Guest Editorial Series: AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Bethany Winkels (Interview Transcript)
From federal cuts and ICE accountability to mining and DFL leadership, AFL-CIO’s Bethany Winkels outlines a labor movement demanding backbone, policy fluency, and moral clarity.
Blue North Beacon spoke with AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Bethany Winkels to discuss labor priorities as Minnesota turns toward the 2026 legislative session and midterm elections.
Bethany Winkels was elected Secretary-Treasurer of the Minnesota AFL-CIO in November of 2025. Winkels, a member of LIUNA Local 563, first joined the Minnesota AFL-CIO in 2016 before becoming Executive Director in 2020. She took a leave of absence in 2018 to work on the campaign of now-Governor Tim Walz. Prior to her time at the AFL-CIO, she organized on behalf of many other campaigns and causes, both in Minnesota and across the country – including working to elect Senator Elizabeth Warren, raising the minimum wage in Minnesota, and passing the Paid Family and Medical Leave program which launched in January 2026.
The conversation covered a wide range of topics including the affordability crisis facing workers, the harm brought on by federal cuts and delays, Labor’s perception of the DFL party, mining, and how Labor has been impacted by ICE operations across the state.
Below is the full transcript of our interview.
Jordan Hagert:
For our readers, can you give some quick background on the Minnesota AFL-CIO, its mission, and your role with the organization?
Bethany Winkels:
The Minnesota AFL-CIO is the umbrella labor organization. There are our AFL-CIO state federations in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. A lot of amazing leaders have come before us across the labor movement.
The preamble to the constitution of the National AFL-CIO really speaks to the humanity of all people and workers and all of our communities having the ability to get a fair return on their wages, for their wages, for their work, as well as have a voice and have safety and have the ability to influence not just what’s happening in their workplace but what’s happening in their communities and in all the halls of power.
Hagert:
What economic pressures are you hearing most about from rank and file workers right now and how is that shaping your legislative agenda?
Winkels:
Yeah, I mean, people are getting it from both ends, right? We see the cost of things going up.
There absolutely is an affordability crisis, no matter what Donald Trump wants to feed you.
And at the same time, we’re seeing more billionaires per capita than perhaps ever in our country, or at least going back to the robber baron age. So we know that the resources are there.
They’re literally being hoarded by people who play by their own rules and elect folks who will not hold them accountable. So we know folks are getting their paychecks not only hit from the cost of things, but But also, even as we’ve bargained for good health care, bargained for good benefits, health care is just skyrocketing, right? So people are taking hits to their paycheck to keep up with their health care.
And that makes everything even harder to afford. And there hasn’t been real legislation put forward that has helped folks, right? You look at who got all the money back from the big beautiful bill.
We cut a bunch of services. We’re going to be feeling that, especially in our health care realm, but not only in our health care realm while billionaires are paying less and less and less.
Hagert:
What are the business sectors that provide some of the most opportunities for your members across the state?
Winkels:
We have a really wide coalition, right? We’ve got public sector workers, educators, we’ve got folks who work in state government, city government, we’ve got the snow plow drivers, we’ve got building trades, we’ve got, you know, manufacturing and food production and health care. Health care is a huge growing sector and especially as Minnesota continues to have more and more folks reaching retirement or getting to a place where they need support, that’s not going to stop.
Those are just some of the sectors, but it’s a really broad coalition.
Hagert:
A quick political question here, how would you describe the labor’s current perception of the DFL party and then what type of DFLers have been the most successful in communicating to and representing your members?
Winkels:
So I’ll start with the first part. I think that across the board we’ve had a lot of acknowledgments that the DFL really is working to put working people first. They’re deeply committed to collective bargaining. They have drawn very clear lines about the importance of not just having the opportunity for folks to unionize, but making sure that when we have new units, right, they’re getting recognized and that the benefits that some of the employers refuse to bargain can get talked about at the state level, right? Paid family medical leave being a good example of that.
And we also have too many DFLers who haven’t taken the time to really understand what the labor movement is, what our unions are, why we have to have conversations around, you know, when and people say, well, why shouldn’t they have to use some of their paid time off for part of their paid family medical leave? Well, a lot of those workers didn’t take pay raises because they opted and bargained to have extra paid time off. So now you wanna punish them for that, right? This isn’t easy to say in context.
So when we have to have conversations with folks that just show that they do not understand what a union contract does or why the historic elements of it need to be valued, it can be very challenging.
When it comes to the folks who are really speaking to the members, I mean, Melissa Hortman, of course, right? Just is such a hero for folks across the movement and was trusted and considered a friend by the entire movement.
Tim Walz was a union member, right? Speaking and being able to speak from this position of why a union contract and why his family had union contracts not making the difference. And then at the local level, we’ve got folks who are really just pushing to say, how do we get more union members?
How do we support the idea that a broader labor movement is gonna put us where we need to be to have a stronger society? You look at other countries that have strong economies, that have strong investments in their civil society. They have very strong labor movements, stronger than ours.
And so part of the reason we’re seeing the erosion and the ability of billionaires to push so hard is because they spent decades undermining the labor movement. they know that we would hold them accountable. And by like attacking us, it makes it easier for them to get away with murder.
Hagert:
Does the DFL, do you think, have any work to do to ensure support from organized labor as we head into the election year?
Winkels:
I think we need folks who are willing to not just vote with us, but lead for us, right?
We need to elect more union members to office. We need the folks who are already in elected office who aren’t union members, even if they do have family members or relatives who are union members, that doesn’t mean that they are willing to stand up and fight in the closed door room. And I also think we need to have folks who really appreciate and don’t just try to manage community partnerships, not just with the labor movement, with community overall. When we have folks who are fighting for and demanding things in the streets, that’s not something to be placated. That’s something, especially when there are values alignment, to be partnered with.
And too many folks want to – and this is especially at the federal level for Democrats – seemingly just want to do beltway work. They want to get the photo op. They want to invite somebody to a press conference. But when it comes to actually talking about what could your members do on the ground to build support for this idea we share together, those aren’t questions they’re asking.
They’re not bringing an organizing mentality to their work. They need to shift that so that they can be powerful. And we see that with folks like Tina Smith.
We see that with folks like Ilhan Omar, and we need to have more of it across the board.
Hagert:
Speaking of an organizing mentality and things going on at the federal level, I want to touch on ICE’s ongoing operations in Minnesota.
How have ICE activities impacted your members, And what role has labor played in pushing back against ICE in the last few months in particular?
Winkels:
Well, I’ll just say that we have been very proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with our community members as we demand that our democracy not only live up to the laws of our land, the Constitution, but also that the administration would be held accountable to adhering to those things, and also saying we’re going to protect folks from violence. We’re going to protect folks from abduction.
we’re going to push back on the disinformation and propaganda that keeps getting spun up to weaponize certain elements of our country against each other, frankly, so that they can keep them angry and distracted and not demanding that their health care costs get lowered and not demanding that they have access to decent schools or good investment in water infrastructure. The sleight of hand from the Republican Party is infuriating, and we can’t continue to treat bad faith politicians and bad faith actors as if they are coming to the table because we’ll only end up negotiating with ourselves. We have to stop accepting the premise of their lives. I love that. Absolutely awful things. And when it comes to ICE I’ll just say every single union in our state has been impacted and the stories I could tell you are overwhelming.
I’m trying to flesh this out for the people who are still under the illusion that they’re going after the bad guys and it’s you know. They’re going after anyone they can get and then after the fact they look for people that they can pretend are the bad guys. That’s what they’re doing. And when you talk about indigenous folks getting arrested because of the color of their skin, that is not about who are the good guys or the bad guys, that is about who can we politicize to make enough of the population think it is appropriate to do these Stasi tactics. And when it comes to what we’ve done, we have worked in coalition to create infrastructure, to create mutual aid, not just for union members, but also for their families and also supporting the broader communities. We have worked hard to make sure that we’re working in close sync with the elected officials who are standing firm with us against these horrific actions. You think about the building trades, right?
They go to job sites. They’ve had ICE show up at a job site saying, we’re looking for this guy. They don’t give a name. They don’t give real information. It’s a picture of a brown man and then when they supposedly quote-unquote can’t find that guy they literally just start grabbing brown guys and later many are found to have been if not citizens and documented right and they’ve had to be released and we get no acknowledgement of these errors all of it is swept under the rug the Pete Stauber’s the Brad Finstead’s of the world are either silent or they’re pushing forward this dystopian 1984 nonsense that hey we can’t do anything that might undermine what Donald Trump is saying is true, even if our eyes are literally telling us otherwise.
And that is dangerous. The fight right now is not just about ICE. It is about the truth and lies.
And we saw January 6th, if you allow for a lie to become a truth for a section of the population, that is still how they are weaponizing and justifying these actions, because they have a small base of people that still are fixated on big lie, and therefore are willing to go down the road of violence, unconstitutionality, and harm to stay in that sector of the in-group.
We cannot have two truths coming out about what happens and what has been happening across our state in Minnesota, not just in the metro, but as far flung as Willmar, right, where we grew up.
And the stories are horrific, and not just the stories of the individuals, most of whom are brown, black, Asian, and indigenous, who are getting swept up, who do have documentation, who are citizens, but also of all of the folks who are being pulled in because they are constitutional observers or doing mutual aid. We’ve got healthcare providers that are trying to go to some houses being followed. And once they get tagged, they can’t go and do help anymore because they are using AI illegally, or if not illegally, then in a horrific unregulated gray area that the billionaires like to create spreadsheets and databases of people’s faces.
And then they will come knock on the door and say, hey Nancy, nice to see you again. intimidation tactics, especially tied to the fact that most of the folks they’re doing this to and a lot of the leaders of what is happening in Minnesota are women, it’s gender-based violence, right? Like the bullies, the people that you would never want to be in charge, have the guns, have the authority, and are willing to use it in completely irresponsible ways. And on top of that, you have the actual police forces and many folks have differing opinions on the police. We know that there are police officers, sheriffs, who are flagging. They have officers being detained on a work because ICE doesn’t care. They’re going after everybody. They’re going after our peace officers. We also had one of the chiefs of a local suburb on her off time go to a local AA meeting to be an observer, try to make sure folks come in and out, we’re safe, and one of the ICE agents come up to her and said, you should get a job. To a police chief, right? This is all about propaganda and asking folks to swallow a lie so that they can continue to weaponize, victimize, and harm a certain set of the population because then they can do it to anybody.
And we know that Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon are the folks that are doing their testing of messages. Steve Bannon continues to say, we’re never going to let them steal another election again. We’re going to have ice at every polling location.
That is their vision. This is an unaccountable secret police that they want to weaponize, and they need to have legitimacy to do it, and they are trying desperately to build that legitimacy on lies and propaganda.
Hagert:
Looking back at the last session and you touched on this briefly earlier, the AFL-CIO was integral to passing the state’s new Paid Family and Medical Leave program. How would you assess the implementation of that program thus far?
Winkels:
Exceptionally well done.
Our unemployment insurance program, on which the Pace Family Medical League program was mirrored, is one of the best, safest, most secure in the country. All, again, of the lies around fraud and what is happening are not only inaccurate, they are politically motivated propaganda. We know that people are taking advantage, and by I say taking advantage, I mean using a social safety net that they are supposed to be using.
The people who don’t like it are the ones who have been doing exploitative policies. someone says, well, what am I going to do if my worker just wants to take time off? Well, if your business model is built on the idea that someone with a new child or someone with a dying parent can’t take time off at reduced pay to be clear, like people aren’t pulling home whole paychecks, and you can’t figure that out, you just expect people to be automatons, you have some internal work to do.
Hagert:
Do you anticipate any legislative reforms, positive or negative, related to paid family leave this session?
Winkels:
No, we are recommending that we let it play out. I mean we are a month and a half into this.
We have to see what is and isn’t working. We have to listen to the professionals. We have to listen to the folks both on the business side as well as the user side about what is happening, and if there need to be smart reforms, then we should review that.
But this idea that we should change it before it’s even gotten out of the gate is absolutely politically motivated to undermine the idea that this is something that should exist.
Hagert:
What lessons stand out to you from your organizing and advocacy efforts around Paid Family Leave that can be used to advance other labor priorities?
Winkels:
I mean, good organizing has always got to have a long game.
We always hope that these campaigns will be quick, and we will be able to win. And we have to be ready for the fact that we might need to educate folks. We might need to bring folks along. We might need to try a lot of tactics. We might need to replace some bosses. And in this case, the bosses are the legislature.
The fact that we were able to achieve all of the wins in our 2023 session and biennium that we did was based on years of hard work, coalition building, faith, community, labor, politicians who shared our values. And that is why even with tiny majorities, Senator Dietzik, Speaker Hortman, the leadership that has come on since, we were able to achieve what is truly miraculous when you look at other states that have trifectas that have been stuck in the mud because of tiny internal politics. And I shouldn’t say tiny, that’s not necessarily fair.
But when we fight each other versus looking up and looking at the big picture, if we are not prepared to look at that big picture and know, hey, we are going to do things, we are going to get things set up, we need to take things piece by piece, and then keep going, and that is similar to a lot of issues.
Upsetting the status quo is often one of the most important parts of organizing.
Too many people think that the way things are is like the weather. You have no control. And that is simply not true.
But if you can’t show that we can make efforts and put forward effort that will have positive impact and make things shift, then it’s harder to get farther down the road. That doesn’t mean whatever we pass is always good enough, but it takes us a step closer to what is just, and to what our demands truly are. We can never lose sight of the long view, and we also have to keep moving forward every step of the way, and celebrating those victories as we go.
Hagert:
If you had to define the labor movement’s North Star for the upcoming legislative session, what are the top three outcomes that would most directly improve the lives of working families?
Winkels:
The first thing is protecting Minnesotans from the harmful cuts, and political threats that are coming from the Trump administration, we unfortunately are seeing across agencies, the federal government weaponizing itself against Minnesotans. Different agencies are racking up different amounts that they are being told we are not passing along these dollars.
That’s not legal. We are going to do an audit at an unnamed date based on unsighted data that we have that you are in a fraudulent space, none of which is grounded in reality. And even if, and we will win in court, with the help of our amazing Attorney General, and his leadership, and other folks who are fighting those fights, the delays have real impact.
It has a real impact on whether or not kids are going to have what they need to achieve their potential in school. It has real impact on whether or not folks who have been working steady in the building trades are going to continue to have empty benches, and the work that they need done because we have the funding coming through and the Department of Transportation isn’t continuing to cancel projects based on a political agenda.
And so I think that protection and that mentality of holding the line is one of the most important pieces.
After that it’s about investments. It’s about investments in bonding. It’s about investments in our schools, and our healthcare programs, and the places where people really need these services, and oftentimes union members are the ones delivering them.
And I think if I was going to name a third, it would be accountability around ICE. We know that we have folks who are not being held accountable at the federal level. They’re working extrajudicially. They’re not even upholding their own laws. We need to make sure that we are using every lever we can to protect Minnesotans from ICE and the administration overall however we can legally as a state.
Hagert:
What barriers to organizing, and touch on this a little bit, to organizing and collective bargaining are workers still facing in Minnesota and what are some fixes that lawmakers should prioritize this session?
Winkels:
I think the biggest thing is that federal labor law has become so impossible to navigate for the average people who want to form a union.
And that isn’t right. The ability to collectively bargain - that’s a right. That’s a right people have fought and died for and that we should have across our nation. And when the laws literally undermine that ability, or when you have brave workers who sacrifice so much to win a union contract or to win a union, then have people who refuse to sit down and bargain a first contract in good faith.
The Amazon Workers Union is still not able, nor has Starbucks truly, come to the table with a full contract. Their goal is always to delay, delay, delay, right? To the point that the union effort hopefully on their end dries out.
And they have the resources that it’s easier to withstand because they are so exploitative. So we need federal changes to our labor law. And the PRO Act which if folks haven’t made themselves aware of this, they should. They shouldn’t just think, oh yeah, I’ll vote for that. They should know why they should vote for it. They should be fighting to vote for it.
They should be bringing it to their leadership at the federal level saying, this needs to be a priority. The Employee Free Choice Act back in 2008, President Obama, he really prioritized healthcare. It was important to make steps, right? But we know Obamacare isn’t perfect.
We also know if ESCA had actually passed, organizing and the power of workers would look very different today. So we cannot miss that next opportunity. We have to prioritize and pass real federal reform, and the PRO Act is the bill to do it.
Hagert:
As demand accelerates for the critical minerals made up for clean energy and housing construction, and Minnesota competes to be a leader in that supply chain. What role should responsible union built mining play? What guardrails are necessary to ensure those jobs align with long-term environmental sustainability?
Winkels:
So the first thing I would say is we have to acknowledge the need to innovate. We have to address the climate crisis. We also have to make sure that we’re not pushing off our needs onto countries and workers that have less safety that have more exploitation, that is a horrible action for a powerful country to take.
And so when it comes to things like mining, if you are going to Indonesia, if you are going to some other countries, they don’t even have mining equipment. We see small children who are doing this work with their bare hands. And that’s not an overstatement. So we really do need to be honest with ourselves not just about our moral imperatives around climate change, but also our moral imperatives about being a global superpower.
And just because we can force others to mine this for us, and then all of us have cell phones, and all of us demand electric cars, what are the real outcomes of that?
When it comes to how do we protect our waters, how do we protect our land? Absolutely, we need to follow the science.
We need to have strict protocols which in Minnesota we do, and we can continue to strengthen those as science dictates. And we also need to acknowledge when you have a unionized workforce, in and of itself, you are going to have an extra check and balance that doesn’t exist when you don’t. That is a good thing. Anytime we are losing market share for the labor movement, everyone should be concerned about that.
And it is not as simple as, these folks should get resort jobs.
I cannot tell you how frustrated I am by the lack of understanding of what a union job that has been fought for, and worked on, and a contract means to a family, versus earning $17 an hour six months out of the year
So we do have real questions to ask ourselves and people need to not pretend that they have all the information just because it feels good to be part of a group that seems to have a catchy slogan.
And when I think about mining specifically, I just think Minnesota can and should be an innovator and a leader. We have done that going back to Wheat and Norman Borud, I think I’m saying his name right. We have done that at the University of Minnesota in a variety of ways. We have so many resources in this state to think through innovation, safety, standards, how to be a model.
And anyone who’s calling for a moratorium on anything, that’s saying no more innovation. Prove it first, right? Or moratorium on X. That’s just telling everyone this is our quick way to stop it until some imaginary boundary that they are very rarely able to acknowledge is clear and true and transparent gets met.
It’s the the same Republican tactics of delay, delay, delay, undermine, undermine, undermine, that the boss is using in contracts and that the Republicans are using in negotiations. And when we see that from activists, even well-intentioned activists who want to at the end of the day, protect things like the boundary waters, as we all do, as folks who live up there do, it’s very frustrating.
We need folks to act from a space of grounded, good faith reality, and not try to simplify very complex conversations. We shouldn’t be afraid of expertise. And too often we see that.
Hagert:
What role should the legislature play in strengthening prevailing wage laws and project labor agreements, particularly in the bonding years, legislators consider investments in infrastructure and clean energy?
Winkels:
They should take any actions they can, right? Those are things that ensure that we don’t have municipalities or the state pitting themselves against each other, racing to the bottom, workers being stuck in the middle of those jurisdictional or budgetary battles.
When it comes to the specifics, I would defer to my brothers, sisters, and siblings in the trades. And we work closely with them regarding the expertise that they bring to those laws.
But any protections we can do to make sure that the working people aren’t politicized, that they’re not given the short end of the stick, those should be prioritized. We should be looking at that. And I would hope that elected officials are keeping that front of mind they’re considering what they want to prioritize.
Hagert:
Last question here, when all things are said and done, how will labor evaluate whether this legislative session was a success?
Winkels:
Because of the occupation of our communities by ICE, I think that we are all in a space where we are playing it day by day. A year ago, I could have never imagined that the first day of session would have been focused on remembering the life and loss of Melissa and Mark Hortman. Now, of course, that is the thing we are all focused on.
We are in horrifically challenging times and I don’t think it’s helpful to set benchmarks when we don’t understand the context. There is so much about this context that is very much not only not understood, but actively being manipulated by folks who just want to have power grabs wherever they can.