The Starbucks Workers Union, a project of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) just succeeded in getting one of its members reinstated to his job at the Mall of America’s Starbucks outlet. See this story for details (http://www.starbucksunion.org/node/2044). After the reinstatement, about a hundred fellow workers had boarded a train to the Mall of America yesterday to celebrate his first day back on the job, but they were stopped and held for 20 minutes on the train by a large number of riot-armed police. They were told that the Mall had told them they were not welcome, even though they had promised not to demonstrate illegally. It was obvious to me, when I read this, that the police action was part of the overall militarization of the Twin Cities area against protests during the Republican National Convention; poeple at Bread Not Bombs in Minneapolis and at a media center in Saint Paul have already been raided by riot-armed police (see http://election411.org/ for ongoing coverage) . Even though the Starbucks victory celebration had no connection with the Republicans, the police had the equipment and training and apparently said “What the heck, why don’t we do a little union-busting while we’re at it?”. Apparently nobody was taken into custdy or injured, but eh train was forced to reverse course and tke the Wobblies back to the staion where they had boarded. The FBI-mandated police “intelligence” gathering that has been going on in the Twin Cities and Denver for the last several months, involving spying on protest and social-change organizations, was obviously what enabled the police to know about the celebration. How else would they even know to suspect a group of young people going to the Mall of anything other than media-driven acquisitiveness.
This reminds me of my own 1999 encounter, as a member of the Footlocker 8 , with the unjust laws that make the Mall of New Hampshire and other malls around the country into no-protest zones, even though they are obviously commuity centers that serve many of the same functions that the downtowns of cities used to serve. A Mall should not be allowed to arbitraritly use the police to exclude any category of people, whether or not they intend to exercise (what ought to be) their free speech rights.
I’ll try to report back on this incident as soon as I know more.