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Minneapolis is poised to be the first midwestern city to pass a $15/hr minimum wage!
In three short years, the fight for $15 in Minneapolis has gone from an isolated call from the far left to the central slogan of the Minneapolis labor and progressive movement in the 2017 city elections. Socialist Alternative was the first to popularize the demand for $15 in Minneapolis through our mass door-knocking for our 2013 city council campaign in Ward 9, which came within 229 votes of winning.
“This is a huge victory for many of us who have been working on this for years,” said city council member Alondra Cano after the vote. “And it’s no secret that this movement started in Ward 9 with people like Ty Moore, Ginger Jentzen, and [CTUL leader] Veronica Mendez-Moore.
One of the key leaders of the fight for $15 in Minneapolis, Socialist Alternative member and 15 Now’s Executive Director, Ginger Jentzen, is also running for City Council this year! Ginger’s campaign is about building a political alternative in Minneapolis, independent of the Democratic Party, with an unapologetic program based on working people’s needs, and refusing donations from corporate executives and big developers. Ginger also pledges to take only the average wage of a worker in her neighborhood, donating the rest of the $80,000/year salary City Council members pay themselves towards building social movements.
But we should be clear - big business and their billionaire owners will spend whatever it takes to stop a fighter for working families like Ginger from winning. They don’t want leaders capable of building movements like $15/hr, affordable housing, and taxing the rich upsetting politics as usual in the back rooms of City Hall and the boardrooms of the Chamber of Commerce.
That’s why we need support from working people across the country to build the political revolution in Minneapolis!
Many of you supported the fight for $15/hr in Minneapolis last year, and it paid off. Let’s build off that momentum!
The proposal Ginger helped win is a crucial victory for workers. The ordinance does not include a lower minimum wage for tipped workers, a carve-out that the restaurant lobby had pushed hard for in recent months. But the proposal grants some of the richest corporations in the country a 5 year phase-in - and McDonald’s and Target don’t need 5 years to end poverty wages! In another worrying carve-out, the council agreed to a lower 90-day “training wage” for workers under 20 years old.
Despite the long phase-in and other concessions, this minimum wage ordinance, if passed, would represent possibly the biggest victory for the left and labor movement in the Twin Cities in decades. In an era of rising inequality, a $15/hr minimum wage would raise wages for 71,000 Minneapolis workers and, according to a new study, will put an estimated $140 million a year into the pockets of workers. Has any other city policy resulted in as large a transfer of wealth from big business to workers in Minneapolis history?
Especially for women and workers of color, who remain concentrated in low-wage jobs, a victory for $15 will represent a major step forward, providing a big boost to the wider fight against Minnesota’s worst-in-the-nation racial inequities. If Minneapolis becomes the first major non-coastal U.S. city to pass $15, it will open the doors to victories across the midwest, which has been decimated by the economic crisis.
2017 City Council Elections
The call for a $15 minimum wage, alongside other demands for racial equity reforms, has emerged as a central dividing line in the hotly contested 2017 Minneapolis City Council races. Business-backed Democrats in City Hall faced growing pressure from insurgent Berniecrat challengers, fueling record turnout in the Democratic Party caucuses this spring. In the end, most of the conservatives on City Council either lost Democratic Party endorsement outright, or were blocked from getting the endorsement by pro-$15 left challengers.
Within this wider political polarization in city politics, Ginger Jentzen’s Ward 3 city council campaign stands out. Much like Kshama Sawant’s socialist campaigns in Seattle, Jentzen’s campaign is having a city-wide impact by acting as a platform to provide a voice and political lead for movement organizers.
With Socialist Alternative as the core activist base, Jentzen’s campaign has won support from broader forces including the Minnesota Nurses Association, the Communication Workers of America, and the Twin Cities Democratic Socialist of America. However, most unions and progressive forces remain tied to the Democratic Party despite the entire experience of the $15 fight pointing to the need for independent left politics.
The powerful grassroots upsurge that has nearly won $15/hr shows the potential to build an entirely new type of politics in Minneapolis. The momentum behind the Ginger Jentzen campaign in Ward 3 is rooted in the unapologetic demand that Minneapolis meet the needs of working people by radically changing its political priorities. A victory for $15 will show that we can build a powerful left alternative to throw out corporate politics as usual.
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