A key challenge for men and women down through the ages has been the art and science of “making a living”. The pressing demands of the “world of work and survival” have been motivating forces throughout time in every corner of the world, including this land we know as “Minnesota”. The pressure to innovate – leading to change – has always been a part of life for human-kind, and that will always be so. While we strive to deal with the accelerating pace of our “present” and“ future”, we have an obligation to learn “about” and “from” the past.

The history of labor is an ongoing story of efforts to serve self, family, community, and “public work”, or service to the “Commonwealth”. “Public work” means patterns of work that have public dimensions work with public purposes, work by a public, work in public settings –as well as the “works” or products themselves. [BA]

As we all strive to identify and play out our individual roles in this “world of work”, it is vital that we do so with a sense of balance and perspective.

Joseph Wood, in his publication “Wealth and the Commonwealth”, said it well:

The mobile nature of our species has stimulated the process of adaptation and innovation, defining and shaping the “work” we have to do. All Minnesotans have an “immigrant” history.

In his “Freedom’s Plow”, the African-American poet, Langston Hughes, vividly combined ideas of the citizen as producer with the unfinished quest for freedom.

The infusion of immigrants into our land has been a continuing process. Every person, every ethnic group, has contributed unique talents, experiences and aspirations toward molding and gradually modifying the environment and culture of Minnesota.

The rate of flow of immigrants has varied – impacted by events within our state, nation and around the world. The most influential factor upon work and workers has been the process of “continuous change” in almost every element of our existence. One great lesson we can learn from this historical perspective is our individual and collective need to cope with the inevitable “changing conditions” of our lives.

An example of the evolving population diversity in Minnesota is reflected by the foreign-born population on the three Iron Ranges as of 1910. Finns predominated with a population of around 11,000. Slovenes were next, with more than 5,000. Italians and Swedes numbered in the range of 4,200 each. Croatians around 4,000. Norwegians and English-speaking Canadians 2,000 each. Followed by diminishing numbers of British, Poles, Montenegrins, Germans, Serbs, French Canadians, Swede-Finns, Bulgarians, Jews, Irish, Romanians, Slovaks, Hungarians, Russians, Greeks, Bohemians, Danes, other Europeans, Asians and Africans. More than 26 ethnic groups are represented.

The workers in our evolving society have been a full range of men, women and children from all walks of life. Our future success, as has been true through the ages, will be enhanced by mutual co-operation, consideration and education. 

A prime factor in the survival of the human species was, and still is, based upon the human capacity to conceive and create tools. This creative ability has served humankind through the ages. It serves us still, and also carries with it the seeds of our potential destruction.

Toolmaking was an ongoing practice and art of the early Native American. Explorers and fur traders introduced them to new products and materials, gradually changing their expectations.

The evolution and number of tools used by Minnesotans is beyond description. A brief representation here of tools, past and present, depicts the variety and ingenuity of their conception.

Advancements in technologies, and their application, breed links of change that ricochet throughout the wider society. Change has the capacity to bring both joy and pain to people who labor.

Over a period of many hundreds of years, the very earliest inhabitants of this land devised tools that improved their ability to survive the receding “Ice Age”. Early immigrants from Europe, in the name of exploration and the fur trade, expanded  the range of tools, capabilities and expectations for Native Americans. Whatever they may have gained by them was eventually overshadowed by the impact of the westward migration of new residents, who were strong competitors for both land and available resources. Native Americans gained very little from their introduction to modern technology, and lost a lot in the process.

Imported technology from Europe was the seed for American technology. As the timbered land of Minnesota succumbed to the ravages of the lumbering and mining industries, the prairies were plowed into farms, and communities of many shapes and sizes evolved; those strategically located grew into cities and, eventually, urban complexes. Budding, and eventually exploding technologies, with all their blessings, were ravenous agents for change in every corner of the young State of Minnesota. In 1900, 1.7 million people called Minnesota home. By the mid-1980s, that number had risen to 4.2 million, with half of that total living in the metropolitan area of the Twin Cities.

Automobiles, trucks, telephones, airplanes and other high-speed modes of transportation and communication dramatically changed the ways and places in which Minnesotans lived, worked and recreated. Other facets of individual and corporate life also underwent profound changes. Machines played larger roles in economic production and leisure activities. Larger machines that did more work completely altered the way in which farmers raised crops and livestock, loggers harvested trees, miners removed ores, factory workers made products, and service people performed their jobs. The number and range of activities in which they could spend their nonworking hours multiplied.
[MIACOC]

 To Native Americans, the home and workplace were much the same. “Going to work” meant moving out from shelter to the surrounding country - hunting and gathering to sustain a tenuous lifestyle.

Over many generations, immigrant newcomers to Minnesota coped with a constantly-evolving definition of the “homeplace” and the “work-place”. Pioneer farm families lived independent isolated lives, where home and work were largely one and the same. Except for that “periodic trip to town” for supplies, they relied on their own initiative, ingenuity and, as needed, local networking with neighbors.

With transportation limited, town and city dwellers of that time typically lived within walking distance of their work.  As road and rail transportation improved, people more frequently chose to make their homes in the suburbs; and support businesses and industry followed. Post-WWII expansion of industrial electronics and cybernetics activity stimulated the growth of metropolitan Minnesota, and transformed the Twin Cities from two urban centers into a metropolitan region – a trend that continues to this day.

Minnesota evolved through the early pioneering phase (when most residents were self-sufficient, independent farmers) into a society increasingly more urban and more industrially oriented, and characterized by a mass-consumer culture. Self-employed producers became employees of others. Technological change, guided by private business and controlled by experts, became the driving force. “All these changes meant that technology and products associated with technology took on a power and reality of their own. Correspondingly, ordinary people’s labor lost ground in visibility and importance.” Abundance was being defined in economic terms, inextricably tied to the purchase of consumer goods. Work was becoming a “means to an end”, not an “end in itself”. The concept of work as a “calling” – work that has a value in itself– has been sharply eroded.
[BA]

French explorers first reached what is now Minnesota in the seventeenth century, and found groups of Native Americans living in every area of the state. In the south, village farmers planted gardens of maize or corn, but were dependent upon wild plant and animal foods of the prairies and forests for much of their diet. The Dakota or Sioux lived in central and western Minnesota. The Assiniboin, close linguistic relatives of the Dakota, lived in the region from Lake of the Woods west to the Red River Valley; ancestral Cheyenne occupied the lower Red River Valley; and the Algonkin-speaking Cree were in the extreme northeast. Ancestors of today’s Ojibway or Anishinabe peoples (also known as Chippewa) of northern Minnesota had not yet moved into the region from their central Great Lakes homeland. The Native Americans of central and northern Minnesota depended primarily upon wild food resources for sustenance.

Like many other groups that preceded and followed them in North America and around the world, ancient peoples and their descendants moved with the seasons in a yearly cycle. Small groups traveled from fish-spawning areas in the spring to a region with good berry patches and few annoying insects in midsummer. They would settle near a large stand of nut trees in the fall, and go to an area with a high concentration of small and large game during the winter, and in early spring they would go to a maple-sugaring site. Small extended families probably traveled to the same locations at the same time, year after year. Regularity made it possible to store tools needed for a particular activity until the next year. These seasonal cycles resulted in a varied and healthy diet with a surprisingly small expenditure of time and effort. Life was neither easy nor hand-to-mouth.

U.S. public policy toward the American Indian at the end of the nineteenth century had as its central purpose the acquisition of Indian lands and resources. They also attempted to reflect a familiar charitable response to the realities of the poverty and dependency that were caused by that policy. Options for independence and self-determination were rapidly disappearing for Minnesota’s Indians at the beginning of the twentieth century. Total assimilation of the American Indian became a dominant goal for our nation.
[MIACOC]

The colonization process by Europeans created a westward-movement pressure that brought the Ojibway into Minnesota from the northeast, and pushed the Dakota to the south and west. Competition between these tribal groups was intensified by the growing presence of explorers, fur traders, U.S. military units and outposts, and a growing tide of both permanent and transient settlers who called the land they chose to occupy “their own”.

The first and most important way that Europeans and Native Americans learned about each other was through trade. Each group wanted things the other had, but neither had any idea of changing the way it lived. In the end, both sides found themselves changed, breaking new trails in human development.

From the 1600s until early in the 1800s, long lines of canoes traveled every year across the Great Lakes. They carried tools, cloths and weapons that were made in England, France and other European countries. In their efforts to improve their control over their environment, the Indian people learned to depend on this new technology.
[NL]

Voyageurs were the ordinary workmen of the fur trade. They paddled canoes and hauled heavy loads on their backs for low pay. Seldom did a voyageur become a trader. English and French ideas at that time held that a trader must be a gentleman. He should be educated and come from a well-to-do family. Most voyageurs were sons of French farmers and workers in eastern Canada. Few could read or write.

Furs from animals trapped or killed in the winter months when the fur was in prime condition were the Indian’s primary trading commodity. Hides of bear, wolf, beaver, marten, fisher, muskrat, otter, mink, deer and moose were popular trading goods. The tribal men hunted/trapped and skinned the animals, and the women took care of scraping, stretching and curing the hides.

French, English and American traders competed for dominance in the fur trade. The French were a strong and persistent force, due to their early introduction to the work and their ability to adapt to Indian ways, frequently marrying into Indian tribes. The migrating Americans finally won out – through sheer numbers – as they moved westward.

Marriages between the French traders and Indian women spawned an inter-racial population known as the métis. These mixed, or métis, families gathered in communities. The daughters usually married métis men, or sometimes white traders. A few of the sons became farmers, some were hunters or guides, but most worked as fur traders.

By the early 1800s, some of the leading métis families had been in the trading business for more than three generations. They had close ties with other métis traders and Indian relatives. Their influence in fur trading was very strong. The largest of the métis communities was in the Red River Valley.
[NL]

The métis were known for the two-wheeled carts that carried furs and hides from Canada and the Red River country across Minnesota to the Mississippi. The carts were made entirely of wood and were pulled by an ox or pony. For safety and help in getting across rivers and mudholes, many drivers and carts chose to travel together. A train of 100 or 200 carts might leave the métis town of Pembina on the Canadian border and travel two months before reaching St. Paul. The routes they followed became known as the Red River Trails. The métis and their carts helped make St. Paul one of the most important fur markets in the country.
[NL]

“White Americans thought they were right to take the prairies and forests of Minnesota from Indian people. Many felt they were bringing the Indians a better way of life – one with less fear, suffering and hunger. Americans also thought
they could put the land to better use. Living [the Indian way] meant that much land supported only a few people. Americans knew that if they cut the trees and plowed the prairies, they could feed many more on the rich fields of southern Minnesota.

“Thousands of people were waiting for that land. There were those who lived on rocky farms in new England and other eastern states. And there were people in countries like Germany, Sweden and Ireland who had no land at all.”

In 1848, the Minnesota Territory was established; and farms and small support communities had come into being in southern and central Minnesota. With the passage of time and the discovery of crops that thrived in shorter growing seasons, new farms and farm communities moved ever northward.

The early farmers in southern Minnesota raised corn, hay and small grains and kept a variety of animals in barns and barnyards. Wheat was the mainstay of north-western Minnesota farming. The success of the giant flour mills in Minneapolis and the building of railroads to the northwest supported wheat production in the Red River Valley. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, corn was grown in a three-year rotation with hay and a small grain, like oats or barley. Oats lost much of its market when tractors replaced horses and mules as the primary power means for field machinery.
[MIACOC]

As tractors replaced horses and rural electrical services moved out into the countryside, farmers planted more specialized crops, dairy cattle produced milk products on a year-round basis, and a car or truck in the garage provided mobility – unheard of in earlier times. With advancing technology, the size of farms increased and the number of farmers decreased, as many chose to become a part of the technological revolution and the urbanization of Minnesota.
[MIACOC]

The reign of King Wheat accounted for Minnesota’s ascendancy in two farm-related businesses – milling and grain handling. Where wheat farmers and water power merged, a grinding mill usually sprang up. As early as 1880, Minneapolis had surpassed St. Louis as the nation’s leader in flour production; and Minnesota maintained its reputation as the world’s milling capital for fifty years – not only because of the abundance of spring wheat, but also because of revolutionary technology. The middlings purifier and the roller mill made possible “New  Process Flour”, and vastly improved production, uniformity and color.
[MIACOC]

In the days when flour mills were small local operations, farmers from the surrounding countryside sold their wagonloads of wheat directly to the miller – a procedure that was abandoned when large mills and a railroad network were developed. This led to a web of grain elevators throughout the state, and the creation of grain-trading organizations in strategic locations such as St. Paul, Minneapolis, Duluth, etc.
[MIACOC]

Continuing pressures to modernize milling and distribution facilities required huge investments to meet growing national and world competition. Centralization of these huge industries created the need for the farmers, grain handlers and milling workers to seek job security and equity through cooperative efforts.
[MIACOC]

Meatpacking also grew with the expansion of the railroad network and the growth of the urban market for processed foods. But meatpacking differed from milling – the product was more perishable. The development of refrigerated railroad cars permitted transporting dressed meat, rather than sending it east on the hoof.

The importance of the Twin Cities as a rail center enabled it to become a regional livestock center. Four of the “big five” meatpackers (Swift, Armour, Cudahy and Wilson) built packing plants in South St. Paul. In 1891, George A. Hormel founded a plant in Austin, and by 1920 was Minnesota’s leading meat-packer. Meatpacking had a more rapid growth in the first two decades of this century than any other major Minnesota industry.

While dairy farmers moved toward cooperative creameries, beef and hog farmers generally sold their surplus livestock to butcher shops in nearby towns. The cattle farmer’s main market remained the local buyer, who dealt with them on a one-to-one basis. The seller had very little bargaining power and, as had the dairy farmers in the 1880s, many livestock raisers turned to the cooperative concept.
[MIACOC]

Technology, new approaches to breeding, marketing and processing, and changing lifestyles all influenced livestock raising and its related manufacturing. No segment of farm economy experienced a more revolutionary change than did poultry raising. Turkeys and chickens gradually disappeared from most farmyards, and the industry evolved into specialized poultry farms and processing companies.

 Advancing technology and the further concentrations of power and control again forced labor to organize and make their voices heard in this fiercely competitive, demanding and often dangerous field of employment.
[MIACOC] 

While nineteenth-century farmers were establishing agriculture in southern and western Minnesota, loggers were cutting most of the white, red, and jack pines growing on well-drained soils, and many spruce and fir trees that flourished in swamps and bogs. Clearing of the massive conifer forests continued into the first decades of the twentieth century. Production peaked in 1905. The lumber sawed in the state that year would have filled about 240,000 freight cars. New technology in the forests and at sawmills hastened the clearing of timber;  and railroad expansion aided in the transport of timber that was too remotely located to be moved by water.
[MIACOC]

Logging camps were set up each winter season in the forest areas scheduled for harvest. The crews were made up of relatively poor and untrained workers, led by a few company-trained, woods-savvy supervisors. Many workers were recent immigrants from northern Europe who were striving to eke out a living as farmers or by working in the budding mining industry during the spring through fall seasons. Pay was low, hours and the workweek long, and work hazards abundant. Wages in lumber camps ranged from $15-to-$30 a month; in bad times, wages were $6-to-$12 a month.
[MIACOC & WFMFED]

Many unskilled immigrant workers came to this country from Socialist back-grounds, resulting in one of the first serious union organizational efforts in the industry through the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The struggle for the right to meet, protest and organize was curtailed by state and federal authorities, and many leaders were jailed.
[MIACOC & WFMFED]

During the boom period of 1890 to 1910, lumber companies took lumber valued at one-billion dollars from the state. As the boom ended, loggers gradually abandoned camps and associated facilities, and moved into other work in expanding, changing, Minnesota. In order to cope with the shift from lumbering, business leaders adapted operating structures and exploited the new mix of dominant trees. Aspen and birch made poor lumber, but they pulped well. In the first decades of the twentieth century, paper mills were built along the Mississippi, Rainy and St. Louis Rivers .

The way loggers harvested the northeastern-Minnesota forests also changed dramatically. Horses were gradually replaced by small tractors. Chain saws became the common tool for felling trees. Tractor-like skidders were used to drag whole trees to roadside lots where they were loaded on trucks for hauling to mills. By the 1970s, the conversion to mechanized harvesting had been completed.
[MIACOC & WFMFED]

Northeastern-Minnesota forests were substantially leveled by the start of the twentieth century, but exploitation of the state’s iron-ore deposits had just begun. Three linear formations of rich iron ore were identified in northeastern Minnesota in the 1860s and 1870s. Mining on the Vermillion Range began in 1884, the Mesabi Range in 1892, and the Cuyuna Range in 1911. Production levels rose and fell in response to changing market conditions. Levels peaked during and right after the two world wars, but plunged in the early 1930s, and to a lesser extent in the 1960s as high-grade ores that were economical to extract became scarce. New technology, however, permitted the processing of taconite, a lower-grade rock found in abundance along the Mesabi.
[MIACOC]

By the turn of the century, the Iron Range had been transformed from a sparsely-populated wilderness into an industrialized landscape inhabited by immigrants from almost every nation of Europe. When iron-ore production increased
dramatically in the early twentieth century, the population of the Iron Range also soared. The advent of collective-bargaining agreements between labor and management during the late 1930s and early 1940s eventually made iron-ore miners among the highest paid blue-collar workers in the nation.

Periods of economic decline and depression have brought disproportionately great hardship to the Iron Range. The finite nature of the iron-ore resource ultimately leads to depletion and the abandonment of mine sites, leaving the miners and their support communities adrift in the ebb and flow of economic change.
[MIACOC]

Corporate managers struggled to control the miners in times of change through housing, safety programs, pension and voluntary relief benefits, stock-subscription plans, and sanitation and welfare committees. The miners, drawn into an orbit of dependence, were induced to accept employment terms without dispute. In spite of these efforts, miners felt compelled to organize as early as 1907, and eventually, go on strike. To combat widespread work stoppage, mining companies imported train-loads of new immigrants, largely from southern Europe, and broke the strike. Many of the original miners decided to try other ways to earn a living, such as farming.
[MIACOC]

The industry was battered by economic shifts during the first half of the century, and its workers were unprepared for the second half.  Changes in the demand for iron ore, the development of new technologies, and importation of foreign low-priced ore, steel and manufactured products, presented serious challenges to the management, and also spelled disaster for the miners. Development of the taconite process brought a short-lived reprieve.
[MIACOC]

Foreign competition and environmental concerns limited a serious resurgence of the mining industry. The elements of change had again exacted a price that was threatening the security and welfare of the miners.
[MIACOC]      

The quality of life for Native Americans had its ups-and-downs, greatly influenced by seasonal and gradual climatic changes. Early European and American explorers, traders and immigrants were similarly affected as they moved out into a virgin landscape. Evolving technologies, procedures and techniques in all elements of society increasingly enabled residents to get a handle on their environment – moving beyond mere survival to basic sustenance and, on occasion, even a tenuous abundance.

The winds of change continued to mold and manipulate the quality of life for every resident as Minnesota matured from “frontier” status into an integral part of a blossoming, growing, United States of America.

The Dakota and Ojibway, who had been occupied with competing with each other, found themselves overwhelmed by the numbers and technologies of migrating white settlers. “Bad times” had come to stay. The newcomers often strove to settle and succeed through reckless consumption of the available natural resources. As resources were depleted, new approaches and technologies were tried in order to create and maintain the “good life”. The demands of new technology, business consolidations and world commerce were creating a fast-changing set of ground rules for Minnesota’s labor force.

Evolving expectations and threats to those involved in the world-of-work have fostered tension and conflict throughout our history.

Transitions from times of scarcity to plenty, and back to scarcity, had many triggering factors. Climatic influences were always present. Competition for space and resources was intensified by growth and development. 

Transportation and communication improvements strengthened the bonds of interdependence at local, state and national levels. Conditions and events in distant locations had a growing impact on local conditions. Wars and rumors of wars influenced the tides of scarcity and abundance. As the nature of “work” evolved from its pioneering status, it became obvious that the quality of life for “laborers” was tied to interaction and cooperation.

Inequity is an inevitable component of any organized society. A key element of the evolving “American dream” has been to minimize “inequity” and maximize “opportunity”. The democratic process provides a peaceful means for oppressed groups or individuals to voice complaints and seek redress.   

Down through the years, efforts to eliminate or reduce inequity have met with mixed success. Typically, there have been requirements for organized groups to develop a “voice” that could be heard over the noise and clamor of business, industrial and governmental operations.

“The first two decades of the twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented level of industrial conflict in the United States. Employers’ efforts to introduce scientific management into the work-place were bitterly contested by skilled workers and their unions.
[MIACOC]

Unskilled workers, swamped by wave upon wave of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, struggled for security. Both kinds of workers built organizations to protect themselves...”; thereby continuing the difficult and painful process of identifying and protecting their portion of the pie – the American dream.
[MIACOC]

Workers learned the hard way that serious reform required serious organization and action. “Labor organizing efforts began in Minnesota right after the Civil War. … Unions were formed to negotiate for workers dwarfed by the power of employers. There was concern, of course, for higher wages. But there was concern as well that the dignity of labor be recognized, and that working conditions be improved. There was also an insistence that the state be willing to intervene on behalf of working men and women, instead of automatically backing employers.”
[WFMFED]

The evolution of organized labor was not without pain and suffering within the movements, or in their dealings with business, industry, government and the general public. Enduring strife, injury and even death (risks involved in confrontations and negotiations), organized unions have made lasting contributions to the quality of life of all Americans.
[WFMFED]        

“Workers had few legal rights, but their sense of what was both natural and moral helped them understand how unions could serve them and the commonwealth. When they banded together and bargained collectively, they slowly won concessions from employers.”
[WFMFED]

“Work of significance–in offices and schools, factories and farms, government agencies or inner-city neighborhoods – has been the way diverse people have forged connections with each other and addressed the nation’s problems. Through such work people gain visibility, authority, and larger intellectual horizons. People become creators of their communities, stakeholders in the country, and guardians of the commonwealth through common work.”
[BA]

The prevailing “work ethic” was a driving force that bound together and motivated the diverse citizens who forged the history of Minnesota. After World War II, “a ‘new gentry’ of professionals and experts, long in formation, came into their own. Institutions increasingly took on the character of service providers, in which experts sought to fix people and solve problems for clients. A consumer culture, itself manipulated by experts, replaced the existing philosophy of the value of work in building community.”
[BA]

“In the war’s aftermath, Americans came to equate the ideals of a democratic society with the successes of modern capitalism. Capitalism became the very embodiment of the triumphs of modern life itself. For many with vivid memories of economic hardship, wrought by the depression and the stresses of war, freedom meant the ability to share in the nation’s abundance. Abundance was defined primarily in economic terms, inextricably tied to the purchase of consumer goods.”
[BA]

“Over the last generation, the reliance on scientifically based techniques for workplace efficiency and for professional practice radically accelerated the erosion of craft. It changed the experience of work. A technical approach that became a culture, weakened workplace social networks, fragmented work roles, and stripped many jobs of more complex skills combining intellectual with manual tasks.”
[BA]

In every society throughout history there has existed a division of work within any given population. Modern society, with its emphasis on professionalization, consolidation and technology, has spawned a greater sense of separation and stratification of work tasks. Large segments of our society feel disenfranchised, with little control over their own direction and future. The sense of self-reliance and community that was a part of daily life in our pioneering past has, for many, been replaced with threats of being “downsized”, cast aside, relegated to an insignificant role, and/or consolidation. This trend affects employees with master’s degrees and PHDs, supervisors, managers, and the rank and file. Many types of work have become more service-oriented.

Health-care expectations, policies and procedures have created a myriad of service-occupational specialties in recent decades.

Advice is available from a variety of “experts” through consultations, seminars, or by the hour.

The pace of life, in spite of timesavers beyond count, increasingly requires us to seek sustenance, mobility, entertainment and support through the services of others.

Advancements in technology profoundly affect every element of our existence at an ever-increasing rate. As jobs are lost in one sector, new openings are created in others, but not without a price. In earlier times, the American worker had been strengthened and stabilized in what was to become known as the “social contract”
between labor and industry - a relationship won through negotiations and battles in boardrooms and on the street. In this new era, job security, health benefits and “living wages” seldom match, or even approach, those of bygone days.
[MIACOC]

Minnesota earned its place in the forefront of technological change and innovation. “From 1941 onward, Minnesota became a center for high-technology industry. By 1980 four high-technology firms – 3M, Honeywell, Control Data, and the Univac Division of Sperry-Rand – employed more than 50,000 of the state’s industrial labor force of about 325,000. The computer and medical-device industries were important examples of the emergence of high technology manufacturing in Minnesota.”
[MIACOC]

“In the 1990s aggressive competition from Japan and other advanced industrial nations challenged the leadership of American manufacturers in one industry after another. In response, corporate America embarked on a drastic strategy called downsizing, streamlining, or, most often, restructuring. In Minnesota most of the largest manufacturing corporations, including 3M, Honeywell, Control Data, Pillsbury, Hormel, and General Mills, went through major restructuring in the 1980s.”
[MIACOC]

One of the most remarkable stories of technological innovation in the history of Minnesota’s industrialization is that of the 3-M Company, founded at Two Harbors in 1902. After more than two decades of struggling to find their niche and moving to Duluth and then St. Paul, the company created a research and development capability that has placed their organization in the forefront of technological innovation, development and diversification. The appointment of twenty-four-year old William L. McKnight as head of production and sales in 1914 was a key step in that process.

Reviewing the history of the “world of work” in Minnesota clearly identifies its most consistent influence – the ever-with-us element of change.

Establishment and development of the Minnesota Labor Interpretive Center in St. Paul will play an important role, now and in the future, in the creation of a fertile environment to help all Minnesotans cope effectively with the world of work in our rapidly evolving society.
[MIACOC]