The H.E.L.L.O. ActHuman Engagement on Live Lines Ordinance

Harold has been on the phone for thirty-four minutes. His problem is a $40 billing error — a five-minute fix, if only he could reach a person. Instead: eight menu options, a chatbot, a forty-minute hold, a transfer, and finally a disconnection. He gives up, and starts shopping for a new provider. Multiply Harold by a city, and you have the problem the H.E.L.L.O. Act solves.

The industry's own leaders say the human is finished — that customer-service jobs done by humans will, in Sam Altman's words, be "totally, totally gone." This proposal rejects that as a choice, not a fate. It restores a simple, once-universal guarantee — and it puts the person who answers the phone back to work here in Minneapolis.

Emma

The operator we should be hiring

⚭

Harold

The neighbor we should be serving

Meet Emma and Harold. Emma is a Minnesotan who is very good at a job that used to be everywhere and is now vanishing: she answers the phone, listens, and gets people to the help they need. Harold is the caller she was made to help. The H.E.L.L.O. Act is about both of them — the worker we should be hiring, and the neighbor we should be serving. Among the Minnesotans on both ends of that line are the state’s wounded, disabled, and partially paralyzed veterans: the callers most often stranded by a menu tree with no exit, and workers conspicuously well suited to a job that asks for judgment and a steady voice rather than physical access to an office (see §6).

The H.E.L.L.O. Act — Human Engagement on Live Lines Ordinance — restores a simple, once-universal guarantee: that a Minnesotan who calls a company large enough to afford it can reach a trained human being. It rebuilds the switchboard operator as a living-wage local job, creates a targeted incentive to hire Minnesotans with disabilities for remote call-routing and helpdesk work, and requires companies to tell you honestly whether you are talking to a person or a machine. Its spirit draws from Mayor Zohran Mamdani's reclamation of public space and dignified labor, and from a longer American tradition in which the operator on the line was the first friendly point of contact for the whole country.

Harold's problem is small. His problem is a $40 billing error. What turns a five-minute fix into a lost afternoon is not the error — it is a system built so he cannot reach anyone who can help.

The frustration Harold feels is nearly universal, and it is measurable. A national survey found that 77% of Americans encountered a product or service problem in the prior twelve months — a rate that has climbed for years. In late 2025, one major newspaper summarized the mood plainly: American customers are angrier than ever. On the phone specifically, roughly 60% of callers hang up if placed on hold longer than two minutes, and being kept on hold is the single most-cited frustration. In one widely reported survey, 62% of consumers said they would rather do an unpleasant chore than sit through an automated phone tree and repeat themselves.

The cost is not just bad feelings. Global research on customer experience estimates that poor service puts roughly $3 trillion in consumer spending at risk in a single year — split between money customers spend less of and money they stop spending entirely. When Harold gives up and switches providers, that is the externality made real: the company captured its labor savings, and the public — Harold, and the next company that now has to win him back — absorbed the cost.

The Open Line TestDoes this provision let a Minnesotan like Harold reach a human when he needs one? Today, the answer is no — and no company pays a price for that. HELLO changes the answer.

There was a time when every call in America began with a human being. "Number, please?" was one of the most familiar phrases in the country, spoken by an operator who was, quite literally, the first point of contact for the modern world.

The Switchboard Operator (1878–1983)

The telephone switchboard operator was, for a century, one of the most recognizable jobs in America. The role quickly became a workforce of women — companies found them more courteous and reliable than the teenage boys who first staffed the boards — and it became one of the earliest large-scale paths to economic independence for women outside the home, a steady wage and an identity of one's own. Operators connected calls, answered questions, relayed emergencies, and knew their communities. Automated switching, adopted widely from the 1960s on, made the job nearly extinct by the 1980s. The work did not become unnecessary; it became invisible. The occupation never legally disappeared — the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics still maintains the classifications for Switchboard Operators and Telephone Operators to this day. The line is still there. We simply stopped hiring people to answer it.

The operator's modern descendant is the customer-service representative — and it remains one of the largest occupations in the country, with roughly 3 million workers, about two-thirds of them women. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the occupation to shrink over the coming decade, with essentially all remaining openings coming from replacement rather than growth — a decline it attributes mainly to automation and AI. The jobs that survive are increasingly sent offshore: the large outsourcing firms that dominate the industry spread the work across the Philippines, India, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Colombia, and El Salvador, in what labor advocates describe as a global race to the bottom on wages.

This is the trend the H.E.L.L.O. Act sets out to reverse — not by banning the technology, but by guaranteeing that the human role has a floor, and by making Minneapolis the place those jobs come home to.

Emma is that job. She is skilled at something boardrooms treat as a cost to be cut: she actually resolves the call. The switchboard operator was an economic on-ramp for a generation of women. Emma's version can be an on-ramp again — including for Minnesotans with disabilities, for whom remote work has become the single biggest driver of employment gains (see §6).

The right to reach a real person is not a novelty. Across the United States and among our closest trading partners, governments are already writing it into law. Minneapolis would be joining a fast-moving wave — and, in one respect, getting ahead of it.

The hardest question any version of this idea faces is jurisdictional: a call a Minnesotan makes may be answered anywhere on earth. HELLO answers it the way California and the European Union do — by anchoring on the customer, not the call center.

The most common objection to a local proposal is "a city can't do that." Minneapolis can, and already does. The city sets binding standards for how private businesses treat the people of Minneapolis every day — its municipal minimum wage and its Sick and Safe Time ordinance both regulate private employers citywide, and both were upheld by the Minnesota courts against exactly the "cities can't regulate this" challenge. The right to reach a real person stands on the same footing: a consumer-protection standard for how large businesses serving Minneapolis residents must treat them.

And the city holds several levers that need no one's permission:

• Franchises & licenses. Minneapolis grants the cable and telecommunications franchises and the business licenses under which many of the worst phone-tree offenders operate. It can condition those franchises and licenses on providing Minneapolis customers a path to a human and honest AI disclosure.
• Procurement. The city and Hennepin County spend heavily with vendors. They can require — and give preference to — HELLO-Certified, human-reachable, locally-staffed, disabled-employing companies.
• Subsidies & economic development. Any business receiving city or county assistance, grants, or TIF can be required to meet the standard as a condition of the public's money.
• Direct funding. The city and county can fund the disabled-hiring wage subsidy themselves, through their own workforce-development budgets — no state tax credit required to begin.

The obligation is not "staff your call center a certain way" — it is "provide the Minneapolis customers you already serve a path to a human, and tell them honestly when they are talking to a machine." That is consumer protection and a condition of doing business with the city, squarely within municipal police power — not an attempt to regulate employment in another state. The threshold for a "covered business" borrows the size test Minnesota already uses in its Consumer Data Privacy Act, so the definition is familiar and court-tested.

A core principle governs the whole program: nothing scales until it proves itself. Each phase is contingent on the last.

A covered business must offer Minneapolis customers a clearly disclosed path to a trained live human during defined business hours — the modern "press 0 for a person." The path must be reachable within a set number of steps or minutes, backed by maximum hold-time and abandonment-rate standards so the right is real and not theoretical. Enforcement runs through the Minnesota Attorney General's consumer-protection authority, with a cure period for good-faith lapses. Nothing here caps or bans the automated “front door”: a covered business may let AI greet, triage, and resolve every call it can. The rule reaches only the exit — the moment a caller needs a person and, today, cannot find one.

At the start of any interaction, a covered business must clearly tell the consumer whether they are dealing with a human or an automated system — no synthetic voices or personas presented as real people. This extends the transparency principle already in Minnesota's data-privacy law and aligns with the EU AI Act's disclosure requirement. It is cheap, popular, and foundational: you cannot meaningfully exercise a right to a human if you cannot tell when you are not talking to one.

The Open Line TestPhase 1 is the whole point: it is the provision that lets Harold reach Emma at all. Everything else in HELLO exists to make sure Emma is a real, well-paid, local person on the other end.

A right without teeth is a slogan. HELLO is enforced on a deliberately proportionate ladder — firm enough to matter, measured enough to survive a business challenge.

• Complaint- and audit-driven. Any consumer or worker can file a failure-to-reach-a-human complaint; the enforcing authority may also audit a covered business’s Minnesota-facing lines against the published hold-time and abandonment standards.
• Cure period first. A good-faith lapse triggers written notice and a fixed window (e.g., 30 days) to fix it — no penalty for a business that corrects course. The ladder targets the willful, not the well-meaning.
• Escalating civil penalties. Uncured or negligent violations draw a per-day civil penalty for each covered line still out of compliance; willful or repeat violations draw substantially higher penalties, scaled to the ceilings Minnesota already sets for deceptive trade practices. Penalties accrue per day of non-compliance, not per call — proportionate, and impossible to treat as a cost of doing business.
• The city’s own lever. Independent of any state penalty, a non-compliant firm loses its HELLO-Certified status and its city procurement preference, and any business that contracts with or is licensed by Minneapolis is in breach — up to and including contract termination. This is enforceable on municipal authority alone, today.
• Statewide teeth. Under the model bill, the Minnesota Attorney General enforces the universal standard through existing consumer-protection authority — the same power used against deceptive and unfair business practices.
• Recovered penalties fund the jobs. Civil penalties collected are directed into the disabled-hiring grant fund, so a company that refuses to hire a human helps pay to put one to work.
• Transparency as pressure. Repeat violators are named on the public dashboard (§9). For a consumer brand, that record is often a sharper deterrent than the fine.

Minneapolis creates a HELLO-Certified Employer seal for companies that meet the human-access and disclosure standards, staff locally, and hire Minnesotans with disabilities. The city then gives certified vendors a preference in its own procurement — putting the city's purchasing power behind human-reachable service. This is entirely within municipal authority and requires no state action to begin.

A targeted incentive to hire Minnesotans with disabilities into remote call-routing and helpdesk roles — the exact work Emma does, and work uniquely suited to remote employment. Now, on local authority: a city- and county-funded wage-subsidy and grant fund for certified employers who hire Minnesotans with disabilities into these roles — drawn from existing workforce-development budgets, so it begins immediately. Later, optionally: the state can convert that grant into a permanent tax credit modeled on Massachusetts’s Disability Employment Tax Credit, scaling it to every employer statewide. The local program does not wait on the state one.

For the largest firms with a substantial physical presence in Minnesota, HELLO sets a jobs-creation staffing floor — a minimum number of live, Minnesota-based representatives scaled to customer and contact volume, so the requirement grows with the service a company actually owes the public rather than being pegged to some token ratio. It is a reshoring target, not an efficiency claim: the more Minnesotans a company serves, the more Minnesotans it helps put to work answering them. The universal right to reach a real person (Phase 1) remains the enforceable teeth; the floor is the engine that brings the jobs home.

A mandate to hire humans must not become a mandate to hire them badly. HELLO's jobs are meant to be good jobs.

• Living wage, W-2 employment. Certified and city-funded roles are direct W-2 jobs at a living wage — not misclassified gig work — consistent with living-wage standards for publicly supported employment.
• Remote-work accommodations as standard. Roles are designed remote-first, with reasonable accommodations built in from the start rather than requested as exceptions.
• No sweatshopping the mandate. The right to reach a real person may not be satisfied by understaffed, surveilled, or quota-punished conditions that make the "human" as miserable as the maze. Standards address caseload, break time, and monitoring.
• Union-friendly. HELLO aligns with the labor movement already leading on this issue — California's human-service bill is sponsored by the Communications Workers of America — and does nothing to impede organizing.

About 668,000 Minnesotans live with a disability, and only around 48% of working-age disabled Minnesotans hold a job. Statewide, people with disabilities make up roughly one in eight residents but only about 6% of the employed population — and their unemployment rate runs near 9.8%, more than double the rate for other Minnesotans. The single largest driver of recent gains in disability employment has been the spread of remote work: nationally, disabled employment reached a record high the same years remote work expanded, and disabled workers now telework at a slightly higher rate than non-disabled workers. Remote call-routing and helpdesk work is precisely that kind of job.

It is also worth saying plainly: many disabilities are not visible. A worker like Emma may have a disability that is not apparent at a glance — a chronic illness, a mobility condition, a sensory or cognitive difference — and still be exactly the skilled, personable operator a caller is grateful to reach. HELLO's disabled-hiring incentive is not charity; it points a proven mechanism at a documented gap, and it does so through Minnesota's existing disability-employment infrastructure (see §7).

The case for this on-ramp is not only economic — though the economics are stark. Nationally, full-time workers with disabilities earn roughly $10,000 less per year than workers without, about 83 cents on the dollar, and disabled Americans are more than twice as likely to live in poverty. But the deeper harm is quieter. Working-age adults with disabilities report severe loneliness at rates near 68% — roughly a third say they often feel left out or isolated, far above the rate for other adults — and the loss of everyday connection is itself a documented driver of poor health, from heart disease to depression to earlier death.

A remote line-operator job answers both gaps with one hire. It closes income by paying a living wage into a household that the market has underpaid. And it closes isolation by giving a worker a role, a team, and a hundred small human contacts a day — the very thing the caller on the other end is also reaching for. When the H.E.L.L.O. Act connects a lonely, out-of-work Minnesotan to a lonely, stranded caller, it does not just resolve a billing error. It rebuilds a thread of the social fabric that automated systems quietly cut.

One group sits at the exact intersection of every problem this ordinance addresses, and deserves to be named plainly: veterans living with service-connected disabilities — the wounded, the partially paralyzed, and those whose injuries are invisible. Roughly 278,000 veterans call Minnesota home, and more than half of them are 65 or older. Nationally, about 5.2 million veterans — close to three in ten — live with a service-connected disability. They are, at once, the caller most likely to be failed by an automated-only system and the worker most ready to staff the line.

Consider what a remote line-operator role actually asks of a person: a clear head, a steady voice, patience under pressure, and the discipline to follow a problem to its resolution. It asks almost nothing of the body. For a veteran with a spinal cord injury, a mobility impairment, chronic pain, or a blast injury — someone whose capability was never in question but whose access to a conventional workplace was — this is not charity. It is a job they are conspicuously good at, performed from a home that is already set up for them, with no commute to negotiate and no building to retrofit.

And on the other end of the call: a disabled veteran navigating VA benefits, a service-connected claim, an insurance dispute, or a pharmacy problem is doing some of the highest-stakes, least-forgiving customer-service business in American life. Telling that person to “visit our website” and looping them through a menu tree with no exit is its own small betrayal. A guaranteed path to a human is the least a state that thanks its veterans can actually hand them.

HELLO does not build new bureaucracy where proven institutions exist. Minnesota already has the infrastructure to place, train, and support workers with disabilities — and advocates ready to champion the caller side.

Everything in this ordinance is funded at the city and county level and takes effect on local authority. The costs are modest and gated. (A future statewide tax credit would be the Legislature’s separate fiscal matter — it changes nothing here.)

What gets measured gets honored. HELLO’s gates are public and numeric — no phase expands on a promise, only on proof.

Accountability here is not an afterthought bolted on at the end; it is the mechanism that lets a cautious council say yes. Every phase must clear an independent gate review before the next one is funded, so the city is never asked to scale a program that has not already worked at pilot size. The metrics below are reported on a fixed schedule and published in full, which does three things at once: it gives residents a way to hold the program honest, it protects covered businesses from moving or arbitrary targets, and it gives the Legislature real Minnesota evidence when it weighs the statewide bill. If a measure stalls — if human-reachability lags, or hiring falls short — the dashboard surfaces it early, while the pilot is still small enough to adjust. Transparency, in other words, is not a courtesy. It is the safeguard that keeps a good idea from quietly becoming a bad program.

A serious proposal earns serious opposition, and the sharpest case against this one deserves to be stated in full — then answered in full. Nearly every objection below rests on a single assumption: that HELLO bans AI and mandates human-only call centers. It does neither. It requires honest disclosure and a guaranteed human exit for the calls automation cannot resolve — the same hybrid model the industry already calls best practice.

The hardest economic and operational objections are taken up in §11, The Case Against, Answered. What follows are the shorter, practical questions — who is covered, how it is enforced, and how the pieces fit together.

Return to Harold, still holding his phone. Under the H.E.L.L.O. Act, his call is different. The system tells him, plainly, that he is about to reach a person. He presses one button. And someone picks up.

That someone is Emma — a Minnesotan, well-paid, working from home, very good at her job. She fixes the $40 error in four minutes. Harold keeps his provider. The company keeps a customer it would have lost. And a job that America spent forty years automating and offshoring away is, once again, being done by a neighbor.

This is the whole idea. Not a war on technology — a floor under human dignity, on both ends of the line. The iconic American operator said, "Number, please?" The H.E.L.L.O. Act simply makes sure that, when a Minnesotan calls, someone still answers.

City Ordinance (Minneapolis) — outline of operative sections:

1. Definitions. "Covered business," "live human representative," "automated system," "certified employer," "Minnesota consumer."
2. HELLO Certification. Standards for the seal: human-access path, disclosure, local staffing, disabled-hiring participation.
3. Procurement Preference. Certified vendors receive a defined preference in city purchasing and contracting.
4. City-Contractor Standards. Entities contracting with or licensed by the city must meet human-access and disclosure standards.
5. Grant & Wage-Subsidy Fund. Establishment, eligibility, and administration for disabled-hiring in remote roles.
6. Dashboard & Reporting. Metrics, publication cadence, gate-review triggers.
7. Legislative Memorial (optional). A standing invitation — not a dependency — for the Legislature to extend the proven local model statewide.

Optional Statewide Scale-Up Bill (Minnesota) — outline (not required for the ordinance to operate):

1. Press 0 to Reach Someone Real. Human-access path for covered businesses; hold-time and abandonment standards; AG enforcement with cure period.
2. AI-Transparency Disclosure. Mandatory human-vs-automated disclosure at the outset of interactions.
3. Scope & Threshold. Covered-business definition keyed to the Minnesota Consumer Data Privacy Act nexus; small-business exemption.
4. Disability Employment Tax Credit. Credit against first-year wages for qualifying remote call-routing/helpdesk hires, with a continuing credit thereafter (Massachusetts model).
5. Local-Jobs Floor. Volume-based staffing minimum for large in-state employers.

HELLO is the first to combine all three levers — human access, transparency, and reshoring — and to add a targeted disability-employment on-ramp.

• Private cost to firm: incremental labor for guaranteed human exits reaching covered lines (per-contact, modest).
• Private benefit to firm: avoided repeat contacts (roughly double the cost of a resolved contact) and avoided churn/re-acquisition of lost customers.
• Public benefit: recovered consumer hours; reduced exclusion of older/disabled/limited-English callers; new Minnesota payroll and disability employment.
• Net framing: the mandate exists because the private savings are captured while the public costs are socialized — the classic case for a service-standard rule.

Remote call-routing and helpdesk work is location-flexible, schedule-flexible, and accommodation-friendly — the combination research links to the largest recent gains in disability employment. It requires judgment and empathy machines lack, it can be trained on the job (as Connect 700 already demonstrates), and it scales with a company's customer base rather than its physical footprint. In short: it is exactly the kind of good, human, local job the H.E.L.L.O. Act is designed to create — Emma's job.

Sources supporting the five hypotheses tested during drafting. Links were current at time of writing and should be verified before formal submission.

Character photographs used under the Pexels License, depicting models rather than the composite individuals described. Harold — photo by Ron Lach; Emma — photo via Pexels (photo 8101313).

• California Legislature. "AB 1609 — Right to Human Customer Service Act." 2025–2026 Regular Session. Guarantees access to a live human within about five minutes during business hours; hold-time limits and AI transparency; sponsored by the Communications Workers of America. Author: Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur. California State Capitol, 1021 O Street, Sacramento, CA 95814. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov
• United States Congress. "Keep Call Centers in America Act." 119th Congress, 2025 (Sens. Ruben Gallego & Jim Justice). Advance-notice-of-offshoring and U.S.-based human-access provisions; public offshoring list. U.S. Senate, Washington, DC 20510. https://www.congress.gov
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• European Union. "Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 — The Artificial Intelligence Act." Transparency and human-availability obligations for customer-service AI; full application 2026. European Commission, Rue de la Loi 200, 1049 Brussels, Belgium. https://artificialintelligenceact.eu
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• Customer Care Measurement & Consulting, with the W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University. "National Customer Rage Survey." 2025. Documented that 77% of Americans experienced a product or service problem in the prior year. CCMC, 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20006. https://www.customercaremc.com
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• Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED). "The Labor Force Experience of Minnesotans with Disabilities." MN Economic Trends. Documents the ~48% employment-to-population ratio and a 9.8% unemployment rate for disabled Minnesotans. DEED, 332 Minnesota Street, Suite E200, St. Paul, MN 55101. https://mn.gov/deed/newscenter/publications/trends/september-2023/disability.jsp
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• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. "Persons with a Disability: Labor Force Characteristics — 2024" and "Telework Trends." Record-high 22.7% disabled employment-population ratio; disabled workers now telework at a slightly higher rate than non-disabled workers. BLS, Postal Square Building, 2 Massachusetts Avenue NE, Washington, DC 20212. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2025/22-7-percent-of-people-with-a-disability-were-employed-in-2024.htm
• Institute on Disability, University of New Hampshire. "Annual Disability Statistics Compendium 2026." Median earnings for disabled workers ~$10,000 below non-disabled workers (about 83 cents on the dollar). 10 West Edge Drive, Suite 101, Durham, NH 03824. https://www.researchondisability.org
• Clark, Melissa A., et al., Brown University School of Public Health. "Loneliness Among Working-Age Adults with Disabilities," Annals of Internal Medicine, 2025. Found severe loneliness affecting ~65–68% of working-age disabled adults surveyed. 121 South Main Street, Providence, RI 02903. https://sph.brown.edu/news/2025-08-21/disabled-adults-loneliness
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• Kessler Foundation & University of New Hampshire Institute on Disability. "nTIDE — National Trends in Disability Employment." Employment-rate gap between working-age people with and without disabilities, and the role of remote work in recent gains. UNH Institute on Disability, 10 West Edge Drive, Suite 101, Durham, NH 03824. https://researchondisability.org/ntide
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• Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED). "Vocational Rehabilitation Services; Employment First Minnesota; Connect 700; Disability Hub MN; State Services for the Blind." Placement, training, and hiring-pathway infrastructure. DEED, 332 Minnesota Street, Suite E200, St. Paul, MN 55101. https://mn.gov/deed/job-seekers/disabilities/