Event

Labor Day Solidarity Picnic 2023

September 9 @ 5:00 pm – 8:00 pm CDT

Join the East Side Freedom Library on Saturday, September 9th, to share food, drink, and music, and help plan our future!

American workers have celebrated Labor Day for more than 140 years. This has been an occasion to honor our history, build solidarity and community in the present, and look towards a better future. We invite you to join together on our beautiful front lawn for food, drink, music, updates from ongoing campaigns and struggles, and community-building. Our national Labor Day holiday’s roots lay right here on St. Paul’s East Side. In April 1894, after several rounds of wage cuts, railroad workers from all trades—engineers, firemen, brakemen, trainmen, switchmen, conductors, maintenance of way workers, and more—united into one union and struck against James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railroad. With the support of other St. Paul workers, they forced Hill to back down and rescind the wage cuts. Their success inspired 125,000 railroad workers to strike across the country that summer, and their power pushed President Grover Cleveland to declare a national Labor Day holiday in September of that year.

We not only have a great history, but we are living in exciting times which portend a bright future for working people. Last fall, by threatening a nationwide strike, 110,000 railroad workers won significant wage increases, sick time and more humane schedules, and improved safety precautions. In August, 340,000 Teamsters at UPS won a contract ensuring the installation of air conditioning in trucks, substantial wage increases for full and part-time workers, and improved safety in warehouses. In the Twin Cities, workers at the Minnesota Historical Society, Half-Price Books, Starbucks Coffee, and the Science of Museum of Minnesota have organized, rallied, and in some cases struck, gaining public support and pressuring their employers to come to the bargaining table. In the past month, doctors in the Allina system have organized the largest doctors’ union in the country!

See you on the lawn!