This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Under pressure from our grassroots movement, Minneapolis is about to get a raise, and become the first Midwestern city to enact a $15/hr minimum wage! $15/hr will raise wages for 71,000 workers, predominantly women and workers of color. This victory is an example of how cities can beat back Trump’s billionaire-supported agenda: by putting forward bold demands capable of inspiring powerful movements.
Let’s build on this momentum.
Winning $15 took challenging the business-backed DFL City Council majority head on. But there’s a lot more work to do. We need to build a fundamental alternative to corporate politics-as-usual.
That’s why I’m running for Minneapolis City Council Ward 3, pledging not to take corporate cash from anti-worker big businesses or from the developers who are pricing working people out of our city. If elected, I would use the position as an organizing seat to win more victories for working people, as my colleague Kshama Sawant has done in Seattle.
In three years, a $15/hr minimum wage in Minneapolis has gone from an isolated call on the left to the central issue of the Minneapolis labor and progressive movement. Socialist Alternative was the first to popularize $15 in Minneapolis back in 2013, when we came within 229 votes of electing Ty Moore to Minneapolis City Council in Ward 9.
But even after Kshama Sawant spearheaded a victory for $15/hr in Seattle in 2014, most in Minneapolis’ City Hall ignored it. At first, many relied on a narrow the strategy of lobbying City Hall, which is dominated by Democratic Party politicians. And despite the Democratic Party formally adopting $15 into its platform, most in City Hall refused to take any substantial steps towards ending poverty wages and Minneapolis' worst-in-the-nation racial inequalities.
We argued that the movement for $15/hr would not succeed by limiting ourselves to tactics that avoided a public clash with the local Democratic Party establishment. This debate came to a head, resulting in a section of the coalition moving forward with going around City Hall and putting the question of $15/hr directly to voters as a ballot initiative.
In a grassroots effort spearheaded by Socialist Alternative, 15 Now Minnesota, Neighborhoods Organizing for Change (NOC), Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha (CTUL) and backed by the Minnesota Nurses Association and Communication Workers of America, we collected 20,000 petition signatures in under ten weeks.
The majority in City Hall fiercely opposed the ballot initiative, as it presented a dangerous precedent for movements to rely on their own strength, not the political establishment, to win progressive change. Eventually, they relied on the conservative Minnesota Supreme Court to block $15/hr from the ballot.
But while we lost the battle in court, our movement decisively won the battle of public opinion, with a poll showing 68% support for our proposal to take all Minneapolis workers to a $15/hr minimum wage. This forced City Council to concede by launching a formal process to raise minimum wage.
We’ve shifted the political landscape of Minneapolis. Due to our movement for $15/hr, insurgent Bernie-inspired candidates are challenging anti-$15 City Council incumbents in elections across the city. And in the party’s endorsement process, these left challengers blocked most conservative City Council members either from endorsement by pro-$15 left challengers, or won endorsement outright.
I think we have an opportunity to build an entirely new type of politics. That’s why I’m running for City Council as a Socialist Alternative candidate, independent of the Democratic Party. Already, our campaign has raised $40,000 and mobilized over a hundred volunteers. The momentum behind our campaign, and of the campaigns for other pro-$15 left Democrats, shows that the mood for a political revolution is strong.
We’ve seen with the fight to win $15/hr that working people cannot limit ourselves to what is deemed acceptable by the political establishment. Right now, big business has its own parties and representatives. Working people need a party of our own. I’m running to become the second socialist elected to office in a major U.S. city, to show that a political alternative is possible.
The victory for a $15/hr minimum shows how socialists fight for immediate reforms under capitalism in a way that empowers working people to fundamentally transform society in our own interests, to win a socialist world.
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