Star Tribune
Workers announce one-day strike at 7 Twin Cities nursing homes over pay, staffing
Roughly 600 workers at seven Twin Cities nursing homes will stage a one-day strike March 5, hoping to pressure employers to boost pay and stop the exodus of nurses and caregivers from elder-care facilities.
Vote results announced Tuesday in favor of the strikes reflect desperation among workers, who are burning out from extra shifts to care for elderly and frail residents, said Jamie Gulley, president of SEIU Healthcare Minnesota and Iowa, the St. Paul-based union that represents the workers.
“There’s not enough help,” he said. “It just really plays havoc on people’s family lives. It causes an extreme amount of burnout when you are forced to work doubles routinely. Folks have frankly had enough.”
Seven strikes at once appears to be the largest simultaneous job action against nursing homes in Minnesota’s history, he said. The time-limited strike is an increasingly common negotiating tool in healthcare, because workers can put pressure on employers while minimizing harm to patients or residents.
The walkouts March 5 will involve Saint Therese Senior Living in New Hope, the Estates nursing homes in Excelsior, Fridley and Roseville, the Villas at The Cedars in St. Louis Park, and Cerenity in St. Paul. Contract support workers at the Villas in Robbinsdale also will strike, but not the facility’s nursing staff.
Leaders of the nursing homes did not reply to requests for comment following the union’s announcement outside Saint Therese. Votes are scheduled at other nursing homes which could join the walkout.
Staffing shortages have worsened since the pandemic. Minnesota has lost 26 nursing homes since 2019 and statewide nursing home capacity shrunk by more than 3,000 beds since 2020, according to Care Providers of Minnesota, a trade association for the state’s elder-care operators.
Lawmakers stepped in last spring with $300 million in rescue funding to prevent more nursing homes from closing, but some still struggled. The Minnesota Department of Health temporarily took over operation of the Bay View Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Red Wing at the end of 2023 when its owner stopped paying bills and employees.
Survey responses last fall from 1,300 union workers at more than 100 Minnesota nursing homes found that almost half make less than $20 per hour. The union believes a $25 per hour minimum wage for nursing home workers would attract more people and address the care shortage.
Laundry worker Teresa Brees said her Roseville nursing home lost a badly needed coworker who loved her $15-per-hour job but earned much more by switching to a job with the U.S. Post Office.
“How many more great people will we lose?” said Brees, who blamed understaffing for a torn bicep tendon she suffered last year after working 23 straight days.
More than 17% of nursing assistant positions were vacant in mid-2022, according to the most recent Minnesota job vacancy data, though that includes some positions at clinics and hospitals as well as nursing homes. SEIU represents nursing assistants, nurses and workers in food service and housekeeping in 31 nursing homes across Minnesota. Facilities under strike will lose the majority of their nursing home workforce March 5, and could be forced to hire high-cost contract workers for the day.
SEIU is banking on public support similar to what Twin Cities hospital nurses received in 2022 when they engaged in a three-day strike over staffing and benefit levels. Gallup’s latest public opinion polling last August showed 67% support nationwide for organized labor, down from 71% in 2022 but still one of the highest approval ratings since the 1960s.
“We believe the residents are supportive of us,” Gulley said. “In many circumstances, the residents know our working conditions are their living conditions.”
“Under the Biden-Harris Administration, more than 11,000 bridges in communities across America are finally getting the repairs they’ve long needed with funding from our infrastructure law,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in a news release. He said the bridge repairs ensure “people and goods can get where they need to go, safely and efficiently.”
A 19-year-old driver trying to get around slower vehicles collided head-on with an SUV in Wright County and killed one person and injured several others, officials said Thursday.
SUV passenger Janice Evelyn Johnson, 92, of Arden Hills, died Monday at HCMC from injuries she suffered in the collision on Oct. 22 in Monticello Township on County Road 37 near County Road 12, the Sheriff’s Office said in a search warrant affidavit filed in Hennepin County District Court.
The driver and two other people in the SUV survived their injuries, according to the affidavit, which the Sheriff’s Office filed to collect Johnson’s medical records at HCMC as part of its investigation.
According to the affidavit:
Deputies arrived at the crash scene and spoke with the car’s driver, Christian Kabunangu, of Brooklyn Park, who said he was heading west on County Road 37 and found himself behind two vehicles traveling below the speed limit.
“He was late for work, so he decided to pass them,” the affidavit read. Kabunangu said he saw the oncoming SUV and estimated it was about a half-mile down the road.
As he attempted to pass one of the slower vehicles, he explained, the other driver “sped up, preventing him from getting back into the westbound lane,” the filing continued.
As the Honda drew near, he swerved to the left, but the SUV did the same and they collided.
Star Tribune
University of Minnesota researchers find that native plants can beat invasive buckthorn on their own turf.
If the invasive buckthorn that is strangling the life out of Minnesota’s forest floor has a weakness, it is right now, in the shortening daylight of the late fall.
With a little help and planning, certain native plants have the best chance of beating buckthorn back and helping to eradicate it from the woods, according to new research from the University of Minnesota.
The sprawling bush has been one of the most formidable invasive species to take root in Minnesota since it was brought from Europe in the mid-1800s. It was prized as an ornamental privacy hedge. All the attributes that make buckthorn good at that job — dense thick leaves that stay late into the fall, toughness and resilience to damage and pruning, unappealing taste to wildlife and herbivores — have allowed it to thrive in the wild.
It grows fast and thick, out-competing the vast majority of native plants and shrubs for sunlight and then starving them under its shade. It creates damaging feedback loops, providing ideal habitat and calcium-rich food for invasive earthworms, which in turn kill off and uproot native plants. That leaves even less competition for buckthorn to take root, said Mike Schuster, a researcher for the university’s Department of Forest Resources.
When it takes over a natural area, buckthorn creates a “green desert,” Schuster said. “All that’s left is just a perpetual hedge, with little biodiversity.”
Since the 1990s, when the spread became impossible to ignore, Minnesota foresters, park managers and cities have spent millions of dollars a year trying to beat it back. They’ve used chainsaws and trimmers, poisons and herbicides, and even goats for hire. The buckthorn almost always grows back within a few years.
It’s been so pervasive that a conventional wisdom formed that buckthorn seeds could survive dormant in the soil for up to six years. That thought has led to a sort of fatalism: even if the plant were entirely removed from a property there would be a looming threat that it would sprout back, Schuster said.
But there is nothing special about buckthorn seeds. They only survive for a year or two.
