Tensions rise between restaurant owners, unions over Minneapolis’ proposed labor standards board

Restaurant owners and labor unions are squaring off as the city of Minneapolis moves closer to establishing an advisory committee with the power to recommend business regulations.

More than two years ago, Mayor Jacob Frey and a City Council majority said they would create a labor standards board that would bring workers and employers together to identify workforce problems in specific industries as they come up and recommend solutions.

A draft ordinance was expected to be released to the public in June, but wasn’t. Council members say they expect the ordinance to be revealed by the end of this month.

Frustrated representatives of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (CTUL) petitioned City Attorney Kristyn Anderson’s office for answers. They encountered a locked door.

Brian Elliott, SEIU Minnesota State Council executive director, said the four months since council members referred the matter to Anderson is the longest it has taken to draft a labor ordinance in his memory, including previous years’ minimum wage and sick leave ordinances.

Elliott is also perturbed that the City Attorney’s Office won’t talk directly with the unions, instead communicating through the ordinance’s council sponsors.

“I’ve been doing this a long time, and I have even been yelled at by a city attorney for not talking to her about something,” Elliott said. “We hear the restaurant owners saying, ‘We haven’t seen anything!’ Well, we haven’t either, and we’re the ones pushing for it.”

Anderson did not respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, the Save Local Restaurants opposition campaign, Hospitality Minnesota and chefs organized with the Minneapolis Restaurant Coalition have conducted news conferences and roundtables demanding the proposal be blocked.

Restaurant owners say they’ve been left out of discussions about additional regulations, none of which they would support.

“The Labor Standards Board fails to account for the unique challenges faced by small businesses,” according to a letter signed by more than 100 restaurant operators. “Please reject the current proposal and engage with business owners to create equitable solutions that support all of Minneapolis’s vibrant and diverse business community.”

In June, celebrity chef Andrew Zimmern moderated a panel of chefs of color, including Christina Nguyen of Hai Hai, Gustavo Romero of Oro by Nixta, Tammy Wong of Rainbow Restaurant and Lina Goh of Zen Box Izakaya. Speaking to an audience of business owners, they described the challenges they face with existing regulations and market conditions in which it is difficult to retain staff, keep menus affordable and stay in business.

“Good prices are going up; the cost of labor has gone up,” Zimmern said. “It strikes me that reviving, revitalizing and encouraging the city of Minneapolis requires a whole set of assistance, forbearance, patience, hard work that you all are putting in. But yet there seem to be policies that are coming out of our local and community governments, most notably the City Council and their proposal for a labor standards board, that provide a really sizable hurdle that may not be surmountable.. Is that accurate?”

Romero agreed.

“The only way that we can survive all these rises in prices is by using creativity,” he said. “If we don’t have the flexibility ... then we can’t survive. The labor board, it feels like it will be the tipping point where it will push us over the bridge, like we have the pandemic, we have the unrest, we have construction, we have winter. We live in a place where six months out of the year we struggle with all those things. We lose our patio ... all those things keep putting us into a position where we are very close to not make it.”

At the event, the audience rallied over distrust of the labor standards board concept.

Brent Frederick of Jester Concepts told the room, erroneously, that the board would have five seats for unions, five for workers and five for business owners, resulting a body that would be sure to favor labor’s point of view.

“As BIPOC owners in restaurants, do you trust the City Council to even give us a seat on a table where it might be stacked against you?” he asked. “Do you guys trust them to be fair, to give small business even a chance?”

Nettie Colon of Red Hen Gastrolab called the council “drunk with power.”

“Nobody here is saying no to a Labor Standards Board,” she said, contradicting the letter signed by the 100 restaurant operators. “What we’re saying is give us a seat at the table so you can see our side, we can see their side and we can tell you what works and doesn’t work because without us, there’s no work.”

When Star Tribune food reporter Sharyn Jackson asked the panel to reconcile their narratives of how much they sacrifice for their staff with recent efforts of workers to unionize the restaurants of Ann Kim and Daniel del Prado, the question was left unanswered as Zimmern steered the conversation away.

City Council Vice President Aisha Chughtai, who sponsored the ordinance with Council Members Aurin Chowdhury and Katie Cashman, said the board would provide an equal number of seats for workers, business owners and community stakeholders, such as consumer advocates and academics, “not union reps.”

Additionally, she said, a majority of board members would have to agree on a recommendation before it would be forwarded to the City Council. From there, any ordinance would require majority support before it could be sent to the mayor for approval.

“The irony of it is we hear from restaurateurs, and operators from businesses within the hospitality industry have consistently told us over the course of the last four years, since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, that they are not consulted and their feedback is not meaningfully considered,” Chughtai said. “And that’s exactly the purpose of this body, to address that core concern for all parties involved.”

Labor standards boards have been established for home care workers in Nevada, agricultural workers in Colorado, nursing home workers in Michigan and fast food workers in New York and California.

The most vociferous opposition to the proposed Minneapolis board has come from restaurateurs who feel targeted, even though no one has suggested a board specific to their industry.

SEIU’s Elliott said his union and CTUL represent many building services workers, including security guards and custodians who say they want better wages, more predictable scheduling and training on how to de-escalate issues with people in crisis downtown. They are not asking for a labor standards board to study policies that have anything to do with full-service restaurants, he said.

Unite Here, the hospitality union at the center of recent unionization drives at Kim’s, Colita and Café Cerés, did not answer whether it would advocate for a restaurant-specific board.

Chowdhury said that so far she has not heard any labor group make such a proposal.

“The only parties that have brought up a sector specific to full-service restaurants are the owners and operators of full-service restaurants,” the City Council member said.

Council members responded to the restaurateurs’ letter with one of their own, leading with: “This proposed policy is not suggesting any new regulations to the hospitality or service industry.”

“We believe that while we, the City Council, may not have the expertise to make and propose policy for vibrant and healthy businesses cross-sector, business owners, employees, and employers of Minneapolis do, and the Minneapolis Labor Standards Board is a mechanism to put you — the experts — in the driver’s seat.”

A meeting is scheduled for Friday, where business groups, labor organizations and policymakers can continue to address concerns and dispel misinformation, Chughtai and Chowdhury said.

They are working with the City Attorney’s Office to release a draft ordinance before the end of July.

Staff writers Sharyn Jackson and Joy Summers contributed to this report.