The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez: Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners just like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and we’ve got a really important episode for y’all today. And it’s about a crisis that affects all of us, even if we don’t think that it does. And I’m really grateful to be joined by a familiar voice that listeners are going to recognize from a number of the one-on-one and panel interviews that we did with railroad workers back in 2022 when the United States was on the verge of its first national railroad strike in a generation.
To protect him and his job, we just call him Jay around here. And we won’t name the railroad company that he works for, but he’s a veteran-trained dispatcher who’s been in the industry for 22 years, basically the railroad equivalent of an air traffic controller and a 911 dispatcher rolled into one. It was rank and file workers like Jay who first alerted us to the long brewing crisis on the nation’s freight rail system, which is also impacting our passenger rail system, our whole supply chain, and the towns and cities where these trains pass through all over the country. We’d learned about the Wall Street takeover of the railroads, the deregulation, the corporate consolidation, the profits and margins obsessed mania that has led to disastrous, unsafe, and unsustainable policies and decisions that have put frontline workers, trackside communities, and the public at large at long-term risk for the sake of massive short-term profits for the rail carriers, their executives, and their shareholders cutting or automating jobs year after year, piling more work onto fewer workers, running those workers into the ground, spitting them out of the industry, and then hurriedly hiring untrained workers to replace them.
We’d learned a lot about this crisis leading up to the potential strike in 2022, which then President Joe Biden and both parties in Congress conspired to break before it even had a chance to begin. We saw the costs of this crisis with the catastrophic train derailment and chemical disaster in East Palestine, Ohio in 2023. So today we’re talking with Jay again to ask the simple question, has anything gotten better on the railroads? So Brother Jay, it is so great to have you back on the show again, man. I know it’s been a minute. First and foremost, how you doing, brother? How you been doing since we last heard from you?

Jay: It has been a minute. How many years now? What is this? 2022? What? Four years now. Already four years. Boy, I feel like it’s growing faster and faster every year, the older I get. But I’m doing well despite facing strong opposition and tough headwinds. I don’t let anything stop me. I mean, if you’re going to do something, you may as well set out, put your hand to it, you may as well do it right. And somebody’s got to tell the truth because if everybody believes someone else is going to do it, nobody’s ever going to tell anything. So here we are, and I’m looking forward to what we have to discuss today.

Maximillian Alvarez: Right on, man. And in terms of speaking the truths that need to be heard, I mean, you recently filed a formal complaint with the Surface Transportation Board. And by the looks of that complaint, it does not sound like the things that you and I were talking about four years ago have gotten much better. In fact, it sounds like they’ve gotten worse.

Jay: I would absolutely say they’ve gotten worse. Unfortunately, something that I figured out, and you continue to see this with the Wall Street syndrome that’s afflicting corporate America, I mean all across the country. It doesn’t matter what job it is, what profession it is, it’s cut, cut, cut, cut to prosperity. But in reality, there is no prosperity when you’re cutting. The prosperity is actually a false, it’s almost like a false flag operation. If a company’s not bringing in new revenues, new investment, new business, whatever the case may be, and yet you continue to show record profits, when as a portion of the company’s earnings, a very small portion often is what your new increases or new customers were, how do you support that? Where does your money come for stock buybacks? Where does the record revenue come quarter after quarter, year over year? And the reality of the situation is it’s not actual revenue.
It’s cutting conductors, it’s cutting engineers, it’s combining trains, it’s eliminating crew districts, it’s cutting car inspectors, hiring non-contracted workers, which are known as scabs to most union workers. Oftentimes these folks are paid less, and we already know with expenses the way they are, that a living wage in America probably at this point would be nothing short of about 25 bucks an hour. I mean, let’s just call it what it is. So if you’re making less than that, man, you’re struggling. Power bills are going up, school taxes are increasing, fuel goes through the roof. I mean, not as bad as it has been in the past, but at 450, 479 a gallon, that’s not exactly good either.

Maximillian Alvarez: No, it ain’t great, man. I’m dying over here.

Jay: Yeah. I mean, it’s costing me 70 bucks to fill a mid-size SUV where it used to cost me 45 or 50. And I mean, for a lot of people, you have to think, in the 1980s, if you looked at what an average conductor engineer earned then and compared it to today’s dollars, if our wages had kept up, I mean, my God, we’d be over a quarter million a year. And you think about that, it’s the middle class that drives the economic engine that is the prosperity of America. It’s the middle class that supports all of the other parts of the middle class. So your food service industry, your hospitality industry, any manufacturing company, let’s say you build lawn tractors. Well, if somebody’s going to need a lawn tractor, they’re first going to have to own a home. And if you buy a home and you want to have it built, well, guess what?
Somebody’s got to ship the lumber. Here’s where the railroad comes in. But before you even do that, somebody’s got to go log it. So there’s a lot of different hands that touch all of this stuff from the time it was a tree standing in the forest till it’s a two by four in your living room wall and all of the transportation in between. But if all you have is filthy rich and broke poor with no middle class, you don’t have anything because who needs a railroad when nobody’s buying anything to ship?

Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, man. It’s like they’re planning for society without humans. It’s like, who’s going to buy your products if no one can afford to live? Who’s going to create anything if you’re all putting AI into your goddamn programs and operational systems? It’s like you see that same sort of blindness that has led Wall Street and corporate executives to take our vital supply chain and destroy it, doing all the things that you’re talking about, destroying the workers in the process, destroying the infrastructure in the process, destroying towns like East Palestine in the process and just moving on because they’re raking in more money than they ever have. It’s like we’re careening towards a cliff and what’s going to happen when those profits run out? Does anyone think beyond a few years in these corporate offices? It sure doesn’t seem like it. But I wanted to sort of ask in that vein, after all the attention that you guys were able to get in 2022, especially as we got to the edge of a potential strike, and then after East Palestine being such a international disaster, it felt like for a fleeting moment, the railroads were feeling like they were going to have to make some concessions and change some of their behavior a bit.
That’s what people have asked me for years ever since. I wanted to pose that question to you. Did they change at all in that aftermath? Did it just go away after a couple months?

Jay: I mean, I think as an industry, and we’re talking the class one industry, a lot of your short lines are operated by people that are trying to do what’s right. You have small companies, in some cases they’re family-owned. Now a lot of them have been getting bought up by holding companies now, but a lot of the smaller companies weren’t the problem to begin with. It’s your giant Wall Street traded companies. And everybody knows that it’s a shell game. Everybody knows the math is a fraud. And the way it’s represented is not the way it’s actually happening. So they said, “Well, there needs to be more detectors out there. We need to have better technology. They need to be fewer miles apart.” Because I think it was an article that I read last year that Transport Canada had written about a rail car wheel bearing, that if it went bad, it could catastrophically fail in as little as 12 miles.
And you got to figure, I mean, if you’ve got a 286,000 pound rail car and you’ve got, let’s see, four axles underneath of it, so that gives you eight contact points. It means you have eight bearings. You take that 286,000 pounds, divide it out by eight, and what? I don’t know, I can’t do the math in my head. It’s like 17 tons or something pressing down on that bearing, something like that, somewhere in that neighborhood. So with that kind of pressure on there, when something stops spinning the way it’s supposed to and the lubricant goes away, you could just imagine how hot that gets and how fast. An empty car will last longer, a loaded one will not. And the more the heavier it is, the quicker the thing’s going to fail because the heat’s going to build exponentially. But putting detectors every so many miles is all well and good.
I don’t disagree with that. But then you have to look at the operating rules that we have, and the operating rules haven’t changed. So for example, on our detectors, we can’t go slower than eight miles per hour over a detector, or it’ll give us a train too slow message. It causes the transducers and stuff not to read right and they lose track of what they’re counting and don’t know what to do. And when that happens, depending on the type of train it is, then the conductor will have to get down and go walk the train for an inspection. Well, that train might be 15,000 feet long now. And yeah, I said 15,000 feet. That’s insanity. A train does not need to be that big.
I saw one that was 46,000 tons, 330 loads, and the thing had nine engines on it with split multiple DP sets. And anytime you ask somebody in leadership about this, they say, “Well, give me a data-driven solution. Data, data, data, AI, models, blah, blah, blah.” Listen, let me tell you something. If you’re going to build a model, the only way you’re going to be able to build a model is on things that have already happened in most cases. Now, you can have predictive models and futuristic models and all that, but all of those are based on past behavior. So if someone like myself comes in and says, “Look, I don’t like that. And here’s why I don’t like it. I can’t put my finger on it yet, but something just doesn’t feel right. Or I can tell you this isn’t going to go the way you think it’s going to go.
And the first thing I get is, well, give me a data-driven solution.” Well, you’re dismissing my concern and you’re saying it doesn’t matter, but yet you’re willing to look at the model someone else built, which is an opinion and take it for the gospel, but you won’t listen to me because my narrative doesn’t agree with yours. That’s a bit of a problem.
And the damage to the equipment, Max, oh my God, dude. I mean, springs are missing on the side of these cars, loaded chlorine cars without springs on the side of them. Draft gear broken in places. I’ve never seen it broken, and yet somehow it’s still out there running. Bolster angularity issues, cars lifted off of the truck. So the truck is actually riding crooked down the railroad underneath the car, burning a hole through the bottom of the equipment. I’ve had two instances where the bottom of a rail car, the welds have broken and fallen out of the bottom of the car while the train was moving. Thankfully, a dragging equipment detector caught both of those. Another one, the car literally ripped in half and caused a catastrophic derailment, put cars everywhere, delayed the morning commute for all the passenger trains. I mean, it’s crazy. You had that big explosion underneath I-10 out on the BN a year or two ago.
It was caught on a tractor trailer dash cam on the TransCon. Mind you, the Southwest Chief goes scorching through there about 90 miles an hour twice a day. God forbid if that train had been coming when the tank car wrecked and blew up.
I mean, multiple pileups on the Pittsburgh line up through Pennsylvania. CSX has had multiple pileups. They’ve had bridge failures. I mean, just like, what are we doing, dude? A railroad is a capital intensive business. You’ve got to spend money to make it run. And they’re not doing that. They’re just milking the money out to make the numbers of Wall Street look good.

Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, I think that’s very succinctly and powerfully put. It is a shell game, right? Because you can see this for yourself if you live near a railroad or drive across the country. Everyone knows our infrastructure’s going to shit. It’s just like a lot of this stuff, maybe folks don’t see it on their phones or their timelines, but if you go outside and walk around, you’ll see that everything’s kind of fallen apart while the people who are supposed to be maintaining it are making bank and the people, the workers who actually are tasked with maintaining it are getting crushed.
Yeah, I see it everywhere that I go, but I wanted to ask what that has looked like from the dispatch office. Because it’s like the country was alerted last year to the long brewing crisis in air traffic controlling as well. And the shortage of air traffic controllers that we’ve had for years that no one’s been listening to when union reps and workers are complaining about it. But I think that folks still don’t know what it looks like for a worker like yourself, all that you’re responsible for from the dispatch office. And they can understand what it’s like to be an engineer on a train that used to be a mile long that’s now three miles long. We can at least imagine that. But what does it look like to be a dispatcher who used to have the area expansion equivalent of a one-mile train going to a three-mile train?
How much terrain are you covering and how many people do you guys have to do it under these policies?

Jay: I mean, there’s nothing short of just straight up saying it’s bad. I mean, they’ve doubled the size of the territory. In fact, the job that I work is two jobs smashed together into one. And one thing that I used to do an awful lot, and this is indicative of your old heads as they call us, the ones that have been around for a while. New school, let me tell you something. The standard that we had to adhere to when I hired is not the standard now, not even close. You just do not have to be qualified like you used to have to be. Now it’s DEI this, DEI that. We have a number we have to meet, and it doesn’t really matter whether or not you actually can do the job or do the job well. They just want a body in the seat. And when they doubled the territory, I went from having time to plan, time to think about what I wanted to do, time to be deliberate about giving track time out.
So from a train dispatcher’s perspective, and most people have probably never met a train dispatcher, it’s a pretty niche craft. Just like most people will never meet a locomotive engineer. It’s pretty rare. You just don’t. I mean, you’re more likely to meet a civil engineer or a lawyer than you are a locomotive engineer. And that’s not to in any way degrade them. That just shows you how niche these jobs are. But if you consider what a train dispatcher does, I literally manage every aspect of the operation of the railroad. So I have 400 plus miles of territory. That spans multiple lines in multiple states, two telephones, numerous radio bases, sometimes anywhere from eight to as many as 18 control screens in addition to your train sheets, your bulletins, all the paperwork that you need to move trains safely. So you might have dimensional shipments on one or two trains or maybe three.
Then you have work zones for maintenance of way. So you might have three or four of those. And depending on the company you work for, those may be handled differently. You might need absolute block protection, you might need to protect switches. You might have to issue Form Ds or track authorities. I mean, all of these different things going on. Then you have people that get impatient and don’t want to wait for the three-mile long train, so they charge through the crossing and break the gate off. Well, now that’s another problem. So then I get a call from the police that I have to facilitate protecting that crossing and running trains at 15 miles an hour because the lights will stay on indefinitely. If the gate can’t go back up, the lights will just flash continuously. So we slow the train down because people come up, see the lights are flashing, not look for a train, pull out in front of it and get hit.
And I don’t need that. I’ve had enough fatalities in my career.
And I have to send a maintainer. I have to slow the trains down. And now you look at that and you say, okay, well, here comes a train that’s 15,000 feet long. I was going to put him in the siding, but there’s just one problem. He doesn’t fit by two railroad car lengths. And 30 minutes behind him is Amtrak. Now I get a broken gate. Amtrak’s still doing almost 80. He’s going to be on that guy’s rear end in a couple of minutes. I mean, literally, you’re literally going to look away and look back and boom, there he is going to be. I mean, that’s a little exaggeration, but that’s what it feels like. And that’s in addition to your rail grinders, your camping, your tying surface gangs, your rail gangs, your bridging building guys, your CNS guys that have to do their switch testing and their crossing tests.
And then you have trespassers out there messing around. We were just talking earlier, I’ve had two fatalities and a partial amputation in the last two and a half months involving trespassers. And for me, it’s a lot of paperwork. It’s a headache. It stops my trains and makes me a lot of mess to deal with. But like I said just a minute ago, I’ve had so many fatalities in my career, I’ve lost count, and I just removed myself from it. It’s just another phone call, another headache, another problem to deal with. And that might sound awful, but you have to realize trauma doctors and nurses have to do the same thing. They see horrible stuff every day. And if they let it get to them personally, they wouldn’t be effective at their jobs anymore. And nobody wants a trained dispatcher that’s not effective.

Maximillian Alvarez: Oh, and again, I was joking with you before we started recording that it’s like whether I’m talking to you or the longshore guys in the Port of Tacoma or guys on oil rigs in the Gulf, the amount of things you have to juggle in your head at once and maintain your focus and decision-making kind of capacity without getting paralyzed by the stakes of everything that you’re managing is wild to me. Because the second I start thinking about it, I start breaking out into a cold sweat because a rube like me who’s trying to envision the job that you do, I start by thinking like, okay, yeah, imagine a map where you got the trains moving at certain speeds. This one’s got to stop here so that one can go. But then the reality starts filling in of a 400 square mile area, multiple lines, trains that are now three miles long, moving a lot slower than they used to, breaking down, screwing up the flow of everything, not just on the freight system, but on the passenger rail system that’s coming up on the same line, like you said.
And then you add the layers that you’re also talking to the maintenance of way guys who are, for listeners, those are the guys on the ground checking the track, maintaining the track, fixing the track. And then you also have the bridges. Those are their own sort of interchange kind of system that you got to navigate. Do you ever have time to take a bathroom break?

Jay: You have to take one because if you don’t, you’ll never get one. Sometimes it is so bad that I literally just, I put everything down on the desk and I get up and I walk out and take a breather. I just can’t do it. I have to clear my mind for a second and just go catch my breath, go over to the bathroom, whatever it is, wash my face off, just refreshing up a little bit and maybe grab something to eat, fill my water cup, and then it’s right back in the seat and you’re charging at it again. And a lot of the policies and stuff that are being implemented don’t make sense. And you’re seeing this all across the class ones. They’re talking about technology like Trip Optimizer and Trip Optimizer now zero to zero. That’s a General Electric/Wabtec program. And what they’re doing is they’re saying, okay, well, the engineer has to use Trip Optimizer all the time on every trip.
If it’s working, he or she has to use it.
There’s a couple parts I want to touch on here. So the rip optimizer, don’t let me forget that, Max, write that down. The Trip Optimizer underpowering trains, then putting throttle restrictions in and saying, “Okay, well, the train has three engines, but over this particular piece of territory, he’s only allowed to use one.” So we run 11 daylights out of that engine. It’s wide open, notch eight full throttle. The train’s doing 16 miles per hour on 60 mile per hour track. And then here comes the UPS train behind it. And he’s all kinds of hot because he’s got, well, UPS loads on it. And hey, guess what? You ordered your package on Monday and UPS told you it was going to be there on Thursday. Well, if that’s going to happen, the train that’s carrying the trailer, your package is in needs to be on time, doesn’t it?
So he doesn’t have time to follow that big turd of a freight train doing 16 miles an hour. And they think they’re saving fuel, but dude, they’re beating a snot out of the engine. I mean, the traction motors are. Go ahead.

Maximillian Alvarez: Just a quick parentheses on that. Because again, for lay listeners, when you hear trip optimizer, it’s like so many great slogans that don’t actually mean what you think they sound like they mean. That’s

Jay: Right.

Maximillian Alvarez: Because what is being optimized here is basically they’re like, how can we pay as little as possible with the fuel we have with the trains as long as they are going as slow as 16 miles an hour when they should be going 60? Is that a fair sort of summation of what is being optimized here? Absolutely. It’s not making the package delivery more efficient.

Jay: No, what you said is literally what it’s doing. And here’s the interesting thing. So statistics. My grandfather told me this years ago, he was actually a corporate executive for Black & Decker a long time ago. He said, “Jay, there’s a lie, a damn lie, and then there’s statistics.” I said, “Well, tell me what you mean by that.” And he’s like, “Listen, you can make a statistical output be anything you want it to be by manipulating the input.” So they’ll say they’re saving fuel, but they’ll only calculate the fuel burn on the lead unit. They don’t calculate the distributed power unit that’s a hundred cars back in the train that’s been in notch eight for the last eight hours, guzzling fuel like crazy, and the train still can’t make two-thirds of track speed on if it’s lucky. And then they’ll say, “Well, we’re saving fuel. All right, we’re saving fuel.
But okay, well, how far under track speed did you go to save that fuel?” So they’re not lying about what they’re saying. It’s truthful. It’s just missing the information that actually would tell you that it’s actual bullshit.

Maximillian Alvarez: Well, and the bullshit, and again, I’m just making sure, A, that I have this right and that listeners are following along. Because all these things like the railroads themselves are interconnected. And to put it back in the kind of understanding that we were getting from you and your fellow railroad workers from 2022, it’s that the whole TripOptimizer thing, the whole precision scheduled railroading racket is basically this system implemented from the top down into the corporate structure and strategy of the railroads to maximize profits and cut costs and maximize shareholder dividends year after year. And so that’s where you get a railroad system that maybe your average person thinks like, “Well, the whole point of the railroads is to deliver good freights, rail service, get the freight there on time, yada, yada, yada.” But what we’ve come to learn is that it’s almost like the whole point of the railroads that we though we knew is secondary to the fact that the railroads are just this money-making widget that these bloodsuckers can squeeze a lot of profit out of.
And so that’s why they don’t care about delivering things on time or more efficiently. They don’t care about higher speed rail or faster trains or anything like that. That’s why they’re piling all these cars onto these trains and getting rid of more and more of the workforce. And the trains are going slower. They’re stalling, they’re braking, they’re breaking the track. But all those sorts of costs are still worth it to them because all this other crap is generating massive profits for them, even if it’s putting all of us at risk. And I guess the last point I’ll say is that the thing that everyone got into in 2022 was what this was doing to the workers, particularly the conductors and the engineers who have to be on these trains and who have to be on call basically twenty four seven now because with these trains being so inefficient, big, breaking down, all that stuff, the workers still have to be on call and they have to be there whenever the damn train gets there and they have to stay on that train wherever it breaks down.
So do I have that sort of right, Jay, that it’s like all these things are different interlocking parts of the same kind of problem, But the TripOptimizer stuff and everything else that we’ve been talking about are basically all designed to maximize profits in the short term. And they’re not about making the freight rail system any better for anyone other than the people getting those dividend payouts.

Jay: It’s calculated vandalism. I mean, that’s what it is. Think about capital expenditures and operating expenses, capital investment. So if you have capital expenditure versus operating expense, you consider that an overworked train dispatcher, for example, can’t effectively plan to let a maintenance of way gang out, can’t effectively plan to let a real grinder out, can’t effectively plan to get thermite welding done or any of the other stuff that needs to be done to maintain the infrastructure. Because at the end of the day, I mean, yeah, you might run big trains and think you’re saving money, but tonnage is tonnage and tonnage causes damage. Now what causes even more damage is excessive in-train force. That can really wear your curves out a lot quicker. That can cause track to shift. If a train goes in emergency and all of a sudden the front end sits down and the ASN runs into it, I mean fricking boom.
And all of a sudden it shifts the track out to the side by three or four inches. You say, “Well, how did that happen?” Listen, energy’s got to go somewhere. And if you can control a train safely, you can dissipate the energy with a dynamic brake as heat. You can dissipate it with friction brakes as heat or what have you. But when the train gets too big and it gets unruly and decides it’s going to do whatever it wants to do, and you combine that with Trip Optimizer, which causes engineer skill atrophy because he or she never exercises their skills any longer, and there’s no government policy to force a railroad to make them let the engineer run 50% of his or her monthly miles to keep his or her skills sharp. What you run into is a situation where the trip optimizer is programmed to work within a given set of parameters.
So you have a group of nerds sitting in a room somewhere, usually from a foreign country, and they’re plugging away at zeros and ones, and they build a model of what they think trip optimizer should do. Here’s your territory, here’s your grade. This has been all GIS and spatial mapped, and the train should run like this. And they plug it in, and most of the time it does a decent job. But then you introduce a variable you can’t control. You introduce a train as a kicker. So as soon as you touch the air to try to stop the train, boom, it goes in emergency. Or you introduce a snowstorm or ice, which will ice up the brake shoes. And then when you go for the brakes, nothing happens for the first 12 or 15 miles because you’re busy melting ice off of the brake shoe.
Well, most of the new dispatchers have no idea what that means to a train crew. They’re not qualified like we used to be. I mean, I used to watch the weather, dude, constantly. I had the weather pulled up from my entire territory. I knew where there were thunderstorms. I knew where there was thunder snow. I knew where there was sleet. I knew if there was going to be tornado warnings or watches. I knew all that. And that was always in my head and I was thinking about that stuff. And for a locomotive engineer, if you got this train going and you think, okay, I haven’t set the air in a minute because it’s snowing outside, you might need to drag the train with the brakes on every so many miles just to keep those brakes nice and up. Because God forbid you have the dispatcher that decides, oh, hey, I’m 22 and I don’t know how to put my phone down.
And here I am in a job that requires my attention, but I need to go check Facebook. So I’m not going to line the signal up for that train on this downhill mountain grade. And here comes an engineer that he’s been qualified for six months. He hasn’t touched a throttle in six months because every single trip he has optimizer. So all of a sudden he thinks, man, this thing’s doing a decent job. I think I can trust it. And then the snowstorm comes and the unexpected approach signal comes because the dispatcher’s out playing on the phone. And he goes to take over the train, sets the air, and nothing happens. Goes for the dynamic brake, the engines start to load up, and the wheels lock up and start slipping because of the ice and snow. So you start spraying sand to try to get the wheels to spin again.
Because what you need is for the wheels to rotate to be effective for dynamic braking. So more air, nothing happens. More air, nothing happens. Unbeknownst to him at the bottom of the hill, here comes an Amtrak train with 300 people on it and they’re crossing over in front of him. And this train blows through the stop signal at 45 miles an hour and slams into the Amtrak train right in the side and kills 30 people. And the company’s going to say, well, the engineer was qualified. He was supposed to have control of his train. We tested him. He had good operating rules, exams, and we wrote him up 32 times for these minor violations. Nobody wants to talk about the degradation of the skills because he never ran the damn train. And that dude, that pisses me off. Because

Maximillian Alvarez: It’s like, again, I know I’m using very caveman style metaphors here, but just bear with me. But when you say the atrophy of engineer skills, it’s like imagine a long-haul trucker sitting behind the wheel and the trip optimizer is basically a cruise control that is driving the damn thing for him, but it’s driving it 18 miles an hour on the highway with – That sounds like

Jay: Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi.

Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, but with 50 trucks hitched to it. And so then yeah, you’re just sitting there and you have to be watching, you have to be vigilant, but the damn autopilot is doing everything for you, not because it’s what you have been trained to do as an engineer, but because it is what the program has been trained to do so that it makes more money for the rich assholes who’ve never been in a cab like you are sitting in at that moment. And then the worst part is that, like you’re saying, that if you’re sitting there and then something goes wrong and you have these sort of cascading failures, the finger’s all going to be pointed at the person sitting in that seat.

Jay: Yeah, 100%. And at the end of the day, and this is kind of sad, but I think we need to be honest about this. When a person is involved, we all want blood. It seems to be human nature. If a computer does it, nobody seems to care. I mean, you might get mad, then stomp around and snort and carry on, steam, come out your dose, whatever else. But nobody really does anything. But if a person screws up, man, you just want to destroy their life for some reason. You want to go after that person and we all have that in us. And even if we want to deny it, we know it’s true, which it’s a sad thing. And this is kind of where you have to really keep this stuff in perspective. You have to remember, until you know the whole story, and I’m guilty of this myself, it’s easy to draw a conclusion.
It’s easy to judge, it’s easy to devalue something or whatever. But if you don’t know everything that happened behind it, boy, you feel like a real asshole when you finally figure it out. I wanted to make a point earlier and I forgot, I said about capital expenditures and operating expenses. And I said about this being a capital intensive business, fuel expenses, things like that. So you can hide that under an operating expense. And let me just make this point quick because this is good stuff.
And to Wall Street, that’s great. Operating expenses, diesel costs, cost of rail, whatever the case may be, or not cost of rail rather, cost of labor. And then you have capital investment. Now, this is where you’re going to buy your rail, you’re going to have these huge capital plans that they spend every year. We’re going to replace 13 bridges. We’re going to do X number of hundred miles of rail, ballast ties, blah, blah, blah, blah. So to anybody investing in a company that doesn’t really understand how it operates, and I’m an investor too, but I don’t personally want to see record profit continually because I know it’s not possible. It’s a damn bubble that you’re sitting on, and sooner later that damn thing’s going to pop and you’re pew, down you go. So you better know how to move your money quick. I’d rather see a steady earnings report with a little bit of growth and a little bit of loss here and there.
That tells me a company is healthy in my opinion. And believe me, I’m no hedge fund manager and I wouldn’t want to be. But you can tell Wall Street, oh, we’re going to buy rail, blah, blah, blah. Capital investment’s the best thing. And to somebody who doesn’t know any better, this looks like a growing company. It looks like the company’s doing great. Oh, look at all the money they’re spending on all this stuff. The company’s growing surely. Bullshit. It’s smoke and mirrors. The company’s not growing it freaking all. Dude, listen, when the war on coal started and started destroying coal miners jobs and everything else in the name of green, whatever have you, closing the power plants, all of that, the coal was the bread and butter for the railroad for decades. I mean, you made money on coal like you wouldn’t believe me. I mean, dude, it’s crazy.
Intermodal, there’s not really a lot of money in. It’s a tight market. The pricing structure is tight. You’re competing directly with trucks. And the performance, honestly, since precision scheduled railroading, I mean, look at the shift from rail back to truck. That tells you how bad the performance is. And you know who pays the price? The captive shippers, the chemical shippers, the agriculture companies have to ship trainloads of grain over to the ports to get it exported or their grain rots. That grain has to move in a couple of weeks, literally from the bread basket of America to the port to get loaded on a ship and go, or the grain’s going to be gone and the farmers are going to lose all of their revenue for the year. A loss like that would be devastating to them. And the railroad can’t provide the service. So what do they do?
They say, “Well, we’re just going to raise the rates on those people.” And then you hear about the merger that’s being proposed right now between Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern. And it’s being met with some serious resistance by shippers. Why? Because of what I just said. They know what’s going to happen. Honestly, the way I see it from the class one perspective right now is a house of carts. They’ve gotten themselves to a point where there’s nothing else left to continue cutting, and the truth is going to come out. And when it does, the stock price is going to tank. The people that should have gotten rich are going to lose hundreds of millions of dollars, and they don’t want that to happen. They want to get their golden parachute and jump out of the plane and let you on the damn thing. All the engines are shut off because nobody put fuel in it.
I hate to say it, but that’s the truth.

Maximillian Alvarez: Well, as we turn the final corner here, let’s talk about that. I don’t want to beat people over the head with the doom and gloom, and we’re not saying that this is the only way it has to be. We’re having this conversation so that we can do something to avoid the disastrous horizon that we’re careening towards right now. But I think it’s important that we sort of look clear-eyed at what we are heading towards. And I wanted to ask, Jade, if you could just impress upon folks the stakes of what we’re talking about. Because some people may be interested in this for different reasons. I mean, you were mentioning the coal and the environmentalists who had their message about the destructive nature of coal. And I think a lot about that because I’ve interviewed these union coal miners. We’ve reported on deep red striking coal miners in Alabama, but I’ve also interviewed coal mining families in West Virginia where the coal is extracted that ends up at the port here in Baltimore.
And I’ve talked to the working class people here in Baltimore who are dying because of all the coal dust coming off those uncovered CSX rail cars for generations. So I don’t think it’s just the environmentalists did this or that. I think, again, the corporations fucked everybody. And working people across the board from the inside the coal mines to the port side communities here in Baltimore are left with the toxic remains or the black lung. But that’s not to say that we always got things right in the past. I think we didn’t. The whole point is to sort of learn, okay, pitting environmentalism and labor against each other was always a stupid idea. In fact, the UAW was one of the driving forces for the environmentalist movement in the first Earth Day because the Cuyahoga River kept catching on fire. And Walter Ruther was like, “What good is a union contract and a vacation if you take your family to a lake that’s poisonous?” I mean, the divide and conquer from the top, it’s been pushed on us for so long.
And now we’re in a state where it’s just like life is getting harder. Everything’s getting scarier. I think society, the things that made us feel like neighbors to each other has been eroding and we fear each other. We don’t know each other. We feel alienated, we feel forgotten, we feel beaten down. And the thing is we’re right. We are. That’s the kind of common feeling that I hear from folks across industries, across states, across ethnicities, across the political spectrum. Everyone feels that way. And yet the people who don’t feel that way are the ones becoming trillionaires, the ones raking in these record profits because they have massive shares in the railroad companies or the people raking in money from government contracts to plop AI data centers in rural red counties or blue cities here in Baltimore. It’s kind of an all-out attack. And so it can be hard to wrap your head around all of this and see the monstrous future that we’re heading towards.
So I wanted to ask you, Brother Jay, because the last time we talked, I’m sorry I’m talking so much, but it’s been so long. And whenever you and I talk, we have such a great back and forth and I wish we could talk for hours more, but this just reminded me of the fact that the last time we talked was six months before East Palestine. And you were warning me and anyone who would listen that something like that, you didn’t know it was going to be vinyl chloride. But a lot of what you described ended up basically being what happened in East Palestine. A lot of those conditions you talked about, a lot of the fallout. And so here we are six years later. And I hope folks heed your warning more now than we did then. But if we don’t address these issues, what are we in store for on the freight rail system?
And why should people care about that even if they don’t know anything about the freight railroads? Because this is impacting passenger rail, the economy, everything. People do need to care about that, but I wanted to give you the final words about why they should.

Jay: I mean, honestly, Max, well, there’s a lot to unpack there, which we don’t have time to unpack all of it. But if I had to think about what people could do now to try to address these things, I would say your best course of action, and as much as nobody wants to hear politics, would be to get politically active. And when I say that, that doesn’t mean go out and terrorize people. It doesn’t mean burn things down. It doesn’t mean any of that. It means educate yourself. Who are these people that are running for office? What do they believe? Do they share the values that you share? Just because somebody has a college degree doesn’t mean they’re qualified to be a politician.
Oftentimes, I find that the people that have the most sense are the people that grew up, they had a hard life. They know what it is to work for a dollar. They know what it is to have to pay for things, and they know what it is to want something and not be able to afford it. And in some cases, they know what it is to need something and not be able to afford it. And honestly, a lot of the policy shifts need to take place to reign in on these things are going to happen at the polls. That’s where they’re going to start. They’re going to start your city councils and you could run. I mean, just because somebody thinks they can’t do it, why can’t you do it? Now, I will tell you, the political system is heavily stacked so that particular people, either the left or the right, you have to have the right people backing you with a lot of money if you’re going to go anywhere.
And that’s because we left it go as long as we did without addressing it. And I kind of think it’s almost like a cancer. You want to catch cancer early if you’ve got a skin cancer or something. You catch it early, usually no problem. They cut it off, done. Dude, let that shit go and you may as well go buy a box because that’s where you’re going to be. And I feel like this is the same thing. It’s this corporate greed has been let go for too long. It’s been unchecked. It’s been left to fester. It’s a malignancy in our society. It’s not just the railroad, it’s the airlines, it’s every freakingwhere. And what happened to America building our own things? I mean, my God, dude, are you kidding me? Look at that steam engine. It just ran across the country. What a marvel. That thing is just the big boy, right?
Wow. We built that here in America. We built that in the 1940s going into the World War II. I mean, men literally grabbed wrenches the size of a daggone computer monitor and were cranking on nuts and bolts that you hold it the size of your hand to build these machines. We did that here. And now because of what we’re dealing with, everything’s been outsourced. The skills that we once had are gone. Nobody knows how to build a bridge anymore like the Pennsylvania Railroad did. The Keystone bridges. They literally had that keystone. They held them together. Nobody knows how to do that anymore. It’s lost. It’s gone. All of the skills that we used to have in the country to.
I mean, I don’t even. Dude, it’s hard to even. I can’t even process it. My mind’s going a thousand miles an hour right now thinking of what we’ve lost because we’ve not been good stewards of what we were given. Artificial intelligence. What is the first word in artificial intelligence? Artificial in all capital letters. Come on, hello. Wake up. Self-driving cars, all well and good. Have I used the technology? Yes. Do I trust it? Absolutely not. I watch that shit like a hawk. And if it does something I don’t like, man, I am on it. But we’ve seen people posted videos online sleeping in their Teslas and running into tractor trailers and hitting pedestrians and whatever else. I mean, it’s out there. It’s not like this hasn’t been reported before. But that ultimately ties back to skill atrophy once again. You trust the computer because it does just good enough, just often enough that you think you can.
And boy, that’s a dangerous place to be, dude. That’s a dangerous place to be. And it’s happening everywhere. Honestly, if the FAA would allow it, the airlines would fly the damn plane with one engine on and the other one shut down because they could save fuel. And I’m here quoting that. Oh, it’d save. Look how much money we’d save. Oh my gosh. But they wouldn’t consider the fact, not that they wouldn’t consider it, they wouldn’t give a fuck. If the left engine’s the one that’s running and the right engine’s shut down, the plane’s trying to turn right the whole time. So you have the rudders or whatever those things are called, ailerons, whatever, facing the opposite direction to counter the force from the engine just to keep the plane straight. Well, that would cause fatigue and then the damn thing would snap off and down you go.
And then everybody would say, “Oh, what happened?” Well, corporate greed happened. “Look at Boeing, dude. Are you kidding? How did Boeing get away with what they got away with? They killed hundreds of people. They lied about it. They found the emails that they were deceiving the government. What happened? Nothing. Not a single executive went to jail and they knew their names. What does that tell you? That’s pretty disgusting. And honestly, I know that some people don’t believe in faith, some people don’t believe in that kind of stuff. But for me, I look at it and I say, if men did what men were supposed to do and led the way they were supposed to lead, got out there, got involved in their school board meetings, got involved in their local governments, led their families, raised their kids, had supportive wives that were right behind them and right beside them the whole time, how different would things be if we had done that in the 1950s instead of looking at it today and saying, “Well, what now?” Instead of all the broken families and all the fatherless children and all of that.
That’s really gotten my attention lately. It really has.

Maximillian Alvarez: Well, I have a lot of thoughts on that. And I want us, especially men, to be able to talk to each other about this stuff because you and I have been upfront on our conversations. We’re from different sides of the political spectrum, but we don’t even identify each other that way. That’s the fourth or fifth or sixth or 10th thing that we know about each other.
And it’s like when you know each other that way, and it’s like when you only know each other through the politics first and then everything kind of flows downstream from that, it’s not impossible, but it’s so much harder to build really meaningful, genuine, organic kind of connections. And I guess all I’m saying is that there is a real problem, I think, that is affecting men in this country. But it goes so much beyond what we’re talking about here because I am also, as a man in this cis, hetero guy in this country who’s got, I’ve got my family, I’ve got my daughter, I got my wife, I got my mom, I got my sister, I got all that. All these people I love and care about in my family, it is not their job to address the crisis in this country of predatory men destroying people’s lives all the way up to Epstein level atrocities, to the shop floor sexual harassment that still happens rampantly daily in this country.
We have a real big fucking problem with men, and men have a lot of problems that they’re not talking healthily about. And I don’t care what it’s going to take, but I’m down to be part of those discussions. I don’t think we’re going to get it here because we have to wrap up, but we’ll just have to do another conversation and bring more folks into that conversation. But there’s a lot of things you said I agree with and a lot of things you said that I vehemently disagree with. But I think if we could at least agree on that final point that it’s like whatever our thoughts are about this, we actually do need better, healthier ways for men to talk about this stuff, process this stuff. And we actually have a real imperative duty to do that given what horrible men are doing to this fucking society, to the people that we live around.
This has gone on long enough. It is not just one political party or another. It could be Graham Platner, it could be Donald fucking Trump, man. We actually need to get together as working people, as men who can sit down and talk through this ourselves. I don’t want anyone else talking through it for us. I think that’s really what I want us to just come to agreement on.

Jay: Well, Max, when you talk to your grandpa, I remember you said you called him Graham. So when you talk to your grandpa, everybody in his era knew everybody. Everybody in the community knew everybody. You knew the neighbor down the street, the neighbor down the street knew the neighbor across the street. You’d sit out on your porches in the evening, they’d all talk to each other. I mean, everybody knew everybody. You had that real sense of belonging and that real sense of community. And that’s the point that I’m trying to make. Most people that are turning to private media are doing so because they’re tired of the corporate lies. They’re tired of it. They want somebody that’s genuine and honest. That’s what people really want. And I think that’s what most guys want. I think that’s what the ladies want. They just want somebody to be honest with them.
And they’ll come to the private media and they’ll listen to conversations like this. And they’re like, think about it. I wouldn’t walk up to you in public and be like, “Hey, Max, I’m a Republican.” How weird is that? Nobody does that.

Maximillian Alvarez: Well, and we even said the same thing about all the reporting we were doing in East Palestine. This was, I believe Ashley McCollum, an incredible working class hero herself who used to live right down the street from where the train derailed in East Palestine. And she’s gone through hell ever since. But she asked the blunt question. It’s like if you run up to a burning car and you see a person inside, do you ask them who they voted for? No. No, you pull them out. And if we can just start from there, I think we’ll be okay. But I think the fact that so many people don’t feel that way is why we have such a big problem that needs addressing now by us. And in that spirit, brother, I cannot thank you enough as always for coming on, talking openly, just being real with me in our audience, keeping it real all the time.
It’s always such a great conversation whenever you and I get together, brother, and it’s been really, really great seeing you again.

Jay: I appreciate the fact that we can set aside differences in disagreements. And honestly, a lot of times you strengthen relationships in your disagreements if you do so civilly.Because remember what I said earlier about not knowing the whole story. There’s a reason that you feel the way you feel and a reason I feel the way I feel. But if we could never sit down and talk to one another, we’re never going to learn what those are. And you may find out you have a whole hell of a lot more in common than you ever thought you did if you just take the time to say hello.

Maximillian Alvarez: All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, longtime friend of the show, Jay, veteran-trained dispatcher who’s been in the industry for 22 years. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our podcast feeds, our website, and our different social media pages, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves.
Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today, amidst so much bleak and awful and overwhelming news bombarding us at all times from all over the world, we’re going to do something different and we’re going to talk about some good news for once. Because this week, a new worker-owned cooperative launched in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and it’s called the Pittsburgh Progress. Here’s their story, which you can find on their website. “The Pittsburgh Progress is a cooperative news organization owned and democratically run by its workers and members.

It was formed in the weeks and months after owners of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette announced on January 7th, 2026, their intention to close the newspaper. This move by the post-Gazette came just weeks after unionized workers there had won a strike lasting more than three years. Those workers and their community supporters initially formed the organization Pittsburgh Alliance for People Empowered Reporting or Paper, with a mandate to research the creation of a daily news outlet more deserving of Pittsburgh. Paper quickly resolved that any new publication would, unlike the block-owned Post-Gazette, respect its employees and address the concerns of all working class people in the region. The publication would serve as an essential and sustainable source of communication and connection in the Pittsburgh region. Workers and their supporters decided on a publication name, the Pittsburgh Progress, in a nod to the striking Post-Gazette Workers Award-winning strike publication, The Pittsburgh Union Progress.

Work continues on the Pittsburgh Progress website, marketing strategy, and the building of a newsroom. We continue to raise funds to lift up worker-centered journalism in Western Pennsylvania, and those funds will be used to hire full-time staff and freelance journalists dedicated to looking out for and telling the stories of the working class people who form the heart and soul of our diverse communities.” So to talk about the birth of the Pittsburgh progress and what it means for working people in and beyond Pittsburgh, I am really grateful to be joined once again on the show by some familiar voices. Steve Mellon is a journalist who was on strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for more than three years and is now a founding worker member of the Pittsburgh Progress. And Natalie Duleba is a former post-Gazette striker. She serves as local secretary of the newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, and is now also a founding worker member of the Pittsburgh Progress.

Natalie, Steve, it is so great to see you both and thank you so much for coming back on the show for over three years while you guys were on strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. We’ve gotten to know you and your coworkers over the many conversations that we’ve had on this show, on the Real News Network, when I was at Breaking Points. It’s been a long road. Did you ever think that it would lead you here?

Steve Mellon:

No, I certainly did not. Our hope, I think Natalie probably feels the same way. I won’t speak for you, man and Natalie, but we were hoping to win the strike and get a contract. That was our goal. And we thought we had accomplished that. We had an incredible community support during the strike. That was a long, hard battle. And Max, you know that. You guys cover the strike more than any other publication, more than any other organization, you know that. But we did win the strike. We won. We went back to work. Things were going pretty well. We had a big rally in front of the Post Gazette. All the community showed up to support us. We went back in. Things were going pretty well. I think we were as acrimonious as the strike was, we were working together. We were resolving conflicts. We were actually producing good journalism.

That all changed on January 7th when the company announced it was just. Max, this came just about an hour and a half after the Supreme Court had denied the Post-Gazette’s request for a stay on a healthcare issue that was related to the strike. It was think of the last gasp effort of the owners of the Post-Gazette to delay the consequences for their lawbreaking actions. Don’t forget that this strike was a result of a law-breaking action by the owners of the Post-Gazette. So they announced the closure of the paper within, I think, what, Natalie, two hours or so after that announcement came down that the Supreme Court had denied their request for a stay. They announced the closure of the Post-Gazette. And it’s like at that point, I think that among a lot of us, Max, there was a lot of anger and frustration is that we did all this stuff to win, and yet the system still fails you.

The system’s not going to let workers win. And at that point, I think a lot of us, we were angry, we were frustrated. That very quickly settled into, we have to do something about this. We cannot let this stand. And we had an extraordinary meeting that night. I think January 7th was a Wednesday, Natalie, I believe. And that night we had an extraordinary meeting of our membership and we just decided like, no, we’re not. You learn things about yourself and your community when you strike for three years, about your colleagues. I looked at Natalie and Erin and all the people we’ve been to strike on. I thought we can do whatever we want. We have a community support, we have the skills, we had the talent, we had the determination. And after a series of meetings, we though, let’s form our own publication, one that we can inoculate against corporate abuse, against the influences of money.

And the result was a worker, community-owned cooperative, a multi-stakeholder. So no, I had no idea I’d be in its position to be like a co-owner with so many other people in the community and my coworkers of a publication. So no, I did not expect to be here, but it feels good.

Natalie Duleba:

Yeah. During the strike, our goal was always to get back to work, but also to build a Post-Gazette that ourselves, but also journalists that came after us could build a life with. And the Post-Gazette still remains. The Venetulas Institute for Journalism did buy the Post-Gazette from the blocks. And Steve and I were among the journalists who were not retained, who were not hired by Venetulas. But we do still have former strikers who are at the Post-Gazette doing the good work to get a new contract with new owners. And we’re hoping that the victories that we got during the strike are carried forward in that bargaining. There’s a bargaining session that is happening today.

And I think that the Venetulas at least knows that the journalists of the newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh aren’t afraid of a fight. But I think that the strike really taught us that if you want something, you got to get it yourself. And when we were looking at the possibility there was no Post-Gazette, a huge vacuum in Pittsburgh, they’re like, “Well, something should replace it.” And some of the other publications in the city were circling vultures, and some of them have expanded into areas that they weren’t in before. But even with the Post Gazette continuing, the new owners did cut the newsroom by about 40%, 80% of which were strikers. We all have an intimate understanding of the gaps in the coverage and communities that told us during the strike and after the announcement of the closure that they felt underrepresented, misrepresented. Those of us before we were not rehired, we were willing to bring that knowledge and that trust in the community to Venetulus to maybe start to repair the damage and reputation the post-Gazette suffered underneath the blocks.

But they weren’t interested in that, at least from us. So yeah, it is wild to think that we’re building our own news outlet. That’s not something that any of us though was going to happen. We wanted to get back to the post-Gazette, but now we’re in control of our own destiny in a way that we weren’t during the strike. Yes, we were out there fighting for ourselves, but also we’re at the mercy of the slow cogs of the justice system. And this is like we’re setting the pace, we’re doing the work ourselves, and it’s fully under our control, which is really amazing, but it is also a lot. It’s like, it’s our responsibility. Yay. It’s our responsibility.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I know it intimately. Yeah, it’s such a head spinner where you’re like, oh shit. Now we got to do that. Oh shit, we get to do that. It forces you to confront the sort of decision-making that affects our lives on a day-to-day level. And it is both liberating and terrifying to have more of that decision-making power yourself instead of just trusting it to be done for you by our higher ups. But so many of us, for that reason, I don’t think have even considered what it would look like in our day-to-day work lives to have that agency, to have that democratic cooperative sort of model rather than the kind of top-down authoritarian model that we’re all so comfortable and used to, which we’ve been conditioned to be used to by force for many, many generations. But I digress. I wanted to hover on that for a second and ask about your time at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

What did working and striking at a paper like the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette teach you about what a project like the Pittsburgh Progress needs to be and why it needs to be?

Steve Mellon:

Well, we learned several things during the strike. Quite honestly, when I was a journalist, I tried to be out on the street a lot and talking to people. But it wasn’t until I went on strike that I was put into conversations with people in various communities that were underrepresented. And I learned a lot during the strike, especially after the strike was over. After we’d won the strike and the Post-Gazette announced its closure. And at that point, Max, we had conversations with people in the community. One of the first questions we asked, I remember, was what does it mean to lose the Post-Gazette? What does it mean to you and your community to lose the Post-Gazette newspaper? Because at that point, we didn’t know that the Venezuelas Institute was going to step in and buy it. And one of the responses really stuck with me is a young woman stood up and she said, “The closure of the Post Gazette doesn’t mean anything to me because they’ve not been relevant to my community for years.” Now, as a journalist who spent his life, a good chunk of my professional life reporting on this city, that was heartbreaking to hear that these institutions that I’d given my life to were irrelevant to the communities that had supported us during the strike and had leaned into our effort, Max.

That’s like, well, what’s wrong with this? What’s wrong with this? This is an issue. And it gets not just to journalism. It’s like we’re seeing the crumbling of communities all over this country.

There are a lot of forces that profit from creating division. And newspapers, news organizations have failed in their duty to be the cohesive force. And it’s like, okay, that’s an issue. How do we solve that? We kicked around several different ideas. And one, I don’t know anything about co-ops, Max, but in our discussions, when we brought up the fact that. Because we talk about nonprofit models, these different models. When somebody said, “What about a co-op?” People got really excited about that. And when we started talking about a co-op, that’s when we started to see a lot more people to show up. I was at a journalism conference in Hershey, Pennsylvania about two months ago, and there was a lot of talk at that conference about engaging with your audience. How do you engage with your audience? Honestly, if we haven’t figured out that at this point, then we failed anyway.

But we thought, okay, well, we’re not going to engage in our audience. We’re going to ask them to become stakeholders in this process. And I think that is a game changer. I think this model going forward is one that can be replicated. There are co-ops, successful news co-ops that exist in other places, a whole list of them. So we’re not new to this. But I do think that what we can do here in Pittsburgh is build on those models and take the lessons we learned from the strikes, take ideas from the communities, the people that we met during the strike, the people that we reported on for a pup, and use those to build a publication where we are not going to have people stand up at a town hall and say, “The Pittsburgh progress is irrelevant to my community.” We’re trying to make sure that that does not happen to us.

And our way of making sure that happens is having that young woman in the room when we’re making decisions.

Natalie Duleba:

The things that I learned at the Post Gazette, besides the things like the skills that I built there that I’m bringing in, I was a copy editor and a pay designer before the strike. I came back to be full-time on the web desk. I’m bringing those skills into this. I’m glad that I can bring that extra oomph to what I can offer. But also I think that being on strike, we saw what it was like to be on the other side of business interests overriding journalistic ethics or the coverage of the strike was just insulting, honestly, because we knew where these things were being obfuscated, but it went deeper of the Post Gazette trying to hide the fact that people weren’t talking to them because they were holding our picket line and getting around not saying the mayor is not responding to comment on this issue because he’s not responding to any comment, but not putting in, he’s not talking to us at all because he’s respecting a picket line, shades the way that people may have perceived that article.

They may think the mayor is running away from accountability on this issue or leaving off said in a press release so it looks like somebody who was holding a picket line maybe gave them a quote. And an average reader might know about the strike, but not know that that came from a press release. And then they’re like, maybe they could see the way that these perceptions change potentially. Or even a local news station that has a business relationship with the post Gazette had coverage during the summer when SAG and WGA were on strike and they had a segment where they talked about all the active strikes in the country and they didn’t mention us. The strike that at that point I think had gone on for over a year at that point. We were deep into our strike. It wasn’t like it was brand new.

And to just see, okay, so the business relationship you have with the post Gazette, I mean allegedly, it’s not like I got this confirmed by anybody, but why else would they leave it out if not because of that business relationship? There’s no other reason why I could think to not put the strike that’s happening in your own city into report about strikes that are happening across the country. And there’s no way that there’s not other communities, other issues that have been covered in that way that have felt like the nuance has been left out or that there has been gaps that have not been filled with reporting. And us being so intimately on the other side of it, I think really places us in such a great position to poke at that. What is not being said in these press releases?

What is the CEO or the founder of this big company obfuscating with legal language? Where when you poke at it, you can like, oh, well, technically what they said is correct, but there’s all this stuff that they’re leaving out that we learned by talking to the working class, the people of Pittsburgh, the regular everyday citizens that are affected by these decisions, who have first person experience being the little guy who was affected by that. And it sucks to be on that side of it, but it has allowed us to build that extra lens of looking at things that way. I mean, journalists are trained to ask questions and poke at things, but I think seeing behind the veil intimately and personally is going to allow us to easily see where that is happening. And also, I mean, we had a little exercise when you’re in one of our founders’ meetings about what don’t we want our newsroom to look like?

What behaviors do we want to avoid when we’re building our newsroom and our editorial practices? And a lot of it came down to not understanding why things are being done.

Why is this decision being made? Why is this policy in place? And why aren’t these things being communicated to the people who actually have to follow these rules? And I think that the transparency that comes in being a worker-created newsroom and a worker-led newsroom will allow. When someone’s laid off, that sucks, but a lot of times an owner just says, “We got to lay you off because we are losing money, I guess.” And you just have to take the word for it. But hopefully we don’t have to ever confront that type of thing. But if we do, that’ll be a decision that is made collectively where you understand what’s gone into it, why. And it’s not a callous just cutting of the cord there so that the owner, I guess, doesn’t get to buy a second summer home. It’s like you’ve been involved in the whole process and there’s trust that is just baked into a democratically run newsroom or any business, I suppose, but we’re talking about a newsroom here.

But we want to try to build a newsroom that people are on the same page, that is collaborative, and that people understand the mechanics that are going on and that the work and the journalism that is being done is ethical and not bowing to business interests. And I think that we’re well on our way to doing that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah. Well, let’s bring this down to paper level and talk about what this looks like in the now officially launched publication. I know as we said in the intro, and as y’all say on your website, this is a work in progress. Y’all are growing, but you have officially launched. So tell folks more about what the Pittsburgh progress is, where it’s going, and what they’re going to find there, and what they can do to support y’all.

Steve Mellon:

Well, right now, we did launch on Monday. We’re considering that our soft launch. We’re working up to becoming a regular daily publication. We just started this process. It’s kind of crazy, Max, to think that this wasn’t even a topic of discussion until January 7th. And it took a couple of weeks before we had consensus about to even move forward with the idea of a new publication. And so a lot has happened very quickly. We’ve had to come up with a business. We’re journalists, Max, we’re not business people, but we’ve had to become business people. And it’s like, okay, the learning curve for this is very, very steep. We’ve had to come up with a business plan. We’ve had to come up with bylaws. It’s over and over and over again. It’s your social media strategy. We’ve had to hire people to do some of the things that we just don’t know how to do, and we don’t want to mess them up.

We have to become incorporated. How do you do that in a timely manner? And all these things. So a lot has happened very quickly. It wasn’t until quite honestly a couple of weeks ago that we were able to sit down and think about, “Oh, wait a minute. If we’re going to publish, we got to have some stories in this damn thing.” So we put together a slate of stories that we felt matched what we want to be and what we want to do that align with our mission to give people a glimpse of what we hope to be in the very near future. If you look at pittsburghprogress.com right now, you’ll see, I think, five or six stories. Our lead story right now is about organized nurses here who are fighting for our contract. That’s a big, big story in this town where these big medical companies have such a big footprint.

Nurses on the front lines of that. So that’s one of our lead stories. Natalie has a story on third places for the members of the LGBTQ community. We have a review of a new book on WPA workers. Kim Kelly wrote the foreword for that. You guys all know and love Kim Kelly. So we have our origin story is another part of that. We have a couple sports stories. We are really going to lean into high school sports because we’re interested in not covering the millionaire. God love them, our millionaire sports heroes. We are interested in covering the sports played by the sons and daughters of the working people of this region. So that’s what you’ll find when you go there now. We’re going to continue to build on that. We’re still working. We’re a small team right now. We’re building and adding, but we’re a small team and we’re having to walk and chew gum and tie our shoes and bake dinner and comb our hair all at the same time.

So it’s going to take a minute to get this thing up to where we want it to be. And we’ve learned, Max, that this group of people, when we get together, we set our mind to something, we can accomplish that thing. And this is a goal we have set for ourselves. And I know we’ll do it. I know we have a community of support. People who want to support this, learn more about it, go to pittsburghprogress.com. You’ll find a button that says join us. It’s like a maroon button, a red maroon button. Click join us. You can learn about progress. You can learn how to support this effort. If you have questions, you can reach out to me or Natalie, I’m sure you’re willing to answer questions too. We’re hoping that there are. I’ve been in journalism a long time, Max. Most people that I was in journalism with, most of the people that I knew in journalism all over the country, none of them are in the business now.

They’ve had to get out. Their newspapers have closed. They did not make enough money to support their families. For one reason or another, they’re out of the business. That’s got to stop. What’s the model for that? Well, we think this is a model that can be replicated in other cities. One of the things, we have a couple of goals here. At least that’s the way I see this. One goal is to do just what Natalie said, provide news coverage that is ethical and that focuses on the needs and concerns of the working class people in our region. But another goal is to say, “This can be done and this is possible. There are other cooperative news organizations that have done this. This is our model. We want to build on those models and say, okay, we’re going to take the baton and run with it.

We are going to run like hell with that baton, and we want somebody else to pick that up too. So we’re all running here and building news organizations that are engaged in covering the news, informing, being a source of communication, but are also building community. And I think that’s one of the things I learned about working in newspapers as a young man. This is back in the ’80s. I worked at weekly newspapers. These weekly small daily newspapers in small towns were part of the fabric of that community and held the community together by being a voice where people could look at that publication and recognize themselves and recognize their community. That’s gone. What we see in a lot of newspapers that post, because that is an example of this, we have an institution talking to other institutions. And what happens when that worker voices, regular people voices are lost?

One of our goals is to do that here in Pittsburgh is create a publication that does not do that, where people can look at that publication and recognize themselves and recognize the community that they care about and that they’re willing to invest in. So that’s where I see where we’re at right now and where we want to go.

Natalie Duleba:

Yeah. The pittsburghprogress.com is our website, but we’re also on Instagram, BluSky and Facebook. You can find us on all three of those by searching for the Pittsburgh Progress and all the same, the link to how to join us is available in all those places. And giving us a follow there is really helpful. And also you can stay up to date on the next steps in our rollout. But I think that having edited all of the stories that went up for the soft launch, that I would encourage people who want to support us to really. Obviously, I’d like you to read all of them, but if you do, you’ll see the way that they actually plug into each other, that they build on each other, the same concepts of building community. We have a high school football coach who has led an incredible team, but he’s also committed to staying at this high school to build up these young men into not only good football players, but also good young men and having that commitment there.

And there’s a football club, a soccer football that’s for a community football club. And the runner of that is similarly aligned and also has similar goals of making the players better people as well as improving their skills. The review that Erin put together of American-made stories of work, it’s a look at the working class voices of many generations ago and how they echo into today’s concerns, even if the technology has changed, but it’s still working class people trying to carve out a space for themselves and finding connections through the lens of history. Also, it’s just like you feel smarter after reading it. And my own story, these are business owners who you think that the kicker is more than money. Obviously they’re running a business, but they want to build community with their customers and fill gaps that they see in their own communities. These are all sober spaces, trying to have that safe third space for people to come to and build community and find like-minded people they can be themselves around.

And then the McGee story of nurses trying to fight for the best for their patients because they’re passionate about what they do and they’re going against big UPMC interests. And I think that seeing the way that came together and how when you let journalists pick where they can find these stories and how they do blend together, if we can continue that, I’ll be so happy and so pleased. And as Steve said, I think that as people feel more alienated from each other and from the bigger interests that control the country, that they will turn to one another and be like, “Let’s do it with each other, with our neighbors who are the people that we know and trust, and we can count on to follow through on what they’re saying they’re going to do.” I mean, our strike was sustained by donations from regular people and the other worker-led newsrooms that we’ve spoke to, they’ve been so open with us about how they did it, how we can follow their example and learn from their mistakes.

There’s been no gatekeeping amongst the worker-led newsrooms that we’ve spoken to. And it’s the same story of journalists who were let go by a new owner or had their publication shut down, and they just turned to one another and said, “What if we did it?” We have the skills, we can learn the new skills that we need to get it off the ground and get it going. And I think that the contraction and consolidation of, as Steve said, of these local newspapers that serve communities as that continues to happen and be gutted by private equity, I think that’ll be the workers who build those things back up, that we’ll see more worker-led newsrooms under various models pop up and fill the gap that business interests left in the pursuit of more profit, more money. And I’m excited to be part of the fabric of that, that there’s other rust belt cities or cities maybe who don’t have the same kind of working class history as Pittsburgh to be like, “We know how to cover our city.

We know these communities. We don’t need permission from a rich person to do this work. Let’s do it ourselves. Let’s get off the ground and they can rely on our lessons and the resources that collectively these worker-led newsrooms are putting together to offer.” And I would really love to see that. And I’m hopeful that we can find our place there, get our legs under us, and that we continue to see the support that we saw during the strike and during the past six months, which it is wild to think it’s only been six months since January 7th. I mean, a little bit more than six months, but what’s that? Is it that Margaret Mead quote of, “Never undermestimate the work that a small dedicated group of people can do.” I’m butchering that, but that’s the sentiment is that people who are passionate and committed to a thing can achieve it because that’s how everything has ever gotten done is people roam up their sleeves and putting in the sweat equity.

This way, all of our work is going to directly benefit us, not rich owners who don’t actually need the money and have never had to worry about being able to pay for the food on their table or keeping the lights on. And Steve said that in his origin story on our website, and it was echoed in the conversation that Aaron had with the editor of American Made. If you resonate with any of that, you’re going to resonate with what we’re doing. So if you want to be part of our story of our effort, check us out on pittsburghprogress.com, on Instagram, BluSky, Facebook. You can hear everything that we’re doing in the next couple months as we head toward our hard launch. We really love it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Natalie Duleba and Steve Mellon, both former strikers of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, and both now founding worker members of the newly launched Pittsburgh Progress, a cooperative news organization owned and democratically run by its workers and members. Go check them out using the links that we provided in the show notes. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our podcast feeds, our website, and our different social media pages, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today.

I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.