Readers Write: Women’s sports, Israel and Palestine, unions

Opinion editor’s note: Star Tribune Opinion publishes letters from readers online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

Thank you Rachel Blount for the fantastic article “Support for PWHL from a legendary sports star” (Sports, May 28). Not many know, but the PWHL Minnesota team could win the Walter Cup on Wednesday in Boston. The article points out how hard Kendall Coyne Schofield and others worked for the new league and went to Billie Jean King for support/guidance. It also stated that only 15% of media coverage is given to women’s sports. If you look at that percentage, that is pretty pathetic.

I believe the state of Minnesota — aka the State of Hockey — could be proactive and be the first to give women’s sports at least 30% of media coverage. Give women’s sports more dedicated columnists such as Rachel Blount; have the local TV sports start out with women’s sports and increase coverage in social media. If sports fans and those who aren’t into sports knew more about the teams, the finesse and skill women athletes have, we, as a state, could break records by filling the arena/stadiums. More merchandise would be bought and the women athletes’ salaries might get closer to what other men’s professional teams receive.

Amy Omodt, Minneapolis

•••

My wife and I are trying really hard to support our Minnesota female athletes, but our local TV channels don’t seem to care about coverage for them. The Star Tribune could help with this. The Wolves are finally winning and so were given most of the front sports page on Friday and even part of the front-page main section. The Minnesota Professional Women’s Hockey League team are in the playoffs and are given very little attention. The Lynx also come in second to the men. I have a daughter (grown) and nieces, and I think about how they feel when they constantly see women being ignored or given very little attention in athletics. I wonder how the women who are related to our sportswriters feel?

On the night of May 26, Israel attacked a tent camp in Rafah of displaced Palestinians living in what Israel had promised would be a “safe zone.” Israel fired eight missiles, killing at least 45 people, mostly women and children, many of whom burned to death. On May 24, the International Court of Justice issued a legally binding ruling that Israel “immediately halt” its offensive military operations in Rafah, citing the “immense risk” to Palestinians. The court had ruled back in January that Israel was plausibly committing genocide in Gaza.

This massacre shows Israel’s total contempt for both international law and basic humanity. Israel does not care about the words of governments. Until there are material consequences from state sanctions and institutional divestment it will continue to massacre Palestinians. How can the Minnesota State Board of Investment (SBI) continue to justify its holdings, mostly state employee pensions, that it invested in Israeli state bonds? Bonds that are basically loans to this government. How can it justify its over $300 million investment in weapons manufacturers that produced the missiles that rained death and horrific injuries upon that tent camp?

The SBI has chosen to do nothing, despite months of community demands for divestment. This inaction makes the board members (Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, State Auditor Julie Blaha and Secretary of State Steve Simon) complicit in this massacre of defenseless Palestinians sheltering in that tent camp. How many more massacres are necessary for the SBI to act?

Bob Goonin, Minneapolis

•••

One Oct. 7 equals 1,200 corpses. Gaza is now up to 30 or more Oct. 7′s from this war with perhaps two or more Oct. 7′s still be to recovered from the ruble. A lot of blowback from this war is yet to come to Israel and the United States. The memory of this will last a long time.

Steven Smith, Minneapolis

What a glorious piece to run on a Memorial Day weekend (“90 years after the Minneapolis Teamsters’ strikes,” Opinion Exchange, May 26). The writer offers an inspiring, sweeping, highly readable and compelling account of early union organizing here in Minnesota that reads like an action-packed thriller.

Stories of a half-century of courageous, strategic and effective organizing and action offer convincing evidence that working together for the common good is one of the noblest of goals to which one might dedicate oneself, a goal that requires all of the heart, brains, sharp strategic planning, collaboration and guts that any group can harness. Gratitude goes to those who have created a plethora of opportunities for all Minnesotans to learn about the history of successes, defeats, and new challenges of union organizing here in our state through “Remember 1934″ (rem34.ampmpls.com).

Gaining knowledge of and inspiration from Minnesota workers’ struggles and successes of the past holds powerful potential to animate, equip and propel us forward to collectively address the pressing issues of our day.

•••

Prof. Peter Rachleff’s commentary waxes nostalgic about the virtual civil war during the Minneapolis Teamsters Strike of 1934 (four fatalities), but some of us, witnesses to the 2020 Minneapolis riots, are not so keen on more “struggle” and “class conflict.” The real legacy of this and other general strikes in that era, luckily, was to diminish this kind of violence and victimization of non-parties in industrial disputes.

The Taft-Hartley Act (1947) banned “secondary boycotts” in which unions would picket uninvolved parties who simply did business with a “struck” employer. An even more important legacy was the spread of mediation and arbitration as means to channel workplace conflict toward compromise solutions and away from either sides’ “nonnegotiable” demands. These developments helped lead workers to full integration into American life, which inevitably led union involvement to shrink to 6% in industry.

A more problematic legacy of that era was the 1960s spread of public sector unionization, always opposed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and others rightly worried about how such unions squared with monopoly government services and the prospect of union control of “both sides” of the negotiations table and government itself. Government unions now represent the majority of union members. But no good answer has yet been offered to Roosevelt’s criticism: Do we really enjoy self-government if public employees are unionized and those unions control, not merely their own terms of employment, but every other political issue and government itself, to the exclusion of “unorganized” citizens?