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Project Description
In partnership with city government, non-profits, and small businesses in Minneapolis, we have developed and piloted a program supporting small businesses to come into compliance with local and state employment laws through enlisting the expertise of community bookkeepers. The lessons of the pilot program and our research, which was funded by the City of Minneapolis, WorkRise, and the Kellogg Foundation, provide the basis for a series of toolkits about the program and considerations for implementing the program beyond the Twin Cities.
Project full description
Small businesses provide important resources to a community and they help make cities and towns unique places. They can also promote economic mobility for their owners, and small business owners are often particularly interested in and capable of creating good jobs for their employees. At the same time, small businesses—particularly those owned by immigrants, members of minoritized groups, and women, which are often very small and have fewer than 20 employees—face many challenges to persisting and thriving which impact their employees as well, including: difficulty accessing capital; lack of tailored technical assistance and human resource system support; and discrimination.
Since 2022, WJL has partnered with the Minneapolis Labor Standards Enforcement Division, and other organizations in the Twin Cities, including the Neighborhood Development Center (NDC), to develop a sustainable and scalable program for supporting small businesses to comply with local and state employment laws such as minimum wage, wage theft, and and paid sick and safe time. Drawing on community and government input and feedback through ongoing conversations, interviews, trainings, and roundtables of participants, the Minneapolis Small Business Employment Standards Pilot Program has trained over 70 community bookkeepers and accountants in employment laws, and subsidizes the work of 17 core bookkeepers to engage small business clients for bookkeeping and accounting needs towards compliance. As trusted intermediaries who deeply understand the needs of small businesses and of the small businesses in their communities, bookkeepers are perfectly positioned to provide exactly the type of technical support that small business owners who want to provide good jobs to their employees but face various constraints need.
Toolkits and Trainings
“I do see there is a lot of struggling; especially for small businesses that don’t have [human resources], you know, so they cannot afford an attorney to help them with the labor compliance.”
– Bookkeeper
“Before the program I didn’t do sick time; I thought since I was so small, it didn’t apply to me. But now I know I have to and it is all set up in my new payroll software. This program is a gift for me. Someone at the City cares about me as a small business owner and that feels nice.”
– Business Owner
WEBINAR SPOTLIGHT
Introductory Training on Labor Law in Minneapolis for Bookkeepers & Accountants
Presentation slides
2024 Overview of Minneapolis Small Business Labor Law
While big businesses turn to their HR departments to understand new employment law, small business owners often turn to their community bookkeepers and accountants. To help expand the network of services providers able to support immigrant and BIPOC owned small businesses to both come into compliance with labor law and strengthen their back-office systems, we are focusing phase 2 of our pilot on a partnership with community bookkeepers. In this webinar, we provided an introductory overview of Minneapolis labor requirements to over a dozen bookkeepers servicing small businesses in the city.
Bridging Small Businesses Support and Labor Law Compliance: A Minneapolis Case Study
Presentation slides
Webinar recording
Because of the unique challenges small businesses face, enforcement alone is not always enough to get and keep these businesses in compliance. Labor standards agencies need additional strategies to address underlying barriers to compliance and support small businesses to comply with the laws they enforce.
In this webinar, we will explore the puzzle of how we can strengthen small businesses while also helping them comply with local and state labor standards. Currently, in most American cities and states, labor enforcement has been largely separated from small business support. Even when these functions are nominally in the same agency or office, they typically do not work together and the opportunity to collaborate and integrate these functions is lost.
We will highlight a promising Minneapolis pilot that is braiding together small business economic development opportunities with labor compliance. We will hear from Minneapolis’ Labor Standards Enforcement Division, workplace justice lab at Rutgers University researchers, Main Street Alliance, and the Metropolitan Consortium of Community Developers (MCCD) who are working together to provide critical back-office systems that small business owners often lack the time and resources to set up. The pilot will subsidize payroll services and bookkeeping services for 30-50 small business owners, focusing on those immigrant and BIPOC owners who have been systematically marginalized. The goal of the project is to set up small businesses for success and growth while also creating tracking systems that enable labor law compliance.
Webinar Presenters
Brian Walsh, JD, has worked for the City of Minneapolis for over ten years. He built its Labor Standards Enforcement Division following passage of a Sick and Safe Time ordinance in 2016.
Mel Koe is the Minnesota Organizer for Main Street Alliance and builds power with small businesses to impact change. Mel enters this work with a public health lens and worked in different public health spaces prior to Main Street Alliance.
Andrew Wolf, PhD, is a labor sociologist who received his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is a Workplace Justice Lab@RU Affiliated Scholar.
Tyler Hilsabeck is the Director of Small Business Development at the Metropolitan Consortium of Community Developers. Prior to MCCD, Tyler worked for Bank of America and attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
