Walz Labor Wins Hailed by Unions as Businesses Flash Red Lights

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz brings to the Democratic ticket some wins on labor-policy priorities such as paid family leave and workplace safety laws, eliciting praise from labor unions and consternation from business groups.

Walz was touted as a “champion” for organized labor immediately after Kamala Harris announced the former teacher, union member, and congressman as her running mate on Tuesday. Businesses, however, say Walz evolved during the past two years from a pragmatic dealmaker to the governor signing off on a flood of progressive policy mandates.

While the labor agenda that he pushed was aided by Democrats who have controlled both chambers of Minnesota’s statehouse since 2022, it’s less clear whether he would be able to help Harris break Washington’s decades-old logjam on these issues and get the support of businesses and Republicans.

“He’s a worker-friendly governor,” said Michael Moberg, a labor and employment attorney for Jackson Lewis PC in Minneapolis. “At times, some of the legislation he’s supported and laws he’s signed are making it more complicated for employers to do business in Minnesota.”

Since Democrats took control of both chambers of Minnesota’s statehouse in 2022, Walz has signed laws establishing comprehensive paid family and medical leave for workers, barring employee noncompetes, requiring strict workplace safety standards for child labor and warehouse workers, and banning businesses from forcing workers to attend “captive audience” meetings—mandatory gatherings where employers discourage unionization.

Union advocates say they see opportunity in how much Walz was able to get done in his tenure.

“The governor is a union person,” Minnesota AFL-CIO President Bernie Burnham said in an interview. “He’s willing to sit down with you and have conversations, even if they’re sometimes tough conversations. He can work through those things and usually get to a point where sometimes there’s compromise.”

Yet Walz’s record in Minnesota also shows disregard for how those same policies can harm employers, management-side lawyers and business advocates said in interviews. One thing both sides agree on: There’s little doubt he would help advance President Joe Biden and Harris’ pro-union agenda, for better or worse.

Paid Leave, Care Economy

Advocates for paid leave and “care economy” workers see opportunity with Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket. Paid leave, child care, and elder care workers have all been included in speeches on the campaign trail. They say Walz solidifies that commitment to these issues in a potential administration.

Paid leave has been gaining momentum at the state and federal level. Thirteen democratic-led states plus Washington, D.C., have passed their own programs, as bipartisan working groups in the House and Senate have been discussing potential paths for legislation that could clear Congress with the support of both parties.

In a Harris administration, Walz would be an asset in these negotiations to advance on issues like paid leave, said Curran McSwigan, senior economic policy adviser at the center-left Third Way think tank.

“He has this extensive record and reputation as someone who can make progress on important issues in a way that’s pragmatic,” McSwigan said, noting Walz’s bipartisan record when he was in the House. “Given how we know that a very close Congress will make things more difficult to pass, having that experience and that reputation will certainly be super important to achieving progress on a lot of these issues that are central to a Harris White House.”

Harris and Walz both have supported paid leave policies as public officials and talked openly about the importance of time off for caregiving in their own lives, said Vicki Shabo, senior fellow at the New America think tank.

“They would be in a strong position to bring together members of Congress around the kind of paid leave policy that the country needs,” she said.

Moberg, the managment-side attorney, said the state’s paid leave plan has been difficult for employers to prepare for, especially since lawmakers amended it earlier this year to allow for higher payroll tax rates overall but a discounted rate for small employers with fewer than 30 employees. Walz supported the changes, which are scheduled to take effect in 2026.

Beyond paid leave, Walz has also signed laws to boost enforcement to curb wage theft, giving the state’s Department of Labor and attorney general more authority to punish employers who aren’t paying their workers’ wages fully.

Minnesota also passed a law last year establishing a state-run sector council to set wages and other workplace standards for nursing home workers. The council—composed of labor, industry, and government representatives—is a new approach to improve working conditions by sector, said Dave Kamper, senior state policy strategist for the Economic Policy Institute Action organization.

And businesses needed some convincing from Walz to pass that law, Kamper, who worked at the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees before EPI, said.

“Governor Walz was helpful in bringing all the different parties to the table to to genuinely hammer out a compromise on how to make the standards board work,” said Kamper. “There are certainly other industries, other states, where this has come up and it’s often opposed very strongly. In this case, the unions and the employers and Governor Walz and the legislature as a whole were able to come up with a deal that everyone felt was in their best interests.”

Political Evolution

Despite signing a laws long pushed by unions and Democrats, at times Walz served as a check on his legislature’s more progressive instincts, said Larry Jacobs, a political scientist and professor at the University of Minnesota.

Walz vetoed an initial minimum pay bill for rideshare drivers at app-based companies like Lyft Inc. and Uber Technologies Inc. before working with those businesses on compromise legislation enacted in 2024—his only veto since becoming governor in 2019.

Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer and Harris’ brother-in-law, has joined the campaign and is taking temporary leave from the company.

Walz’s veto, along with his efforts to scale back the cost of the paid leave program, reflect a pragmatic approach to advancing pro-worker policies, Jacobs said.

“He’s certainly more moderate than many of the Democrats in the legislature,” he said. “He’s really been supportive but trying to tamp down the progressive tsunami of legislation.”

But the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce has seen a change over Walz’s five years as governor from a more moderate dealmaker to a governor signing a wave of workplace mandates and other progressive policies, said Doug Loon, the chamber’s president and CEO. The rapid-fire lawmaking over the past two years has hit businesses hard and hurt the state’s economic competitiveness to attract new jobs, he said.

That policy push under Walz stands in contrast to the business community’s experience working with him during his first term, prior to Democrats taking full control of the legislature in 2022.

“Back when we had divided government, we found the governor to be very amicable,” Loon said. “Compromise was something he was striving for.”

Since then, Walz has largely shed the moderate reputation that he had during his time in Congress.

“He’s a decent match for Vice President Harris,” in terms of policies that advance higher taxes and heavier regulatory burdens, Loon said. “It’s not what we saw prior to ’22 from the governor. It’s not what we saw when he was in Congress.”