On the last day of the legislative session, members of the Minnesota state legislature voted on a whopping $6.2 billion health and human services budget.

Among the policies that passed is a groundbreaking expansion in healthcare for undocumented people. Starting in 2025, all low-income people will be eligible to enroll in MinnesotaCare, regardless of their immigration status.

This policy is a major win for Minnesota, where 21.8% of non-U.S. citizens were uninsured in 2021.

Nationally, six states and the District of Columbia provide Medicaid coverage specifically to undocumented youth. Minnesota is one of only two states to allow all eligible low-income people to enroll in public insurance regardless of immigration status or age.

“When the people who are most vulnerable don’t have the services that they need, then we all get hurt,” said Cynthia Pando, PhD candidate in the Health Services Research, Policy and Administration program at the University of Minnesota. “Because we need everyone in this population to do well.”

Undocumented immigrants struggle nationally to access insurance. About two in five noncitizen immigrants in the United States were undocumented in 2021. In that year, 46% of undocumented immigrants nationwide were uninsured, compared to 8% of citizens.

Despite the numbers, policymakers have been slow to respond. 

The policy passed in the legislature along party lines, one of many victories made possible by a Democratic majority among lawmakers. In sharp contrast, similar policies have stalled in other blue states while red states like Florida have been investing in antagonistic, anti-immigrant legislation. Policymakers, it seems, are no closer to a way forward on immigrant rights than they were before the pandemic.

The conflicting national debates are striking given the role immigrants, documented or not, have played in the last several years.

Immigrants played a major role in the COVID-19 response, serving as essential workers across a myriad of industries. In 2020, it was estimated that 6 million immigrants worked in frontline industries.

At the same time, immigrants were more vulnerable during the pandemic. In 2020, immigrant workers in frontline industries had lower incomes than their U.S.-born counterparts and were more likely to have children at home to care for. Immigrant communities also had less access to sick leave or paid time off if they got sick, despite being more exposed to COVID-19. And, if they did get sick, they were more likely to be uninsured.

These hardships were mounting for decades before the pandemic. They could have been avoided or mitigated at many points. Now, with the true pandemic behind us, lawmakers have the opportunity to follow Minnesota’s lead.

A few months ago, Minnesota became the 19th state to offer driver’s licenses to all residents, regardless of immigration status. Now, the MinnesotaCare expansion could open doors for thousands of uninsured residents to secure healthcare coverage.

It’s worth noting, however, that legal eligibility is not the only barrier to healthcare access in immigrant communities.

“Just because you’re eligible doesn’t mean that you’re gonna enroll,” Pando noted. “Just because you have good healthcare, doesn’t mean that you have good healthcare access.”

Pando highlighted the need for medical information in multiple languages, having interpreters available and addressing the stigma towards people with low-income insurance.

There are also drawbacks to MinnesotaCare itself that may impede people’s ability or willingness to enroll. MinnesotaCare, unlike Medicaid, requires regular premiums.

“That’s still a potential barrier for people,” Pando said.

An estimated 40,000 people will be eligible for coverage under the expansion. But its impact could go beyond that number.

Pando noted that the MinnesotaCare expansion “could also affect the access to care and the health insurance of their child, both undocumented or documented, citizen or not.” 

For example, the program could increase child enrollment now that their parents don’t need to fear deportation in a clinic they have a legal right to be in.

There are a myriad of arguments to be made in support of this expansion. We can argue that healthcare for people in low-income, public-facing jobs is a matter of public well-being. 

Immigrants participate in the labor force at a higher rate than U.S.-born workers and paid $4.5 billion in taxes in Minnesota in 2019. We can argue, as workers, they are entitled to benefits. They have earned them.

But these arguments speak to a need to defend the economic value of immigrants to a state or a nation. They reflect a national debate, not the people in any given community.

“I wish that we could think about undocumented immigrants as humans, not just a workforce,” Pando said. “I wish that was sufficient.”

Time will tell how this MinnesotaCare expansion is implemented and how many people will benefit from it. For now, I am grateful to be living in a state capable of passing such explicitly progressive, pro-immigrant policies. I hope that lawmakers nationwide can follow suit.

It’s a stunning day in June when you tear your ACL. You didn’t mean to –– you work part-time while you’re in school.

But it’s a breezy 76 degrees out. You have the day off work. You grab a few friends and a soccer ball, and you head somewhere green. You’re only a few minutes into the game when you lunge past your buddy for the ball and: POP! There goes your ACL.

All the way to the urgent care center, you think: “Man, I’ve gotta tell my manager I’m not coming in tomorrow.”

At some point in their lives, everyone is going to need to take time off work to take care of themselves or a family member. This can mean welcoming a newborn or adopted child, caring for a sick parent or recovering from an illness like long-COVID-19.

These needs are inevitable, but for many they are tainted with unnecessary distress over the financial consequences.

Making a full recovery from a torn ACL, for example, is a weeks- or months-long process, but can put you immediately out of commission for close to two weeks.

Maybe you can take some paid time off? But you took a few days to visit home over Memorial Day weekend and then finals week claimed a couple more. If you’re part-time or new to your job, you might not have any time off, paid or unpaid, accrued. If you’re a habitual gig worker, you likely have no paid sick days or paid leave at all. Can you afford to stay home from work for two weeks?

In Minnesota, a typical worker who takes four weeks of unpaid leave loses nearly $3,700 in income. That’s on top of whatever expenses you might encounter if that time away means a hospital stay or recovery, traveling to care for an ill relative, adopting a child, caring for a newborn or any other costly issue that may arise.

About 62% of Minnesotan workers have no access even to unpaid leave. Comprehensive paid leave is even rarer. About 2.5 million workers in Minnesota, 80% of the state’s workforce, have no access to paid family leave.

That is, until now.

At the end of last month, Governor Tim Walz signed a bill to make Minnesota the 12th state (plus the District of Columbia) with a paid family and medical leave social insurance program.

In states without government-provided paid leave, time off is dictated by employers’ sparse and varying policies. The federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) does allow you to take unpaid leave without fear of losing your job. However, not everyone is eligible under the policy, and many rightly fear its defining characteristic: leave under the FMLA is unpaid.

Under the legislation passed and signed this year, Minnesotans will be entitled to paid medical leave, parental leave, safety leave (for victims of domestic violence), caregiving leave and deployment-related leave. Applicants can take up to 12 weeks of leave in each of two categories — medical leave and other types of leave — per year, for a total of up to 20 weeks of leave in a benefit year.

The policy is portable, following employees from job to job. In this way, the program explicitly extends to part-time, seasonal and temporary employees. Applicants only need to have earned 5.3% of the state’s average annual wage in the 12 months prior to starting their leave; currently, that’s about $3,500 in total over a year.

These criteria will allow even people like undergraduate students and graduate workers, who are often locked out of eligibility for these benefits, greater access to paid family and medical leave.

Under this program, you can rest easily. You lie back on the examination table in the urgent care clinic. Your parents are on their way. The pain meds are finally kicking in. You text your manager: hey, so I tore my ACL and I can’t come in tomorrow. Just so you know.

Little dots burble at the bottom of your screen. Your manager is typing.

The program will be administered by the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED). As for what the process of receiving benefits will look like, the ink is still drying on Governor Walz’s signature. The state government still has almost three years to design the program’s specifics before it goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2026.

“Over the next couple of years, we’ll be building out the systems to allow people to apply to the program,” Evan Rowe, the DEED deputy commissioner, told MPR News’ All Things Considered. “Really what we’re aiming to do is to implement a system that will be really simple and straightforward for folks to use.”

This victory is a sweet one: the cherry on top of a progressive legislative session sundae. While not without its shortcomings, this session passed everything from abortion and trans refuge bills to healthcare expansion for undocumented immigrants to mandated paid sick days to increased funding for mental health support, child care and homelessness services.

Congratulations, Minnesota, and thank you to our hardworking and determined state lawmakers!

Even though she knew her time as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota would be unfunded, Layal Almosa said she was eager to apply.

“Two of my brothers studied at this school. My dad graduated from it with his Ph.D. It’s just something that reminds us of home,” Almosa said. “But no one I knew was applying to it.”

People were hesitant to apply to a program that didn’t guarantee funding. Aspiring international students, Almosa said, didn’t even consider it.

Most graduate students are expected to teach undergraduate classes and support faculty research as they attend their own courses, work toward their thesis or dissertation and pursue publication in their field. On top of these demands, graduate students also juggle social lives, professional connections and networking, families and children, physical and mental health needs and more.

Between 2011 and 2019, the number of people enrolled in graduate and professional programs in the United States increased by 8.1%. In fall 2020, 3.1 million students attended graduate programs.

Given the enormous role graduate students play in a university’s ecosystem, a growing number of programs in different fields are fully or partially funding their students. Full funding is most commonly provided through guaranteed teaching or research assistantships for a certain number of years, for which graduate students are paid (or, more commonly, underpaid) with a yearly stipend.

At the University, every student pursuing a doctorate in English or a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing with the English Department is fully funded. Many Master of Arts (MA) students are not.

“They tell you that from the beginning. They only say that you can get funded, kind of, if you get lucky,” said Almosa, who is in the first year of her MA program.

Without formal funding, MA students are forced to rely on massive loans to pay their tuition, fees and living and material costs. As full-time students, they have no time to work jobs outside of the University.

“The first semester I really was kind of miserable because all I could think about was this loan,” Almosa said. “And I was just thinking, ‘Okay, so this is just one semester. What about the next four? And what if I don’t graduate in two years?’”

Almosa’s program is competitive and well-recognized. The University was ranked in 2021 as having the 32nd best graduate school for English in the United States. Among public universities on the list, the University ranks in the top 25.

Yet the University doesn’t guarantee either assistantship positions or fellowship funding for their English MA students. For Almosa and her peers, this leads to alienation and isolation in their program, where they study alongside fully-funded doctoral and MFA students.

“We sit in the same classes, like, I literally sit with six other students that are totally funded,” Almosa said. “They’re paid and everything and we take the same exact classes. But I pay for mine. They don’t.”

Because funding is provided through employment as a teaching or research assistant, funded students can receive certain employment benefits such as paid family and medical leave, health care and more.

Unfunded students are cut off from these benefits.

“We have zero benefits. If you want to be on the health plan, you have to pay from your pocket a good amount of money,” Almosa said. “But when you’re funded, it comes as a bonus as well that you do get health care.”

When teaching assistantships do, by chance, open up, they can change an unfunded student’s entire semester.

After spending her first semester without funding, Almosa lucked into a teaching assistantship in the spring semester after a professor’s longtime TA received their doctorate and graduated.

The timing couldn’t have been more perfect: just a few weeks ago, Almosa had a baby. As a University employee, she was able to take six weeks of paid parental leave.

“I’m grateful that this semester I had this opportunity,” Almosa said. “I’m only imagining: if I didn’t have this position, what would I be doing?”

Many programs, like the Department of Chemistry, guarantee funding to all graduate students in good academic standing. Others, like the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, guarantee full funding for Ph.D. students. Most commonly, applicants are told that they will have opportunities for funding through assistantships and fellowships, with no guarantees.

Funding rates and a program’s stipend are often deciding factors in a competitive application process. By not guaranteeing funding for all students, or by providing mixed messages, we drive away applicants who can’t forgo their income for anywhere from a semester to several years.

Despite the flaws in the graduate assistantship funding model — particularly in its failure to provide guaranteed benefits and encourage marginalized applicants — it does allow many graduate students to pursue a fully-funded education.

Such funding means a lessened burden on the student, who will have less long-term debt and be less likely to leave the program due to financial insecurity. It increases the availability of graduate education to lower-income applicants, people with children or other caregiving responsibilities, international students and the ever-growing number of people who already have student loan debt from their undergraduate degrees and probably aren’t looking for any more.

So, why shouldn’t full funding be guaranteed for every single graduate student?

Almosa and other MA students have spoken with people in their department. Responses from professors are almost universally supportive. They express regret she and other MA students aren’t funded. They wish it could change. They know it’s unfair.

“But at the same time, I kind of wonder: so whose hands is this decision in?” Almosa said. “We’re only a couple of students. Why can’t this change?”

Layal Almosa just had a baby.

“He’s the cutest,” she laughed. “Yeah, he stays up, but he’s so cute.”

Almosa is pursuing a master’s in English at the University of Minnesota. As a graduate worker with a 50% assistantship appointment, she was able to take six weeks of paid family leave, which she is about halfway through. But she’s not sure that’s enough.

“I think before I had the baby, I thought that [six weeks] was, like, amazing,” Almosa said. “And now, being in it, six weeks is super fast.”

This week, Minnesota legislative committees considered a bill to establish guaranteed paid family and medical leave for all workers in the state that was introduced to the Legislature in January. The policy would operate as a social insurance program similar to the state’s unemployment benefits program. It would offer Minnesotans up to 12 weeks of paid family leave and up to an additional 12 weeks of paid medical leave per year.

If passed, Minnesota would join 12 other states, including the District of Columbia, with paid family and medical leave programs. Currently, about 80% of workers in Minnesota, or 2.5 million people, do not have access to paid family leave through their jobs.

Critically, this bill would completely sever paid leave benefits from employment. The benefit would be portable, following workers from job to job, and would allow people working outside of a traditional workplace to opt into the program. This would particularly benefit self-employed workers, gig workers and even, potentially, graduate student workers.

David Wolfson is pursuing a doctorate in conservation sciences at the University and has two children. When the first was born during his master’s degree, also at the University, he wasn’t able to take any leave.

For the birth of his second child, while he was working, he had to save his sick and vacation days to be able to take time off. In 2018, before Wolfson returned for his doctorate, the University implemented the six-week paid family leave policy for those with 50% assistantships.

“I do feel like I could take time off if, say, I were to have a kid right now,” Wolfson said. “I think that’s not true for all grad students.”

If he couldn’t take paid leave through his University employment, Wolfson notes the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) would be his next resource if he needed to take time off to care for his parents’ medical needs, for example.

The FMLA is a federal policy that allows employees to take unpaid, job-protected leave for up to 12 weeks. It requires workers to have been employed at their jobs for 12 months and to have worked 1,250 hours in the year prior to taking their leave.

However, 62% of Minnesotans have no access to unpaid FMLA leave. And even those who do pay the price: in Minnesota, a typical worker who takes four weeks of unpaid leave loses out on almost $3,700 of income.

Graduate students face further challenges.

Although the 12 months of employment required by FMLA do not have to be consecutive, graduate assistantships are often contracted by semester or exclude the summer months. It’s possible for graduate students to be two years or more into their programs before they have been officially employed for 12 months and become eligible for FMLA coverage — and that’s only if they meet their 1,250-hour requirement.

That means graduate students, depending on their program and their funding situations, are not guaranteed access even to unpaid leave.

Almosa’s program doesn’t guarantee her a graduate assistantship, and she worries about securing a position for the fall semester. If there isn’t a position for her, she will have to pay full tuition and fees with no income for the semester and no benefits tied to her employment.

“That makes you want to think of taking a longer leave or a gap semester, or something like that,” she said.

This lack of guaranteed leave adds to the burden of inconsistent benefits and financial precarity that weighs on graduate students and bars many people from programs at the University.

“All those people who maybe can’t come or decide not to, it’s like an invisible absence, you know,” Wolfson said. “We’re not even aware of the enrichment that could come to our student body if anyone could feel like this was within their means. So that’s too bad.”

The University of Minnesota Graduate Labor Union – United Electrical, (GLU-UE) advocates for parental leave and clear paid time off policies in their platform online, a move that rightly calls out the urgent need among grad student workers for guaranteed leave.

But I argue the University is not the body that should be providing us, as graduate students, with paid leave. Any leave policy that is bound to our inconsistent employment will create gaps for people to fall into.

What about people who can’t work a 50% assistantship due to a disability? Or those working part- or full-time outside of the University to afford the often-astronomical cost of graduate school? What about those whose needs go beyond a six-week family leave policy?

The GLU-UE is right to prioritize paid leave for graduate workers, and an expansion of the University’s leave policy would benefit many. But, in the long run, we are better off supporting a state program. There is no upside to employment-related benefits if state-provided benefits are available, funded and well-administered.

The news broke in November 2022 that Blue Cross Blue Shield, the multi-million dollar insurance company, would be withdrawing from its role as the cornerstone sponsor of the Nice Ride Minnesota bike share program.

The bike share, administered by Lyft since its purchase of the program’s original nonprofit operator, has been running in Minneapolis for 13 years. Due to Blue Cross Blue Shield’s withdrawal, Lyft has recently suspended the program completely.

There will be no Nice Ride bikes this summer, or ever again.

The biggest shock of this news isn’t necessarily the end of a groundbreaking, 13-year-long public transportation initiative. The real surprise is such an enduring and critical program has been running for so long on the mercy donations of a private corporation — a corporation which, on a whim, seems to have run out of such generosity.

Nate Gahr is a fourth-year environmental science, policy and management student working as a University of Minnesota Bike Center service coordinator at The Hub Bike Co-op. For students, bicycling is a matter of affordability and convenience, they said.

“[Bicycling is] definitely so much cheaper than having to own a car and pay insurance,” Gahr said.

Given that, a bike share program offers particular perks that owning your own bicycle does not. For example, a rider is not on the hook for part replacements or repairs.

“The biggest draw for the Nice Ride program would be that the bikes are maintained,” Gahr said. “It really opens the door for a lot of people who might live in apartments where they can’t store a bike, or just don’t have the budget to keep and maintain a bike of their own.”

Lily Osler is a first-year MFA student in creative writing. When it was running, she was a frequent Nice Ride user who relished the convenience and flexibility it allowed. She was especially a fan of the program’s fleet of 2,000 ebikes, which was introduced in 2020.

“[Nice Ride ebikes] meant that I could leave for appointments the way that someone who owns a car could,” Osler said. “Where you don’t have to live your life around the schedule for public transit or have to schedule so much around how you’re going to dry off all the sweat after you bike somewhere.”

The Nice Ride Minnesota program had a record-breaking year in 2021, with 533,000 total rides, up 200,000 from the previous year. A whopping 70,000 riders gave the program a shot for the first time. The increase was made up predominantly of students, people of color and low-income residents who qualified for the bike share’s “Nice Ride for All” reduced-cost membership initiative.

Students in particular benefited from the program. If you were on campus last fall you might remember a flurry of outreach events and membership registration drives splattered with Lyft and Blue Cross Blue Shield branding.

Students receiving FAFSA financial aid qualified for the reduced-cost membership.

In September 2022 alone, students took more than 31,000 rides and accounted for more than 40% of rides taken across the entire bike share system. In 2022, nine of the top 10 busiest Nice Ride stations were on the University of Minnesota campus.

These statistics describe a popular program well-used by residents who might otherwise struggle to access other forms of transportation. But, that doesn’t seem to mean much to Blue Cross Blue Shield. The corporation’s decision to stop donating money to a nonprofit has single-handedly ended 13 years of low-cost public transportation access.

But, why was a corporation funding public infrastructure anyway?

The residents of St. Paul have already learned this lesson — the city ended its bike share contract with Nice Ride in 2018 to open a new one with Lime. Then, after just three months, that fell through, too, leaving the city without any bike share program at all.

It’s becoming clear, in case there was any doubt before, that for-profit companies are fickle partners when it comes to providing accessible and affordable public services. Transportation cannot operate on a whim. It requires consistency that corporations are not capable of.

And corporations don’t need to be. Public services should come from the public sector.

The state of Minnesota currently has a $17.2 billion budget surplus, a number most states would dream of. Despite the extra money, public transportation in Minneapolis is suffering.

“Public transportation has gotten worse in the cities since I was in high school,” Osler said.

Just last winter, the city reduced service on dozens of bus routes and suspended two routes entirely.

“But it sucks, it’s harder to live in the city now without a car than it was before,” Osler said. “And this is just another thing that makes me feel like Minneapolis does not care as much as it says it does about trying to encourage people to get places by means other than driving.”

Hope supposedly remains. A Minneapolis city spokesperson told KARE 11 News that “the City has other licensees in the Shared Bike and Scooter Program interested in providing shared bikes, ensuring that the city will have bikes in the program this upcoming season.”

With such a promise, though, I have to ask: if such a miracle does indeed come through for the city’s 2023 biking season, what guarantee do we have that the deal won’t fall apart yet again next year? Or the year after that? What plan is in place to provide long-term bike share access to Minneapolis if no corporation can hack it?

“Minneapolis is and has always been a city that talks a big game about progressive politics and social justice while not doing everything it can to support those policies materially,” Osler said. “And I just don’t understand why you’ve got to be reliant on an insurance company to be able to have a public service here.”

Following a burst of national labor organizing during the pandemic, graduate student unionization is now having its own moment.

Since the beginning of the year, graduate student workers at the University of Chicago, Temple University, Rutgers University, Yale University and Johns Hopkins University have all taken major steps toward unionization or negotiating contracts with their universities. In fall 2022, 48,000 graduate student workers at University of California schools went on strike for nearly six weeks. It was the largest-ever higher education strike in U.S. history.

Last week, the Minnesota Daily reported that graduate labor organizers at the University, after collecting almost twice as many signatures as they initially needed, have filed with the Minnesota Bureau of Mediation Service (BMS) to hold an election.

Yusra Murad is a first year Ph.D. student in Health Services Research, Policy and Administration. Like me, she knew she wanted to join a union even before she arrived at the University.

“I have never been part of a union in any of the places that I have worked,” she said.

But, she continued, “I have been acutely aware of working conditions, which I know would have been improved by the presence of a union.”

Given her past experiences, Murad said the presence of a union or unionizing efforts were factors when she was thinking about which university to attend.

Graduate student workers share the demands of those in myriad industries: higher pay, better working conditions and improved benefits. But graduate unions are poised to offer broader, more intentionally anti-racist and inclusive change if they choose.

Murad said the homogeneity she sees in academia is one of her main motivators for unionizing.

“[I see] so many people who would be really exceptional graduate workers and researchers don’t have access to grad school because of the low pay and the poor working conditions,” Murad said. “I think that having a union is a starting point. It’s not the only thing that would make that shift happen, but it’s definitely a place to begin.”

Murad’s graduate program in Health Services Research, Policy and Administration is 63% white, an improvement from the University-wide 73% white. The knee-jerk reaction to these statistics is obvious: we can do better in recruiting diverse applicants.

But I pose an alternate interpretation: only 27% of graduate students at the University are people of color. How can we justify recruiting and exploiting more?

It isn’t enough to want more diverse voices in academia. Academic work — because graduate students are expected to teach, research and publish as they study — needs to be more than diverse. It needs to be fairly compensated labor that provides a sustainable quality of life for the worker.

“[I think about] how my life might change in the next few years and the reality that graduate school is just not supportive to life changes that happen for all of us,” Murad said.

“I feel completely unprepared, for example, if I have a medical emergency or if somebody in my family dies and I need to leave work for a few weeks or a few months,” she said. “I don’t know what that would look like. I know there’s no guarantees for me in terms of a contract and actual guaranteed accommodations.”

Right now, protections for academic workers are decided by chance and the goodwill of faculty.

Murad said she has a supportive advisor and a good research assistantship. She has faith that both would work with her to find a solution to any obstacles that might come up in her life, but she knows this is a matter of luck.

“It shouldn’t be up to good fortune,” she said. “It shouldn’t be the case that I feel blessed that I have access to faculty who are supportive but that there are coworkers and colleagues of mine across the University who by no fault of their own just got dealt a set of different cards. It’s completely inequitable and unfair.”

Graduate education is a serious financial burden. At best, it is a period of two to six (or more) years during which a student is economically unstable, unable to put away savings and often working side jobs or living off of prior earnings. For the many students who can’t get their education covered by a patchwork of fellowships, grants and assistantships, a graduate education means going into thousands of dollars of debt.

In 2022, the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development calculated the average basic-needs cost of living in each county in the state. For a single person with no children, the annual cost of living in Hennepin County was $37,025. The current average annual salary for half-time graduate assistant appointments is only $23,000.

These hardships weigh heaviest on low-income and BIPOC students as well as students with disabilities. They also disproportionately impact international students, who are ineligible for many forms of financial aid, and students with children, who often lack affordable child care.

The Graduate Labor Union’s platform, listed on their website, calls for comprehensive benefits that include improved health care coverage and employer subsidization of family premiums, affordable child and paid parental leave, access to employer-sponsored retirement plans and affordable transportation. They also call for higher pay, lower fees, anti-discrimination and anti-harassment policies, improved grievance procedures and more.

These are all demands that, if met, could radically improve academic work. They could make graduate education and labor accessible to the marginalized people we want to see in academia.

Of course, this is not a guarantee. There is not yet officially a union. The process of negotiating a contract with the University will reveal what both sides are willing to compromise for the sake of an agreement. It’s entirely possible that an increase in benefits will require workers to accept their low wages, or that affordable child care will be named an unnecessary expense. It will require firm commitment from members of the bargaining unit and the negotiating team to prioritize our most marginalized community members.

But, Murad is optimistic.

“Of course it’s gonna be hard,” she said of negotiations on the horizon. “But, I don’t see that as something that feels like an obstacle. It’s more like — I would way rather have the challenge of working with my colleagues to negotiate a contract that works for us than have the challenge of not having a contract at all.”

As a transplant from the East Coast, I didn’t expect the Midwest to be a hub of rail transportation.

I grew up in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., where a trip on the commuter rail between the District of Columbia to Baltimore is $6–$15. Prior to the pandemic, the D.C. metro system had an average of 816,700 daily riders, more than any subway system except New York City’s. Senators and Representatives in D.C. often take an Amtrak train every weekend to their homes hundreds of miles up and down the East Coast.

The infrastructure I grew up with was unusual for the United States. I knew finding a Midwest subway or passenger rail system to match that of a city like D.C. was unlikely. When I arrived in the Twin Cities, I was introduced to an impressive metropolis with millions of residents, a population center relatively close to major Midwestern cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis and even Indianapolis.

But there was, and is, almost no passenger rail transportation between these locations.

Stephanie Valle, a first-year PhD student in psychology who moved to the Twin Cities from Chicago, felt the lack of rail transportation as soon as she arrived.

“As someone who was used to doing most of her commuting via trains [and] buses, it was definitely surprising to see how much we have to rely on a car here,” Valle wrote in an email to the Minnesota Daily.

For travel home, air travel is her most convenient option after driving.

“I’ve traveled by car when going back to Chicago for longer trips. However, I made two trips to see my family in Chicago last semester and had to fly as those were short weekend trips and I was planning around classes,” Valle said. “A one-hour flight versus a seven-hour drive makes a difference.”

While recent incidents like the East Palestine train derailment may make readers skeptical of rail travel, the truth is the alternatives are expected to have long-lasting impacts on our environment and our health.

Air travel accounted for 2% of global carbon emissions in 2019, and the number of annual air travel passengers is predicted to double to 8.2 billion in 2037. Vehicle emissions produce about one-third of all U.S. air pollution, and studies have also found vehicle-related air pollution exposure to cause health problems.

An estimated 7,100 deaths in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions in 2016 were linked to exposure to vehicle emissions.

On the other hand, traveling by rail produces up to 83% less greenhouse gas pollution than driving and up to 73% less pollution than flying.

As climate change accelerates and natural disasters increase in frequency, every corner of the country is increasingly forced to reckon with the consequences of our air and auto industries. But, we live in a part of the country that seems built for passenger trains — the Midwest is flatter than most of the country and is already linked to an extensive national network of freight railways.

So, why don’t we have the passenger rail infrastructure to match?

The absence of rail connections between Minnesota and other states is especially conspicuous. Minnesota has tuition reciprocity agreements with Wisconsin, Iowa the Dakotas, as well as the Canadian province of Manitoba. These agreements mean any Minnesota resident can apply to select institutions and receive in-state tuition as if they were a resident of those states.

Residents of participating states can also do the same in Minnesota. According to the Minnesota Office of Higher Education’s 2021 Tuition Reciprocity Annual Report, 39,198 students participated in tuition reciprocity in the fall 2019 semester. Of those students, more than 8,000 were Wisconsinites studying in Minnesota, and more than 13,000 were Minnesotans studying in Wisconsin.

Despite this frequent movement between neighboring states, the options for transportation are limited and students have limited options to physically get to their educational institutions.

Sarah Engadol graduated from the University in 2022. They applied as a Wisconsin resident, received in-state tuition and moved to the Twin Cities. When they made that move, traveling by car was the only convenient option.

Engadol uses both she/her and they/them pronouns and will be referred to with they/them pronouns for consistency.

“There is very little train transportation right now that I know of,” Engadol wrote in a text to the Minnesota Daily.

Engadol said Amtrak’s Empire Builder line “is really the only train option, which kind of sucks because the closest stop is still one and a half hours away from my hometown.”

Engadol said Amtrak’s Empire Builder line’s service paused during the pandemic, further limiting their already sparse travel options.

“They weren’t doing this ride for a while during the first few years of the pandemic so it wasn’t an option for transportation,” they said.

To be worth it, passenger rail needs to be widely available, accessible to all and an affordable alternative to auto or air travel.

Passenger rail has the potential to radically change transportation in the Midwest. And the demand for such infrastructure is there. When I asked what it would take for her to travel more by train, Valle’s answer was clear: “Expansion of passenger rail!”