By Doug Cunningham

The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA and the Airline Pilots Association are rallying Wednesday in Minnesota to protest the growing pay disparity between company executives and employees at Northwest Airlines. The rally in St. Paul Minnesota will be at the state capitol. Workers and unions from across Minnesota have been invited to the rally. The pilot’s union will set up it’s 25 foot tall inflatable rat on the capitol grounds as working families protest the huge pay inequity between executives and workers.

By Doug Cunningham

Leaders of the Sierra Club and the United Steelworkers are barnstorming through the politically important states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Minnesota with a combined message of clean energy, green manufacturing, jobs creation and industrial heartland economic revitalization. USW President Leo Gerard is joining Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope on their “Road To Energy Independence Tour. Gerard says clean energy initiatives can create thousands of new jobs throughout the U.S. industrial heartland.

By Jesse Russell

A Minnesota organization is seeking to help families of National Guard members taking part in the Iraq War find child care. Elizabeth Cooper is spokeswoman for Minnesota Child Care Resource and Referral network:

Cooper: Parents who had been staying home with children find
themselves in a position of needing to go to work, or go back to work. So, they are faced with a decision of dropping out of school, going back to work, changing their entire situation, because they are, essentially, single parents for the duration of their spouse's deployment.

In Minnesota, nearly half of the National Guard members are currently training and expect to be deployed early next year.

As of July 1st, Minnesotans could be looking at their first minimum wage increase since 1997. Currently set at $5.15, the state Senate vote in favor of increasing the minimum wage to $6.10 by July 2005, with a second increase to $7 an hour in July 2006. It is now up to the House and Gov. Tim Pawlenty to cast their votes. Two Republicans crossed party lines to vote in favor of the increase with Senate Democrats. Nearly 50,000 Minnesotans currently make minimum wage. Only fifteen states currently have a minimum wage higher than that of the federal standard of $5.15 an hour.

Testing the limits of the union's "conflict of interest" clause, the St. Paul Pioneer Press newspaper in St. Paul Minnesota suspended two investigative reporters for attending a MoveOn.Org concert. The reporters lost three day's pay and benefits after management said the paper's ethics policy bars them from activities that would conflict with their employment, like the Bruce Springsteen "Vote for Change" concert. The reporters argue they did nothing wrong, first because MoveOn.Org is non-partisan and second because they don't cover politics.

The paper is refusing to back down.
Minnesota Newspaper Guild executive officer, Mike Sweeney.

Workers at the Southern Minnesota Beet Sugar Cooperative - who had been locked out for three weeks - will return to work today after voting to approve a new three-year contract yesterday. The 220 workers at the Renville cooperative showed up for work three weeks ago to find the doors locked. Repeated attempts to make contact with the cooperative were ignored. It wasn't until a mediator stepped in that the two sides were able to sit down and hammer out a new contract.