Early Wednesday morning, Bluestem watched the Senate debate on the bill to allow home child care providered and personal care assistants the ability to organize.
The Pioneer Press reports in Minnesota Senate OKs unions for child, personal care workers:
. . . The bill would allow two groups of workers to vote on whether to form a union:
-- Licensed and unlicensed in-home child care providers who care for children receiving state subsidies.
-- Personal care attendants who care for the disabled and elderly in their homes.
Supporters say the bill secures greater access for recipients and better working conditions for providers. But the issue has sparked the ire of Republicans who have been fighting the bill all session, focusing most of the debate on including child care providers. They argued it's just the DFL's political payoff to organized labor that helped them grab the majority in last fall's election.
Majority Leader Bakk spoke out, concluding [partial transcript from video below]:
"It just gives this group of workers, that don't have the right to have a vote, an opportunity to decide if they can form a union and form a bargaining unit so that they can bargain for some of the things that my union card has provided for me. My whole working career with the carpenters union, I've had health insurance provided for by my employer through a Taft-Hartley labor management trust fund.
Members, in the first of every month I draw defined pension fund because I'm retired from there--a pension fund of over thirty years of contributions that my employer put into that. This union card put food on the table for my family my whole life. It bought that car that sits out on the south of the Capitol lawn. It put my kids through college.
Because without it, you're alone and you have no power to improve your standard of living because you stand by yourself. But in a union, you have the opportunity to get together and there is power in numbers and you can raise the standard of living of the whole. "
Here's a video clip. The remarks come near the end:
Photo: Tom Bakk speaking for the right to organize.
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