I attended a Chicago Teachers Union rally and the local Trump and Bernie Sanders political rallies earlier this year, so I thought I knew what to expect when I stumbled upon a labor protest in Paris on Tuesday afternoon. I was wrong.
I wondered how ugly this battle might get—or at least I did until a few minutes before 6 PM, when an officer aimed his cannon and fired a shot my direction. A cylinder arched high into the air and broke into four pieces before raining down on us. The fragments landed about seven to ten yards from me, and tear gas quickly enveloped me and the protesters around me. I’d tied my shirt around my face in an effort to shield myself from the chemicals, but it didn’t seem to help. Tears welled in my eyes and my throat burned like fire. I coughed fiercely while jogging toward the edge of the park, sat on a bench, and tried to suppress a wave of nausea.
It’s not hard to see why there are so many mixed feelings about high-profile labor battles in Chicago, whether it’s Karen Lewis and the CTU pushing back against a union-busting Democratic mayor or service workers rallying for $15-an-hour minimum wage: many of us are lukewarm on the idea of people swimming upstream against the mighty market.
