This story about labor unions is part of a series by MinnPost reporter Matthew Blake on Minnesota efforts to stabilize its nursing home workforce, which has long struggled with high turnover. Part one looks at the state’s plan and the pushback to it from nursing home operators. Part two looks at the exhausting work performed by nursing home employees, and part three delves into nursing homes’ complicated financial situations.
For organized labor in Minnesota, the 2023 legislative session was a rousing success. Labor unions worked closely with the Tim Walz administration and a DFL-controlled legislature on high-profile accomplishments, like the creation of a state paid family and medical leave program.
There were also less obvious goals, like a new part of the state government dedicated exclusively to the conditions of nursing home employees.
“We were the driving advocacy group for the standards board to exist,” said Jamie Gulley, president of SEIU Healthcare Minnesota and Iowa, a union that represents 40 nursing homes across the state. “The nursing home is the lowest paid segment of our membership universe.”
Gulley will get no argument from the nursing home lobby, who have called the board they have sued to eradicate a favor to labor unions.
“The risk is the workforce board turns into a political hammer,” said Toby Pearson, executive director at Care Providers of Minnesota.
And Rep. Esther Agbaje, DFL-Minneapolis, said she worked with SEIU and AFSCME Council 65 in writing the bill that created the board. Asked if the measure was meant more to improve the labor conditions of nursing home employees, or simply increase the number of unionized facilities, Agbaje said, “A little bit of both.”
But if the workforce board is labor unions leveraging their clout, that raises the question of why labor is so into the idea.
Wage boards intertwine with labor unions’ rapid rise
University of Michigan law professor Kate Andrias in 2019 published an article in the Yale Law Journal called, “An American Approach to Social Democracy: The Forgotten Promise of the Fair Labor Standards Act.”
Andrias’s article tells a fascinating story of a forgotten New Deal experiment that has sparked a current political movement.
“The original FLSA was more ambitious both procedurally and substantively than the low minimum wages and overtime protections for which it is known today,” she wrote. “It created ‘industry committees’ or wage boards composed of tripartite representatives — employers, labor unions, and the public — with discretion to set minimum wages on an industry-by-industry basis with a statutorily defined range.”
By 1940, 20 such committees were established for primarily low-wage industries like garment and textile manufacturing. Instead of a union bargaining behind closed doors with a single clothing manufacturer, the committees were required to meet in public, produce reports about working conditions, and set an industry-wide minimum wage.
“The resulting committees increased the wages of hundreds of thousands of workers during a short period” and “helped facilitate the rapid rise of unionism,” Andrias wrote.
The law professor pointed out that these boards withstood court challenges. In fact, it was President Harry Truman who scotched the boards in exchange for a Republican-controlled Congress raising the minimum wage to 75 cents-an-hour.
After the ‘Fight for 15’
While the federal boards were wiped out, blue states like California and New York kept laws on the books for decades allowing for industry-specific wage boards. In 2015, the concept was revitalized when New York state passed a $15 minimum wage specifically for fast food workers.
“That helped spark the consciousness of policymakers, workers and advocates,” said David Madland, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank that has advocated for wage boards.
A Center for American Progress study last year found that six states including Minnesota have adopted industry-specific wage boards, along with three cities. The case most relevant to Minnesota is Nevada, which has set up a commission for home care workers.
In 2023, the Nevada board raised the minimum wage of home care workers to $16 an hour, while increasing Medicaid reimbursements for state home care providers.
Nevada’s health department has touted statistics that between December 2023 and April 2024, the state’s home care workforce grew by 1,500 employees or 6.5%.
But the health department also acknowledged that the state is thousands of home care workers short. Meanwhile, SEIU representatives in Nevada have pushed for a $20-an-hour home care worker minimum wage.
If there is a throughline between fast food, nursing home and home care workers, it is occupations that tend to elicit public, and political, sympathy.
“The goal of the workforce board is to make sure our caretakers are cared for themselves,” Agbaje said.
