Union members talk state of the movement and hopes for the future at MULP

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ: All, right. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you.

My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and I got to see firsthand that there are good people making good trouble and making change happen right now in the state of Minnesota. For the past couple years now, my wife Meg and I have been honored to be invited to be guest educators at a phenomenal and truly unique program for union members and elected union leaders across the state of Minnesota. It’s called the Minnesota Union Leadership Program, or MULP for short, and it’s run by the Labor Education Services team who are housed within the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.

I took my podcast recorder with me this year, and I got a chance to sit down with a handful of participants between our sessions and record some short interviews. Basically, I asked everyone the same two questions. First, I asked them to introduce themselves and talk about their path to MULP. Then, I asked everyone what it means to them to be a union member here and now in this dystopian year in this changing country. Here’s what they had to say.

MARY HAMPTON: My name is Mary Hampton. I am a community organizer with the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation, and it’s a regional branch of the AFL-CIO. I’ve been organizing for about five years. I’ve been involved in the labor movement probably about eight years. I started working for Minneapolis Public Schools as a special education assistant in 2016, and it was important for me to find a job that was unionized, because I come from a labor family.

My mom was a third generation welder, sheet metal worker, and my dad is a social worker with child protection with Minneapolis and Hennepin County for 30 years, and both of their parents were unionized. My dad’s dad worked at General Motors in Illinois, and was able to provide for his family. He had 12 kids, he was able to take care of all of them with the union job. And my grandpa, he was a welder. He actually helped create the duct work at the Mall of America that helps recycle the air and the heat and stuff. I always think that’s kind of cool.

ALVAREZ: With all of that in your background, and with all we’ve been discussing here at MULP the past two days, I’m asking folks what does it mean to you to be a union member here and now in the United States of America in 2025?

HAMPTON: I’ve always really felt that being in a union is access. A union and the labor movement is an established place. It’s an entity that has respect and that can move and change things in a tangible way, especially in these moments where there’s a lot of aspirational movements. There’s nothing wrong with that, but after you go to a rally, now what? After you go meet for some community stuff, now what? I think being involved in labor and being involved in my union gives me something to do with it.

I don’t have control over the military. I don’t have control over what the leaders are gonna do, but I have control over this, and it’s my union.

The political power that labor has and has had in the past is, in a way, not being used as we could. There is so much power and influence that labor has that in these moments it could be so transformative. I think a lot of people feel the same way, and even if everyone doesn’t agree on how to go there, we have these places where we can have the conversation.

I’ll also say, I think with the union it’s a place you can’t push me out of. You can’t tell me I’m not allowed to be here because my dues go into the work that’s being done here. This is my space. Especially as a Black woman, people don’t really want my voice, or they don’t want to hear my vision. I get to have control over that and advocate for the people that don’t necessarily get their voices heard, and I can make the spaces for people, and I think that’s also really powerful.

TREY BOLTON: I am Trey Bolton. I work at Fairview Riverside Hospital. I’m a psychiatric associate on some mental health units. I’m from SEIU healthcare, Minnesota and Iowa. I mainly work with pediatric patients, supporting them and helping them throughout their time while they’re in a crisis management situation. I’ve been doing this off and on now for nine years, and it’s been a wild ride, but I’ve loved every bit of it.

ALVAREZ: What does it mean to you to be a union member here, now in United States, 2025?

BOLTON: I think a big thing that it means to me is just having a strong, supportive community. I know that not everyone has that, especially with everything that is going on in, not only just the world, but also specifically in our own country here. It means to have a group of people who are willing to fight not only for our own needs, but also care about our patients. 

A lot of those cuts that are coming down from the federal government are directly affecting not only our patients who rely on Medicaid reimbursements and Medicare reimbursements, but they also directly fund our units in hospitals. And when we don’t have that kind of funding, our patients are put in danger. The nice thing is that we’ve been able to use our union membership together to fight for increased reimbursement rates on the state level, along with supporting each other and making the community that, when things get tough, we can work together to keep ourselves and our patients safe.

CLAIRE MATTHEWS-LINGEN: I’m Claire Matthews-Lingen. I grew up in the Twin Cities in Minnesota, and have been working at Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (CTUL) for three and a half years. We’re a worker center in South Minneapolis. I’m fundraising in there. We support low wage workers of color around the Twin Cities. I also am in a grad program at the University of Minnesota, Master of Human Rights focusing on labor rights. There’s surprisingly little about labor rights in that program. MULP I’m seeing as a supplement to the lack of programming they have around labor. I see it working well with my current job and also the education I’m in right now.

I’m also involved in my staff union. There’s about 12 of us in a small staff union unit connected to the CWA, the Communication Workers of America. That’s been a good experience of seeing the inner workings of a union, even at a really small scale.

ALVAREZ: Given your experience as a union member, but also being part of the labor movement through a worker center, what does it mean to you to be doing that work, especially given the specific nature of the work you do at the Worker Center? What does it mean to be doing that work in the year of our Lord 2025, in this country? 

MATTHEWS-LINGEN: I feel like the staff union at CTUL is ideally walking the walk of the working conditions that we want people to have. On some level there’s that — acting out the reality that we want within our small unit, doing what we can there. 

Also, in the current moment, thinking about how we really need the solidarity and the understanding of supporting non-union workers alongside building up union power. That piece of CTUL work has been really solid in the Twin Cities for around 17 or 18 years. Thinking about the people that are often left out of the traditional labor movement, and knowing that needs to all be tied together. Thinking about the historic hurt there in some cases, of workers not seeing themselves reflected in the labor movement. 

Coming into my job at CTUL, I learned that a lot of times there’s tension between unions and worker centers in different cities. I think that that’s been really effectively challenged by CTUL and by the labor movement in the Twin Cities, because we do work really closely with unions, but also know that we’re in a distinct lane of work as well. So, that’s been really positive to see and to know that there can be that level of solidarity. 

ALVAREZ: Hell yeah. Go support your local labor center, folks!

ALVAREZ: All right, gang, that’s gonna wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank all the incredible folks at the University of Minnesota Labor Education Services team, everyone who does the unsung work to make the Minnesota Union Leadership Program happen.

And I want to thank all the MULP participants who sat down and spoke with me for this episode, and everyone who attended for making our retreat so special and for keeping the labor movement alive.

And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network, where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle here in the US and around the world.

Sign up for The Real News newsletter so you never miss a story, and help us do more work like this by going to the​re​al​news​.com/​d​onate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference.

I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

This episode of the Working People Podcast was published on November 20.