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.
Star Tribune
Sentencing set for Monday morning for a Minnesota man who was drunk and speeding when he hit a woman’s SUV and killed her.
A man with a history of driving drunk received a four-year term Monday for being intoxicated and speeding when he hit a woman’s SUV on a southern Minnesota highway and killed her.
John R. Deleo, 54, of Lake Crystal, Minn., was sentenced in Brown County District Court after pleading guilty to criminal vehicular homicide in connection with the crash on Aug. 17, 2023, in New Ulm at Hwy. 68 and S. 15th Street that killed 82-year-old Sharon A. Portner, of New Ulm.
With credit for the two days he was in jail after his arrest, Deleo is expected to serve the first 2⅔ years years of his term in prison and the balance on supervised release.
A week ahead of sentencing, defense attorney James Kuettner asked the court to spare his client prison and put him on probation for up to five years.
Kuettner pointed out in his filing that Deleo stayed at the crash scene and attempted “to aid Portner, and he left [her] side only when directed to by law enforcement.”
The attorney also noted that Deleo has been sober since the crash, and therefore, at a particularly low risk for reoffending.
According to the criminal complaint:
Police arrived to find the two damaged vehicles near 15th and S. Broadway streets. Emergency responders took Portner to New Ulm Medical Center, where she died that day.
ROCHESTER – The defense for Shane Roper, the former state trooper charged for his role in a crash that killed Owatonna teenager Olivia Flores, has asked the court to dismiss eight of the nine charges against him.
In a motion filed Oct. 24, Roper’s attorneys said the state has “failed to meet its burden of offering direct evidence tending to demonstrate that [Roper’s] actions, or negligence, were the proximate cause of death or bodily harm.”
Roper, 32, faces nine criminal charges related to the May 18 crash, including felony charges of second-degree manslaughter and criminal vehicular homicide. Both charges carry maximum sentences of 10 years in jail.
The only charge the defense did not ask to have dismissed is a misdemeanor for careless driving, which carries a maximum sentence of 90 days in jail.
Among the other requests made to the court, Roper’s defense asked for a change of venue outside of Olmsted County, citing the extensive media coverage of the case. The defense said “jury pools have surely been tainted and a fair trial cannot be had” in the county.
Roper’s attorney, Eric Nelson of Halberg Criminal Defense, also argued that any evidence related to Roper’s prior speeding or traffic incidents should be precluded as evidence in the case.
In the five years leading up to the crash, Roper had been disciplined by the State Patrol on four separate occasions for careless or reckless driving, including a February 2019 crash that injured another officer.
District Judge Christa Daily has not responded to the motions. Roper is scheduled to be back in court Nov. 21 for a pretrial settlement conference.
Star Tribune
Who is comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who insulted Puerto Rico at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally?
NEW YORK — Of the nearly 30 speakers who recently warmed up the crowd for Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe got the most attention for racist remarks.
”I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” he said, later including lewd and racist comments about Latinos, Jewish and Black people.
The comments have led to condemnation from Democrats and Puerto Rican celebrities, with Ricky Martin sharing a clip of Hinchcliffe’s set, captioned: “This is what they think of us.”
The Trump campaign took the rare step of distancing itself from Hinchcliffe. ”This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” senior adviser Danielle Alvarez said in a statement.
Here’s what to know about Hinchcliffe, his comedic styling and the response to his Madision Square Garden comments.
Hinchcliffe, raised in Youngstown, Ohio, is a stand-up comedian who specializes in the roast style, in which comedians take the podium to needle a celebrity victim with personal and often tasteless jokes. He has written and appeared on eight Comedy Central Roasts, including ones for Snoop Dogg and Tom Brady.
Even fellow comedians aren’t immune. At the Snoop Dogg roast, Hichcliffe made a joke referencing comedian Luenell, who is Black, being on the Underground Railroad. Of the honoree, he said: ”Snoop, you look like the California Raisin that got hooked on heroin.”
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