Take a seat in the Break Room, our weekly round-up of labor news in Minnesota and beyond. This week: Membership swells as federal employee unions confront DOGE attacks; dairy farmer faces rare criminal charges for wage theft; Mayday Cafe reopens as worker-owned co-op; Americans don’t believe Democrats care about the economy; and Whole Foods challenges union election in Philadelphia.
Federal workforce insulted, demoralized and joining the union
Federal workers say there’s never been a more confusing — and upsetting — time to work for the government, as they’re inundated with orders and memos at all hours of the day and night.
“We feel very degraded and insulted … We feel terrorized,” said Regina Marsh, a Minnesota-based claim specialist for Social Security.
Marsh has worked at the federal government for her entire career — 37 years — starting right out of high school. She says it’s been a stable job and rewarding to help administer benefits to Americans who’ve recently become disabled or diagnosed with a terminal illness; people who have lost a spouse, and children who have lost a parent.
“We deal with people at the worst times of their lives,” Marsh said. “I feel like we’re compassionate and kind to the people that we serve, and we take pride in that.”
Marsh voted for President Trump in 2016 and 2020 because of her Catholic convictions on abortion, but lost faith in him after the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
“In all my years, we’ve been in and out of administrations on both sides of the aisle, and it’s never really changed our lives that drastically,” said Marsh, who is also executive vice president for AFGE Local 3129. “I feel like our government is being taken over and nobody is doing anything about it.”
The ranks of federal employee unions are swelling as they attempt to shield their members from a barrage of executive orders from President Trump, who with billionaire advisor Elon Musk, has launched an unprecedented assault on the federal workforce aimed at reducing its size and weeding out “disloyal” civil servants.
The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union, grew to a record size of 319,233 active members after adding more than 14,000 in the past five weeks. That’s nearly as many as the union added in the previous 12 months, according to union spokesman Tim Kauffman.
The growth is significant because public employees haven’t had to pay membership dues to the unions that bargain contracts on their behalf since the 2018 Supreme Court ruling in Janus vs. AFSCME. The added revenue will help the union’s many legal battles against the Trump administration on behalf of federal employees.
Jacob Romans, a registered nurse at the Minneapolis VA and president of AFGE Local 3669, says his local of about 2,000 nurses, physicians and other VA workers has added 100 members in the last two weeks alone.
“They’re looking for protections, and they don’t know what’s going to happen,” Romans said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty, a lot of anger.”
The unions — including the American Federation of Government Employees and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — have filed lawsuits challenging orders making career civil servants easier to fire; offering workers potentially illegal and unfunded buy-outs; and sharing confidential data with Musk’s initiative called the Department of Government Efficiency, which is not an official government agency.
Unions have also sued to block the gutting of USAID and stop DOGE from accessing Department of Labor data, which could give Musk access to non-public information about OSHA probes into his companies SpaceX and Tesla.
A federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s “Fork in the Road” buy-out offer until at least Monday. Union leaders and Democrats warned federal workers not to be cheated by the offer to resign and be paid through September because it is likely illegal and not funded. About 60,000 employees took the offer, according to Reuters, though it’s unclear how many were planning to leave anyways. The 60,000 workers represent about 2.5% of the total federal workforce, which typically sees 6% of workers resign or retire in a typical year.
Romans said he’s worried Trump’s executive orders offering buy-outs and ending remote work will only exacerbate the chronic short-staffing at the VA and lead to greater privatization, sending more federal funds to private hospitals.
It wouldn’t seem like Trump’s order ending remote work would affect jobs at the VA. But Romans said the Minneapolis VA employs doctors across the country — from Florida to Michigan — to provide virtual care to veterans.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen to them,” Romans said.
More than a fifth of the VA’s 479,000 employees have telework or remote work arrangements, but the agency hasn’t said what its policy will be regarding unionized employees.
Remote work is part of their union contract, but the Trump administration said it doesn’t believe it needs to honor those agreements, setting up another legal battle. A memo from the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources department, said determining telework is a “management right,” and “provisions of collective bargaining agreements that conflict with management rights are unlawful and cannot be enforced.”
“We’re going to disagree with that,” Romans said. “We bargained it, and they have to abide by that agreement.”
Ellison files rare criminal charges for wage theft
The owner of a sprawling central Minnesota dairy operation accused of stealing millions in wages from hundreds of workers now faces felony criminal charges in what is surely the most significant prosecution of wage theft in the state’s history.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison announced on Tuesday he charged Evergreen Acres owner Keith Schaefer with four counts of felony wage theft and one count of felony racketeering. Ellison’s office sued Schaefer and his companies in civil court last year alleging he stole at least $3 million in wages before settling the case for $250,000.
The charging document alleges horrific labor abuses in a dangerous industry notorious for exploiting undocumented workers. One 15-year-old employee worked upwards of 84 hours per week, in violation of child labor laws, and was regularly shorted pay while being charged rent for a small bed he shared with his father. Schaefer allegedly threatened to kill two other workers, who were also shorted wages.
Many of the workers are undocumented immigrants and Schaefer threatened to call the police to have them deported if they complained, according to court filings.
Minnesota lawmakers made wage theft in excess of $1,000 a felony in 2019, but no one has yet been convicted despite it likely being one of the most common forms of theft.
Ellison has made wage theft a central focus of his office and has brought cases against construction subcontractors, a property maintenance company and the Target-owned delivery service Shipt.
Mayday Cafe reopens as worker cooperative
Mayday Cafe, a decades-old south Minneapolis institution, reopened on Friday as a worker-owned cooperative, serving its familiar croissants and M&M cookies.
“It’s going to be the same cafe that people have known and loved for three decades, but now it’s going to be owned and managed by people who work here,” worker-owner and barista Mira Klein told MPR News.
Workers purchased the cafe with $100,000 in donations, a $130,000 0%-interest loan from the city of Minneapolis and support from the Metropolitan Consortium of Community Developers. The workers also received assistance from Nexus Community Partners, a wealth-building nonprofit in St. Paul.
Poll: Americans don’t believe Democrats care about the economy
Americans care a lot about the economy, but don’t believe Democrats do, according to a recent poll from the New York Times and Ipsos.
Survey respondents were most likely to list the economy, health care, and immigration as their top issues personally, but said they believe Democrats care most about abortion, LGBT policy and climate change. Respondents said they believed Republicans cared most about immigration, the economy and guns.
The poll underscores Democrats’ perception problem, which was already made abundantly clear on Election Day.
Winning back working class voters was the overarching theme of the race for chair of the Democratic National Committee, which Minnesota’s Ken Martin handily won by touting his winning streak, working-class upbringing, and union bonafides.
On Monday, the leading super PAC supporting House Democrats announced a $50 million investment in a new “Win Them Back Fund” aimed at appealing to working-class voters.
Whole Food challenges first successful union election
Amazon-owned Whole Foods is challenging the first successful union election at one of its stores in Philadelphia, arguing the election cannot be certified because the National Labor Relations Board lacks a quorum after Trump fired board member Gwynne Wilcox.
The unprecedented firing of an NLRB member — which can only be done for neglect or malfeasance — has paralyzed the board since it needs at least three members to conduct business. Wilcox is challenging her ouster in court in a case that will test the constitutional limits of presidential power.
Workers at the Philadelphia Whole Foods voted 130-100 to unionize with the United Food and Commercial Workers, but Whole Foods is also alleging the union unfairly promised workers 30% wage increases if they voted to unionize and intimidated workers who didn’t support the effort.
Union local president Wendell Young IV said in a statement that Amazon is just trying to bust the union.
“Their goal is clear: They don’t want to bargain in good faith with their workers,” he said in a news release.
Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com.
