The Minnesota Senate and House on strong bipartisan votes Monday approved new contracts that 10 state employee unions negotiated with the Dayton administration. Workers would get a two-percent increase retroactive to July 1st 2017 and an additional 2.25 percent effective this July. Duluth Democrat Erik Simonson said about one area of particular concern to Republicans, “Our agencies, our commissioners… have committed to absorbing the costs of some of these increases within their existing budgets.”
Earlier some Republicans had proposed changes to the contracts which Democrats called “union-busting language.”