Why Restaurants Are Unionizing: Unattributed Speculation Edition

Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.

Biz-Booster Magazine Attempts Labor Coverage

Much like sea captains fearing mutiny, restaurateurs are really paranoid these days about unions. So much so that the mostly anonymous, restaurant-owning sources in this Twin Cities Business story from today seem to believe that the city, unions, and even their own employees are plotting against them. Sounds like the lamest spy thriller ever. 

“Restaurant owners believe [United Here] Local 17 is using operatives to take jobs in targeted businesses, who identify and encourage disgruntled employees, inviting them out for a beer, where organizers are waiting with a sales pitch,” writes Adam Platt, raising the specter of "outside agitators" that anti-labor forces have historically relied on. 

But it’s not just these troublemakers threatening the livelihood of the business owners, ones Platt describes as “cowboy entrepreneurs.” (We'd love intel on the trust funds and rich spouses of many of these rootin', tootin' restaurant-owning rebels.) The Minneapolis city government is also apparently meddling with the purity of the marketplace. According to unidentified "insiders," Platt writes, "[Embattled restaurateur Ann] Kim was targeted for speaking out forcefully against the LSB," referencing the city’s proposed labor standards board, a non-existent org that, if created, would could make recommendations to the City Council.

While fretting that unions and theoretical labor boards are putting ideas in peoples' heads, Platt also seems to believe that all union-friendly restaurant employees are spoiled, "sour," pie-in-the-sky kids. "Disaffected 20-somethings who’ll be in grad school next year do not have standing to tell the owner who the milk vendor or general manager should be," he writes. (According to an April 2024 report from the National Restaurant Association, only 15.1% of college age waitstaff—ages 19-22—are enrolled in college.) At one point, it's suggested that most service industry jobs aren't for adults. At no point is a worker or union official quoted. (Hear from plenty of workers and labor folks in our story on the recent higher-end food/drink unionization wave; the bosses all refused to talk.)

Must be hard on the ego to be told that there's a better way to do your job by the people who work for you. But it’s even harder to take a stand and lose your job. You can support workers at the briefly unionized Kim’s, which just conspicuously and abruptly shut down, over at GoFundMe.

Teens Learn How To 'Crowbar' People Away From Abortion

After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, states began outlawing abortion across the country. But anti-choice advocates out there still feel they have work to do—like teaching teens in St. Cloud how to turn people against abortion. “We don’t want to just make it illegal. We want to make it unthinkable,” says class leader Liz, who the Strib (for some reason) permitted to go without a last name for this story. (She's "worried public association with the movement could affect [her] future employment," though sharing a majority SCOTUS opinion doesn't usually doesn't meet the anonymity threshold for major newsrooms.) Liz likens her work to being “a crowbar, not a sledgehammer.” While the federal judiciary is on her side (for now), nearly two in three Americans believe abortion should be legal in all/most cases. Even in small towns and rural areas. Here's hoping the Strib's new mission to expand coverage of Greater Minnesota doesn't always result in this kind of stenography for reactionary talking points in the name of both-sides journalism.

Corn Sweat Is Real Thing, But Don't Be Afraid

I’ve heard of the lake effect, but corn sweat is a new one. According to scientists it's a very real thing, and it can contribute to overall humidity if you live in a corn state like Ohio, Iowa, or Minnesota. “Transpiration, or evapotranspiration, is the term used to explain this phenomenon,” explains Braeden Coon at the AG Daily. “The process is common across the plant world. Think of it as breathing, but instead of carbon the plants expel oxygen.”

That “breathing” is just one of many things that can cause humidity to rise in a region, but it’s getting attention these days as corn is a major crop here in the U.S. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ranks Minnesota as the fourth biggest corn producer in the country with 1.5 billion bushels in the state. (Racket recently explored whether the state corn lobby is brainwashing school children, a charge it denied.) Ag Daily points out that, despite our human discomfort, corn sweat is actually a good thing—it means that we have healthy crops. “A lot of transpiration and humidity is a good thing for crops because it means there’s moisture available in the soil, the crops are successfully photosynthesizing, and they’re doing what they need to do to produce yield at the end of the season,” says field agronomist Meaghan Anderson at Iowa State University.

So, How About That Storm Last Night...

It was really bad! But also, really photogenic. Last night’s sky rumble left so much detritus and destruction at the State Fair that it was forced to delay opening today by a few hours, starting instead at the late morning time of 9 a.m. MPR estimates 150,000 Minnesota homes and businesses were without power this morning, and according to this resource site that number still looks to be around 63K as of 5 p.m. 

But boy, it sure did look cool.