Minnesota

Wall Street Took Over a Vital Sign Language Service—And Started Union Busting

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This article is a joint publication of Workday Magazine and In These Times. “Do no harm” is the guiding principle of American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters’ professional code of conduct. But when Joe Klug, 28, worked as a Video Relay Service (VRS) interpreter for a Twin Cities metro area office of Purple Communications, he says this principle was routinely violated. The VRS field, which allows Deaf and Hard of Hearing people to make phone calls by video interfacing with interpreters, is difficult and fast-paced work. While some calls are social, others can be serious: medical emergencies, job interviews, jargon-heavy discussions with lawyers or sensitive conversations with doctors.

Art
Kira Ross is a member of ATU Local 1005 and Metro Transit’s first black woman mechanic. Ross is photographed while working at the Haywood Garage in Minneapolis, posing next to a tool box. 

Still Lives of Workers in Motion

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“Archive in Motion: The ATU Workers of Metro Transit”, a photography exhibition, is on display at the East Side Freedom Library, in St. Paul, Minn. featuring the photographs of Leslie Grant and Jeffrey Skemp of the workers of Metro Transit. The exhibit features film photographs of various transit workers, represented by Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1005, honoring the essential work they do and the importance of public transit in bringing people together in a shared public space. 

The exhibition includes portraits of the workers while on the job, as well as still-life photographs of objects bus operators carry with them, photos and scans of archival finds and everyday transit ephemera, and the architecture that makes up the transit system—from the mundane yet necessary infrastructure, to the wooded landscapes of the Twin Cities urban parks. 

Leslie Grant, a photographer and professor at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and Jeffrey Skemp, photographer and poet, began the project on Metro Transit by contacting ATU Local 1005. The union then invited the photographers to join a meeting and present the project to the union members.