Right to Work Protest

I haven’t really been anywhere I don’t go all the time lately so I haven’t had a blog entry in a while. I worked in Green Bay and Milwaukee in the last couple weeks, so of course I stopped in Chicago and captured a few shots.

Tuesday I decided to head downtown Lansing to the Capitol to capture some of the Right To Work Bill protest. I arrived around 8am and stayed until 10am. When I arrived people were just getting to the Capitol. There were probably a couple hundred people at the time.

I started walking around to see what I could find. This was one of the first people I saw. She was standing silent, alone on the Capital steps, and it really stuck out to me.

About 20 minutes later the crowd started to get bigger by the minute. I would say by 8:30 there were a couple thousand people outside and from what I heard there were a few thousand inside as well.

Most of the people I saw seemed to be UAW members, but I know there were a lot of teachers there as well.  As the crowd got bigger they started yelling, “Who’s house – our house” over and over amongst other chants. There was a guy in the middle of the Capitol steps with a red megaphone with a lot of UAW members surrounding him.

I then noticed a few people that were for the bill (I will call them Pro-Bill) at the bottom of the steps. I saw them walk up to the UAW members and start yelling, then the Union members started yelling back calling them scabs and a lot worse. This exchange went on for about ten minutes until the Pro-Bill people finally walked away. I saw this same scene play out several times in the time I was there. You could tell it was going to get a lot more heated as the day continued, and from all reports it sure did.

I then decided to walk around and capture some faces in the crowd.

After about two hours I had enough. I decided I would head home and edit some photos. I then uploaded them to CNN.com and did a couple IReports (One currently has over 17,000 views and the other has 4,000+) which started some heated discussions online.  As soon as I uploaded them, one of the producers called me to vet the story; then, about a half hour later, another producer called me from CNN’s sister company, HLN. She asked if I would like to be on the show “Making It in America”. I said sure. She said it would be a phone interview with the host, Susan. They called me about 3:55 and I was on the air at 4. The whole story lasted about two minutes and I was probably on the air for 30-45 seconds. I prefer to be behind the camera or in this case behind the scene, but it was an experience, and I was glad I did it.

It ended up being a lot busier day than what I expected when I woke up!