Business

Norm Coleman used to sit on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, which oversees the U.S. Census Bureau. But now that he’s out of the U.S. Senate, he won’t have to worry about turning a corner at the Capitol and running into U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann and her deep suspicions about the [...]

In February Kadar Yusuf Haji Ali, a worker at the Jennie-O Turkey Store in Faribault, sat down for a cup of coffee with an organizer from United Food and Commercial Workers Local 789. A week later the Somali immigrant was fired from the slaughterhouse.

The slow-motion UNITE HERE labor meltdown continues both locally and nationally. The merger of the two storied unions, completed five years ago, has been acrimoniously unraveling over the last nine months. But one local entanglement appears to have resolved itself: This week negotiations will begin on a new contract for roughly 75 workers at the Radisson Hotel in Duluth.

United Food and Commercial Workers Local 789 has withdrawn charges of labor law violations by Wal-Mart against employees at its store in St. Paul’s Midway neighborhood. The union, which is currently engaged in an organizing campaign at Wal-Mart outlets throughout the Twin Cities, accused the world’s largest retailer last month of illegally threatening to terminate workers who supported unionizing.

A report released this week by the Federal Bureau of Investigation found that Minnesota ranked in the top fifteen states for mortgage fraud claims in 2008 and in the top ten on a couple of measure. Specifically, data from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network found Minneapolis FBI field offices ranked 9th in the number of [...]

Wal-Mart is threatening to fire pro-union workers at its store in the Midway neighborhood of St. Paul, according to a complaint filed today with the National Labor Relations Board. The charges, filed by United Food and Commercial Workers Local 789, allege that starting on June 11 corporate representatives began telling employees that they could easily acquire a list of union backers and that those people would lose their jobs.

At the urging of local meat packer JBS, Worthington will write off 80 percent of what it could tax a new apartment complex. The city council agreed to forego as much as $250,000 to tempt Gilt Edge, LLC, to build the 72-unit project, with JBS promising to pay rent on vacant apartments so the building [...]

The Minnesota Department of Health is investigating six cases of E.coli linked to eating raw Nestle Toll House cookie dough. The affected individuals range in age from 5 to 18 and became sick between May 3 and June 11. All have since recovered. Nationwide the tainted cookie dough is suspected in 66 cases of E.coli [...]

An “End the Fed” group that will rally today outside the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank hasn’t felt a backlash since Wednesday’s arrest of James von Brunn in the fatal shooting of a guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Von Brunn, who mixed anti-Semitism with antipathy for the Federal Reserve, served six years in prison for his 1981 attempt to take Federal Reserve board members captive.

Rep. Michele Bachmann took to the floor of the House of Representatives twice Tuesday, likening the United States to the Titanic and lambasting “gangster government” for meddling in carmakers’ affairs — though she boasts on her Web site of doing the same auto dealership-advocacy she decries Democrats for.