ordinance’s council sponsors.
“I’ve been doing this a long time, and I have even been yelled at by a city attorney for not talking to her about something,” said Elliott. “We hear the restaurant owners saying, ‘We haven’t seen anything!’ Well, we haven’t either, and we’re the ones pushing for it.”
Anderson did not respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, the Save Local Restaurants opposition campaign, Hospitality Minnesota and chefs organized with the Minneapolis Restaurant Coalition have been conducting news conferences and roundtables demanding the proposal be nixed. Restaurant owners say they’ve been left out of discussions about additional regulations, none of which they would support.
“The Labor Standards Board fails to account for the unique challenges faced by small businesses,” according to a letter signed by more than 100 restaurant operators. “Please reject the current proposal and engage with business owners to create equitable solutions that support all of Minneapolis’s vibrant and diverse business community.”
Last month, celebrity chef Andrew Zimmern moderated a panel of chefs of color, including Christina Nguyen of Hai Hai, Gustavo Romero of Nixta and Oro, Tammy Wong of Rainbow Restaurant and Lina Goh of Zen Box Izakaya. Speaking to a friendly audience of business owners, they described the challenges they face with existing regulations and market conditions in which it is difficult to retain staff, keep menus affordable and stay in business.
“Good prices are going up, the cost of labor has gone up,” said Zimmern. “It strikes me that reviving, revitalizing and encouraging the city of Minneapolis requires a whole set of assistance, forbearance, patience, hard work that you all are putting in. But yet there seem to be policies that are coming out of our local and community governments, most notably the City Council and their proposal for a Labor Standards Board, that provide a really sizable hurdle that may not be surmountable.. Is that accurate?”
Romero agreed.
“The only way that we can survive all these rises in prices is by using creativity,” he said. “If we don’t have the flexibility … then we can’t survive. The Labor Board, it feels like it will be the tipping point where it will push us over the bridge, like we have the pandemic, we have the unrest, we have construction, we have winter. We live in a place where six months out of the year we struggle with all those things. We lose our patio … all those things keep putting us into a position where we are very close to do not make it.”
At the event, members of the audience rallied around their distrust of the Labor Standards Board concept.
Brent Frederick of Jester Concepts told the room, erroneously, that the board would be composed of five seats for unions, five years for workers and five seats for business owners, resulting a body that would be sure to favor labor’s point of view. “As BIPOC owners in restaurants, do you trust the City Council to even give us a seat on a table where it might be stacked against you?” he asked. “Do you guys trust them to be fair, to give small business even a chance?”
Nettie Colon of Red Hen Gastrolab called the City Council “drunk with power.”
“Nobody here is saying no to a Labor Standards Board,” she claimed, contradicting the letter signed by the 100 restaurant operators. “What we’re saying is give us a seat at the table so you can see our side, we can see their side and we can tell you what works and doesn’t work because without us, there’s no work.”
When Star Tribune food reporter Sharyn Jackson asked the panel to reconcile their narratives of how much they sacrifice for their staff with recent efforts of workers to unionize the restaurants of Ann Kim and Daniel del Prado, the question was left unanswered as Zimmern steered the conversation away.
City Council Vice President Aisha Chughtai, who is sponsoring the ordinance along with Council Members Aurin Chowdhury and Katie Cashman, said the Labor Standards Board would provide an equal number of seats for workers, business owners and community stakeholders such as consumer advocates and academics, “not union reps.” Additionally, a majority of board members would have to agree for any recommendation to be forwarded to the City Council, which would require majority support to forward any ordinances to the mayor for approval.
“The irony of it is we hear from restaurateurs, and operators from businesses within the hospitality industry have consistently told us over the course of the last four years, since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, that they are not consulted and their feedback is not meaningfully considered,” Chughtai said. “And that’s exactly the purpose of this body, to address that core concern for all parties involved.”
Labor Standards Boards have been established for home care workers in Nevada, agricultural workers in Colorado, nursing home workers in Michigan and fast food workers in New York and California.
The most vociferous opposition to Minneapolis’ Labor Standards Board has been coming from that restauranteurs who feel targeted, even though no one has suggested a board specific to that industry.
SEIU’s Elliott said SEIU and CTUL represent many building services workers, including security guards and custodians who say they want better wages, more predictable scheduling and training on how to de-escalate issues with people in crisis downtown. They are not asking for a Labor Standards Board to study policies that have anything to do with full-service restaurants, he said.
UNITE HERE, the hospitality union at the center of recent unionization drives at Kim’s, Colita’s and Cafe Ceres, did not answer whether they would advocate for a restaurant-specific labor standards board.
Council Member Chowdhury said she has not heard any labor group propose that so far, and “the only parties that have brought up a sector specific to full-service restaurants are the owners and operators of full-service restaurants.”
Council members responded to the restaurateurs’ letter with one of their own, leading with: “this proposed policy is not suggesting any new regulations to the hospitality or service industry.”
“We believe that while we, the City Council, may not have the expertise to make and propose policy for vibrant and healthy businesses cross-sector, business owners, employees, and employers of Minneapolis do, and the Minneapolis Labor Standards Board is a mechanism to put you —the experts, in the driver’s seat.”
A meeting scheduled for Friday aims to convene business groups, labor organizations and policymakers to continue to address concerns and dispel misinformation, Chughtai and Chowdhury said. They are working with the City Attorney’s Office to release a draft ordinance before the end of July.
Staff writers Sharyn Jackson and Joy Summers contributed to this report.
About 50 Ukrainian refugees have signed up to donate blood on Saturday in Minneapolis as a way to give thanks to Americans for welcoming them to this country and for support in the face of Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine.
The donated blood will then be given to the Children’s Hospital of Minnesota.
The Ukrainian American Community Center, located at 301 NE Main St. in Minneapolis, has organized the event. The blood drive will run from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday, said Iryna Petrus, community outreach manager at the center.
“It’s a sign of gratitude to Americans for supporting Ukraine and saving children’s lives in Ukraine,” said Yosyf Sabir, speaking on behalf of the blood drive.
It’s also a way to say “thank you to the United States for welcoming us so warmly,” said Petrus. She said there will be a program at 10 a.m. Saturday when several leaders of the Ukrainian American Community Center will speak. She said the center is hopeful that Ukrainian groups in other parts of North America will do similar blood drives.
Those who are unable to give blood have been asked to donate cash, which will be used to purchase tourniquets that will sent to Ukraine to be used by persons who have been injured in the war. Every $50 raised will purchase one hemostatic tourniquet, the Ukrainian Center said in a news release.
If approved, that approach would drop the district’s fund balance to 6% of general fund expenditures. The current board policy is to maintain a fund balance of at least 10% of general fund expenditures.
Anoka-Hennepin’s current operating referendum brings in about $1,154 per student, but the state-allowed cap is about $2,200 per student. If increased to the cap amount, a referendum would bring in another $40 million, McIntyre said.
According to community feedback collected through surveys and community meetings over the last month, nearly 90% of respondents said they supported a referendum. Parents and families also expressed concern about growing class sizes as a result of cuts.
The two options have already been revised based on board members’ requests to reduce cuts that would mean fewer teachers at schools, McIntyre said.
At one point in the discussion, the district floated changes to middle and high school class schedules to save money, but that was removed after board member feedback. At the board’s meeting last month, several board members thanked district staff for transparency about potential cuts and responsiveness to board and community feedback.
“I would encourage people to keep asking questions,” Board Member Michelle Langenfeld said at the September board meeting, “because as we unfold more information, the opportunity becomes greater for us to make the most informed decision under these very, very difficult circumstances.”
On Monday morning, contract workers began snipping razor wire and removing it from fencing that was propped atop concrete barriers along the perimeter of the former Third Precinct police station, which was set ablaze during the uprising over George Floyd’s police killing.
Finally, the concrete barricades will come down, after 4.5 years. As private security guards looked on, contractors began removing the security measures put in place to secure the building at 3000 Minnehaha Av. after it became a focal point of protests.
For the past three years, Third Precinct police officers have been based out of a city building in downtown Minneapolis, with plans to eventually bring them back to a south Minneapolis Community Safety Center just down the street at 2633 Minnehaha Av.
What to do with the former police station – home to what has been called a “playground” for renegade cops – has been the subject of heated debate, with the Minneapolis City Council and Mayor Jacob Frey at odds.
While the city debated its future, some conservatives jumped at the chance to use the charred building as a backdrop to hold press conferences and news reports in which they blasted the city and its leaders. Most recently, vice presidential nominee JD Vance made a campaign stop in front of the building earlier this month to blast his opponent, Gov. Tim Walz, for his handling of the 2020 riots and portray Minneapolis as a city overrun with crime.
GOP vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance speaks outside the former Minneapolis Police 3rd Precinct building in Minneapolis on Oct. 14. (Leila Navidi)
After that, several council members expressed frustration at the city’s failure to clean up the site. Despite signs saying “cleanup efforts are underway,” concrete barriers, fencing and razor wire remained all summer.
Council Member Aurin Chowdhury said earlier this month that the blight makes people feel uncared for and gives opportunists a backdrop to manipulate the scene for political gain.
Council Member Linea Palmisano blamed some of her council colleagues for the delays, accusing some members of being “desperate for any objection” to Frey’s proposal. The council passed a resolution saying that the building should not be used for any law enforcement functions again. Palmisano called it disgraceful that the building remains, scarred and secured, over four years later.
