On April 8, LaborLab was invited to testify before the Minnesota Senate Labor Committee, where researcher Teke Wiggin presented findings from LaborLab’s report The Price of Repression. Wiggin was joined by Adam Reich, professor of sociology at Columbia University and co-director of the Columbia Labor Lab, who presented complementary research documenting workers’ experiences with employer anti-union tactics across Minnesota nursing homes.
Wiggin laid out LaborLab’s estimates of the costs of five anti-union campaigns at four Minnesota nursing homes between 2022 and 2025, ranging from $139,000 to over $400,000 per campaign. Those figures, he explained, are only the tip of the iceberg. The estimates are built from employer and consultant disclosures, industry billing rates, anti-union manuals, and scholarly research, but loopholes and abysmal compliance rates mean the true costs are likely higher still.
At the heart of the report’s findings was a simple question: why are publicly subsidized nursing homes spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to prevent their workers from organizing, when that same money could have gone toward giving those workers a raise? In most of these cases, the nursing homes could have done exactly that for less than what they spent trying to stop them from organizing.
The testimony was accompanied by accounts from Chapel View CNA Cassandra Thomas, who described working short-staffed, getting injured on the job, and watching management bring in a union-busting consultant and “waste” money on anti-union meetings. Bernie Burnham, president of the Minnesota AFL-CIO, also testified, calling the anti-union campaigns in the state’s nursing homes “unacceptable” and “shameful,” and urging the committee to ensure nursing home workers are paid what they deserve and treated with dignity.
Read the full report here and watch the testimony below.