Dina Aune testifies before the Labor Committee about the tragic death of her son Brady Aune, pictured left, and the need for SF 1346, a bill that would create workplace safety standards for workers that use scuba gear to clear weeds from lakes Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2025. (Catherine Davis/Senate Media Services)
Take a seat in the Break Room, our weekly roundup of labor news in Minnesota and beyond. This week: bipartisan push for commercial diving regulations; more than 200 Ramsey County probation officers threaten to strike; Democrats propose path for Uber and Lyft drivers to unionize; Macalester student workers vote to form independent union; and data show federal workers aren’t lazy.
Bipartisan push for commercial diving regulations
Minnesota legislators are weighing new safety regulations for businesses that remove weeds and other aquatic plants from lakes after two young and inexperienced workers drowned in their first week on the job.
Brady Aune and Joe Anderson died two years apart in remarkably similar accidents that their parents blame on the carelessness of their employers, which didn’t provide adequate training or safety equipment that might have saved their lives.
Neither man was certified in scuba diving. In fact, neither had been scuba diving before they were handed oxygen tanks and weighted belts and sent to pull out weeds in deep murky water with little to no supervision.
Aune was 20 years old when he drowned in Lake Minnetonka in Spring 2022 on his fourth day working for $16 an hour for Dive Guys, an aquatic weed removal company owned by Matt Wilkie.
KARE 11 reported that investigators found Aune’s weighted belt was on backward, so he wasn’t able to remove it, and that just one of the five employees on the job was trained in scuba diving.
“Matt (Wilkie)’s carelessness with all these boys to save a dollar cost Brady his life (and) shattered his family,” Aune’s mother, Dina Aune, told members of the Senate Labor Committee on Tuesday. She was reading from a letter she sent to the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, which is considering criminal charges.
Aune said after her son’s death she received a phone call from a retired police officer who had quit working for Dive Guys because of how unsafe the conditions were. He told her he warned the owner he was going to kill “one of these kids.”
Anderson was 18 years old when he drowned in Lac Lavon in Dakota County two years later while working for a different company, Your Lake Aquatic Plant Management. It was his third day on the job and his first time diving underwater.
His parents say he was a strong swimmer but he received just 15 minutes of training the day he died, from a co-worker who wasn’t scuba certified. Anderson’s supervisor also wasn’t trained in CPR, and while first responders were able to resuscitate him, he died three days later in the hospital.
“It’s absolutely awful to live with this,” Anderson’s father, Joe Anderson, told lawmakers on Tuesday.
OSHA fined Dive Guys $128,450 and Your Lake Aquatic Plant Management $730,000, which the company is appealing. The men’s parents say the fines won’t prevent future deaths, and new regulations are needed.
The Brady Aune and Joseph Anderson Safety Act (SF1346), which has both Republican and Democratic authors, would require workers who use scuba equipment while removing aquatic weeds to have an open water scuba diver certificate, or more advanced certificate, from a nationally recognized agency.
Commercial diving operations would also have to require workers to wear a buoyancy control device that can inflate automatically like the yellow emergency vests on airplanes. David Anderson said such devices can be found on Amazon for less than $300 and could have saved their son’s life.
Businesses that break the law could face penalties of more than $15,000 from the Department of Labor and Industry for serious violations.
“The biggest thing that’s scaring the heck out of me is, even though it’s cold, spring will come soon,” David Anderson told lawmakers. “Both Brady’s company and Joe’s company are still in business today.”
Ramsey County probation officers call strike for next week
More than 200 Ramsey County probation and parole officers who supervise some 11,000 people could strike as soon as Tuesday unless they reach a deal with county leaders on pay raises, overtime pay and promotion rights.
Ramsey County probation officers, who are unionized with the Teamsters Local 320, say they are the lowest paid in the Twin Cities metro area: new probation officers earn $8 per hour less than the regional average, and the most experienced officers earn $6 per hour less, according to the union.
“In the 29 years I’ve been a probation officer, we’ve never had a strike and I don’t recall one ever being discussed,” said Jim Hawkins at a union rally announcing the strike outside the Ramsey County courthouse in St. Paul on Tuesday.
“We do not want to strike. We do not want to leave our clients and community without this important support for even one minute, let alone for however long a strike may last… But we need to be fairly compensated for the work we do,” he said.
A Ramsey County spokeswoman said county leaders have contingency plans to ensure “uninterrupted care” in the event of a strike.
“County leaders are committed to reaching a fair, equitable, and competitive agreement while ensuring high-quality service and fiscal responsibility,” the county said in a statement.
Democrats propose path to unionize for Uber and Lyft drivers
Less than a year after the Minnesota Legislature passed a sweeping bill raising wages for Uber and Lyft drivers, two Democrats announced plans to create a path for drivers to unionize.
Because they’re treated like independent contractors and not employees, Uber and Lyft drivers aren’t able to unionize under federal labor law.
“The best way to hold these companies accountable is to give drivers a seat at the table,” said Sen. Zaynab Mohamed, DFL-Minneapolis, during a Tuesday news conference with drivers and leaders from the Service Employees International Union.
The bill, which is still being drafted, is modeled off a law in Massachusetts, which became the first state to allow drivers on apps like Uber and Lyft to unionize through a ballot initiative passed by voters last November.
The drivers and their labor allies will need at least one Republican vote in the Minnesota House, where the traditionally anti-union GOP holds 67 votes out of 134; 68 are needed for passage.
Last year, lawmakers set minimum pay rates for drivers, increased insurance requirements and added procedures for firings — or “deactivations.”
Macalester students form first undergraduate union in Minnesota
Macalester student workers voted overwhelmingly to unionize, forming the first undergraduate student worker union in Minnesota.
The election was one of the largest in the Minnesota private sector in at least the past 25 years, according to the National Labor Relations Board’s online database, with around 1,100 student workers across campus eligible to vote.
Officials from the NLRB tallied the ballots cast over two days in the college library on Wednesday evening, announcing the results to cheers from about a dozen students: 406 in favor and 61 against.
“We put our hearts and souls into this … I’m in disbelief” said union organizer Eliot Berk, a junior biology major who works part-time as an office assistant at the Olin-Rice Science Center.
A Macalester spokesperson said the college “plans to proceed in good faith into collective bargaining with the elected leadership of the union.”
Federal workers aren’t uniquely lazy
The Trump administration justifies its purge of the federal workforce led by Elon Musk with the claim that government employees are lazy grifters.
Trump accused remote workers of golfing instead of working — something he himself does quite a bit — while his administration has repeated a debunked statistic that just 6% of federal employees are working full time in their offices (it’s more than half).
Far from being uniquely lazy, federal employees work more hours and miss less work for less money than their peers in the private sector on average, according to federal data from the American Community Survey.
Washington Post’s data columnist Andrew Van Dam sifted through the data and reported federal workers – not including those in the military — average 41.6 hours a week, ahead of the 39.4 hours per week by their peers in the private sector. He also found that federal workers are the least likely to miss work for vacation or any other reason, behind only nonprofit workers. While they are more likely to work remotely, that was intentional and is not a reliable barometer for productivity.
In an email federal workers found deeply offensive, Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency encouraged them to quit because “the way to greater American prosperity is encouraging people to move from lower productivity jobs in the public sector to higher productivity jobs in the private sector.”
But most strikingly, Van Dam reports that the data show federal employees who leave the government for the private sector end up working fewer hours for more money.
This supports what many federal workers say about their decision to work in government: They wanted mission-driven work with stability and quality benefits rather than a larger paycheck.