Can this reality — work very hard, don’t get very far — be ended?
Rep. Ryan Winkler may be a Harvard- and Minnesota-educated lawyer and four-term DFL legislator from Golden Valley, but he’s also a guy from Bemidji who watched his hometown friends and extended family struggle as real median household income in Minnesota dropped 9.5 percent between 2001 and 2011.
That background has something to do with Winkler’s decision to take his House Select Committee on Living Wage Jobs on the road this fall. It summoned local pols and businessfolk to hearings in eight Minnesota cities, Bemidji among them, to consider how best to make work pay more.
There’s this, too: Winkler is historian enough to understand that growing income inequality is one of the biggest problems facing the state and nation, and idealistic (and ambitious) enough to believe that he and the Minnesota Legislature can do something about it.
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The emergence of a potent minimum wage coalition in recent months makes those ideas seem more politically plausible than they were a few years ago. So does the rise of TakeAction Minnesota, which crowed last week about its role in Betsy Hodges’ successful mayoral bid in the Nov. 5 Minneapolis election.
Calling itself a “people’s network,” TakeAction is sometimes tagged as socialist. But it stands for some pretty basic American ideas: People who want to work should be able to do so. People who work ought to be able to support themselves and their families. They ought to be able to afford health insurance. They ought to be able to vote without impediment.
TakeAction earns its liberal stripes when it makes clear that it means all people — ex-felons, single parents, country folk, inner-city dwellers, immigrants and people of color. And it maintains that where there are systemic barriers to work (and to work’s just rewards), government has a duty to knock them down.
In seven years, TakeAction has grown from 1,000 to 14,000 individual members, 26 member organizations and an e-network of 45,000. Executive director Dan McGrath says that growth springs from a sense that the American dream escalator out of poverty is no longer reliably working. “Whether we are knocking on doors in the suburbs or in Duluth or Grand Rapids, the question of income inequality is at the center of what people want to talk about,” McGrath said.
