MN University Strike Ends: “Our Fight is Just Beginning!”

by David Jones / October 2007 issue of Socialist Action newspaper

MINNEAPOLIS: A bold and inspiring strike by workers at the University of Minnesota last month ended after 17 days with voting beginning the first week of October on a settlement essentially unchanged from the offer on the table at the beginning of the strike. The strike involved four locals of the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) representing 3500 clerical, technical, and health-care workers.

The two-year contract offer to AFSCME contains a 2.25 percent cost of living increase for clerical and technical workers, (2.5% for health-care workers), plus steps and a $300 lump sum in each year of the contract. Workers who are at the top of their range will get an additional $300 in each year of the contract. AFSCME had sought a 3.25% increase. The university's settlement offer went to members without a recommendation from the negotiating committee.

“In voices filled with frustration and anger, local leaders of the strikers' union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, called the increases “inadequate” even as they accepted them,” the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune reported. “’We are shocked by the administration's absolute disregard for people's lives,’ said Gladys

McKenzie, chief negotiator for the union. ‘The university should be ashamed.’”

“We are forced back to work because we can no longer sustain the loss of salary and a looming end to our health-care coverage, the negotiating committee said.

"A typical striker earns $34,000 a year and qualifies for food stamps if supporting a family of four.” Rhonda Jennen, president of the health-care workers local, said, "We have been met at every turn by an intransigent administration, led by President Robert Bruininks and Vice President and Provost E. Thomas Sullivan, who are committed to the idea that those who already have should have ever more while the have-nots are pushed further to the bottom.

Phyllis Walker, Clerical Local 3800 president, said, "We are energized to build a world-class union. We are confident that we will do that before the administration builds a world-class university. Bruininks and Sullivan have an agenda of more money for the rich, more free research for corporations, and education only for the elite. Their agenda shuts working-class Minnesotans out of the university."

The September strike was only the second in 60 years, the first occurring in 2003, when the clerical workers (Locals 3800 and 3801) struck. This time the AFSCME locals negotiated jointly and struck together. The 72% of the members who voted for a strike were almost totally mobilized. A rally on the first day of the strike drew some 2000 workers and supporters to the Minneapolis campus. Hundreds of strikers fanned out daily to picket across the Twin Cities campuses, with over 100 buildings. Periodic mass meetings of over 500 workers who gathered to hear reports from the negotiating committee and to plan strike tactics punctuated the strike.

Instructors took classes off campus in solidarity with the strike. Some 100 students sat in at a meeting of the Board of Regents. A dozen students began a hunger strike in support of the workers’ struggle.

The famous muckraking writer and socialist journalist Upton Sinclair wrote in the 1920s that in Minnesota "the Steel (iron ore) Trust, in alliance with the (grain) millers and the lumbermen run the government of the state, and of course the state university." The university's Board of Regents, he said, was an "interlocking directorate" with the big economic interests of the state, and the university itself "an academic department store."

Sinclair's analysis, with a few adjustments, remains valid today. The Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, from which, Sinclair said in 1923, "the Northwestern grain country is run," remain the center of U.S. agribusiness - dominated by such Minneapolis-based giants as Cargill, Pillsbury, General Mills, ADM Corp., and others, along with their associated banking, transportation and trading institutions.

These are the same elements that were the power behind the Citizens' Alliance, which kept Minneapolis an open-shop town until 1934. Today, supplemented by new capital in Minnesota-based HMO's and manufacturers of medical devices, the ruling class has been transforming the land-grant university into a center for corporate research development.

Opposition to corporatization of the university has been voiced vigorously by the militant AFSCME locals, who first organized within the university's medical facilities (1970s), and grew dramatically with the organization of the university's clerical workers in the early 1990s. This, along with a ruling-class consensus that a more favorable settlement at this highly public institution would send an undesirable signal to workers statewide, undoubtedly were primary in fueling the university's intransigence.

"Despite their dissatisfaction with the tentative agreement," the St. Paul Union Advocate reported, "AFSCME leaders claimed victory in their struggle with the university. They pointed to the outpouring of support they received from faculty, students and community members. And they pledged that the fight for economic justice will continue."

"We did exactly what we needed to do," chief negotiator McKenzie said. "We did not accept defeat in advance. We stood up and we did it with dignity and humor. We are stronger for it." Local 3800 President Walker said the union would build on the solidarity created during the strike. "AFSCME is going back to work but our fight is just beginning."