"Tear Gas Tim" - Tim Walz's executive orders to repress the George Floyd Uprising

Union activists boot MN National Guard from St. Paul Labor Center. Walz says this is ‘unacceptable.’

By Frederick Melo | fmelo [at] pioneerpress.com | Pioneer Press
PUBLISHED: April 15, 2021 at 5:21 p.m. | UPDATED: April 16, 2021 at 1:15 p.m.

The Minnesota National Guard rolled into the St. Paul Labor Center on West Seventh Street on Tuesday, at least 50 uniformed soldiers and some 17 armored vehicles.

The National Guard then rolled out of the Labor Center on Wednesday evening, to chants of “Don’t come back!” and “Whose house? Our house!” and “Na-na-na-na, goodbye!” shouted by a dozen or more labor advocates.

The ousting took little more than an hour, and illustrated the widening gulf between the public safety measures championed by Democratic leaders such as Gov. Tim Walz, who have sworn to protect the Twin Cities from the unrest that caused upward of $700 million in damage nearly a year ago, and the civil rights concerns of social justice activists, including rank-and-file members of the labor movement.

“I was a little surprised at how fast it went,” said Kieran Knutson, president of the Communications Workers of America Minneapolis Local 7250, who arrived at the St. Paul Labor Center on Wednesday evening with staffers, rank-and-file members and executive board officers from eight different labor groups.

House Minority Leader Kurt Daudt, R-Crown, called Thursday for union members involved in the incident to issue an apology to the Guard and resign.

“The treatment of our National Guardsmen stationed at the St. Paul Labor Center this week was nothing short of appalling,” said Daudt, in a written statement. “These are citizen soldiers who left their families and jobs this week to keep us safe. They deserve better than this.”

At least one DFL lawmaker appeared to agree with Daudt.

In a Thursday evening Twitter post, Rep. Dave Lislegard, who represents an Iron Range district, said: “While I am a proud John F. Kennedy labor Democrat I’m not proud of and do not support the actions taken against the men and women in uniform who are serving us all. An apology is in order.”

An hour later, DFL Gov. Tim Walz also weighed in on Twitter:

“Let’s be clear: The brave men and women of the Minnesota National Guard are our neighbors. They’re teachers, health care workers, and business owners who live in communities across our state. This is unacceptable. They can’t “go home” — this is their home.”

Walz himself served for nearly 25 years in the Army National Guard before retiring as a master sergeant.

A FINE LINE FOR POLITICAL LEADERS

With the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin entering closing arguments and then jury deliberations next week, political leaders are walking a fine line between assuring the public their homes and businesses are safe and protecting the rights of protesters to assemble.

“Our position, especially as members of organized labor, is it’s critical that we side with the people on this issue — not the politicians, not the bank owners and not the armed forces that are defending both,” said Cliff Willmeng, a member of the Minnesota Nurses Association’s board of directors. “Our position has always been, in especially in light of another killing of an unarmed Black man, that we are unequivocal in our support of that community’s right to protest. The infrastructure of labor is not for rent to the people who are suppressing that protest.”

Knutson said he and Willmeng helped lead efforts to expel the National Guard from the labor center after learning of their presence.

Located just outside of downtown St. Paul, the labor center serves as a hall for a wide variety of unions, including members of the building trades and the St. Paul Regional Labor Federation, which serves as an umbrella association for more than 100 local unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO.

“As I understand it there was no democratic decision made to let the Guard use our facility,” Knutson said. “It’s a big union hall for all of St. Paul and east metro labor. The police are not a constituent of St. Paul labor.”

Asked to respond to Pioneer Press questions about the soldiers’ use of the labor center, a National Guard spokesperson did not have a comment on Thursday night.

HEIGHTENED TENSIONS

Tensions around the use of military-grade weapons, technology and manpower on city streets aren’t new, but they’ve been heightened during protests following the deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis last May and Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center on Sunday.

Both were Black men killed during police encounters. For several consecutive nights, hundreds, if not thousands, of protesters have gathered in defiance of nightly curfews outside the Brooklyn Center Police Department to demand fundamental police reforms, or even a complete defunding of local police departments.

Local and state law enforcement officers, who are being augmented by the National Guard in the leadup to the verdict in the trial of the former Minneapolis police officer accused of killing Floyd, have engaged in tense standoffs with the protesters before being cleared away ahead of the curfews. Law enforcement has deployed tear gas and crowd-control projectiles; violent demonstrators have thrown bricks, rocks, bottles and cans at the officers.

UNCLEAR WHO INVITED THE GUARD

Knutson said it was unclear who invited the National Guard into the St. Paul Labor Center. Kera Peterson, president of the St. Paul Regional Labor Federation, declined to comment through a spokesman on Thursday.

In a letter to the Labor Federation on Thursday, the St. Paul Federation of Educators Local 28 said the presence of the National Guard in the union hall sent a message to union members of color “that their lived experience has no value” and was also “deeply traumatizing to our many immigrant union members across the city of St. Paul.”

Willmeng, who captured the Guard’s departure in a 13-minute video posted to Facebook, said a member of a building trades group had offered the Guard the keys to the site, which is owned by the Main Street Labor Corp. Multiple labor groups own shares of the corporation.

“We got on the phone to (him), and we said, ‘Look man, you can’t be lending out the keys to the labor hall, not under these circumstances,'” Willmeng said Thursday. “He came down to the hall — I don’t know him personally but he seems like a perfectly nice guy — and within five or 10 minutes the Guard was packing up their stuff and leaving.”

Mara H. Gottfried contributed to this report.

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