MINNEAPOLIS—Having not won a satisfactory contract raising their wages, members of Unite HERE Local 17 will target the low pay at Minneapolis’s Target Field strike scheduled to start on the evening of June 22.
The strike authorization vote among the baseball stadium’s 500 concession workers passed 81%-19% among voting members, the union announced. The vote occurred June 11, the day after the AFL-CIO convention left Minneapolis, where Local 17 members served the delegates, guests, reporters, and others who gathered for four days at the Convention Center.
Besides the low pay—the cooks, bartenders, suite attendants, dishwashers, and other workers make Minneapolis’s minimum wage, $16.37 an hour—the workers demand first-ever health insurance and more job security.
With that low pay, the Target Field workers join the millions of underpaid, overworked, and exploited workers nationwide who have had it up to here with corporate greed and profits at their expense. Others include RAs, TAs, and grad student workers at universities, adjunct professors, port truckers, warehouse workers, Amazon workers, and Starbucks baristas.
Those exploited workers, many of them women, workers of color, or both, opted for two lines of resistance: Taking a hike to higher-paying jobs or joining unions and often striking to gain better pay and working conditions.
The Minneapolis workers aren’t employed by the stadium, home of the Minnesota Twins, or the team, but by a giant concessions firm, Delaware North, headquartered in Buffalo, which runs concessions at many major league ballparks.
The previous contract between the local and Delaware North expired in January, and workers took to an informational picket line—in Minnesota cold—for the Twins home opener earlier this year. The last reported bargaining session was the day of the strike authorization vote.
After the vote, Delaware North offered 25-cent hourly raises for minimum wage workers, and 60-cent raises for everyone else, Local 17 reported.
The union set this strike to begin at the start of the baseball team’s planned home series against the major league champion Los Angeles Dodgers, always a big draw. It’s also telling fans to bring their own food and beverages to that game and others if the strike continues. That way, the fans won’t cross the union’s picket line.
“The bargaining committee for Local 17 has been committed to avoiding a strike through good faith bargaining,” Local 17 said after the vote. “Unfortunately, the company has not had that same commitment and has forced the committee to authorize a strike.” The union notes Delaware North uses the excuse that the concessions workers are “seasonal” as its reason to not offer health insurance.
“Me and my coworkers are ready to strike for our healthcare and our future,” said Schreifels, a suite bartender, at a news conference outside Target Field on June 11. Added concessions worker Nariel Green: “Many of us need multiple jobs to get by.
“We want to be here, and we want to work, but we also want to be treated fairly while we do.”
Volunteers, who are non-union, staff some concessions that raise money for non-profit groups. One news report said Delaware North wants to use volunteers elsewhere in the stadium, and the company criticized the union for potentially hampering the non-profits.
That use of volunteers “devalues the skilled work (Delaware North) food and beverage workers do. Unite HERE believes philanthropy does not have to come at the expense of the workers who help fans enjoy every game,” Local 17 Secretary-Treasurer Sheigh Freeberg said in a statement.
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