How a WyoFile error led to a lesson on labor

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During the first week of the legislative session, a WyoFile photographer captured an image of two men standing on the steps of the Wyoming Capitol. The man on the left wore a tan work coat. An item protruded below the hem near his right hip. It appeared to be a holster.

The photographer snapped thousands of pictures during the session’s first week, and this one wasn’t on our radar at first. But as we prepared a story about a new law that allows concealed carry at the Capitol, the photo seemed like a good way to illustrate the piece.

Except for one problem. That thing we thought was a holster? It turned out to be something else. A wallet. A unique one, to be sure. One that straps to the leg like a holster might. But definitely not intended for carrying a handgun.

I know this because the wallet’s owner, Austin Wagler, sent me an email the day after the story published. So did his friend, Drew Slavkoff, the man standing next to him in the photograph. Neither was carrying a gun that day. Austin even provided photos of the falsely accused wallet.

We’d messed up. We made an assumption and got it wrong.

Austin and Drew were not happy. People had seen the photograph and, like us, jumped to conclusions about what they believed to be armed men at the Capitol. 

But there was more to their frustration than being misidentified and criticized online. The men had gone to the Capitol with other union workers to advocate for a completely unrelated issue, and our mistake had overshadowed the real reason for their visit.

“Our purpose for being there was to support the working people of Wyoming and lobby against anti-labor legislation trying to be passed,” Drew wrote to me, adding, “I feel like getting the truth out there in good faith would be a good gesture.”

Wyoming is a blue-collar state. And yet labor receives relatively little attention. As a state, we lionize our workers — rig hands and miners and folks doing construction — but have historically done little to address a worker fatality rate that routinely ranks among the nation’s worst. Austin and Drew had tried to raise some awareness about labor issues, but got roped into a debate about guns instead.

And so I asked them for an interview. The next morning, the three of us met on a video call, along with Marcie Kindred, the Wyoming State AFL-CIO executive director who’d organized the labor event at the Capitol. We introduced ourselves, and I apologized for the error. They were gracious and kind, and our conversation soon turned from the photo to why they felt so passionately about labor issues.

Austin and Drew belong to the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 800. They run heavy equipment and perform construction and infrastructure work for things like power plants and wind farms. “If you want the simplistic answer,’ Austin told me, “if it’s big and yellow, we move it.”

Both are proud union members — Drew is an organizer — and operators like themselves play a big role as Wyoming embraces new industries like next-generation nuclear power and data centers. As they see it, Wyoming is going to need more workers, so now’s the time to push for better working conditions.

And so they and about two dozen other union members traveled to the Capitol during the session’s first week to lobby against House Bill 6, “Unemployment insurance coverage-period and reporting,” which proposed a new, lower cap on the duration of unemployment benefits in Wyoming. The size of that cap is important because construction workers are often laid off once the weather turns. Or as Austin explained, “if you can’t move dirt, you can’t work.”

Notably, the bill would not have applied to all union members, which Marcie says was a tactic by lawmakers who wanted to avoid drawing opposition from labor, which led to a similar measure’s defeat last year. But that didn’t dissuade Austin and Drew from speaking out.

“I think they thought that that was going to get the union off their back,” Austin said. “And the union is much in support of the common man as well as common blue-collar workers.”

They met with lawmakers and watched some of the legislative action, though the bill they were focused on had already failed introduction by the time they arrived. Still, they appreciated being able to show people at the Capitol, including those who might hold organized labor in a negative light, that union members are advocating for workers — even the ones who don’t carry a union card. 

“People think union, oh yeah, they care about themselves,” Drew told me. “But I was there for the working-class people. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander in my eyes.”

Neither had attended a legislative session before. I asked about their first impressions. “It was a little overwhelming initially seeing all the stuff happening and seeing all these people in suits and people taking pictures,” Drew said. “But the more you’re there, the more comfortable I got, the more part of it I felt … that’s a good thing for people to experience themselves, is to go be a part of your government.”

As a guy in construction, Austin was struck by the Capitol building. “I was paying attention to the architecture itself,” he told me. “Architecture was big for me. I spent a little time in Europe just last year, and well, you know America does have buildings that are three-feet thick in concrete.”

I was still wondering about Austin’s unusual wallet. I didn’t want to make things awkward by going back to the thing that started all of this, but my curiosity got the best of me. How exactly did he end up with a wallet that hitches to the side of his hip? 

Turns out, he was looking for a way to avoid messing up his back by sitting on a wallet while working. “So I was like, ‘Well, I’m going to get myself a fanny pack.’ And, uh, fanny packs look not super cool. So, I decided to try and sport something like that, that looks maybe a little more cool. Yeah, it does get brought up as a pretty frequent subject even just in my day-to-day life.”

Which is the lesson here: If other people regularly asked Austin about what’s strapped to his leg, WyoFile should have done the same.