Hundreds of park workers in Minneapolis plan to strike for a week starting July 4

Hundreds of park workers in Minneapolis will go on strike on July 4, one of the busiest days in the city’s parks.

The union representing more than 300 workers who keep the parks clean and safe announced plans to strike on Tuesday. They say the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board’s latest collective bargaining agreement fails to provide adequate wage increases and hazard mitigations — and includes new language that hinders transparency and bias protections.

“We are not asking for special treatment, we are just asking for fair treatment,” AJ Lange, executive director of LIUNA Local 363, said at a press conference Tuesday.

That announcement followed more than 15 hours of negotiations with the parks administration on Monday and another seven months of failed negotiations before that. Lange said the union requested another negotiating date but was denied. He said workers would strike for a week and were prepared to announce another strike if the administration did not “come back to the bargaining table with a fair offer.”

The MPRB argues that the negotiations were reasonable and conducted in good faith – and that the final offer was “competitive, fair and reasonable”. It is willing to adapt the maintenance service to a smaller workforce.

The committee also announced that striking employees will not be able to return to work until an agreement is reached.

“We have asked – and continue to ask – that they present our last, best and final offer to their members for a vote,” Robin Smothers, a board spokesman, said by email.

The union says it is prepared to file an unfair labor practice suit with the state after receiving at least one legal opinion from Minneapolis-based law firm Cummins and Cummins that said banning striking employees from returning to work constitutes an “illegal threat of a discriminatory lockout.”

In a statement, Smothers said the MPRB’s legal team believes its actions do not constitute an unfair labor practice and that it intends to continue implementing its plan.

Security during warehouse clearances a problem

A week before the latest negotiations, the union gathered outside Lyndale Farmstead Park, where Minneapolis park rangers have lived since Theodore Wirth took over in 1910.

The current resident is Al Bangoura. While his warden’s salary has risen in line with inflation, the union argues that their positions have not kept pace with development and have fallen behind, while the park’s reputation continues to rise steadily in national rankings.

The park administration has proposed a 10.25 percent wage increase over three years, including a 2.75 percent increase in the first year and a $1.00 market adjustment for 13 positions over the following two years.

Union leadership said it had asked for a market adjustment of $5.00, and the wage proposed by the board still meant some positions would lag behind those in other cities.

The increase would increase the maximum salary of a “parking attendant” from $30.99 to $35.52 in 2026. That’s still less than the salary of park attendants in 19 competitive suburbs, according to a 2023 League of Minnesota Cities local government salary survey.

“MPRB leadership believes it is extremely important that employee wages and benefits are fair and competitive across the company,” it said in a statement, citing a policy that provides 37 paid days off per year for employees with up to four years of service.

Park ranger Lanel Lane looks after a family of four, including a teenage son and six-year-old daughter, who were playing soccer on the park’s green space. Although they are a dual-income household, Lane says his family doesn’t have enough money to pay the bills or fund car repairs.

“I don’t have any money saved right now,” said the 40-year-old. “I’m not living paycheck to paycheck, I’m living paycheck to paycheck. If wages go up, I think we can make ends meet. That’s all we’re asking for.”

Lane says he has been working in Minneapolis parks for more than a decade, arriving daily at 5 a.m. in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, during the 2020 unrest following the killing of George Floyd and regularly when he was tasked with cleaning up homeless encampments.

It can be a grueling job, he said. He’s constantly cleaning up broken glass, syringes and feces, and making sure the common areas are safe. On one of his hardest days, Lane said, he witnessed a woman die of an overdose. But like any other day at work, he carried on.

“Just seeing the poverty was disheartening,” he said. “It touched me, man. I cried a few times just thinking about how people live here.”

A major union criticism of the proposed contract is inadequate hazard protection. The board offered eligible employees safety glasses and a hazard pay increase from $0.75 to $1.50 an hour for workers who perform “warehouse cleanup” involving “visible biohazard materials and sharp objects.”

The union claims the safety eyewear rule is a previous “decision.” LIUNA Local 363 manager Lange said Tuesday he wants protection from retaliation for workers who raise safety concerns, as well as the ability for workers to request a risk assessment and stop work until that assessment is completed.

The fear of risky situations is something that park ranger Hunter Hoppe is confronted with on a regular basis, he says.

“There were homeless camps that we had to clear out and that hurt me personally because you don’t know what they’re going through,” Hoppe said. “But even if you do that, you don’t know if someone who lives there is going to come by and potentially get mad at you even though we’ve told them.”

“Not a middle-class job”

Arborist Scott Jaeger said he’s turning 40 soon and had hoped to buy a home by now. What was once doable for the generation above him seems completely out of reach. He and his partner rent an apartment in Minneapolis, where the average rent eats up nearly 40 percent of his monthly income, he said.

“I’m a certified arborist working for the best park system in the country, and I can’t afford a house. It’s sad,” he said. “This isn’t a middle-class job anymore.”

Jaeger wanted to become a civil servant, but the career does not currently seem sustainable to him.

“We love being public servants,” Jaeger said. “That’s why we all took this job. But at some point the love of helping the community stops when you can no longer afford the bills or can no longer live in the city you work in. So at some point that stops.”