Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s department of labor in 2023 approved a six-figure contract to a group that has aggressively advocated defunding the police to promote a labor law he signed last year.
The Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry in 2023 approved a $100,000 contract to Centro De Trabajadores Unidos En La Lucha (CTUL) to “increase worker knowledge and understanding” of the earned sick and safe time law Walz signed, state records show. CTUL has an extensive history of anti-police activism, ranging from participation in the 2020 demonstrations over the death of George Floyd to a campaign it’s currently running to siphon funding away from law enforcement and into “social programs,” per materials published by the organization.
CTUL’s office, located a block away from where Floyd died, was a “hub of protest” during the demonstrations over his death, according to Dissent Magazine. Members of the organization handed out food, water and masks to protestors, with some CTUL activists participating in the protests themselves.
Valentina McKenzie, an organizer with CTUL, spoke at one such protest, complaining that police were not doing enough to stop “wage theft” from “black and brown bodies” while wearing a “#Defund Police” t-shirt, according to a Facebook post.
“We’ve protested,” another organizer with the group said in 2020, according to Dissent. “We fought for the police not to get higher pay, but we were ignored and they are still killing. Now, it is to the point where everybody is so angry—I don’t think half of these stores would have been burned or touched if we weren’t so fed up.”
Protestors burned down or otherwise damaged over 1,500 locations in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area during the riots following the death of Floyd, causing an estimated $550 million in damages and killing two people in the process. Walz has been criticized for receiving a request from Minneapolis’ mayor to deploy the National Guard to quell ongoing arson and looting in the city but waiting until the next day to respond, according to the New York Times.
To date, Minnesota has paid out about $43,000 of the $100,000 contract it awarded to CTUL.
CTUL’s 2020 impact report touted how it had “made it more clear than ever that the fight for worker justice is deeply connected to fights for dignity and rights in other areas of our lives and identities” by taking part in campaigns to “cancel rent and mortgages” and to defund the police so that resources could be diverted to “programs that build community wealth and community safety.”
CTUL eventually got its wish as the Minneapolis City Council voted to slash $28 million off the police department’s budget in December 2020, Bloomberg reported. The year following, Minneapolis saw the highest number of homicides in over two decades, alongside a 21.6% spike in all violent crime, according to multiple outlets.
Following the spike in crime, the Minneapolis city council at the end of 2021 restored practically all the funding they cut from the city’s police department the previous year, the Star Tribune reported. While some in the left-of-center world now believe the defund the police movement was a mistake, CTUL is holding firm.
The organization is currently running a “campaign to defund the police and reinvest those funds into other programs that actually keep communities safe, such as worker protections, additional wage theft investigators, and other social programs,” according to its website.
Minnesota business owners have said that the earned sick and safe time law CTUL was tapped to help promote, which allows employees to earn one hour of paid time off for every 30 hours they work, has made their lives more difficult, Fox News Digital reported.
“Our business has totally been affected by Walz. Since Walz has been in, it’s kind of been a nightmare,” a local business owner told Fox News Digital, referencing the law. “It just appears that he’s really against small businesses.”
“I appreciate my employees and I love my employees,” another small business owner told Fox News Digital, reacting to the law. “I just feel like he’s created a policy for my business when it’s not workable for me.”
CTUL, the Harris campaign and the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.
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