On a balmy evening the Thursday after Labor Day, 2,000 Minneapolitans and visitors sat down to $20–$250 prix fixe meals served up by some of the city’s finest dining establishments at the second annual Dinner du Nord along Nicollet Mall. The event launched last year as part of a flagship effort by Mayor Jacob Frey and hospitality industry associations to showcase downtown Minneapolis’s economic and cultural revitalization. Tickets to this year’s event sold out.
As the dinner got underway, a few dozen members from the worker center Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (CTUL) pulled up to the corner of Eighth Street & Nicollet Avenue with microphones, oversized props, and a small set of velvet curtains representing a stage. They were there to perform a playful but pointed renegade production called Theater du Nord.
Over a series of skits, members acted out experiences familiar to many service industry workers: scarfing down a snack over a trash can while on break, learning a time-off request has been denied, making a dime while the bosses make a dollar. Behind the “stage” members held signs asking, “Is health and safety on the menu?”
“When it comes down to the budget for businesses, they get a pretty large slice and we as workers get scraps,” says Artemis, a bartender who’s been working in hotels since spring 2025. (Speaking of scraps: A “portion” of Dinner du North proceeds benefit Help the House Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for workplace safety.)
Just a few weeks before welcoming guests to Dinner du Nord, Mayor Frey spoke of “difficult decisions” and “rightsizing” spending during his 2027 budget address. Pointing to a $60 million budget gap, the mayor warned that “some aspirations are not affordable in our current fiscal reality.”
Among those aspirations wiped out in the face of harsh fiscal truths? The Labor Standards co-enforcement program, through which worker centers (CTUL, Restaurant Opportunities Center, and the New Justice Project) receive city contracts to inform workers about their rights and assist them in filing labor violations. As of 2023, the city has hired one full-time Labor Standards investigator for every 83,000 workers; the co-enforcement program is essentially the Labor Standards Division’s outreach arm. Since 2020, co-enforcement has helped recover $3 million in stolen wages and benefits for workers. In 2026, the budget for the program stood at $628,000; Mayor Frey’s cuts would reduce it to $232,000.
Meanwhile, the Minneapolis Convention Center and downtown assets (which include Target Center and U.S. Bank stadium), sponsors, and beneficiaries of Dinner du Nord, will receive $75 million in 2027, up $3 million from last year’s budget. The city’s total proposed 2027 budget is $2.3 billion.
Angelica, a 20-year veteran of the service industry, says she has repeatedly dealt with time-off denials, unsafe working conditions, wage theft, and racism over the course of her career. When she first started working, she didn’t speak English.
“I remember [the owners] used to give me honeybuns. The owner would say, ‘Angelica, this is for you.’ And you’d feel like, ‘Oh, she’s so nice,’” she remembers. But when Angelica asked for her tips? “The owners told me, ‘It’s not for you, it’s for us, because you work for us.’” When her employers found out that Angelica had been talking with her co-workers about wage theft, they reportedly fired her and others who had spoken out.
For Artemis, the issue has been accessing paid leave. In 2024, Minnesota expanded legislation requiring employers to offer workers up to 48 hours of earned sick and safe time (paid time off) and to notify them of these rights. But at her hotel job, Artemis says she didn’t get that information at her onboarding, and instead “heard far more about collecting parking fees than our ability to get time off.” It was only when a letter appeared in the mail from the Labor Standards department that Artemis’s employers complied with the law.
Angelica and Artemis’s experiences are not uncommon. Restaurant and hospitality workers face startlingly high rates of wage theft and work related physical and mental health issues. Rutgers University’s 2023 “Minimum Wage Non-Compliance in Minneapolis” report found the highest number of violations in the food-service industry, affecting at least 11% of workers in the sector; non-citizen women face minimum wage theft at two to four times the rate of white citizen men. “These numbers still do not approach the true number of violations,” the report cautions, which are estimated to cost Twin Cities workers $90 million per year.
Over last winter, Operation Metro Surge dealt a heavy blow on an industry already in crisis. According to North Star Policy Action, ICE activity in the Twin Cities hit food service and hospitality workers hardest. The cost, North Star Policy Action estimates, was nearly four million working hours, 4,600 jobs, and $71 million in wages.
“Ultimately workers are seen as an afterthought by the administration,” says Artemis, reflecting on the mayor’s reasoning for the cuts to Labor Standards co-enforcement. “But you can’t shove us off the blocks that we walk every single day, the buses that we take, the services we use. You can’t just shove us away if you want to have a revitalized downtown.”
Angelica compares Mayor Frey and the wealthy business association heads who organized Dinner du North to her ex-bosses, who gave her honeybuns while stealing her tips.
“It’s like, ‘I’ll give you a little crumb so you can be busy, but I’ll take the whole cake that is yours.' It’s not only affecting the people who are working, it’s affecting a family,” she says. “And when you’re affecting a family you’re affecting a whole society. It’s not like we’re asking for a favor, like a kid saying ‘Can I have this candy?’ No, we deserve it, it’s ours.”
