Minneapolis—Security officers and community supporters are intensifying their calls today on large downtown building owners U.S. Bancorp and Ameriprise to ensure good jobs with health insurance for Minnesota families. The companies have the power to quiet growing tensions downtown by directing the security contractors they hire to provide the wages and benefits the security officers need to support their families. Today 17 community supporters are urging the companies to take action to protect working families’ healthcare by engaging in an act of non-violent civil disobedience in the lobby of U.S. Bancorp Center.

“By refusing to provide healthcare, more and more employers are passing on the cost of doing business to working families,” says Reverend Bruce Arnevik of Workers Interfaith Network. “Workers and their children are going broke or going without medicine and U.S. Bancorp needs to step in to help protect the community.”

The non-violent protest comes one day after U.S. Representative Keith Ellison and Minneapolis City Council Members called on area business leaders to shoulder their fair share of the Twin Cities’ health care burden.

Security officers announced Wednesday that they voted overwhelmingly to reject their employers’ demand that they pay as much as $1100 a month on family coverage, an unrealistic proposition that would consume more than 50% of their income. On February 25, security officers held a one-day strike—the first-ever of its kind in the area—to send a message to their employers that families need to have access to medical care and life-saving prescription drugs. The officers, who have been at the bargaining table with security firms ABM, Allied Barton, American, Securitas and Viking for nearly four months, have been working without a contract since January 1.

Each year fewer and fewer businesses in Minnesota provide medical coverage. Now less than half of businesses provide insurance, which means that 1.1 million Minnesotans will spend more than 10 percent of their pre-tax income this year on healthcare. 276,000 Minnesota families will spend more than 25% of their pre-tax income on healthcare.