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. My name is Maximillian Alvarez.

Jules Taylor:

And I’m Jules Taylor.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And today we are going to Terlingua in West Texas, right on the US-Mexico border and right next to Big Bend National Park. As the Texas Tribune reports, “Since President Trump returned to office in January of 2025, his administration has renewed efforts to erect border barriers in parts of the US-Mexico border that don’t currently have any. That includes the Big Bend region in far West Texas, home to the Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park, both of which the Trump administration has targeted for border security infrastructure. Historically, the region has recorded the fewest illegal crossings along the entire Southwest border, but the Trump administration has awarded billions of dollars worth of contracts to build some form of infrastructure to deter illegal border crossings, while telling concerned West Texas residents that they will not build a border wall or fence in the national park.

Local residents, environmentalists, and a bipartisan group of elected officials, including sheriffs and county judges, have still asked the administration to stop all construction.”

Jules Taylor:

According to the website of the community advocacy group, No Big Bend Wall, 2.1 billion in contracts have already been awarded for wall construction in Presidio and Hudspeth counties. Over 500 private landowners stand to lose access to the Rio Grande due to the proposed border wall. Construction is planned for Texas gems, including Big Bend National Park and Big Bend Ranch State Park, and the Department of Homeland Security is waiving 31 federal laws, including National Environmental Policy Act, National Historic Preservation Act, Native American Graves Protection and Reparations Act, and Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So to talk about what the hell is happening on the US-Mexico border, we are really grateful to be joined on the show today by a panel of folks who are on the front lines of this story and who are joining us from in or near Terlingua, Texas. Thank you all so much for joining us. Please introduce yourselves to our listeners.

Yolanda Alvarado:

I’m Yolanda Alvarado. I’m a fifth generation cattle rancher and the regional director for Conserve Big Bend: No Big Bend Wall.

Crystal Allbright:

Hi, I’m Crystal Allbright. I live in Terlingua, Texas. I’ve lived here 36 years. My husband and I own a bicycle shop and have outdoor gear as well as art. We’ve operated the river for 29 years, but we’ve phased that out for now. I’ve visited the area since I was a young child and love it very much.

Sara Ryza:

I’m Sara Ryza and I have the Desert Air Motel in Sanderson, Texas. It’s a renovated 1960 motel in Sanderson, which is a gateway town into Big Bend. So while the national park and the state park are kind of the anchor places that bring people into the region, they’re going through gateway towns to the region and into the park. And so a big part of this area is tourism and there are a lot of independently owned small businesses that are concerned about what all of this is going to do in the short and long term for tourism.

Scott Whitener:

My name’s Scott Whitener. I was a former superintendent on the Big Bend Ranch State Park along the river corridor located along the river road, which is just along the Rio Grande and covered about 50,000 acres of the front country of the state park side. I have been going to the Big Bend for 30 years. My wife fell in love with me there, I think, to check and see if that’s still true. But I currently live in Marfa, which is in Presidio County. I also am a property owner in three of the six counties in the affected area in the Big Bend sector. And yeah, this is near and dear to my heart, my family’s heart, and it will remain that way.

Sharron Reed Gavin:

My name is Sharron Reed Gavin and I also live in Terlingua with my husband. We moved there in 2013 full-time. We had both loved the Big Bend independently of knowing one another. My first time to go there, and this is before most of y’all were born, but was 1976 and went with some friends with the canoe and we wanted to do the river. And there weren’t such things as desert sports really at the time, but we found some good folks like Crystal and her husband who would help us get down to the river and go on it for a while. But I have six grandchildren and that’s why this is so important to me, also for my neighbors and all that love the Big Bend. There’s not a lot being done to save it by our elected officials, but I think all of our voices matter.

All of these people are working so hard at their real jobs and on top of it, especially what Yolanda and Sarah are doing with No Big Bend Wall. It’s just all of these people are doing full-time jobs and doing a full-time job with no Big Bend wall, and I just appreciate them.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and we genuinely appreciate all of you for being here and talking to us about this. I’m just incredibly sorry that you and your community are going through this, that our country is going through this. It’s like every week it’s another horror show, but I really want to zero in on what you were just talking about, Sharon. I’ve never had the pleasure of going to see Big Bend or being in this part of the country. I really hope to correct that soon. But this is, from what I’ve seen, one of the most just beautiful places on God’s green earth. But for those of us who are not from there and for folks who are listening who have never been there, I want to ask if y’all can describe what our listeners can’t see for themselves. Tell us more about this area and what it’s like to live and work there.

Yolanda Alvarado:

Yeah, so I’m not directly near Big Bend National Park. My family ranches in the Big Bend region and that starts from Hudspeth County and it goes all the way to Valverde County. But we have ranches in Hudspeth and Presidio and near Jeff Davis. And we’ve been out here for hundreds of years and it’s really just quite desolate. You could see four hundreds of miles just desert and no one around. It’s a really serene environment and it’s also really harsh to be in the desert. It’s filled with rural communities. No communities are huge out here. We have very few ambulances, small schools. My children go to a school with 35 students from kindergarten to high school. So it’s just a really small time, small town, rural environment. And we throw on tourism and people going to the National Park and passing through these small areas. So even though we are small in size or small landowners, it still feels big.

It still feels connected to the rest of America because we still have all these visitors and people coming through.

Sara Ryza:

It also feels like time slows down here. You can relax and it’s kind of the call of the desert. You wouldn’t expect that you would love it so much if you weren’t originally thought of yourself as a desert person, but it’s also, it’s very gritty. There’s a grit to the people that live and work here and a lot of the business owners have several businesses. We also have a liquor store and also we’re part of this bigger region, but we’re also our own little communities. And in Sanderson, it’s Terrell County that’s getting vehicle barriers going through our county, which is only 20 miles to the border to the river, but that’s all private land. So we’re connected geographically to the river where we are, but also to the region through the tourism. It’s all really interconnected.

Crystal Allbright:

Yeah, I agree with both Yolanda and Sarah. It’s very remote and fairly isolated, but we all are connected. In the national park, I like to describe it as three biomes. There’s the mountains, the Chisos mountains, and then there’s the open expanse of the desert, and then there’s the river corridor that connects us all. So if you start at Yolanda’s Ranch and drive the Chispa Road all the way through Presidio and to Terlingua and then up through Alpine and then Marfa, you can make a big loop. You can do Fort Davis and Sanderson. And so we’re all connected. This has brought us together in so many ways from learning about each other’s businesses and lives as well as participating in the community meetings, whether it’s a town hall or a commissioner’s meeting or a groundwater meeting. We’re all working together to learn ways that we can delay the construction, which we prefer to call destruction of this area that we love.

Scott Whitener:

We all have to continue agreeing with each other because everybody else before me said it way better than I think I will. But at the same time, a few days ago I put it into perspective. I looked at all the population in all of our six counties that are affected right now in the Big Bend sector, and there’s like 23,000 people. You know how many square miles there is in those six counties? 23,000 square miles. Think about that. That’s a one person per square mile. Could you imagine being anywhere that allows you to have that type of expanse? We are all connected by this region, honestly. We all know what each other are doing because we love it out here. We love one another and it’s trampling on our freedoms, it’s trampling on what we love, and this government overreach is, it’s destroying our way of life, but we’re not going to let it.

And I’ll continue to say that, but at the same time, it’s made this community bigger, better, stronger. And I can’t say enough about the people, the place, the sunrises, the sunsets, the mountains, the open expanse, the plains. This is a special place, and if you haven’t been down here, you don’t have to come because like Austin used to say, “Hey, come for the fun, but don’t move here, please.” We do love the visitors. We love having people down here, but you live out here for a reason and we share this place with one another because it’s not any of ours, but it sure is ours to share.

Sharron Reed Gavin:

And the only thing I would add to that is you asked what it would look like to people who haven’t been here and everybody’s kind of hit that nail on the head, but it really is something that you can’t understand until you see it in person. And my favorite other place in the world is the north rim of the Grand Canyon, and I promise they have nothing on us, absolutely nothing. But we also, the beauty is here, but there’s archeological sites, there’s historical sites. They’re not paying any mind to those. They even started working on one of those sites and were interrupted. Yolanda, I can’t remember if it was by you or somebody else out near you, but the scale of the destruction and the history and the things that we absolutely cannot replace, it’s mind-boggling. And then everybody said this too about how we are all working together and we may be different and love our isolation, but boy, you step on this anthill and you’ve got a lot to contend with.

The thing that makes me feel really good about it though is this group isn’t going away. These people across the country who have banded together to fight this wall, they’re here to stay. They’re here to stay and the people are going to make their voices heard, and I think just at the end of the day, get this to stop.

Scott Whitener:

I don’t work for the state park system anymore, which is why I can be on this podcast and talk as much shit as I want. Pardon my French. But I actually work for an animal rescue. We rescue dogs out of shelters one tail at a time. We cover an area about the size of South Carolina, even bigger than our six sexers. So we save a lot of shelter animals and abandoned animals, and probably that’s what 40 to 50 to 60 hours of my week is. And then the other waking hours is fighting this.

Crystal Allbright:

I said earlier that my husband and I have a bicycle shop and we worked in the river outfitting business. We work six to seven days a week all day long. And again, using that time, especially when people come through the shop, we have displays about what’s going on in the area and we encourage people to voice their opinions about what’s going on and contact representatives. We use our space to show photographs of some of the destruction as well as to help raise money for these organizations that are working so hard to stay on top of what’s going on.

Yolanda Alvarado:

Yeah. I’m a cattle rancher, as I mentioned. I manage all my family’s ranches, and so I work every day outside in the desert. I work with mother nature. I work with the animals with droughts, with floods, the rain, any type of environmental issue you can think of a hundred and plus degrees outside or freezing outside. So my everyday working life and what it has been for the past almost 10 years has just been me and the desert, me and the animals, and that is my job. And carrying my family’s legacy, it has been my responsibility to be a steward of the land and continue that and teach my children how to take care and live out here, take care of the desert, the ranches and the animals, what it means, what you can use the plants for. So yeah, that’s basically what I do all day.

And then now I am fighting the border wall as the regional director, spending a lot of my time behind a computer now, but here we are.

Sharron Reed Gavin:

Yeah, I’ll say one thing. None of these folks work nine to five. I mean, I’m retired and that’s very fortunate because I have some more time to help on the no wall fight, but none of these people work nine to five. I can’t even imagine the number of miles that Yolanda drives or Scott used to do when he was with the state park or Crystal on their river trips. It’s mind-boggling. I do know where Crystal lives, and you have to love it out here to drive from where she lives into Terrlingo. It may be like seven miles, but it can take you up to 30, 40 minutes. So these people are working before and after work and during the working hours.

Jules Taylor:

National borders everywhere in the world are deeply political constructs with complicated histories, and the US-Mexico border is no different. I mean, it’s been a political talking point our entire lives. Can you talk to us about what it’s like to live somewhere that is so regularly charged by political narrative and policy battles and tell us why that’s different now?

Yolanda Alvarado:

Well, historically, the river down here in this part in the Big Bend sector, it’s been so isolated and desolate that we don’t have many crossings here, as you mentioned. So for many years up until almost recently, and still actually today, the communities on the river are on both sides. So you see Presidio and Ohinaga sharing a river, you see Bokias, we are one community. So politically, not until the first border wall came through, it wasn’t something that we even thought about for us and my family and the ranchers because we’ve always just been safe out there. We’ve been alone and we’ve been one community with the other side of the border that was Pilates, Mexico. And it wasn’t until, I guess, Bush, he built a fail billion dollar wall that’s actually on my aunt’s property. And that’s when we started seeing, for us anyways, in this region, it being more politically charged.

And even then at that time, I don’t believe anyone looked at the Big Bend region close to the National Park and said, “We need a wall here.” So I personally felt a little separated from what was going on in other places. I mean, me and my family never thought in a hundred years they would try to put a wall where we are because it just doesn’t make sense at all. It’s like you go down there, I even took the border patrol agents, the head director, infrastructure project directors of the Border Wall Project, and they said, “Yolanda, I see what you’re talking about because that’s how ridiculous it looks in person when you get off of a map.” We did see when Kersey Nome was a Homeland Security Director, we started seeing Stryker military vehicles, the army lining the border. Still today, I’m passed by Army people.

Our border’s completely militarized now. So it was a very isolated, safe place. And now I have to worry about running into a Stryker military vehicle hitting me on the way to the ranch. And most of the time I find them napping in their trucks because it’s so quiet and they don’t have anything to do. I see them on just, there’s actually a weightlifting area where they’re bored and they’re lifting weights because there’s no emergency on the border, yet our military’s deployed in our own homes, in our own backyards, filling up all the hotel rooms in these small rural communities already causing damage to tourism. So it’s been interesting watching it in real time. I was sitting on our back porch less than half a mile from Mexico on the Rio Grande reading that we were in a state of emergency and within the week we had military driving in and showing up at our property.

I even had military personnel drive through our gate in the middle of the night because they were just messing around, driving really fast. So it’s been a really interesting experience watching it in real time, not on the news saying like, “Oh, we have an emergency. Oh, there’s the military. Now we’re getting a wall.” It’s been really crazy and at the very least, such a disturbance to our peace or what was peaceful.

Scott Whitener:

This should make every taxpayer mad, and I’m only going to put it into perspective. I won’t put names under the bus. I live in Marfa, which everybody poo-poos Marfa just because it’s fun to do it anyway, and I get it. We’re a little art community, everybody’s a little bougie, whatever. I live in an old train warehouse, which it’s fun. Anyway, but I go down the street and I have the US military staying at a place that costs $285 a night minimum, and they’ve been staying there full-time since February of 2026. They use the pool, they use the weight room, all the things that people in this community can’t afford to use. Our US military is occupying that hotel and they’re not paying hotel taxes, they’re not helping the community, and they’re showing up to the pool and drinking at the bars. And it’s like, what are they defending?

And when we ask them, “What are you doing here?” They said, “We’re here to help this place. We’re here to defend you guys.” And I’m like, “Defend me from what? Art critics?” I mean, certainly it should make any taxpayer mad of what’s being wasted down here. These guys cruise around all day, all night and do nothing. And I’m not dogging the military, I’m dogging the decision. And it’s going on all over this region and it’s despicable.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, it’s going on all over the country, right? I go to Washington DC this week and there are a bunch of board national guardsmen just walking around. It’s like, what the hell are we doing?

Yolanda Alvarado:

Really an insult on, I think, our military service also. My sister’s in the Air Force, and I mean, it’s insulting to even separate them from their families, deploy them in the United States, separate them from their families. They’re off on a mission, but it’s really there’s no mission down here. There’s nothing going on. But yeah, millions and millions, if not billions of our taxpayer dollars are going towards this. So I’m glad you said that, Scott.

Sara Ryza:

Yeah. It feels like an upside down world where before it was like, yeah, we’re safe. We didn’t even think about our safety, but people that don’t live here, that don’t work here, they’re talking about how it’s a scary place. We have to put up physical barriers. And so it’s created a narrative that is not what reality was. And now in addition to people thinking that we need a wall, well, now people think that, well, if they needed a wall, then it probably wasn’t safe. So why am I going to visit there? There’s so many other national parks, so many other places that people could go on a trip, and it’s really messing up our tourism and the economy that drives on the tourism. And while contractors coming in, the military coming in, that’s not an investment in our communities and in this long-term economic development.

Anybody that thinks that might be good that it could bring in money to our towns or to our county, that’s just a very shortsighted view and it hurts us in the long run.

Sharron Reed Gavin:

And when you were talking about being politically charged, I mean, it all goes back to the false pretense that we need a wall because of the border crisis down here. It’s all bogus. There is no border crisis. The border crisis right now are the construction workers or as Crystal said, the destruction workers. But yeah, I think that’s really important. This isn’t needed. It’s all about our president rewarding the people that are funding him for his political office, and it’s not doing this community any good whatsoever. It’s harming it significantly. One of our Texas state senators has a bill called the Fed Act, which is supposed to protect landowners specifically in West Texas from federal overreach, yet he hasn’t said a word about the overreach that’s happening here. So yeah, I better stop because it really makes me mad.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, I mean, I was going to ask y’all to, let’s get more mad, right? Because I mean, Jules and I have also been talking to fellow Texans who are dealing with data centers in their damn backyards now, all over the place. It feels like local control is just being ripped away and people are just having, whether it’s a border wall, whether it’s a data center or some other polluting piece of crap in their community, we get no say in it and they’re just steamrolling everybody. Because I wanted to sort of ask y’all, if you could speak to the non-Texans who are listening to this, right? We all know that there’s a, speaking of narratives, there’s a narrative in this country that makes a lot of people assume that Texans would be for this, that Texans would be shooting their guns into the air and say, “Yeah, let’s build a big border wall.” What do you want to say to people who think that about you?

Sharron Reed Gavin:

Come down and see for yourself. It’s nothing like the narrative that you’re hearing. Nothing at all.

Yolanda Alvarado:

Yeah. I mean, the data center border wall is so correlated. It’s the same fight that everybody’s been starting to fight across the country. So the only difference is that say it’s Boise, Idaho, and the only difference is the president saying there’s only rapists and murderers coming to Boise, Idaho. We need a wall around it and not a data center. It’s the same correlation. So we were just painted this black. We were already painted black, and that’s why people are not really opening their eyes to the issue, but it is exactly like you said, it’s just like having a data center show up in your community and taking your natural resources, jobs, all of the above. So to speak to the greater America, one thing I’ve been saying is that they declared a national emergency to waive laws to do this project. Who’s to say they’re not going to do it in Boise, Idaho?

Who’s to say they’re not going to say, “Oh, we see this emergency here. Let’s deploy the army and build and do whatever we want to these Americans. Forget American sovereignty, forget whatever existed.” It’s disgusting, the overreach. So I think everyone in America should be upset about what they’re doing to abuse this power to take advantage of American citizens, Texans. It’s not right.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Weren’t we raised to hate this stuff? Didn’t we all learn in school that this is exactly the kind of thing that as good red-blooded Americans we should despise and fight against? And you got ICE agents in unmarked vehicles wearing masks, driving all over people’s property, being peaceful protestors. I mean, just the violation of rights and property and everything, it’s mind-boggling.

Sara Ryza:

Right. In Terrell County, there’s a $2.6 billion contract over the Big Bend five project, which bans all of Terrell County, some of Brewster, some of Valverde. It’s not the 30-foot wall. It’s four and six-foot tall steel bollards that’s the vehicle barrier system to stop vehicles from crossing. This is on the other side of canyons, the river, the wild and scenic river right there. It’s canyons. And so they’re putting this vehicle barrier up saying it’s to stop vehicles, but vehicles aren’t crossing and people can go under it. So it’s not stopping people. It just doesn’t make sense and it’s a waste of taxpayer money and it just does not make any sense. But it’s back to this narrative that if somebody says that we need it, then I guess half the country’s going to believe it.

Crystal Allbright:

Just my take on it is my life here has spent a lot of time on the river and never had a bad experience. Usually people were hungry, starving, needed water, but just the thought of losing access to our river, the river we share with Mexico, it is appalling to me that we wouldn’t have access. We want border security, but we were already secure before. And a lot of that was because there’s several villages along the river. Prior to nine eleven, it was an open border and you could go across and have lunch at the villages and people would share news about what was going on. If there was something bad going on, we would learn from the people that lived there. And then after nine eleven, the border was shut and then we were cut off from our friends. We still get together once a year on Mother’s Day and we go to the river and bands play on each side.

They take turns, a band in Mexico and a band in the United States and they take turns playing and the families come together and we eat, we sing, we laugh, we dance, and we get to do that one day a year. And to have the idea that they’re going to come in with whether it’s vehicle barriers or walls, it just cuts us off more from friends and family that live in Mexico. I just agree with the sheriffs and the border patrol that can talk to us that they’re doing a good job already and that just more the technology that they can use to detect people crossing and being able to get to them, they could use more drones and maybe a helicopter that sure doesn’t cost $7.46 billion, which is how much they’re trying to spend on 517 miles of riverfront in Texas. And just the whole idea of landowners along the river, farmers, ranchers losing access to the water, again, we’re all saying it doesn’t make sense and we think we’re pretty logical people.

So I just want them to slow down, think about what they’re doing and start believing in the rule of law again.

Yolanda Alvarado:

Yeah. Speaking on the border security we have, as a rancher, I got a new four-wheeler. I was chasing cows near the border in the middle of nowhere. And border patrol knows me. They know my truck, they know pretty much what I do, but this was new to them. They were there within 10, 15 minutes, found me in the middle of nowhere and was like, “Oh, it’s just you, Yolanda. All right, have a good day.” That is a response time already. And I was going really fast on that four-wheeler. So just the idea of them being able to come in and take land away from landowners to ruin this entire region when we already have a very secure border. I mean, if you look at CBP, the Customs and Border Patrol Instagram right now, they just posted a video that says the border is secure. Even they’re admitting it at this point.

It’s comical, but they’re getting away with this at a national level because again, for me, and I’ve said this from the beginning, I’m very vocal about it. I think it’s a very racist agenda. It’s very anti-Latino. It’s very anti-brown. That’s why we can see ICE getting away with kidnapping people, murdering them in the street because they’ve pushed this anti-Latino narrative for a long time now since Clinton era, Bush did it and even Obama did it and it’s getting worse and worse. So people are turning a blind eye to it and it’s really frustrating because just as Crystal described, it’s not what it seems like here. We are communities, we are families, we are one on the river, and it’s really deserving to watch in real time of how people are being treated just for this agenda. And honestly, in the very end, it’s just so people can make some money at top.

It’s for these large contract deals. It’s to sell beds to detention centers. It’s all of the above. And we are just a byproduct of this huge anti-Latino showboat.

Sharron Reed Gavin:

Sometimes people will ask if they haven’t been down here on some of these chats and all, is it safe down there? Do you feel safe down there? I said, “We feel perfectly safe. We haven’t locked our door in 13 years. We don’t even know where the key is.” But then I also say, “I feel a lot safer here than I do going to Dallas or I do going to DC or some other place. This place is safe.” And if you took the amount, and Yolanda, you can probably correct me, but somebody did a calculation of the amount they’re paying, the seven however many billion dollars versus the number of people who have crossed, it comes out to something like $500,000 a person or $50,000 a person. I’m not a mathematician, but it’s ridiculous that that’s where our taxpayers’ money is going.

Yolanda Alvarado:

Yeah, it’s definitely the higher number. I believe it’s more over a million a person per apprehension, but it is $14 million a mile to build this border wall in our region. That’s our taxpayer dollar. So my family’s property, we’re going to have, I believe, a new fence, a 30-foot bollard wall that’s costing taxpayers. On our property alone, rough math, almost a hundred million dollars just on our property. That’s our new fence. So the cows aren’t going to go to Mexico anymore, but it is actually ridiculous what is happening and how much money’s being spent.

Sara Ryza:

Isn’t it 17 million per mile, right? Is that right? I think that’s the number, 17 million per mile. And the entire county budget for Terrell County is less, just less than 2.5 million for the entire year for the entire county, but they’re spending 17 million per mile.

Jules Taylor:

The last time I was there in Terlingua, I realized that water is scarce as a resource. It’s something that y’all could use more of. Sometimes power would go out or power did not seem like it was necessarily in all places. So when y’all talk about these huge numbers going on in terms of… I just think about how better that could be used within your communities to make better the lives of the people who choose to live there. And instead it goes to this godawful cause that helps no one hurts everyone who lives there and is completely unnecessary and ridiculous. And if you just were to look at the landscape of where they are intending to place it, like you mentioned, Yolanda, it doesn’t make sense, like vehicle barriers on the other sides of canyons. I mean, it just all sounds like a giant shit show, and I’m sorry that everyone’s having to live through this and deal with it.

And in terms of how the community of Terlingua is, man, I remember being there last year, there’s the Boathouse and there’s a Starlight Theater and there’s DB’s Rustic Iron. And I was reading somewhere in the Texas Tribune, there are actual signs that all these businesses have put up where if you are working with the contractors, we don’t want your business here, please take it elsewhere and you’re not welcome. And I just think it’s incredible the way that the businesses and the people who live out there have sort of been galvanized by this entire ordeal. As a wrap up question here, where do things stand now, like upcoming events? What can people, listeners do to get involved and what’s the current status now? Because I understand that the actual construction was paused and I think I remember reading today the pause ceased or something. Can we get an update on where things stand at this point and how listeners can help?

Sara Ryza:

It’s really easy to get mad and it’s nonsense, but the way that we’ve come together has been really great. We’re stronger than we thought we ever needed to be. We didn’t know we were going to need to be this strong, but the businesses, there’s a business network, we come together, we’ve talked about all of this. And the thing that has helped us, I know you want an update on the construction, but what we’re working on is fighting for tourism. That’s helped kind of shift the narrative because yes, we’re fighting against the wall and all of that, but we’re also fighting for something. Crystal reminds us all the time we’re fighting for what we love. The businesses are fighting for tourism. So the thing that people can do is to keep coming, keep coming to Big Bend, support the local businesses, come to the parks, even watch what’s going on if construction resumes.

But there’s a big tourism campaign called Big Love for Big Bend that reminds people that when you come to Big Bend, you’re supporting these businesses and these independently owned restaurants, gas station, grocery stores, motels. So that’s in addition to writing representatives and a lot of other things that they can do, a really huge thing would be to keep visiting Big Bend.

Yolanda Alvarado:

We just took a trip to Washington DC. We talked to lawmakers. We were trying to wrap our minds around what are they saying? What are they doing? And the biggest thing that stuck out was all of them have said they’ve received phone calls, they’ve heard from their constituents, and it’s huge no matter where you are outside of Texas to keep calling your representatives and let them know that putting a wall or any infrastructure in Big Bend will hurt you as well and it’s not needed and that’s not where you want to spend your taxpayer dollars. And we’re working on some bills and things there to hopefully halt that. And on top of that, our coalition, Conserve Big Bend, we started a landowner coalition and we have almost over half of the landowners on the border in our coalition who is against the wall. And we just filed a lawsuit a couple weeks ago against the federal government.

So it’s landowners versus DHS and we’re taking it all the way to the top. It was filed in DC and we’re hoping to see another TRO there and hopefully we can halt construction. We are challenging the waivers, letting them know that they can’t just come in and claim a national security and take away all of our rights. So yeah, aside from other small events we’re working on, that and donating to all the people who are working hard, it’s not just No Big Bend Wall, but there’s so many people in Terlingua all over. Anyone who even shares an Instagram post or Facebook post and talks about what is happening helps us. This is all really good and really helpful.

Crystal Allbright:

There’s another hearing tomorrow in El Paso. So some of the people originally scheduled for this podcast are in El Paso with the lawyers getting ready for that tomorrow and hopefully that will pause it again. We have not seen construction resume, but there are people watching for that. I think they’re just still waiting, but they’re still not talking to us. That’s been a big thing. The lack of transparency has been really aggravating. If they would just talk to us and we could give them ideas on alternatives for what’s going on, that would help. In Terlingua from February, we started having rallies on Saturdays and this Saturday is our 32nd rally. People come from all over and join us. We’ve had people from New York and California and Florida, Atlanta, all over Texas come and join us. And then in the big cities on Sundays like Houston, Dallas, they’re having rallies there as well.

So the moment they started bulldozing at Santa Elena Canyon, finally the news broke out to a bigger audience, even though we had been chipping away at that for six months. So more people are aware, but we just keep spreading the word.

Scott Whitener:

Yeah. And being able to attend the ones in Terlingua are at the rally at the Y is always special. That kicked it all off. And the bigger point here, and that was amazing, and what’s happened after that has been even more amazing. But if you’re talking about how can people help right now, not only attending those rallies at the Y, but what we’ve been doing, and everybody on this call and everybody’s in El Paso, I talked about how big this area is. The people on this call and the other people, our constituents out here have been driving to county meetings, city councils, groundwater meetings. You go to every single one of those, and I think every American should be paying attention to what’s going on down here. I know people are objecting to AI data centers, but looking at the gas, paying $4.50 a gallon, we’ve got people that are retirees thriving on social security, people that are part-time workers, part-time, anything, seasonal workers, because this is all tourism.

People are showing up to these county meetings and holding the people we put in office, holding them to account to do what we ask them to do because it’s bullshit. I’m sorry, you can bleep that one out. I mean, it’s bullshit. I keep saying it. It’s

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, man. Go for it. Let it fly.

Scott Whitener:

It’s bullshit that they keep going and they’re not listening to… We have the county commissioners probably scared to object to anything when we show up with 150 people that drove from all over the place. Like last week, I mean, we are calling people out that have been sitting in a La-Z-Boy enjoying their county judge position, their commissioner position, their city council mayor, people that just thought this was going to be easy and they can just check the box and say, “Hey, yeah, y’all go ahead and we’re just going to go bulldozer here because nobody lives out here because like I said, 23,000 square miles with 23,000 people.” Oh yeah, this isn’t like a city full of liberal dims or something that are going to object to everything. It’s us and we’re pissed and we’re going to keep showing up. And that’s what everybody, not only in the state of Texas, but definitely in the Big Bend region is doing it on their own.

And they’re out and my wife’s in El Paso, which is two and a half hours away right now. People in Terlingue in El Paso right now, which is five hours for them. People just need to show up and I think the gig is up. I mean, I’m done. I mean, I’m done with this crap.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. Before we go, I do want to give you an update on this story that occurred after we recorded the conversation that you just heard. As Martha Piskowski reported on October 6th in Mother Jones, “Federal Judge Kathleen Cardone granted a preliminary injunction Friday to halt construction on the border wall in Texas’s expansive Big Bend sector, including the national and state parks. Cardone read a brief order from the bench after hearing more than four hours of testimony from conservation groups and residents of the Big Bend region, known internationally for its dark night skies, abundant biodiversity, and rugged river canyons. Cardone said that the plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in at least one of their claims and to suffer irreparable harm if construction continues. Her ruling stops border barrier construction in the entire Big Bend sector until the federal government complies with all applicable laws.

The ruling applies to all of Big Bend National Park, Big Bend Ranch State Park, and the border along the Rio Grande in the rest of the sector. The injunction will remain in place while the court considers the lawsuit, which was filed in April.” So the struggle is still very much not over, but that is huge news and that is a huge win. I want to thank our guests in and around Terlingua, Texas, near Big Bend National Park, Yolanda Alvarado, Crystal Albright, Sarah Riza, Scott Whitener, and Sharon Reed Gavin. And if you want to learn more about what our guests are doing out there in West Texas and you want to connect with them, please use the links that we provided in the show notes for this episode. And Jules, I actually wanted to ask if you could give our listeners the scoop on an event that is happening in Terlingua this month that you are a part of.

Jules Taylor:

Yes. This month from October 15th to 18th, I will be taking part in the TerrLingua Music Bash. I believe there’s about 40 different artists spread across half a dozen or so venues, which are different businesses there in Big Bend. It’s all a benefit for school that’s out there. I mean, it’s all a really good cause. My friend John Whipple puts it on and it’s all free admission. So if you’re anywhere near TerrLingua on the 15th through the 18th, come hang out. There’s also a Day of the Dead costume parade that we’re going to do, which is also really super cool. But yeah, I can’t wait to be back out in Big Bend. I can’t wait to be back out in Terrlingua. It’s just a fantastic place and you can’t really describe how wonderful it is until you go there and then you’re just kind of at a loss for words.

When folks say you have to be there yourself to experience it and it has nothing on the north side of the Grand Canyon, I’m like, “Yeah, I’ve been there. I’ve been to the Grand Canyon too. This Big Bend is where I want to go every October for this music bash, and this will be my second year going.”

Maximillian Alvarez:

You heard it here first, folks. Our Texas co-hosts and guests say Grand Canyon ain’t shit. So thank you so, so much again to all of our incredible guests, and thank you to Jules for helping us put this incredible panel together. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring about this. We do this work for you, but we cannot do it without you. Working People is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. The show is produced by the great Jules Taylor and is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. We will 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 across the US and around the world.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Check out our great podcasts like Under the Shadow and the Mark Steiner Show, and connect with us on social media and get updates on our reporting there 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 Maximillian Alvarez.

Jules Taylor:

And I’m Jules Taylor.

Maximillian 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. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are in Fort Worth, Texas, and we’re talking about a fellow worker named James. As Maven Navarro recently reported in the Fort Worth Star Telegram, “After leaving Oklahoma, James Gardner built a life for himself in Fort Worth. Now he could lose it all. When Gardner walks into doctor’s offices to receive treatment for his terminal liver failure, he has to ask staff to remove all the air fresheners for his skin condition. Gardner has multiple chemical sensitivity, which he says was caused by his time as a concrete specialist working with two-part epoxy resin. The illness causes him to break out anytime he gets around chemicals, air fresheners, perfumes, cleaning supplies, and paint spark allergy flare-ups that can last for 10 days.

Concrete work is known to cause health problems. Cement plants can also cause respiratory or cardiovascular issues according to the Environmental Protection Agency. James Quigg first met Gardner in high school in Oklahoma where he was given the nickname NDN after enduring bullying for being Native American and kids calling him Indian. A few of Gardner’s friends started calling him NDN or Indian, and it stuck. Now, Quig started a GoFundMe to help prevent Gardner from losing his house. As he is unable to work and has faced challenges receiving disability, Gardner was denied disability the first two times he applied for it. It wasn’t until his third application that he was approved because of his internal organs shutting down.” So to talk about all of this, I am truly grateful to have James Indian Gardner himself and James Quigg, who they have given me permission to call them “NDN” and “Quigg,” friends since high school, both here on the show with us today.

Thank you guys so much for being here. It is really, really great to be connecting with y’all. And my God, I wish we were connecting under less horrifying circumstances and I’m so sorry that you’re going through all of this. And NDN, as much as you’re comfortable, I want us to make sure that we focus a good chunk of time today talking about what you’re going through now, where things stand now and what people listening can do to help. But we’ve got 50 minutes here and I really want listeners to get to know you and your lives more, your friendship and all the things that make you, you, not just these horrible people and jobs and systems that have done all this unforgivable damage to you. So NDN, start us off. Tell us the story of you and what brought you to Fort Worth. And then Quigq, hop in and tell us your story and how it intertwines with Indians.

James “NDN” Gardner:

I’ll start with a nickname “NDN” and then I’ll go from there. So as you were saying, back in school, kids were making fun of me and bullying me, and my principal called us into the office in my freshman year, said, “You guys can’t call him an Indian anymore. You’re being racist.” And one of my friends stood and said, “We’re not calling him Indian. We’re calling him letter N, letter D, letter N.” And he says, “Well, I can’t do anything about that.” And it just stuck and I’ve always enjoyed it. A lot of people are like, “He’s not just a Indian, he’s the Indian. There’s only one of them running around.” As far as career goes, I am third generation doing precast concrete with the passion. I’ve always enjoyed doing concrete. I’ve loved it. Being able to take the raw elements of earth and forging it into something that’s going to last and help the world is phenomenal to me.

I relocated down here to Fort Worth to actually do the McKinley Stadium, which is my third stadium to be a part of. Years ago, I was working for a company that dealt with a very strong epoxy resin and only 4% of the people that are exposed directly to it will develop an allergy to it. And with the company, it’s easier for them just to pay you off than it is to change their safety protocols, which shouldn’t be the way, but it’s cheaper for them that way. And over time, my symptoms and my condition got worse and worse and worse because it just doesn’t stop once you’re out of the environment of that specific thing. I remember one time they laid a new asphalt in front of my house here on the road and I broke out for a week because of the adhesive and the tar and the asphalt and I couldn’t avoid it because I was in my own home.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So I have so many questions about that specifically because I don’t know if you guys know about it, but on this show specifically, I’ve been doing a lot of interviews with working people who have been exposed to toxic chemicals from work, from industrial disasters near their homes, all this kind of stuff that poor and working people are being exposed to daily. I mean, I was just filming in South Baltimore last night where residents just like you guys, but here in Baltimore are fighting trash incinerators that are blasting toxic chemicals into the lungs of their children. So this is definitely something that we’ve talked a lot about on the show, but I do want to talk about what that looked like for you, Indian, on a day-to-day working level. But before we get there, I want to go deeper into some of the lore here. Take me back to where you guys were in high school where you first met.

Quigg, who was this guy in high school when you met? And NDN, same question about Quigg.

James Quigg:

So Indian is a grade above me. So I came in as a freshman. He was already an established sophomore. He had a cool car. It was painted. He had some lady. Did it have a female on the hood and it had the universe? I mean, you couldn’t miss this car.

Maximillian Alvarez:

You had a low rider?

James “NDN” Gardner:

No, actually, it was a 91 Chevy Cavalier and anytime I’d get bored, we would just re-spray paint it. It was all animal print once. Once it was all hippied out, make love, not war. Even at one point I gave all the kids an art paint pens and we just wrote quotes over the entire car. People would stand there and read it for hours. It was just something to do. So

James Quigg:

You’d see this car. I’d see the car around before I was even in high school. So then you see, oh, this is the cool guy with the cool car. And then he’s always hanging out in the courtyard and he’s always got this group of girls because he’s just very didn’t try very hard, I guess. And honestly, I don’t think we liked each other necessarily in the beginning. It was just he had this girls that I was trying to hang out with, talk to, and he just didn’t really like the new guy, the new skinny white dude that was hanging around.

Maximillian Alvarez:

You got to earn your keep, baby.

James Quigg:

It took a couple years.

James “NDN” Gardner:

He really had to. And most of these girls I’ve been friends with for years, so I was very protective of them because they were my friends. And here’s this scrawny kid coming in trying to ask them all different kinds of things and get involved. I’m like, “Hey, hey, you don’t need to be around here right now.” But eventually he warmed over to me and I warmed over to him.

James Quigg:

Yeah, I was saying hope I was best friends with his cousin for a couple years. Then probably what, sophomore, not sophomore, junior, senior year, we started maybe hanging out a little bit more. You invited me to your house.

James “NDN” Gardner:

I had a house that most people weren’t allowed to. I was very young and I lived on my own, so it was just me and this trailer house at 16 years old. So a lot of parents didn’t even allow their kids over to my place. And they spray painted up too in the walls.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. I mean, to be honest, I don’t think my parents wouldn’t allow that either, but that would be exactly the house we’d all want to go to. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, can I ask how you ended up having your own kind of place when you were 16?

James “NDN” Gardner:

My parents separated and it was a choice of either do I go live with my dad or do I go live with my mom? And I was already working full-time at the time, and I bought a trailer house on state auction and moved into it. And it was just simpler that way. My mother ended up moving back in with me a few years later, but it was just more convenient. So like I said, I already had the income coming in.

Maximillian Alvarez:

What were you doing back then for work?

James “NDN” Gardner:

Back then? Well, my first job was working for the Department of Wildlife through a program called ATEC, which was American Indian Education Training Association. They took Native Americans and put them at federal buildings and gave them summer jobs. So that got me experience. Pretty much I was doing property management, mowing the yard, stuff like that, but I got to do a lot of really cool stuff with them because I was, “Hey, let’s grab him and take him with us to go do this fish survey or let’s go explore the bat caves and do a survey out there.” And so it was very fun as a youth to have that. And then I went straight from that to Home Depot, working at Home Depot as a pro associate.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So paint a picture for me. When you guys were back there in Oklahoma, are we talking kind of small town Oklahoma, medium town, city? Yeah, paint a picture for me.

James “NDN” Gardner:

So Bethany, Oklahoma at that point was the very edge of Oklahoma City. So it’s pretty much small town. I knew all the police officers, they all knew me, not because I was in trouble, just because there wasn’t a lot of us running around. And of course it was the late ’90s, early 2000s, so we were always getting into some sort of trouble as we all did back in that time.

James Quigg:

Oklahoma is a pretty small, big town. I think less than a million people in the whole city, probably less than that now, but I mean it takes what, 10 minutes or less to get down into the heart of Bricktown, downtown Oklahoma City. I mean, it still is small town, but it’s trying to be bigger than it really is.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, I come from Southern California, the land of endless lights and sprawl from the beach to the mountains. So everything feels small town to me to some extent. But to be honest, I kind of got a lot of love for the small and medium-sized towns in the country. I don’t think I gave them enough credit when I was younger, but the older I get and go visit more, the more fascinating they are. But I wanted to ask in that vein, we’re talking about Oklahoma. I guess we’re talking in the colonial project of the United States of America, so everything is ironic, but living in a state named Oklahoma and going to a school where you make fun of Native American kids feels so ironic and ridiculous that I don’t even know what to do with myself. But was that normal Indian? I mean, what was the kind of ratio?

Were there a lot of indigenous kids going to school there?

James “NDN” Gardner:

No. No, there wasn’t. In high school, there was maybe five of us altogether. I mean, there’s not a lot of us left. It’s sad to say. I was fortunate enough to run into… I mean, we just kind of all clicked together because, oh yeah, you’re native too. Cool. What tribe? What’s your family line? But the whole reason why we were in Oklahoma City is that my father was one of the Native Americans you hear about in the past being adopted off the res for a very low amount of money. And then he was adopted with four other siblings, all native from different tribes raised by a white man in the city. So yeah, there just wasn’t a lot that made it to the inner city area at that time. They all stayed out near the reservations, near the small towns like Carnegie and Adarko. So being inside the city, yeah, there wasn’t a lot of us.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I take it from the origin story of your nickname that it wasn’t a very kind place to Native kids like you?

James “NDN” Gardner:

Oh, no, no, no. I remember once I was 14 walking down the street and the cops pulled me over because they had an APP put out on a Native American with long hair. I just happened to be a Native American with long hair. And they picked me up and took me down to the police station, which was just three blocks from my house. I wasn’t the person they were looking for. The person they were looking for had robbed a gas station and he was in his late 20s and I was 14. We stood out, so you either knew who we were or it’s just the way it was.

James Quigg:

It’s true. And what they only taught us in school about Native American culture is just an annual field trip we take to the Cowboy Hall of Fame and they’d show us the statues and talk about the Trail of Tears.

Speaker 4:

Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

But there’s a lot to this story that I identify with in certain ways. I don’t know what that’s like Indian, but I know what it’s like to be a bald, scary looking Mexican dude in America. I’ll take looking like Quigg over looking like us on a normal day if I don’t want to get stopped by the cops. But that’s all the more reason why it just fills my heart when I hear stories of comradery and lifesaving solidarity, even among kids who are standing up for a friend. Tell me more about that, both of you, the stepping in to sort of reclaim the name and to say this is not how we’re going to do things. This guy’s our friend, not our enemy.

James “NDN” Gardner:

Oh yeah. I mean, Quig is my white guy. I always joke with people like, “I got my white guy. He’s right here. I’m safe. I don’t need a card. I got a whole person.” And I mean, he’s always had my back. Once we really connected and I realized that this is somebody that I needed to be part of my life and everything he’s done for me over the years, I can’t live up to. I try.

James Quigg:

I seriously doubt that, brother. I have computer smarts and I can do techie stuff, but this guy is the dude if you need any help. I mean, I’ll go back to last year, we had a leak in my daughter’s bathroom and it was coming down in the guest bathroom and I was like, “I don’t know what the hell to do, man. It’s just coming down.” And he just hopped in his car and he brought all his tools because he’s just that guy. And so he came and he helped me change the drywall. And as he’s doing this and helping me with all the stepping outside because I got to spray some kills on the wood, I mean, he’s getting hives, he’s getting blisters. I’m feeling incredibly guilty and he’s like, “Don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it. Let’s just get it done.” But he’s just that kind of guy and it’s been like that anytime I’ve needed him.

He’s just always there. And it’s not just me, it’s everybody. He’s helped damn near everybody that we know, either with a place to stay, help fixing their car, mowing a yard. It doesn’t matter. He’s a helper, he’s a doer, and that’s just something I’ve always admired from him.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and it’s genuinely beautiful to hear you guys say that, right? Because first and foremost, I’m thinking just as three men in the country today, we don’t say this enough to each other and we don’t allow ourselves to be that for each other. And so I just wanted to kind of honor the beautiful friendship that you guys have, having each other’s backs for this long is a marvelous thing. And I’ll be honest with all of you listening, Quig reached out to me about Indian’s story and told me about it, and that’s how it got on my radar. So these guys have been together for years and they’re still looking out for each other, and I think the world will be a better place if we all do a little more of that for each other. And Quig, even you telling that story reminds me that we’ve still got so much to talk about here, Indian, about your working life and the conditions and chemicals that you were exposed to that are now collapsing your health and your quality of life.

So that’s normally what we talk about on this show is I talk to workers and I say, “Tell me about your working life.What does it look like on the job?

For people who’ve never worked in this line of work, what does it entail?” Can you kind of take us a little bit on that journey and then tell us about the kind of work hazards that you were exposed to?

James “NDN” Gardner:

Yeah. The company where I was working for made burial vaults and the poncho that they used went on the liners of the burial vaults to seal it to the concrete so it maintain a watertight sealness for 50 to 100 years. That’s what they were concerned about. The people working in there that were alive being exposed to a hazardous chemical to keep somebody that’s going to go in the ground from being exposed to the elements of the ground was more important to them than the people actually doing the job because there was other things that could have been used that was more efficient but cost more money.

And after my initial exposure with this company, I was still passionate about concrete. I still wanted to do concrete, but I had to relearn what companies I could work for, where I could work at, and how I could do it because now I got to change everything. I can’t be around anything that has sold chemicals. I’ve got to be in open environments. And one of the things, I was also a journeyman iron worker because every now and then you get tired of staring at gray when you do concrete long enough. And back to the whole having lung and breathing respiratory issues, as a journeyman iron worker, I was working on the Devon Tower, which is the tallest building in Oklahoma City, and I was going from the ground up a thousand feet every day, and I had developed acute altitude sickness from just working on the outside of the building every day.

But a lot of that was contributed because they did a long biopsy on me to test me for silicosis, which is from concrete dust. And I did have some concrete dust built up in my lungs at the time. And that’s just because not wearing enough protection when you should wear protection because old school concrete guys just get the job done, which I got no problem getting a job done, but it should be done safely, effectively, and efficiently, not the other direction around, efficiently and safety being one of the last concerns. So after no longer working for the company that caused my initial, and I didn’t realize how bad I was going to get over the years, because initially it was just adhesives in general. Then it got where I couldn’t even put a bandaid on without breaking out from the adhesives as I am now.

I actually have to order special medical stuff when I do get a cut so I can seal myself and not have a reaction to it for a long period of time.

James Quigg:

He has to take his own adhesives to the ER when he’s got to go to the ER because of his terminal liver failure, otherwise he’ll break out from that.

James “NDN” Gardner:

Yeah. Even going in for a procedure, they put an EKG machine on me. I’m going to break out from every point where the EKG machine is.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Jesus, man.

James “NDN” Gardner:

Even the tape on my fingers or to monitor my heart rate and my breathing will make me break out. So I travel with my own medical stuff now. It

Maximillian Alvarez:

Sounds like hell.

James “NDN” Gardner:

It is. It made me a shut in for quite a while because going to Walmart, going to the grocery store, luckily there’s DoorDash and things like that now where I don’t have to get out and get exposed. But again, like I said, it made me change how I worked in concrete. I went to places that had super structures that worked outside, still making beautiful things with concrete, but eventually the skin allergy, the multiple chemical sensitivity just overtook everything. I did work for a trailer company for a little while working three days a week because they knew my skin issue, they knew my thing. So I would go there whenever they needed something welded or something wired that they couldn’t figure out. But again, now I’m going to this place to work on a trailer and that trailer might’ve had paint in it. It might’ve had construction debris.

I can’t even walk into a Home Depot or a Walmart or Lowe’s. Fast food restaurants get me pretty good too. And as much as I love old people, they’re a little heavy with that perfume.That’s

Maximillian Alvarez:

Putting it mildly, man. And yeah, I’m sure so many of us don’t even realize all the spaces that we walk into where those irritants are, but if you start breaking out in hives the second that you’re exposed to it, you start realizing that actually there are a lot of places you can’t go. And that is just something that I think so many of us don’t have to think about. But when you’re in your position and you have to think about it, it must be just genuinely overwhelming at times.

James “NDN” Gardner:

T-Mobile has their own scent of air freshener. So when you open a T-Mobile store door, it puts a little spray into the air for a sensory thing. I understand how that can be with marketing. Oh, this is what T-Mobile smells like. I’m getting a new phone. And I didn’t know that till they rolled out with that and I went into a T-Mobile and next thing I know I’m being sprayed and now I’m breaking out in hives and I’ve got a leak.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Jesus, man. So as we sort of get to the situation that you’re dealing with now, I’ve heard from you a number of things already. We’re talking silicosis, we’re talking exposure to epoxy resin generating a chronic skin sensitivity, right? I mean the altitude sickness that you developed on the job. I guess if you had to sort of sum it up, if you could, what conditions do you have now that came from working in this country, from being exposed to things or repetitive actions to things? I guess I wanted to try to collect all that for listeners and ask what is the kind of sum total of all the crap that you’re dealing with from all the jobs that you’ve worked?

James “NDN” Gardner:

If the MSDS is laid out and has its certain rules and regulations, if the company will abide by the MSDS correctly, I would’ve never been overexposed.

James Quigg:

What’s the MSDS?

James “NDN” Gardner:

Material safety data sheets. It tells you about the hazardous of the chemicals, what you’re supposed to be wearing and be doing to you’re not hurt by it and it doesn’t affect you. And most companies, yeah, we’ve got an MSDS. It’s in a book on the wall over there. You can go look at it if you want to. And then they tell you to go to work. And I was guilty of doing that to people too. I’m like, “Well, yeah, the MSDS is over there, but just put this little mask on.” In reality, they needed a respirator instead of just a dust mask and went on with the day to get the day done. Things have changed a lot now than how bad it used to be when me starting off in the industry of concrete and everything else, because again, it was you’d stand in a cloud of dust grinding and just put on some safety glasses and hold your breath.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and let’s talk about when these health conditions started piling up and to the point that you needed disability checks and then had to navigate this Kafka-esque system that doesn’t work to try to get the aid that you need to live. Tell us more about the kind of crisis that you’re in now and all the people who are supposed to be helping you right now but aren’t.

James “NDN” Gardner:

Yeah. I mean, even going to the social security office to file for disability, I would sit there breaking out because I’m waiting for long periods of time in the line in a room full of people with chemicals on. So it became I have no choice. I have to go do this. I’ve got to go file this paperwork and I filed the paperwork and I wait and I wait and I wait. And then, “Well, we want to send you to this doctor.” Well, I call the doctor’s office. I’m like, “Listen, I can’t just go in there and they don’t abide by those rules.” They’re like, “No, you’ve got to come in, you’ve got to wait, you’ve got to go through this.” Even now, I’ve got some doctors that really help me with my situation and make sure the days that I’m scheduled, that nobody’s wearing perfume and that it’s going to be a nice, clean environment for me.

And then I have other doctors that could care less, but I’ve got to go through them because the social security’s telling me, “Well, you need to go to this guy and get tested for this.” I mean, they just did an allergy test on me, and part of the allergy test, the bonding agent in the allergy test is an adhesive. So I tested positive for everything, even though I told them I’m an adhesive and yeah, it just has to be on my skin for a few minutes to test me for allergies. Well, that’s still an adhesive on my skin for a few minutes. And I ended up having to get an epishot in the middle of the test, which now became an inclisive test.

James Quigg:

And I do want to clarify that Fort Worth Star Telegram’s article, I don’t believe he’s been approved for disability yet.

James “NDN” Gardner:

No. No, I haven’t been approved yet, but since we’ve gotten the articles, they’ve started reaching out to me more instead of me having to wait and call them. So now we’re actually communicating back and forth for the first time, but I’ve been denied twice.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So the situation, as I understand it, please correct me if I’m wrong, is that you now, because of what you’ve been exposed to over the course of your working life, are no longer able to work and you are disabled by those things you were exposed to, but you have received no money from the disability office. Your life is in limbo right now.

James “NDN” Gardner:

Yes, I am in limbo. And the first two times I was denied because they did not recognize multiple chemical sensitivity as a disability until the past five years. And I’ve been dealing with it for 10 years now. So it wasn’t recognized as a disability. Now they’re starting to, “Well, what do we have to do to prove that this is a disability?” And because of my skin always having to fight these battles and me being on experimental drugs, trying to overcome with it, and part of being native is that most drugs aren’t made for a 40-year-old Native American guy. They’re made for a 40-year-old white man who has years and years of antibodies built up in the systems where if I get a flu shot, I’m ending up with walking pneumonia, where if Quigley got a flu shot, he’s just fine the next day because it’s more developed.

So my body started shutting down because of it’s trying to fight all the time, always battling, always battling my skin, always fighting, led to me having internal organ failure. I go in for another surgery on Monday, which will be my 10th surgery this year alone because my body’s just shutting down.

But yeah, I’m just in limbo. But now, so I was able to refile for social security with the internal organ failure and the liver failure and the terminal diagnostics now. So it’s not even really taking the multiple chemical sensitivity into effect with my disability. That’s just added to it now.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I guarantee that there are going to be folks that I know who are going to listen to this and they’re going to reach out and they’re going to say, “You’re damn right it’s a disability. They have it. A lot of the residents I was talking about who have been exposed to these chemicals, now they are so hypersensitive to these chemicals and they bioaccumulate and they make them feel worse and their kids are getting sick or staying sick or they haven’t been not sick for years at this point. And it’s just this kind of hell that they’re living through. And I can’t help but think of all the other workers like you who are exposed to this stuff. I mean, in the year 2026, black lung is on the rise in this country. There are men our age dying from coal mining or other forms of silicosis because of the stuff they’re inhaling, the lack of PPE they’re getting, just this whole system of grinding people down to dust and subjecting our bodies to the most toxic conditions just to make a buck.

And it’s so systemic, but it impacts us in so many different ways. And I kind of wanted to just ask you guys about that.What does this all say about the daily realities that working people are going through in this country? And especially if you’re disabled or indigenous or both?

James Quigg:

Well, I’ll say that invisible disabilities are easily ignored. That is one thing that Andy and I both have in common. You look at both of us on a normal day, you don’t see a disability. You don’t see a multiple chemical sensitivity in him. You don’t see type one diabetes in me. So it’s easy, kind of out of sight, out of mind for a lot of people, except for the people that have to deal with it day in, day out when they wake up to when they go to bed.

James “NDN” Gardner:

I feel like in a way I was robbed because I always wanted to provide for my family. I always wanted to work hard and make a living. And because I was working hard and making a living and the companies that I worked for ignored safety protocols, I can no longer do what I want to do for my family and be there for my family the way I should have been allowed to. And a lot of working people, that’s all we want to do is make ends meet, survive and enjoy life and enjoy the little things. And to not be able to do that now because a company wanted to make more money isn’t justified.

James Quigg:

I mean, it’s true. America is built on the backs of people like Indian and a lot of people just use them as stepping stones to get to the future.

Speaker 4:

Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think that was beautifully and powerfully and put and it’s so depressingly true. I mean, Jesus, we just passed the 25th anniversary of nine eleven and we’re learning about all the things that not just first responders, but people all over New York were exposed to and lied to about for years later. This is unacceptable at every single level and we can’t keep accepting it. We’ve got to do something about it and we got to start by taking care of each other. And I wanted to bring us there for the final turn here because I know I can’t keep you guys for much longer, but I wanted to ask where things currently stand. I mean, you guys already gave us an important update from the Fort Worth Star Telegram that apparently Indian still hasn’t received anything from the disability office and he was denied two times before that anyway until his organs started shutting down.

Then he got some movement, but where does that leave Indian now? Where does that leave your family now? And what are folks doing in response? What can folks listening do to help?

James “NDN” Gardner:

Right. I mean, to back it down, sage up, pray to whoever will listen.

James Quigg:

Yeah. We’re kind of waiting to see what disability says. Hopefully he gets an approval and he’ll get some sort of back money so that he can get caught up with his bills because the bills haven’t stopped. The mortgage hasn’t stopped. They’re still trying to foreclose as far as I know because he’s terminal. They’re trying to get at least the ability for him to stay in his home and not be evicted. But that doesn’t solve a problem. That just pushes it down the road and it leaves it for his kids when Indian’s no longer here to help. But as far as what’s keeping him afloat has been this GoFundMe the last month or so, just from the kindness of strangers. Indian spent his life helping anybody and everybody. That doesn’t mean that those people are in positions to be able to help financially or monetarily in any way.

Indian’s always been that person to support others.

It’s just there’s nobody there maybe outside of myself that’s able to help him in that sense. And so we were sitting around his cousin, my other best friend and his mother on his birthday, what, six weeks ago, something like that, sitting around the kitchen table trying to figure out how do we stop this foreclosure? What can we do? Can we get a loan? Can we try to refinance? Can we refinance his mom’s house? Can I afford to purchase the home on my own? And realistically, none of us, we couldn’t do any of that. So I went home frustrated that we had to do this on his birthday, kind of cried about it a little bit and said, “Fuck it, I’m going to do this. I’m going to make a GoFundMe. I’m going to tell my friend’s story the best that I can and see if people are willing to respond.” Just try to show the world the kind person and generous person he’s always been and hopefully karma will come back tenfold on him.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, Indian, I want to give you the last word here and it can really be anything that you want, but I guess if you could know that you’re speaking to fellow workers around the country who listen to this show, who work in industries like this and industries that unlike this, if you could talk to those folks who are working jobs like this now or folks out there who could help, what would you just want to leave them with?

James “NDN” Gardner:

My family’s got a motto. If someone needs help, you help. You don’t ever respect anything in return. Whether it’s an old lady crossing the street, somebody on the side of the road with a flat tire, any situation. Somebody needs you to help them push a car or you notice your neighbor’s grass is too tall and you know he hasn’t been feeling well the last few weeks. Nothing’s going to cost you but time. Time is all we have for each other and let’s enjoy it and spend it and help everybody together. We’re all in this together. This is one world, one life. We’re all part of this. We’re all part of this.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, James Indian Gardner and James Quigg. You can get in touch with them and keep up to date with Indian story by using the links that we’ve included in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring about this. We do this work for you, but we can’t do it without you. So thank you. Working People is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. The show is produced by the great Jules Taylor and is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. 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 across the US and around the world.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel and check out our other great podcasts like Under the Shadow and the Battle for Free Speech and connect with us on social media and get updates on our reporting there 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 Maximillian 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:

All right. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are talking about labor unions, why they are important, why they have always been important for working people, and why they are more important now than ever, and why you should be part of one. In their new book, Fired Up About Unions, veteran labor educator, organizer, and writer Cole Rockharts writes, “We are living in a pivotal moment in labor history. At a time when corporations have more power, profit, and political influence than ever before, workers are leading inspiring union organizing campaigns and taking on bosses to win big. These workers are fighting not just for themselves, but for their communities too. Their struggles reveal that everyday people can unite, change their conditions, and build better workplaces and a better world.” So this is what we’re going to be talking about today, and we’re really basing this conversation on Cole Rockhart’s great new book, which everyone should go read.

You can find it using the links in the show notes for this episode. And I’m really grateful to have Cole Rockarts themselves joining us on the show today. So Cole, welcome. Congratulations on this important book. Could you tell our listeners a little bit about the book and where it came from?

Cole Rockarts:

Absolutely. Thanks, Maximillian. It’s really exciting also to hear someone else read it because it’s just been in the ether for such a long time, so thanks for that. It’s very cool. So Fired Up About Unions, which again, you can get at BTL between the lines in Canada or AK Press in the US or your local library, give it an order there, really examines what unions are, demystifies the myths around unions, that we don’t need them, that they’re outdated, that young workers can’t be organized or different types of workers can’t be organized, and really lays the groundwork of why unions have become so weak in our respective countries in Canada and the US, and talks about why young people can be the antidote to all of the problems facing work and really unions themselves. Unions aren’t perfect, but if we take the view that unions are made up of people and we recognize that our coworkers are just regular people and we all ultimately want the same things, and that’s higher wages, protections at work, health and safety on the job, and better, that’s the great place where we can start to come together and change not only our individual situations, but as I say in the book, our communities and even beyond.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. And we’re going to be talking about how to do that, how to do better, get better, and fight better from the shop floor and beyond. And I’m so grateful with Cole’s help that we’ve pulled together an incredible panel of folks here, union organizers and members from across Canada and the US. And we’re going to dig into all this now, but first I wanted to ask if y’all could introduce yourselves to our listeners.

Hassan Husseini:

My name is Hassan Husseini. My day job is a national negotiator with the Public Service Alliance of Canada, which is the largest federal public sector union in Canada. As such, I’m also unionized member of Unifor Local 2025. Unifor is a merger of a couple of private sector unions in Canada, one of them being the Canadian Auto Workers that split from the American Auto Workers Union back in the 80s. And I am also a member of the National Steering Committee of Labor for Palestine Canada. I’ve been active in social justice and labor movement for 30 plus, maybe more years. Happy to be here. Thank you.

Tina Oh:

Hi folks. My name is Tina Oh. My pronouns are she/her. I’m joining in from Halifax, Nova Scotia here in Eastern Canada. My role is organizing coordinator with Service Employees International Union Local two. We’re the only national SEIU division in Canada, but I also have a role as vice president for Eastern Canada. So the region is all of Atlanta, Canada, Newfoundland, PI, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Really happy to be here.

Alex Raymond:

Hey y’all, I’m Alex Raymond. I am a mental health worker out of Richmond, Virginia, United States, and I am just a regular worker organizer, very new to the labor space, but very fired up to be here.

Cole Rockarts:

My name is Cole Rocker. My pronouns are they/them, and I am a longtime union staffer, although the veteran brand doesn’t sit well when Hassan’s in the room. I’ve been working for labor unions for the past 10 years, and that’s been in Canada and the US. And I’m now a labor educator at a healthcare union in Los Angeles. And I am the author of the forthcoming book, Fired Up About Unions, which is about why young people can change the working world and the labor movement.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah. So maybe we need an updated taxonomy. We got veterans here and then we got legends with Hassan. So we got the full spectrum here, baby. And I’m so grateful to have all of you on and to hear all of your perspectives on this important subject. So I want to dive right in and ask y’all, what have unions meant to you over your lifetime? What did you know or not know about unions before being part of one? And I’m asking that as someone who does a labor show now, but knew jack shit about unions for most of my life.

Alex Raymond:

I kind of want to just directly responding to that, that was sort of my experience, that labor organizing in mental health, that’s really not a thing. But over the years that I’ve been in this industry, almost 15 years coming up this November, we just see wages decrease the amount of patients or clients that we are responsible for increase expectations going up while benefits go down. And a lot of us just silently accept that. We get into this line of work because we care and it almost feels like a betrayal to the work that we’re so committed to, to even think that better is possible. But it had always been a discussion. And growing up, my dad, he was an organizer with SEIU in Boston during his residency, and he would always tell me this story when he was laid off for labor organizing, that it was just the proudest moment of his professional life when all of his coworkers came to his shitty Boston apartment and they essentially shut the hospital down.

There was a lot of anxiety about what that would do to patients, but there was a lot of camaraderie and that’s something that’s missing nowadays. We’re struggling to get by and we deserve better. And I think that sort of bubbled up over the last couple of years. And a group of us got together a couple years back and we started organizing from the ground up, literally Googling how to make union. And we came into contact with a lot of people that have a lot of expertise and thank God because we needed all the help we can get. And we went from zero union density to more than zero and growing each and every month. And we formed a union here in Richmond, Virginia with Teamsters Local 322. And now there are unions with United Automotive Workers within our industry as well as National Union of Healthcare Workers and United Food and Commercial Workers.

And we’ve had to learn what all those acronyms mean and what they can mean for people in our field. And it’s been a huge thing. But from my perspective growing up, I’d always thought that was such an important thing to do, but just never really knew how to go about doing it.

Hassan Husseini:

From my experience way back when I first became unionized, and I think it’s still with us today, the thinking about unions is that it’s only about money. It’s only going to put more money in your pocket by increasing your wages from what you had before you were unionized. And to me, the thing that struck me, and I think it’s still with me today and in the organizing campaigns that I was involved in, it is really important for us to recognize and talk to workers about the fact that it’s about increasing your power in the workplace. It is about working class empowerment, and it is about some of the things that Cole just rhymed off with respect to health and safety, with respect to being valued in the workplace, giving your voice on so many different committees, and taking away the power, the exclusive power that bosses have without a union.

So I didn’t know that at the beginning. I came in, I though, okay, my wage will go up a little bit, not knowing that it’s going to give me so much more empowerment both individually and as a collective within the workplace. And that is something that opened my eyes to huge possibilities for that particular workplace I was in, but for the working class generally. And that lesson is still with me up to this point. I think things are getting even worse in terms of capitalist bosses propaganda that we can give you a little bit of a bump in your wages. You don’t have to go to unions because they know that when you unionize, you have more power in the workplace and that’s what scares the shit out of them.

Tina Oh:

Hasan, I’m just going to piggyback off that because I think that last point you just mentioned about how non-union workers are still gaining and benefiting off the winds of union workers is so relevant and I think that’s how I want to answer this question. It’s going to take me a second to get there, but I’ll get there. So my family moved to Edmonton, Alberta when I was two years old. My sister was five and it was just my mom and my dad. There was no other kind of family support systems that my parents had in Canada nor in Edmonton. So that like many non-economic migrants, that meant working traditionally low wage service jobs.

My parents have never worked a union job in their working careers in this country. And one of my dad’s longest held jobs was as a housekeeper and a janitor at the Western Hotel, and that was a non-union job. But the reason why that’s relevant is that that job, even though it was non-union, it was the first job that my dad had that gave us health benefits. It was the job that ended up getting us permanent residency so that we could stay in the country. And the reason why, of course, that connects to unions is because the work of the private sector hotel unions that have raised the industry standards to the point that these non-union hotels cannot recruit workers without offering health benefits, without offering them a pathway to permanent residency. And so I think about that job, especially now that I work for a janitor’s union, SEIU Local two, half of our membership is janitors, private sector contracted out janitors.

And now that I’m in this role and I think back to my childhood and the horrors really that my parents had to face in their working careers, I know absolutely without a doubt in my mind that our lives would’ve been better had my dad had a union at that hotel or any union really. And at the same time, I also can see how our lives still greatly benefited from the wins of the working class that have progressed the labor movement to the point where non-union jobs are still offering health benefits and whatnot. So I just wanted to leave that there.

Cole Rockarts:

I think for me, it’s a bit of a combination of all these things. As my co-podcasters have just said, a union can be the difference between having healthcare or not, having benefits or not. When I was younger, I didn’t realize that my mom was unionized. She was a teacher for many years before she retired, and it wasn’t until I started getting involved in my student movement. And in Canada, the student union system is quite different than in the US, and I think the US should absolutely steal this idea from Canada. But many of our student organizations that fight for lower tuition fees or free tuition or more rights for international students or different campaigns of equity on campuses are unionized. So my first foray into having a union was starting to work at the student union and run all these campaigns as a student organizer.

And so it wasn’t until I started getting involved that I had this conversation with my mom about, “Oh, there’s this union.” And I was told to go to a meeting because there’s free pizza and I wanted free pizza. And she said, “Oh yeah, I’ve been involved in my union. I was a shop steward.” I was like, “What the hell is a shop steward? What does that even mean? And it’s essentially the person that represents the workplace while they’re actually working in there, and you can go to them with questions about your contract or different issues you’re having.” And I said, “What? You were a shop steward?” She was like, “Yeah, I used to carry the book and the book is the contract.” And I said, “I didn’t know that.” She said, “Yeah, I’ve been out on strike. I’ve been on the picket line.” And so it was years later that I realized like, “Oh my God, my parent has been a union member, has fought for these things, and it’s because of her that I have the life that I have.”

Maximillian Alvarez:

It’s always so fascinating to me to hear stories like yours and the stories that folks have shared with me on this show for the past nine seasons. I always tell folks that I am endlessly fascinated in the stories of our fellow workers who take that step to do something, to change their conditions, because I lived most of my life not knowing that that was an option. Like most people in this country, I’m talking about the US here, when I had crappy jobs, whether they were in service or factories, warehouses, retail, I thought I only had two options. If the job sucked, I could either just stay, grin and bear it, or leave and try to find something better. I didn’t know there was a secret third thing you could do and band together with your coworkers and fight back and stay and fight to improve things.

And so to me, anyone who takes that step, especially in a country where working people are so routinely reminded and conditioned to believe that we are powerless, anyone who says otherwise and does otherwise to me is a hero. And not just that, but the way it changes your perspective on things to take that step, to organize, to bring your boss to the bargaining table, that really changes a lot of the ways that you look at the world and yourself and the work that you do. And I wanted to turn that into a question for y’all. You talked about this a bit in the first round, but I wanted to ask if you could go a little deeper and say how it changes your life at work and beyond when you become part of a union or join a union drive. Did it change the way that you guys all look at your own work in life when you did that?

Tina Oh:

For me as a young person that started labor work, I think I was 21 at the time when I first got my union job. And of course, previous to that, I was part of the student union like Cole was. And we’re living in a time where obviously we can talk about all these crises that are happening, global crises to mention that, and union work really helped make the world make more sense, if that makes sense. And I think a lot of young people, and when I reflect back to what I was thinking through when I was 21, and I’m not saying obviously I’ve got it all figured out now, certainly don’t, but I think a lot of young people are probably really confused and puzzled by all these kind of disparate crises when obviously they’re all interconnected. And maybe we could even say that they are interconnected, but it wasn’t really until I really immersed myself and understood how power works and the history of the gains that workers have made to really push the needle to where we are today.

Things really just started to click. And now when a new crisis happens in the world, it’s just less confusing for me. And I think that’s relevant because that feeling of hopelessness I think really gets reined in when you are in a fighting union because that fighting union is then about solutions and it’s about optimism and it’s about hope. And it’s also about, yeah, we might lose, but we’re just going to get back up the next day and fight again. And so that clarity really became clear when I was part of a union drive and helping workers form unions at their workplace. And seeing the transformation happen to them was so transformative for me because I’m seeing it in real time, ordinary people coming together to do extraordinary things.

Alex Raymond:

Yeah. Tina, hearing you say that, especially that piece about hopelessness was something that was deeply more so than I think I’ve even been aware of in my personal experience of work and working up until the idea that there could be something better came up in my working with this organizing that we’ve done recently. Meeting people across the country that are fighting for change and are in the exact same position. We are inexperienced, we are outnumbered, we are dealing with a very effectively organized managerial group that wants nothing more than to see us lose. And then seeing people like Sean and Noah out in Massachusetts, workers out in California coming together, Jane and Colin out in Marilyn, all these different people that I would not have met had not been for this organizing work changed a lot of that hopelessness into a deep sense of optimism that’s going to be really, really hard to lose.

And that I think is the most important way my life has changed since participating in organizing. And I see it at home, at work. We have this current style of people coming in and out of care work and healthcare, and it’s hard on us. We’re job hopping a lot, but it’s really, really hard on the clients that we serve. We work predominantly for little kids and somebody comes in, they build a relationship with you, and then you can’t afford to work the job anymore, you get burned out. And that’s devastating for those young people, and we want to change that. And since we’ve started organizing, we’re seeing turnover rates decrease. These people believe that better is possible and that possibility is brought into existence through our collective action. We alone can’t formulate what a solution might look like, but collectively we’ve found answers and we’ve put them into practice, not just in one location, but in lots of other locations.

And we’re seeing people pick up the banner with us, and it’s just been one of the most inspiring, if not the most profound experiences of my life. And hearing you speak on that just reminds me why I’m part of this fight.

Hassan Husseini:

This is a really good segue because most of you have done the organizing part, which is the hard part to organize workers into unions. My role as a national negotiator is that I come in to work with these newly organized group of workers to get in place a first collective agreement, which is challenging in and of its own, but it’s during the negotiations for a collective agreement. Well, actually it is during the organizing drive that you see their power and a recognition of the power that they have really come into fruition. But it is also a different kind of a very, very rewarding process when you’re working collectively with workers, trying to get a new collective agreement and seeing the bosses push back to put language in collective agreements that gives them more rights, more powers, more protections, more provisions. This is where you see that they are solidifying their power in the workplace and there’s nothing like it because at times when we’re negotiating new terms, and I’ve negotiated terms in the new collective agreement in the university sector, in the gaming industry, right now I have a group of firefighters in an indigenous community in Southwestern Ontario that I just came back from starting negotiations with them.

And you’ll see that their questions is that, “What do you mean we can put language in the collective agreement that is better than the minimum standards?” It’s like, yes, you are organized in order to do that. Minimum standards, you’re protected by it anyway, but your collective agreement, it relies on your power in the workplace, your power in the community, and you’ll see the relationship with their coworkers, their relationship with the boss, their relationship within the community completely changes. It gives them the confidence, it gives them the power, it gives them the power that comes with the fact that when they’re sitting at the bargaining table, no matter what, they’re equals to that boss. And of course, when the boss goes back to the workplace, they try to play games, but you cannot put back, what is that expression, the genie in a bottle or something?

They’ve recognized their power and they’re willing to take that extra steps in order to keep building on it and to demonstrate it in the workplace and outside the workplace. And there’s nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing like it when work is recognized, I want to go Tina’s original point, recognize the power that they have in the workplace and in the community. And I’m privileged, I feel, that I get to work with workers to try to put together collective agreements that give them that extra power.

Cole Rockarts:

Yeah, I’ll just pick up on something Hassan said in his current negotiations about raising the minimum standards. And as organizers and workers, we talk about expectations a lot and great folks have written about raising expectations, so I won’t go into too much of that. But when people realize that not only can they raise the floor at their job, like Alex said, that he could change the mental healthcare industry and the ability for him to have consistency with his clients, with the kids that he’s trying to serve, that’s very mission-driven work. And we see all the time workers in organizing drives, particularly in healthcare, but lots of places, education where they say, “Well, I don’t know if I could do this because I would put the kids or the patients or whoever it is at risk.” But a lot of these campaigns are about connecting, “Well, this would actually make things way more sustainable for the work that I’m trying to do.

This would make me stay. This would help raise my wage so I can provide for my family.” All of these things go back to that question of power. And so when I think about how it changed the way I look at work and life, particularly now coming from Canada and the US, there is an entire industry that is dedicated to crushing workers’ ability to do this. And it has a lot of money behind it. It has a lot of politicians behind it. I mean, the US, we look at right to work states. We look at what is going on in Alberta, Canada right now and the attacks on trying to privatize our healthcare, which is a big no-no in Canada.

We workers, workers historically fought for all these things to get a public healthcare system to get funding. And so I think this’ll go to a little bit about the power that we’re up against, but we also talk about how we don’t have, and it’s because of people crushing unions, we don’t have a lot of money. We don’t have the ability to match dollar for dollar what our bosses are doing, but what we do have is people power. And so I think I was lucky enough to get into it at 20, but since moving here, even in the past few years, I’ve completely changed the way that I see power and what workers are up against as well.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, man. I mean, in the good old US of A, I mean, we have many rights on paper, but not in reality. And I’m constantly telling folks that you have a right to be a part of and form a union and collectively bargain in your workplace in this country. But in this country, that’s basically saying that Frodo Baggins has a right to go into Mordor, right? I mean, the opposition that you’re going to face, the pain that you’re going to be put through, the system that’s going to chew you up and spit you out just for exercising that right is going to take a lot from you and your coworkers, and you need to be prepared for that. And that’s what I wanted to talk about here in this round. Let’s talk about the hard stuff because we’ve seen over the past few years, over the course of me doing this show, I’ve heard it in the stories we’ve reported, this boom in energy around new labor organizing from the Starbucks workers to the Amazon workers, to the independent union movements, to the revivals within the established unions like the UAW, the Teamsters, some of the historic strikes that have happened in Canada in the past five years.

A lot is clearly happening, but at the same time, I think a lot of folks who got swept up in that energy over the past five years have also come to the hard kind of realities of unions aren’t perfect. Labor law is stacked against you. There’s going to be a whole lot of crap that you’re going to have to go through, but it is worth it. And so I want to talk about that with you guys and sort of address head on these real issues that folks have had or will face when trying to organize. So let’s talk about what people are really going to be up against when they try to unionize today in the US or Canada. And if someone’s listening to this, what do they do when their union sucks or union officials break their heart and screw them over?

Hassan Husseini:

You’re right. There are a lot of unions that, to put it in your words, can break your heart. But I always say having a union, even a shitty union is better than not having a union at all. Because even with a shitty union, there are mechanisms that you can do internally within your union in order to challenge those leaderships that are not willing to fight a good fight on your behalf, but collectively on behalf of all the workers and the community. So definitely I think we’re all on the same page or should be on the same page that unions are better than no unions whatsoever. But we also need to recognize that there are a lot of sellout unions or leaderships within unions that are no longer willing to fight a good fight. They’ve become part of the institutionalized capitalist system. They’ve lost the vision and they don’t advance anything more than protecting their careers.

And they have forgotten that unions are, after all, also political organizations of the working class. And they’ve lost that. And that’s where you see some unions or some leadership within unions making decisions that end up harming workers that they’re supposed to represent. But it’s not the end of the world because I always say that what you need to do as workers, the union is yourself. So you organize internally, you organize in order to bring democracy back into your union and your workplace. And you organize to take over, to take back those unions from those careerist elements within the union movement. Those who are willing to and understand and have class consciousness and they are fighting a class war to go back to the classics. This is the reality of it. And they’re not going to advance a lot of workers if they compromise with the employer on some fundamental issues.

And so our work is premised on the fact that we believe in the power of workers, but we also need to be very realistic about what kind of unions we’re dealing with. And also in my work in organizing in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle and Palestinian workers, I’ve realized that the connection between those unions who are taking better positions in solidarity with international workers around the world is very much connected to how much they’re willing to fight for their own members and for the working class in Canada or the US. And those who have sold out when it comes to the class struggle in their own workplaces and communities and in Canada and the US, you find them that they’re not willing to actually be in solidarity internationally. They may pay lip service, but they don’t do anything concretely to honor that global picket line of the Palestinian people.

And as it was before, the people of South Africa that fought against apartheid. So they’re connected. Good fighting working class unions that have clarity of purpose are also clear on the local, on the national and on the international issues. And we have no choice but to continue to fight a good fight internally to make sure that they stay on the straight path or the left path rather.

Tina Oh:

I want to hear from you, Alex.

Alex Raymond:

Yeah, I’m itching to jump in on this one. So what you’re up against, you hear, especially when you’re new to this, “Hey, there’s the NLRB, you have these rights and the NLRB will adjudicate if there’s any unfair action taken against you by your employer.” But my boss, Lindsay Thompson straight up fired me in writing for labor organizing and that’s still in NLRB hell. And we’re expecting a ruling any decade now, probably 2035, 2045, my grandkids will get a decision passed down. So I mean that’s the reality of it. And I’ve got some comrades that have similarly experienced pretty nefarious dealings from their employer because who’s going to stop them? They fire you, you’re kind of done for. And then on the heels of that, my union internally was going through a little bit of drama precisely when I got fired. And that happened to create a really perfect storm that weakened our bargaining unit and set us up for a lot of trouble going into 2026.

But what is the solution? To quote the adage, don’t mourn, organize. And I remind myself that these things, these institutions that exist today were built by the literal blood of people that were massacred and organizing in significantly more difficult conditions today. I lost a job, I got a new job. I wasn’t brutalized in the ways that you encounter in the history book. So not discounting the struggles that people are facing today, it’s just that the solution remains the same, which is you organize. And my union, we organize internally, brought it up to the local president. They got it fixed. He’s out there on the line with us, every opportunity he’s got. And they’ve done an incredible amount to organize with us. And not just Brian Payton with Teamsters Local 322 and a huge chunk of amazing UPS workers, Jennifer Hancock, those folks coming out, making sure that we’re all right and that this group of workers gets represented fairly.

But the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, especially their caucus of rank and file electrical workers, it’s an internal caucus that has come together and shown up for workers in Richmond and across the country in really profound ways. If there’s a worker struggle in town, there’s going to be hard hats there. And I think it’s that kind of ethos that we need to really embrace. One worker’s struggle is my struggle and it’s been really hard. There was an understandable amount of almost desperation when we did everything right and the employer is just able to break every rule and get away with it. But I think it taught us a very valuable lesson, which is that you don’t just win a vote and then you’re all done. You organize not just to win a contract, but then to enforce it and then to be able to have the capacity to show up for other workers because there’s not just one fight and then you’re done.

This is a global fight. The cause of every member of the working class is our cause. So this is the fight of a lifetime, not just for a contract or a vote or some particular grievance. So I think it’s been hard, but we’ve learned a lot of lessons and we’re continuing to learn. And a lot of that is because of the very cool people that are on this panel today. So shout out to y’all.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and obviously the fact that we have such an incredible panel of folks from Canada and the US, and Cole, you came from Canada to the US. I was wondering if you could also wrap into this question the differences of the situations and the things that folks are going to face in the US versus Canada while we’re answering this question.

Cole Rockarts:

Absolutely. I think I have two different parts to this answer. The first is that I think in Canada we have a different history when it comes to not only our labor movement, but our political parties. I think in the US, you folks are locked into the two party hell, that is the Democrats and the Republicans. Our system in Canada is multi-party and we had a labor movement that formed a political party that became the new Democratic Party, the NDP. And those were the folks I mentioned earlier that led to Medicare, healthcare being public in this country. And I say that not to give a knighthood to politicians because we know that everything that we’ve won in any country has come from workers pushing for that and pressuring that and always will be, always has been. And so I think that’s one of the big differences.

And obviously in the negotiation realm, when you don’t have to think about Medicare or healthcare being part of the contract and you can instead think about the things in Canada that haven’t gotten into that system like drug care, prescriptions, it changes the negotiation landscape for sure. I think the other big difference is the matter of density. And I mentioned the word density earlier, but that is how many workers percentage-wise are unionized within a given population. So in Canada, that is much, much higher. In the US, it’s brutal and it shows all of the things that have –

Maximillian Alvarez:

We’re below 10% now, I believe. That’s

Cole Rockarts:

Correct. And I’ll just say to your listeners, the Economic Policy Institute put out this amazing report about what would change if union density in the US was higher. And the reality is we would have healthcare. We would have about, give or take, 7,000 extra dollars a year in your pocket. And I don’t know about anyone else on this call, but I think people could use 7,000 plus dollars a year.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And that’s $7,000 a year that you would get in your contract versus the kind of fantastical fake $5,000 that President Trump is promising you if you just believe him and vote the way he wants in the midterms.

Cole Rockarts:

Exactly. And I’ll just say quickly on that, studies have shown that in countries where there are strong labor movements, there are more democracies. Even if we look at the US, we see that in right-to-work states, there are more attacks right now on the voting system than there are in states with higher union density. And so that’s kind of the first part of the answer to my question. But the second part is how is Canada and the US different? They’re not. Workers in Canada and workers in the US coming from both places, they’re not that different. They want the same things. They want higher wages, they want benefits, they want good jobs, and they want clean air and for the AI overlords to not ruin the planet and put a data center in their backyard. And so same as it ever was, workers, no matter the country, if they can get enough power, they can change things and make things better.

Tina Oh:

Everything yes, that Cole just said, a thousand percent. I just want to say genuinely, SEIU, it’s a giant of a union, one of the biggest in the US. And so when I look at my comrades in the US, not just in SEIU, but US unions in general, I really don’t have a problem in saying, I genuinely think it is harder to organize in the US than it is in Canada. And I don’t mean to say that as good or bad, as simple as that. But I think where in Canada workers have made gains like card check, which is a one-step unionization system. All you have to do is sign a union card. There’s no vote. Where there’s successor rights in the three biggest provinces of our country. So Quebec, Ontario, BC, the most populated provinces have successor rates. That means contracted workers when there’s contract flip that the new employer has to hire them on and keep their contract.

Those are two really sizable, genuinely… Those are huge wins, legislative wins that workers have made in this country. And it has, for maybe a less sophisticated word, I think it does actually produce some lazy organizing when I compare it to my comrades in the US who have to strike for recognition or right to work states where the dues aren’t guaranteed. And part of that lazy organizing is it can get dangerous, of course, because we know, just as Cole said, the bosses are the same. The power that they have will absolutely crush us. Our dollars can’t compete. Our legal can’t compete. And so when organizers on the ground, whether it’s a member organizer, worker organizer, staff organizer, is taking these shortcuts, we know we’re going to get hit by those shortcuts down the road because a fight is coming guys. A fight is always coming. And so I think it’s a really important, I think, moment for Canada-based organizers where even though we’ve made those gains like card check-in successor, that we do the right thing, which is to develop and recruit the best leaders we can in our organizations and keep it a fighting organization.

And that means yes, there might be shortcuts, but we’re actually going to do the really rigorous spade work that is required to build a fighting union.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. I thought that was all beautifully and powerfully put, y’all. And it bears mentioning that you could say the same thing about unions here just a little farther back in our history. I mean, the union density in this country at its height was around 30% or a little over. I mean, unions built the middle class, they gave us the weekends. We know all the talking points, but then that middle class gave up on the struggle. They cared more about their middle class existence, their specific contracts. They lost that sense of working class solidarity. And here we are 40, 30 years later with the results. Union density below 10%, wages have been stagnant or declining, cost of living has been going up, power has been shifting to the top away from the bottom. So I think the real takeaway message from Canada to the US to everywhere is don’t get complacent.

The struggle has to continue, and I could genuinely talk to you guys for hours about how to continue that struggle. And I’m so grateful for the conversation that we’ve had, but I know we have to wrap up here. And so I wanted to finish with a big picture question that y’all have touched on in this conversation, but for folks who are listening to this right now and saying, “Yeah, that all sounds great, but why should I care about unions now in the year of our Lord 2026 when the world is on fire and everything sucks and these oligarch nut jobs are taking over everything and destroying the planet?” So what would you say to folks in closing who are still in that head space?

Alex Raymond:

Yeah, what I would say is why you should care about a union now is because things have already gotten to a point where we’re feeling the everyday economic ramifications of those decisions. And whatever inertia is kind of keeping us moving in this direction, if we can overcome that, if we can come together, we can identify any solutions that need to be found and start putting them into practice so that we can build a future that we want to be part of. And I know that sounds like fanciful language, but every small step in the right direction is also a step we’re not taking in the wrong direction. And it feels difficult. It feels impossible. It feels exhausting when you think about it individual terms, but you’re not alone. People like me don’t know a ton. I’m sitting on a panel today with Hassan, Cole, Tina, and you, Max, and there’s a lot of expertise out there and you’re not alone.

So nothing weaker than the feeble strength of one. We got this together.

Hassan Husseini:

Very briefly, I think that for all the reasons that you spoke about Maximilian, it’s for all these reasons, because the world is run by not oligarchs, it’s for the reason that they’re destroying the planet, the reason that we have Trump in the White House and Mark Carney in Ottawa that are governing on behalf of banks and corporations and the super rich. It’s for all these reasons that we need unions if for nothing else to equalize things, to make sure that they fight for working people on the shop floor, but also they continue to fight for better society, for all the working class. And also they continue to make sure that international solidarity is not just a performative thing, but a real element of the work of unions. And without unions and without organizing and without that kind of mass democratic organizations that we value so much, that we will fall back even more.

And so from that perspective and because of that, unions are a lot more critical today than in my opinion, they were 50 years ago or 60 or 70 years ago. And we finish on the adage again that an injury to one is an injury to all. So this is not about individual protection, it’s about a collective work, a collective organizing and collective protection and collective empowerment.

Tina Oh:

I think a good union organizer knows how to answer any question with the answer being union. And so to me, it’s why should people care about unions? Well, it’s less about why people should care about unions, more about do you want a better life for you and your family and your loved ones? If so, the only answer is union. And I believe that. We just talked about the trickle down effects of increasing union density is that we live in a better society. There’s healthcare improvements, education improvements, life expectancy, I’m sure. And so I think that question that Cole talked about, workers in US, Canada, across any border, they want a better life for themselves and their families. I don’t know a single ordinary working person that doesn’t. And the answer to that question is going to be union.

Cole Rockarts:

Couldn’t agree more. I think the answer is unions. If we look at the world being on fire, what’s going to protect workers that are going out in increasingly record-breaking heat working outside if they’re postal worker, construction laborer, what is going to do that? Is the boss going to say, “Oh, I’m recognizing it’s a bit hot and unsafe out there. This doesn’t need to get built today. This work doesn’t need to get done.” No, bosses are going to continue to try and extract as much as they can. So that’s one example. If we look at this mass global movement in many countries, unionized dock workers have stopped the ports and refused to unload Israeli cargo.

The struggle of the anti-war movement, the struggle for basic protections of not dying on the job, and yes, the individual and materialistic thing of wanting more money in your bank account so you can pay your rent, so you can buy food, so you can get the basic necessities, all comes from having a strong resourced infrastructure. And the only thing that working people have in this country right now is a union. And so that would be my answer. Why should you care about unions now? It is literally the only thing that working people have on our side. And that’s not big you union, that’s you and your coworkers coming together to push for more and to fight the boss and to hopefully win.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Hassan Husseini of the Public Service Alliance of Canada and Labor for Palestine Canada, Tina Oh of SEIU Local two in Halifax, Canada, Alex Raymond of Teamsters Local 322 in Virginia, and Cole Rockhart’s veteran labor educator and organizer and author of the excellent new book, Fired Up About Unions, which everyone should go read. And you can learn more about the book using the links that we provided in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring about this. We do this work for you, but we cannot do it without you. Working People is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by the great Jules Taylor and is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network.

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 weekly at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories of people on the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Check out our great podcasts like Under the Shadow and The Marc Steiner Show, and connect with us on social media and get updates on our reporting there and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really, really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian 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.

News Clip 1:

A massive explosion and fire in South Toledo led to two people killed earlier today.

News Clip 2:

Firefighters rushed to the scene just before five this morning. The fire is still burning.

News Clip 3:

I was kind of about ready to get out of bed, oh, give or take about 4:45, 4:50. And all of a sudden I heard this huge explosion. I was scared to get out of bed to go see what it was. And then I heard a second one. It’s like this is like God of a movie. And then I stepped outside and then everyone was out in the street. I did see the fire and the flames were hundreds of feet up in the air.

News Clip 4:

People from all over Northwest Ohio could see this thick black smoke just pouring into the air and out of the rubble. Part of the building also collapsed. Two employees were killed, a man and a woman. We did hear from the family of Mary Allen. They say she was one of the victims and had worked at Brent Industries for 13 years, a dedicated worker, mother, and grandmother. And officials here say that there are still hazardous chemicals on the property, but the air here is considered safe.

News Clip 3:

OSHA teams are now involved in the investigation.

Sara Locker:

This is residents nearby ask more questions about what they have potentially been exposed to.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are in Toledo, Ohio. And we’re talking about the terrifying story behind the news clips that you just heard. As the Associated Press reported on the morning of August 18th, “Explosions rocked an Ohio industrial recycling business early Tuesday, killing two workers and sparking a large fire,” officials said. Flames and dark smoke poured from Brandt Industries in Toledo as fire engines surrounded the building TV news video showed. Cruz later discovered the bodies of two employees, a man and a woman. “Inside the smoldering building, “said Toledo Fire Chief Allison Armstrong. “Two or three other employees had minor injuries,” she said. “Two explosions occurred shortly before 5:00 AM during a shift change, “Armstrong said. Crews had to deal with hazardous materials, runoff and the threat of more explosions while first searching for victims and accounting for the other employees,” she said.

Aerial images showed that nearly all of the building’s roof was gone and that the blast blew out its walls. The Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, said it was investigating. “The agency has six months to conduct its investigation and it won’t release any more information until that’s completed,” officials said. Authorities encouraged people near the site who could see or smell smoke to keep windows and doors closed and avoid the area. Now the company, Brent Industries, based in Brent, Alabama, offers textile reconditioning and industrial recycling services aimed at reducing waste and saving money according to its website. It was founded in Alabama in 1977 and has operations in Brent and Toledo. The company’s Alabama location also had an explosion and fire in 2015 that killed one person. After that deadly explosion, OSHA determined that flammable vapor from mineral spirits, a petroleum solvent used for cleaning and other purposes, ignited in an industrial washing machine.

The company was cited for a half dozen violations and fined $27,000 according to OSHA records. Fire officials say tanks containing mineral spirits were at the Toledo plant. The company says on its website that it uses mineral spirits in the cleaning process for work gloves, wiping clothes and other textiles that contain hazardous substances. In 2004, OSHA cited Brent Industries for two serious violations at its Toledo plant, including failing to protect workers from death or serious harm when they were exposed to a 270 degree Fahrenheit or 97 degree Celsius steam release from a washing machine OSHA Records Show. So we got a lot to talk about here and to talk about all of this, I am really grateful to be joined today by a panel of guests who are all residents of Toledo, Ohio. Thank you all so much for joining me on the show today. I really appreciate it and I wish we were meeting under less horrifying circumstances.

And please, before we get rolling, introduce yourselves to our listeners.

Mike Balonek:

My name is Mike Balonek. I am a local filmmaker and advocate for Sacrifice Zones, have worked with Max in the past and worked on the East Palestine train derailment for the last three years.

Dr Brittany Jones:

Hi everyone. I am Dr. Brittany Jones, councilwoman at large, and I have basically been following a lot of these type of explosions and environmental hazards for quite some time. I would say that I’m very involved with trying to save our environment, but also with the health and the lives of our residents and just people in general surrounding these incidences is really what I want to focus on and try to provide more healthier living standards.

Sara Locker:

My name is Sara Locker. I live five doors down from the Brent Industries explosion. I’m here today to represent my fellow neighbors, my community, and the great city of Toledo, Ohio to make more people aware of it just doesn’t happen in East Palestine. It happens everywhere in a small little town like ours, in a small little neighborhood like ours, and our voices need to be heard and our questions need answers.

Kris Ramsdell:

And last but not least, I’m Kris Ramsdell. I live right around the corner from Brent Industries and I just want to call awareness so things like this don’t become the norm where a greedy business owner sacrifices not only his employees’ lives, but then also creates a disaster and a neighboring community in which their business operates in.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, again, thank you all so much for being here with us today, and I’m so, so incredibly sorry that you and your community are going through this. I really want listeners to hear directly from y’all what has been happening and what it was like to experience this firsthand. So can we please just start by going around the table and talk about the explosions at Brent Industries and the nightmarish 24 hours that followed? Walk us through what happened and how you experienced it all as it was unfolding.

Sara Locker:

Well, I had just gotten home from work early that morning, had just started to fall asleep. We have a train rail right behind us, so when the explosion happened, it was one of two things in my mind being ripped out of a deep sleep that either somebody hit a transformer or something happened in the train tracks behind us. It jolted our entire household awake. When the first explosion hit, it shook our house. It bowed our windows, it terrified our children. The second explosion hit almost immediately after, and that was when my husband flew out of bed and out the front doors and my 19-year-old followed behind and my 16-year-old and our nine-year-old little girl were absolutely terrified. They didn’t know what was going on. My husband ran down the street, phone in hand. I was trying to call 911. You couldn’t get through. 911, there was no 911 because of the flood of calls that was happening.

The mushroom cloud of smoke and flames that you could see, the smell, it was traumatizing. And then to realize what had happened and then finally see emergency crews showing up, the mounds of people that gathered in our front yard in tears crying. We actually had one lady that had reported to work that morning for her 5:00 AM shift, and she was absolutely horrified. My husband directed her to our house where she could park her car. She was crying. She had had a young lady in her car next to her, didn’t speak any English, and the look of terror on her face just broke my heart. I think we spent a better part of that day comforting neighbors and comforting people that were standing there wanting answers. They hadn’t heard from loved ones. They didn’t know if their family members were in that explosion. Unfortunately, two lives were lost innocently for no reason, no reason at all, and we have no answers, nothing.

Kris Ramsdell:

Yeah, and I’m just going to piggyback off of what Sara said. I was actually just getting up. First blast happened about, oh gosh, I want to say it was about 4:50, 4:55 AM. So I was just about to get ready to get out of bed, start my day. The first blast, it was so extreme. Well, they were both extreme, but the first blast was so extreme, I thought I must be kind of dreaming this. I didn’t really equate it to something that was actually happening. Well, then the second one happened a couple minutes later and it’s like, okay, this I’m not dreaming. This one actually, it shook my house and as I’ve described in the past, it felt like someone picked my house up and dropped it. Literally, it was that forceful.

At that point, I hate to admit this, but I was kind of scared to get out of bed because it’s like, well, did somebody run into my house? Did one half my house blow up? No. And I kind of stayed in my bedroom and I’m like, let me see if I smell anything. And thankfully I did. So I got out of my bedroom to see what was going on and seen everyone congregate down at the end of my street here. I should say, I do live two doors away from South Avenue. South Avenue is where Brun Industries is located. It’s about, I would say a block and a half away from my house. I knew it’s like if someone was even near that, I can’t imagine how anyone could have survived that. And so the first thing I thought of was, oh my God. God forbid, hopefully nobody was there.

Hopefully they only operate for second shift. I thought at one time they operated three shifts, but again, it was 4:00 AM, so my guess is the third shift was probably still on. So my first thing was hopefully no one got killed.

So within probably 15 minutes or so, this car comes speeding down the street and it was this girl, she was looking for her mother. And so similar to what Sarah had mentioned, my neighbor directed her to park in the driveway at the house next to me. It was vacant at the time and she’s like, “I need to go find my mother. My mother is there.” And I just put myself in her shoes going to find my own mother or going to find someone I love, not knowing, walking up to this building that has exploded, not knowing if your loved one was in there that may have perished in it. It’s got to be the worst thing to ever face in life and nobody should have to. Her car was parked there for several hours post the incident. I kept looking out my window every 20 minutes or so to see if I could see her, see if I could follow up with her.

I don’t know if she was one of the folks to which she lost someone in or not, but the car did end up leaving several hours later. So that’s my experience the day of the explosion.

Dr Brittany Jones:

Yeah. From my experience, I don’t live in the proximity of the actual incident, but I am on this side of town and I also have family on this side of town. And also a matter of fact, some of our staff from council, they actually live within the neighborhood. So when that happened, from what I can recall, as both Chris and Sarah had said, getting jolted out of the sleep, not because of the rumbling, but our electricity basically went out and came back on. And so when power comes back on, alarms and noises start happening and we were like, “What is going on?” So we’re just same as Sarah, probably somebody hit a transformer or something like that and didn’t think too much of it because the electricity was back on. So then my work phone started going off with text messages from our deputy mayor, also our safety director, and telling us about this explosion that just happened.

First and foremost, I definitely want to give thanks to fire and rescue and all of the first responders. There were about a hundred that were out there, if not more, and especially the residents around that was trying to do whatever they could to give comfort, give just any sort of support for that. And there’s not much you can do from an industry explosion, but that comfort is really what’s important. And just getting the reports, and especially afterwards, seeing all of the bad reviews, the citations of the actual company, that was something that was really concerning of me. Some of my colleagues, the next day they held a press conference and they came back and was saying that the smell, just the illness that they were feeling afterwards. And they were only out there for, I don’t know, maybe 20, 30 minutes, and they were already experiencing the symptoms of migraines and nausea and burning, chest burning.

And so it was very, very traumatic. And mind you, this was really coming off of the back-to-back incidences that we also had because we also had a fire at OmniSource, and then there was a tanker on the east side that had overturned that had hazardous materials. So there were three incidences within maybe three weeks of this caliber. And so that’s when a lot of questions started popping up like, “Well, what is the regulation and were they up to date with different things? And what more can we do, especially if people are experiencing these symptoms and having to go to the doctor if they can go to the doctor?” And it is just a lot of things that really bought to the forefront of what do we do as a city, as a neighborhood when it comes to these types of incidences moving forward really.

Mike Balonek:

So funny enough, I actually found out about this from some of my friends in East Palestine. They were messaging me, asking me if I was okay. Luckily, I don’t live in the immediate vicinity. However, just from some of the research that I’ve done on the weather patterns, how long this thing burned for, there’s a good part of the city that could have been affected by this. We don’t know because they’re not doing the kind of testing that’s necessary to find that out at this point. But for me, my initial reaction was, this looks serious. This looks like something that I’ve seen many times before. And as the day progressed, I kept following it. And within a few hours, the EPA came out and said that everything was safe, which I’ve heard this story before, and I know Max, you have as well over and over and over, unfortunately.

And so that was alarm bell number one, and I decided that I really need to start talking to some folks. Met Kris almost within the first 24 hours, I think, of all of this and just started talking about what was going on. Went down there myself for the press conference that Councilwoman Dr. Jones had mentioned, and I could taste it, I could feel it, all of the same things that I experienced in East Palestine. And so for me, immediately I knew this was something that was concerning. I wanted to do whatever I could to help because this is something that I’ve been doing for three years now, and anything that I can do to shine light on what residents are going through, I felt that it was something necessary for me to do.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I appreciate y’all so much laying this out, and I hate so much that this is a trauma that you have to relive because it’s a type of trauma that so many of us are getting a firsthand experience in, even if we though it might never happen to us. And I know what that feels like. Mike said we connected first in East Palestine, Ohio where that train derailed in 2023. And ever since then, I’ve had the same fear that I think so many have had who’s heard those stories is what if that happened in my hometown? What if that happened near my house or where my family lives? And then it happened to me in May of this year when I read the headlines, I wake up in the morning and I see GKN Aerospace facility experiencing a pressurized tank crisis. It could explode. 50,000 people have been evacuated.

Where? In Garden Grove, California, 10 minutes from where my family lives. And it was East Palestine residents, like you said, Mike, who were texting me about it, asking if my family was okay, asking if the EPA was giving everyone the same shtick and saying, “It’s all fine. Everyone go home. Whatever you’re breathing in is going to be okay.” And it was like seeing the same movie playing over again, but in my hometown. And I really can’t stress enough for people listening, if you think this shit can’t happen where you are, it can, and it may already be happening and you don’t even know about it. And again, we’re not equating all of these different catastrophes. Everyone is different. Every community is different, but the sort of larger increase in these types of explosions, derailments, toxic disasters, that doesn’t just come from nowhere. There is a larger kind of history here.

There’s a system here that is contributing to endangering frontline workers and fenceline communities all over the country, whether you’re in a city, rural area, if you think you’re in a “blue state” or red state, this crap is coming for all of us. So I’m going to get off my soapbox for a second, but just hearing y’all, I was just so overwhelmed with emotions that I had to say that, but I want to bring it back to what and who this is really about. And I wanted to ask if y’all could tell us what we know about the two workers who lost their lives in this explosion. What do we know about them and what is being done for their families?

Kris Ramsdell:

Well, I will just say this. The explosion happened on the 18th. We didn’t hear anything from the company in regards to their employees until the 27th, they released a public statement. And in the public statement, they said something to the effect of that they’ve been in contacts with the families that are affected. I don’t know if I believe that or not, but we’re talking several days that elapsed that these poor people that worked for this company, I can’t imagine they were paid more, a little bit maybe over minimum wage, probably were living paycheck to paycheck while this company is making millions of dollars off the back of these people and they don’t even have the decency to come out and make a statement saying that they’d mourn the loss of their employees. What is wrong with us? What’s wrong with our humanity? These people didn’t make their millions just from themselves.

They made it off the backs of these people. One of the victims, her name was Mary Allen, and then the other victim, I don’t know his first name, last name was Garcia Perez, I believe. And so Mary Allen, her family has been in the media and whatnot.

I regret I didn’t know her. She just sounded like an all around great person. And I don’t mean to sound mean or unprofessional, but it pisses me off to no end that her life got sacrificed because of someone’s greediness because that’s what this boils down to is corporate greed.

Sara Locker:

I have to agree with you, Kris. I’m actually upset at the fact that a woman that dedicated almost 14 years of her life to such a, I guess you can horrible company, horrible money hungry company and then not to speak out after so many days. What about Mr. Garcia? I haven’t heard anything about him. And what does that say? If people that have lived around here don’t know anything about the people that lost their lives so close to their homes, and with us being such a close-knit community and we’re worried about our neighbors, our community members, and for them to not even acknowledge the two lives lost and then to not even acknowledge the residents that live close by, to not say anything to anybody, they’re not compliant. My 16-year-old went to the city council meeting over Brent Industries and he came to us and said when I had to work and his dad had to work that he wanted to go to this city council meeting because as a child who’s 16 years old, people don’t take them very seriously because most of these kids run around and they don’t care about anything but what video game they’re playing or what friend’s house they’re going to.

But my son has been side by side with us and he likes Mike, he likes Sherry, he liked you. You are the few people that my son has felt comfortable enough to attend this city council meeting on behalf of kids his age to show the council members that we too are affected by this and he’s angry with Brent Industries. We live five doors down and it was like living in a sandstorm in the Sahara Desert for at least three days. The smell, the heartbreak that you feel for these families. We had to leave our home and go to a motel and people around here, we can’t afford that. Like you’ve said, we live paycheck to paycheck. And when we have to uproot the only place that these children call their safe place and it’s no longer safe, please explain to me how I explained that to my nine-year-old daughter who can’t sleep in her bedroom at night, who has migraines and stomach problems, who isn’t the same person.

She doesn’t like any loud noises anymore. My 19-year-old won’t come out of his room some days because his stomach hurts so bad. My 16-year-old has migraines and he’s puking every morning. He gets up.

The first week of school we thought, okay, the Brent Industries happened the 18th. They started school literally that next Monday and my daughter goes to Burroughs. What do you explain to these kids when she has questions and comes home about what happened? She came home and we thought she was back to school sniffles. No, she had a sore throat, itchy eyes, runny nose, congestion. It’s disgusting. And Brent Industries sits back and does absolutely nothing. We’re just going to continue to collect our money, but we owe the city of Toledo $20,000 in back taxes, a million dollar water bill. Where’s the accountability for them? They don’t have any. They feel like they’re untouchable and that’s not fair.

Kris Ramsdell:

And I will just kind of piggyback off Sara for a second. I’ve been kind of doing some digging on this company, looking at Ohio EPA records, and I think part of the cause might be a lack of regulation. We’ve had some conservative governors the past several years that have tried to make the state more business friendly, but I almost wonder if that’s kind of come to a cost of people’s lives. And I’ll cite to one example with one of the EPA inspections, I was kind of surprised to see where they were trying to schedule a time to go and inspect the facility. And of course you have to expect when you go and schedule an appointment to make sure a organization is in compliance with the law, you should expect that they’re going to put some kind of a show on. You’re not going to see the real deal as if you dropped in unexpectedly.

So I think that has not served us well. I’m all about providing opportunities for jobs and for folks to make a good living and whatnot, but at the same time, there’s got to be a decent handoff where we’re not exposing people to dangerous working conditions. And I kind of feel like the way our policies are written here in the state, we kind of enable this behavior, I guess might be a way to put it because we remain business friendly, but at what expense, at the expense of the two people who perished, I mean, absolutely not. Now all of us that live around here, I shouldn’t say all of us, but a lot of us are now experiencing the aftermaths of it. Meanwhile, this company, they’re living high on the hog, haven’t seen them. There’s no face in front to represent their company. We just get this little mediocre statement.

I mean, that’s nothing.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I think so many people around the country are waking up to this reality because of all these goddamn data centers that are popping up everywhere. It’s like people are learning. They’re getting a crash course in how screwed up our regulatory apparatuses or lack of regulatory apparatus and all the ways that local regulatory control has been removed or legislated away in the dark years ago. And that has made communities increasingly more vulnerable to the predatory exploits of these companies. And we’re seeing it all over the country. We see it here in Baltimore all over the place. And so I wanted to kind of keep going in that direction and ask for folks who don’t live in Toledo, if y’all could keep help painting a picture for us about this area and the issues that Toledo has had with Brent Industries before and other industrial polluters in this area.

Mike Balonek:

I mean, just to paint a picture of Toledo for folks who aren’t familiar, Toledo’s a heavily industrial city. We’re the home of Jeep. We have a very long history of industry in Toledo with many similar kinds of disasters. There’s a lot of legacy chemicals and stuff that are already in the ground that have been affecting people’s health for probably the better part of a century at this point. And so this isn’t anything new for Toledo, but there’s a lot of history of this. However, this is becoming a pattern as Councilwoman Dr. Jones mentioned, within that same period of time, we had many incidences. In fact, the same day there were two incidences. There’s the Brent Industries and then there was another one. And so I mean, this is just a problem that is systemic. It’s a regulation issue. As you mentioned, Max, it’s not a red or blue issue necessarily because this happens everywhere.

This happened in your home state of California, which is about as blue as they get. And so I think that’s an important thing to recognize with people that this isn’t just one side that’s causing these problems. This is a long running issue. We can look back as far as Love Canal and Times Beach just in modern history, but it goes back further and a lot of this stuff has probably never been documented. So I mean, we as Toledoans, we’re very familiar with this. I feel very lucky that as a city, we do have leaders that are keen to this. I think that members of city council have been asking some really tough questions of city leadership of the EPA, hopefully that they can get answers to eventually. This is something that they don’t necessarily have in places like East Palestine. City leaders in East Palestine were mum the whole time, if not directly supportive of the narrative.

And so I think that’s a really good quality of Toledo. We are fighters here. We are people that aren’t afraid to stir the shit if we need to. And so I think this could be a moment for us as Nation to maybe stop and reflect and say, “Hey, we need to start looking into this.” I really hope that Toledo, even though it’s not going to be the last one, there’s already been other disasters after this, that we can be one of the last ones, that we can be the catalyst to start a national conversation to maybe fix this.

Dr Brittany Jones:

I really want to add to that because as Mike had said, we are heavily industrial, but we’re very dependent on industry as far as how we get our revenue, property taxes, income tax, majority of population is definitely working class, blue collar. I came from union family working at GM, and so that is literally our bread and butter. But now we’re moving into, we mentioned data centers, we’re talking about AI, we’re talking about automation. So that is adding an extra layer to this because if we’re having all of the technology, what does that regulation look like? Is it going to be even more dangerous? I mean, of course chemicals are very dangerous, but now we’re talking about more advanced technology. And what does that look like when it comes to disaster preparedness? Looking at and talking about this, we are very adamant as far as trying to get answers.

To this date, I don’t think we have even a list of who has been in the plant at that time. And at the committee meeting that Sarah had mentioned, we had talked with Chief Armstrong, we talked with police that were giving just the updates, talked with our environmental services as far as their monitoring, and they really haven’t heard anything from Brent as well. So this is a prime example of when you put profit over people instead of opposite. And that is really what we have to strive for as we’re moving forward as a city. We’re a legacy city. And so that’s just another term for post-industrial city. And as we’re coming into that redevelopment, kind of rebranding, this is what we have to keep in mind because our infrastructure is aging. Of course, that’s costing money, that’s going to have more regulation, that’s going to really have to have more accountability as we make this transition.

And hopefully, I say hopefully in quotes, there won’t be any shortchanging when it comes to these policies and regulation and things of that nature because it is seeming like that profit over people at this point. And I’m so glad, as Sarah had mentioned with her sons, and there was a couple of other young people there showing up and speaking out because they are the next generation. If they decide to stay in Toledo, this is what is going to be left of them. And I don’t want that. I have three little ones. I don’t know if they’re going to stay in Toledo, but if they do, I don’t want to leave it like this. I want it to be safe and I want everybody else’s future and legacy to be safe and secure as well. And so trying to get answers, and it’s really hard because they are a private industry, that is really going to take a lot of pushing, even from the mayor, even from our commissioners, Lucas County commissioners.

We have to have those questions. We have to get those answers, but they seem to be dodging. They had that statement as Chris had mentioned, but what does that mean? You’re not doing, you’re just issuing a public apology. There’s no disbursement of money to take care of medical needs. Houses may have been damaged, especially if they were right there. There was just nothing that was being offered and we’re still trying to get information. So it’s literally at this point, it’s trying to keep pushing and really keep asking those same questions and trying to figure out how do we take care of this with other industries that are within this city because Toledo is getting hot. If you’ve been reading the headlines, we’re most affordable. Everybody’s trying to move here. Since we’re talking about the environment, climate migration is real. People are coming to the Midwest.

So what does that look like? That’s more people. That means more services. That means more power that has to be used. If our systems are not up to date to take care of that capacity, we could have repeated incidences just like this. Then what? Now we’re going to have a population that’s sick because we don’t have the right processes and check-ins in place. We’re doing mediocre monitoring. I understand that our services, environmental services, EPA doing air monitoring, water pollution, they said that everything was fine. We were like, no. We need continued reporting. And their level of safe is probably just that little threshold to where you’re not dying. It’s not like you’re not sick, but you’re not dead. So I think that’s okay. And that’s how we should not be doing that right now. Actually ever. We should not ever do that because again, everything is connected.

If people are sick, people can’t go to work, they can’t provide for their family. Now you’re talking about you can’t provide housing, you can’t provide food. So now we’re talking about homelessness, starvation, it’s a domino effect. And that’s why we need to really hit hard with this and keep this going because it’s going to keep happening and they’re just going to keep doing it or keep coming to Toledo saying we’re offering you jobs, but it’s your safety that’s at risk. And whatever, if you get hurt or die, it doesn’t matter. We’re getting money anyway. That is not how Toledo needs to work. That is not how we should market ourselves and definitely should not be an acceptable reason for our residents just because to get a job. The safety protocols are just not in place right now. And this is clearly evident with all of the incidences that have been happening just around here and around the state as well.

Kris Ramsdell:

To piggyback off the councilwoman’s statement, I feel like sometimes in some cases, and I think we could apply this to this organization as well, that lives are disposable and they are absolutely not. And I ask myself this question, why doesn’t this type of thing happen in the wealthy neighborhoods? Why does it happen in neighborhoods like this? Are we lesser? Are the employees that provide that million dollar salary to the owners and shareholders and whatnot, is their life really disposable so they can make a quick buck? I think we really need to truly reevaluate our value system.

Sara Locker:

I a thousand percent agree with you, Kris and Councilwoman. I think you nailed everything that I’ve been feeling recently on the head. We have, not going to lie, have actually thought about leaving Toledo because it’s literally, that’s what we look at every day. That’s what we deal with every day. And being a born and raised Toledo, we’re a very proud city. We are very, very close. And I think we can all agree that Toledo hasn’t had the best rap lately. But when something like this happens, we come together as a community and we stand up for what we believe in. And for the EPA to come in and say, “Oh, it’s safe,” like Councilwoman said, to me it feels like Brent Industries is basically saying, “But did you die?” Well, two of your people did. And who’s to say six months from now, just like in East Palestine, just like in other places, that somebody doesn’t end up even sicker than what we are now.

I have blood clotting disorders. I have history of clots in my lungs. I’ve had two surgeries in the past. How do I know this isn’t going to cause a flare up and I end up with another clot? How do I know this isn’t going to result in my son’s asthma flaring up to the point where he can’t breathe? My 19-year-old was literally, I can’t breathe. I had to give him two back-to-back albuterol treatments just to bring him out of it.

And for Brent Industries to not be held accountable and for them to not stand up and say, “Hey, I apologize. This is what we’re willing to do to make you guys feel more comfortable about the situation.” I’m sorry. I don’t think they feel bad. I think they just feel like because this factory was in a lower class neighborhood, “Oh, well, we’ll let it die down till the dust settles. We’ll be forgotten about.” No, not today, sweetheart. No, ma’am.

Kris Ramsdell:

And I kind of worry too, and I had very extensive conversations with Mike when him and I connected about getting the word out. It’s like this is probably an annoyance to them, all of us speaking out and raising hell about this. And I sometimes wonder, these are well-connected folks. Am I going to be retaliated against? I think that’s a real thing too. All the way around, it’s unfortunate. And I must say too, it’s like the government we’re paying, and when I say government, I’m talking more state and federal, maybe not so much the state, but they too have a portion of this, especially the federal government. It’s like I am paying them taxes for an agency such as the EPA to work against me. It’s like they’re providing cover for this company and it’s like you’re supposed to be looking out for us, not looking out for this company.

And that’s what it feels like. I’ve asked if everything is kosher, my thing is show me the raw data. Tell me what you’re testing. Tell me what the limits are. If I have that and other scientists agree that it’s okay, experts and whatnot, then I will be quiet about this. But it’s the unknown, I think also that just is elevating this anxiety.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And it’s the goddamn gaslighting, right? I mean, because, again, everything that you guys are saying, like we were saying earlier in the conversation, it’s like I’m hearing the same script from different places. I found out that the EPA was telling my hometown community back in California during the GKN Aerospace facility crisis that they were using the same air monitors to test the safety levels of chemical exposure that they were using in East Palestine to tell people that it was fine when we know that it wasn’t, to tell people that they were safe when we know that they were being exposed to toxic chemicals that were bioaccumulating in their bodies and harming their health and continue to harm their health. Now we’re seeing the cancer rates spike. They tell everyone it’s fine in the beginning and then years later we all see that it wasn’t. And not only that, but we learned that they knew that they were lying to us in the first place.

And so you can’t just come out and say everyone’s lying to us all the time. We have to make concerted decisions about finding the truth and knowing what the heck is happening and not jumping to conclusions. But the very agencies that we expect to be there to help us do that are demonstrating that that’s not what they’re there to do, that they’re not there to serve us. They’re there to serve the companies, they’re there to serve the political interests. But this kind of thing, just the script happens, a new disaster happens and all the same crap kicks into gear. And that’s why it’s so reminiscent of the story of East Palestine, Ohio and the train derailment and chemical disaster that happened there in 2023, which brought Mike and me together. And we filmed a Izzy Award-winning documentary in East Palestine about that catastrophe. Did it fix the problem?

No, because people continue to get sicker and their lives continue to get harder. Property values are going down, costs of living are going up, hospital bills are going up.

East Palestine became a national example of a preventable catastrophe with disastrous consequences for the people and hardly any for the company that caused their pain. And industrial disasters like this one in Toledo and Brent Industries and like the fires and explosions at Smitty Supply in Louisiana or the BioLab facility in Conyers, Georgia, or that deadly paper mill tank rupture disaster in Longview, Washington that happened earlier this year and it killed 11 workers. These kinds of disasters always trigger a sort of traumatic response in our consciousness and certainly in mine, and I know everyone who listens to the show. And so I kind of wanted to finish by asking in what ways has the explosions at Brent Industries been similar and different from what happened in East Palestine?

Mike Balonek:

I will say right off the bat, this isn’t as bad. What happened in East Palestine was on a scale nearly unimaginable. People had called it the Chernobyl of chemical disasters, and I think that’s accurate. However, what happened here is still absolutely devastating. Brent Industries is basically straddled by two pretty sizable neighborhoods. Basically just doing a little on the back of a napkin kind of math. I figure there could be potentially 20,000 people that were affected by this just based on the direction that the plume went initially. And so I think that in and of itself is very, very concerning. One of the things that I absolutely appreciate from Councilwoman Dr. Jones was that she was pushing for symptom tracking. I think that’s absolutely critical at this stage in what’s happening and the development of this. If we don’t start following this stuff now, when the cancers start happening, when the thyroid issues start happening, when the heart issues start happening down the road a year, two, three, five years from now, we will have no record of this.

There will be no evidence. And basically Brent Industries will have gotten away with it. And at this point, we have a moment where we can actually take care of that. And I think that’s very, very important. And Dr. Jones, if you would like to speak on that a little further, I think that would be really helpful.

Dr Brittany Jones:

Yeah, thank you for bringing that up. That was actually the next step of what I’m trying to push for. I’ve already talked to the director of the health department because at our committee meeting, that question just kept coming in my mind. Who can people go to? Who can people call in order for them to report their symptoms? Even though they’re not experiencing them at that moment, we’re talking about down the line because it’s still there. If you could still smell it and taste it and still having those symptoms, obviously something is still there. And so we need to keep track of that. Unfortunately, the health department does not have something like that. You have to call a number or you have to go to your primary caregiver and they would report back to them and that’s how they usually do the tracking. I said we can’t do that mainly because, like I said, some people can’t afford a doctor.

Some people don’t go to the doctor. And how can you rely on the information from the medical providers? Not saying it’s fraudulent, but as far as transferring that information, and then also what do you do with the data? How can you visualize it? How can you plan for it? How can you do strategy from it? Because we still have to understand that data does tell a story and data is proactive when used the right way. So looking at that, I think it’s very important to start doing this, especially if these incidences keep happening and have been happening. As Mike had said, we don’t know what’s down the line. And thinking about the children, the schools that are within that proximity, that’s young and they are very sensitive to a lot of things and that can develop over time. So now we’re not talking about physical, but we’re talking about mental, we’re talking about learning capabilities, talking about behavior because all of that can affect as they get older.

It’s stored in your system. And so looking at that, we need to start doing this now, have to update our disaster planning. I’ve been talking to the Lucas County commissioners about that. There is some plan that’s in existence. It needs to be updated. So I’m trying to get that updated, but I don’t understand why people are not seeing the urgency in this. So that is what I’m working on and I need some help in terms of pushing that and trying to get that going, but that is in the works right now. So I’m very adamant about that and this needs to be a normalized system, not just something that you do temporarily because of this, a normalized system that is part of every incident because we need to start understanding what we could possibly be getting into as a result of these explosions.

Kris Ramsdell:

I do want to say that our health department, Councilman, you might be aware, they did read a webpage which gives information to contact Poison Control. I guess they’re the ones that are doing some of our symptom tracking right now if I read.

Dr Brittany Jones:

No, you’re correct. And that was because I reached out to the director and said that he needs to do that. Thank you. That’s what I was talking about. Yeah. So that’s why that’s happening.

Kris Ramsdell:

So Max, that might be one thing you want to put in your report. I can actually give you the link to the Lucas County Health Department. That’s our county that we live in, the webpage that they set up that gives information on this. It’s still not adequate though, by the way. I say that, Councilwoman, I know you are doing great and I appreciate it. I’m talking overall, but we’re just not equipped as a jurisdiction to handle these types of things as of right now.

Sara Locker:

I’m going to take a nice little walk down to what we call ground zero. And I will, Max, I can email you some pictures, some videos, whatever you may need. I can send you the videos that my husband has as well for context. Councilwoman, I commend you. You’re doing a fabulous job. We as residents appreciate everything you’re trying to do to make sure that our voices are heard. Mike, you guys have been phenomenal. We appreciate you. I know Chris does, I do, the kids do. I think as residents, we grow more concerned every day because there hasn’t been answers. There hasn’t been any updates. And I understand Councilwoman Jones and the rest of the council members are doing everything that they can on a city level. Unfortunately, Brent Industries is going to stand by, “Oh, you’re going to be okay. We’ll live through it.” You’re not going to sit here and tell me that a chemical textile plant exploded five doors down from me and we’re safe.

I’m not going to buy it until I see hard proof, like I’ve said from day one, until I see hard proof that proves that I’m not going to believe it. We as a community need to stick together. We need to stay close to each other. We need to stay in contact with each other. We need to check on each other. I think as far as our kids are concerned, I’m going to follow up with the appointments, especially for our youngest, get her into some therapy for PTSD because clearly she has it. And like Councilwoman said, it’s affecting them all differently. And who’s to say six months down the road that one of us, I don’t develop a blood clot or my husband doesn’t, God forbid, develop something or one of my children. And Max, I’ve seen your video on East Palestine. Actually, before this podcast, I didn’t know who you were, so I did my research and I sat and cried when I saw that from East Palestine, just to see the emotion in them people and to see the fact that three years later and these poor folks are still living the same horrors that I couldn’t even imagine knowing what we go through.

It’s gut wrenching and it’s disgusting. And I think we as a community, we deserve the answers. Whether Brent wants to give them or not, we’re not going to stop until we get them.

Kris Ramsdell:

And I will just back up everything that Sarah said. I wholeheartedly agree with her. I will say I’ve kind of rethink everything and the things I’ve taken for granted, such as breathing decent air at least. Today here in State of Ohio, it’s in the 70s, perfect day to have my windows open. I’m scared to have them open. I have this cough. I feel like I’m going to cough my esophagus up. In fact, I was worried about having these coughing fits on the call. I can’t shake it.

Sara Locker:

The kids haven’t shaken it either. They’re still sick.

Kris Ramsdell:

Yeah. It’s a dry cough. Thankfully I was having immediately after the explosion, I was having these headaches. Thankfully that has gone away for myself. I’m only speaking for myself, but this cough that I have, it’s terrible. It’s absolutely terrible. Like I said, I can’t shake it and I cannot tell you the last time I’ve been sick.

Sara Locker:

This is our new norm in this household.

Kris Ramsdell:

Yeah.

Sara Locker:

When a 16-year-old has to take two of these just to go to school and two of them just to go to bed because his headaches are so bad, when you have to buy a bottle this big to last because everybody’s experiencing some sort of symptom, there’s an issue.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I guess for folks listening, Sarah’s holding up an industrial size bottle of ibuprofen.

Kris Ramsdell:

That’s what greed will do to a community when they value the dollar over the lives of human beings, and it’s sad.

Mike Balonek:

I just want to add one experience I had as well. So we invited Scott Smith, the independent scientist who’s been going around to various sacrifice zones, blowing the whistle on the contamination there. And we went out on Saturday, we did most of our testing, but then Sunday before he left, this was at the end of August, we went back down just so he could get a few pictures and stuff before he headed out of town. It was a foggy kind of rainy day that day, and I’ve heard a lot from East Palestine residents about them experiencing smells and other issues on days like that. And the smell at Ground Zero was atrocious. It was more intense than anything I have ever, ever smelled in any of the disasters that I’ve been to. I’ve been into contaminated homes in East Palestine and I’ve never experienced anything like this.

I got a huge headbuzz. I’ve gotten head buzzes off of going into the creek with you, Max, when we went and filmed our documentary. I got head buzzes from going into residents’ homes, but these were slight to moderate. This was extreme.

I felt like I was going to throw up at one point. I was just so dizzy and just out of it basically. And so just that experience alone led me to believe that there is definitely some significant contamination there. We’ve smelled the smells coming out of the creek. We’ve seen the sheen in the creek behind Brent Industries, and I can only imagine what people who are living in it have to experience. I get to leave the area. I live several miles away, not downwind of it luckily. And so most of what I experience here at home isn’t even close to what residents in the immediate area are experiencing. And so I think that’s an important thing to recognize. I was outside. I wasn’t in somebody’s house like I had been before, and this just hit me like a ton of bricks, and that’s really concerning to me.

Kris Ramsdell:

And Max, another thing too, I know we got to wrap up real quick, but even after the fire department, and by the way, the entire city of Toledo dispatched their fire department. We had to call in neighboring communities to cover for the department, the areas that have to respond to this fire over here. But something else that I think should be pointed out here is even days following the explosion, we had these issues with reignition and the fire department would have to come back again. I can’t tell you how many times, at least three times where the scenes, everything’s all locked, gated up, but these chemicals would start mixing and they’d have a reaction and they would start to inflate again. So I think that just adds also to the toxicity of what is over there on that property.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang. Well, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I sincerely want to thank all of our guests from Toledo, Ohio, Councilwoman Dr. Brittany Jones, Mike Balonek, local filmmaker and sacrifice zone advocate, and Sara Locker and Kris Ramsdell, who both live right next to the Brent Industries facility where the deadly explosions happened on August 18th. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring about this. We do all of this work for you, but we cannot do it without you. Working People is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by the great Jules Taylor and is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, please 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 around the US and across the world.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, check out our great podcasts like Under the Shadow and the Battle for Free Speech, and connect with us on social media and get updates on our reporting there. And please 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 Maximillian 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. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are speaking with union nurses who are speaking out against big tech and big brother, sneaking more of their tentacles into our healthcare system and into our lives. They and their union, National Nurses United, participated in a National Day of Action on August 27th, which brought together hundreds of registered nurses, patients, and community allies in cities around the country to demand that hospitals and elected officials cut all ties with artificial intelligence giant Palantir. As a press release from NNU lays out, “The nurses who are members of National Nurses United, the nation’s largest union of registered nurses, stop traffic in an act of civil disobedience in eight cities, Palo Alto, California, Los Angeles, California, Chicago, Illinois, Washington DC, Portland, Maine, Asheville, North Carolina, Austin, Texas, and New Orleans, Louisiana.

Union nurses cannot be silent when our most vulnerable people, babies and children are being detained by federal immigration agents,” said NNU President Jamie Brown. “While our patients and neighbors are living in fear of immigration raids enabled by Palantir, our hospitals are facing huge cuts and our patients are facing mounting healthcare costs because of H.R.1. Nurses aren’t just saying no to Palantir, but we’re calling for our public resources to go toward the benefit of working people, not billionaires and their corporations. “The press release continues. From 2009 to 2025, Palantir received $2.5 billion in federal government funding, but this number has grown tremendously in just the past year. Last July, the Department of Defense announced a $10 billion agreement with Palantir to use its technology to share data across federal agencies, enabling unprecedented surveillance power. This followed a $30 million contract awarded to Palantir by the Department of Homeland Security to build an AI-powered system that would identify immigrants for deportation.

In February of 2026, the Department of Homeland Security and Palantir signed a $1 billion contract. In the hospital industry already, Palantir manages more than one fifth of US hospital beds. For nurses, this marks a dangerous threat to their nursing profession, which is seeing a glut of untested and unregulated technology introduced into patient care settings.” All right, so we got a lot to talk about here, and to talk about all of this, I am really grateful to be joined on the show today by three guests who are all registered nurses, all members of National Nurses United. Thank you all so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. Please introduce yourselves to our listeners.

Kiera Arbour, RN:

My name’s Kiera Arbour. I’m a registered nurse from Chicago, Illinois.

Kelli Brennan, RN:

My name’s Kelli Brennan . I’m a registered nurse from Portland, Maine.

Lee Barker, RN:

I’m Lee Barker. I’m a registered nurse in Kansas City, Missouri.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, again, thank you all so much for joining me today. I really, really appreciate having you all three here to talk about this because there’s so much here that I didn’t even know before I saw the day of action and started digging into this. So before we really get into Palantir and all this AI stuff, I want to start at the shop floor worker’s eye level, and I want listeners to get to know more about you all and to have y’all give us more of a lay of the land here. So could you start by telling us more about the jobs that you do, the hospitals that you work at, the kind of patients that you care for? And I guess could we talk a bit about all the non-AI workplace issues that you and your coworkers are already dealing with on a daily basis?

Kiera Arbour, RN:

This is Kira. I am a nurse in the neurosurgical ICU at Stroger Hospital of Cook County. We are one of the largest safety net hospitals in the United States. So I am just finishing up my first year as a nurse. Just graduated from my nurse residency program last week, came to nursing late in life. I took my licensing exam the day after I turned 50. For me, I think the thing that has really been the most challenging part of my first year of practice as a nurse is the patient population that we serve at Stroger Hospital as a safety net hospital in the third largest city in the country is just all of the poverty related, social determinants of health related illnesses. So in the neurosurg ICU, anybody who’s a gunshot wound to the head comes to us, blunt force trauma to the head, two gunshots to the head on the unit last night, one blunt force trauma, and then a whole bunch of people who have had strokes because they live in food deserts, they don’t have access to healthy things to eat or they don’t know how to manage chronic conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure.

And as somebody who grew up pretty privileged and whose parents are heading into their 80s over the next year and a half or so, I see my amount of death play golf every day. They go swimming with their grandkids every day because they grew up middle class, they grew up with money. And then I see people 20 years younger than them who are looking at end of life type of illnesses in our hospital. And it has really kind of overwhelmed me emotionally just because we live in a system that doesn’t do a very good job of allocating resources to folks. And so I’m watching people be very sick and eventually die from very preventable diseases and things that are associated with poverty. Violence is associated with poverty.

Kelli Brennan, RN:

I’m Kelly. I’m at Portland, Maine. Similar to Kara, I also work in neurosurgery, neurotrauma. My background is in stroke. I’ve been a nurse for a little over 17 years from Boston and then I moved to Georgia. I was a director of neurosciences in Georgia, so I was in management, left management to come back to the bedside and be a union nurse and use everything I learned as a manager now for the good of the union. So happy to be here. I’ve been at MaineMed for about five years. I was a member of the original facility bargaining committee when we were organizing for our union. And when I got here, I was coming from Georgia right after COVID and COVID in Georgia was awful, made me realize I needed to go back to New England. So I left the South, came back to New England, wanted to be near family.

So I came to Maine and just wanted to work at the bedside, work my three 12s, get my shifts done and go home and not have twenty four seven responsibility. Now I’m in the union and I have a different kind of twenty four seven responsibility, but I love it. So I started and when I got to the hospital in Maine, I was almost like, well, this is compared to where I came from in Georgia, I was like, “Well, this is pretty nice.What are you guys all upset about?” And started talking to the staff and learning things. And then I shifted my thinking and I was like, “I just came from a really bad situation. Things aren’t that bad up here in Maine, but I know that the way healthcare works, because what I saw in Georgia was consolidation of healthcare systems, lots of financial issues, lots of layoffs and closures and all that kind of stuff.

I didn’t want any of that bad healthcare to come up to this hospital.” So I was like, “You know what? The best thing is to start a union and to lock it in what we have now so that it can’t get taken away because we know the turnover in the C-suite is every five years. These people are not dedicated to the communities. They’re not dedicated to the hospital. They are there for five years just to make a resume, just to go on to the next place.” So I got all in with the union. I’m a charge nurse, I’m a steward, I’m chair of our professional practice committee, and I’m co-president of the Maine State Nurses Association. Yeah, I’m all in. And the things that we’re working on now outside of AI is staffing. There’s this huge misconception or this though process that there’s a nursing shortage.

And we’ve been saying for years there’s not a nursing shortage. There’s a shortage of nurses willing to work in unsafe conditions at the bedside. And that’s why I went into management when I did because the working conditions at the bedside suck and nobody wants to work every weekend. Nobody wants to work every holidays. You can go to management and have your weekends off, have your holidays off, get paid more. So you see the shift of people leaving the bedside because the work is just unmanageable. The working conditions aren’t safe. The patients are sicker, more complex. Our nursing turnover is super high. The years of experience on the floor are low. When I work, there’s a lot of times I’m the most experienced nurse on my unit by 15 years. So it’s a lot of challenges in that, and there’s no focus on nurse retention. They just let one go and then just hire a traveler or temporary staff and we try to make the best of it.

I was at my professional practice committee meeting this morning and it was all about staffing. The hospital has budgets and staffing grids and plans, but they fall through. They don’t hold themselves accountable.

Lee Barker, RN:

Just wanting to build off of what Kelly said, staffing is also an issue at the hospital that I work at research in Kansas City, Missouri. I work specifically in our inpatient psychiatric population. Our staffing grids call for one nurse to every eight patients. That’s already an unsafe ratio and our management likes to push us to one to nine, one to 10. I’ve seen 11 and 12 as well. And like Kelly said, it’s not that there’s a nursing shortage in this country. There’s a shortage of nurses that are willing to work in the unsafe conditions that the hospitals push on us. At research, I mean, we used to have, I think, 800 nurses when we were fully staffed up. Currently we have like 550 and we just can’t. The hospital doesn’t care to retain nurses. Somebody leaves and, oh, we can hire in a new grad and they’ll stay for their two years, get their experience and leave and well, we’ll just hire another new grad.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and it’s like, I hate to make light of all the incredibly serious and important stuff that y’all just laid out, but in 2026, hearing all this, my mind is imagining the Pawn Stars meme of like, “Hey, hospitals, can you fix any of these problems?” And the response is, “No, the best I can do is nothing, and I’m going to add Palantir to your list of things to be worried about now.” So that’s the kind of upside down, topsy-turvy nightmare reality that we’re living in right now, but it is what it is and we got to deal with it.

I’m so grateful to all of you for laying that out for folks because it’s such important context for everyone to understand even though we’re all focused on AI and Palantir right now, let’s not lose sight of the forest from the trees here. There’s so many other systemic issues that are running workers into the ground and screwing over patients and all of us for the benefit of a few. Those sorts of dynamics are already at work in the stories you’ve been hearing on this show about the working conditions for healthcare workers around the country. We’ve been covering it for years, but now we got to worry about ICE coming into hospitals. We got to worry about these truly super villain-esque big tech oligarchs putting their AI into our most sensitive and private systems and information. So let’s talk about this gang, because I need your help unpacking this for myself and for our listeners.

So I want to stay in the world of healthcare right now, and I want to ask if you could sort of lay out for us how is AI in general and Palantir specifically seeping into your workplaces and your work lives?What are nurses seeing here that perhaps the average patient is not?

Lee Barker, RN:

So the hospital that I work at is owned by HCA or the Healthcare Corporation of America, and what HCA has done in their partnering with Palantir is to build an AI scheduler called Timpani. We don’t really know how it works. It’s like a black box. We put our preferred days of working in. Timpani spits out a schedule that’s allegedly balanced, so we have enough nurses working throughout the week. They’re supposed to also balance our level of experience so we don’t have a unit full of new grads and then all of the experienced nurses are working different shifts. These were the promises that we were made. And unfortunately, at the end of the day, Palantir is giving us a shitty product. Aside from all of the moral reasons that Palantir sucks, they can’t even provide us again with the product that meets the promises that they told us, which is that it would take the burden of scheduling off of our managers.

And now our managers in the building don’t have any way to adjust our schedules. So when the AI inevitably screws up, puts out a bad schedule, nobody in the building has any way to fix the schedule unless it’s, I think, within 24 or 48 hours of the shift beginning, which is ridiculous. Part of what Timpani does as well is HCA is using it to push short staffing. Allegedly, our understanding of how Timpani works is that it somehow looks at the average daily census on the unit and decides, “Oh, for 16 patients on this psych unit, we need two nurses every shift.” What Timpani doesn’t see is that that unit can hold up to 24 patients, and frequently we are trying to fill it up to 24. Timpani will schedule only two nurses and management will say, “Well, really, we could admit a couple more patients.

We’ll push you guys up to one nurse can take 10 patients instead of one to eight.” And so they’ll sneak in and just ask us to do more and more with less and less.

Kelli Brennan, RN:

So at MainMed or Maine Health, we have Palantir in our hospitals through their application called Foundry. When we first heard about the potential, we asked the hospital or MaineHealth to let us know what they were using it for. And at first they told us it wasn’t really any of our business. We further pushed, sent letters to the board asking what’s going on, what’s it for? And their response was that they’re using it for insurance denials. So they’re using it. So say a patient comes in and they have pneumonia and the doctor doesn’t write the details of the pneumonia clearly. The insurance company will deny the claim and say that there’s lacking documentation for payments or whatever. So the hospital or MaineHealth’s idea is that Palantir’s AI software will look at these denials and claims and figure out what the letter or what the documentation needs to be in order for the claim to get approved.

So this requires us, Maine Health, sharing information with Palantir of our patient’s information.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I’m sorry. So was our whole system of already not approving so many prescriptions and surgeries in our American healthcare system, was that all not bad enough that now we need a fucking AI bot denying us as well? I can’t believe that that is actually happening.

Kelli Brennan, RN:

It’s very much crazy. The argument is that the return on investment is already better than projected, so the hospital will be gaining so much money, but they’re claiming that they’re losing money because the insurance company is denying it because the insurance company changes the rules 15,000 times a year. It has no obligation to tell the hospitals, so that’s why they’re getting denied. So instead of holding the insurance companies accountable, now we’re introducing Palantir to help solve it. That’s the solution. It doesn’t make any sense, and it just makes us complicit in this whole thing.

Kiera Arbour, RN:

Thankfully, in Chicago, we don’t have Palantir software anywhere near our patient’s information. Our action was based on the fact that our pension fund has $28 million invested in Palantir. That includes all county employees, not just nurses. So everybody who works for Cook County, which is where Chicago is, including all the people who work at the hospital, the doctors, the administrators, the nurses, the PCTs, the environmental service people, the folks who work in the cafeteria, the people who work in the forest preserves of Cook County, where I like to ride my mountain bike. All these people unknowingly have their pension funds, A, invested in a company that’s heavily aligned with the current administration and could potentially go, if Democrats screw his spine, could go belly up in a couple years. And then B, is doing some pretty nefarious stuff, is collaborating with ICE and making it so.

Kellyann mentioned that the patients are getting sicker and sicker. One of the reasons the patients are getting sicker and sicker is because they know that they have the potential to get arrested if they come seek healthcare. So they delay and defer care and then they come to us and they’re a lot of times near death. I took care of somebody last night who intubated completely unconscious body full of ammonia because their liver had failed and they had deferred care. And I couldn’t get this person’s story because obviously they were intubated and in a coma, but judging from this person’s last name, they very easily could have been somebody who was undocumented. But for us, for me, for the nurses at Cook County, we became nurses because it sounds cheesy, but it is a calling. I walked away from a six-figure career in supply chain and logistics management to come do this with the rest of my life because I felt a calling to do so because in 2020, I was at the George Floyd protest.

I said, “Wow, I’m actually the baddie and I need to get my life right.” And so I was feeling really good about what I was doing every day, taking care of some of the sickest people, the poorest people, the least fortunate people in my community and serving my community. And then I find out the thing that I’m relying on for my retirement is heavily invested in a company that’s collaborating with ICE, that is writing software for the IDF, that is tracking kids home from school in Gaza so that the Israeli Defense Force can send a bomb to this person’s house because there’s a one in two million chance that this kid’s dad is part of Hamas. And so that doesn’t align in any way with my values. And so we felt the need to step up and demand that our pension board divest itself from Palantir, and we were kind of blown off.

So I am looking to put together a run to be part of the pension board in the next few months. So that’s where our involvement with Palantir is.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. Well, I want to keep going in the direction that y’all are leading us to. I want to keep zooming out here and take this discussion beyond the world of healthcare, but I think it bears repeating or reminding all of us who and what we’re talking about here. I mean, if you’re still asking yourself or you listen to this and you’re saying, “Well, why is Palantir so bad? Who are they?” They’re telling us who they are. They published a whole batshit manifesto about their evil vision of and for the world. Their CEO, Alex Karp is constantly saying super villain type stuff about the kind of future he imagines with AI. And there’s a piece that we’ll link to in the show notes from The Guardian that is literally titled Palantir Manifesto described as Ramblings of a Super Villain Amid UK Contract Fears. And in that article, here’s a quote that says, “Palantir’s manifesto, which embraces AI state surveillance of citizens along with national service in the USA is either a parody of a Robocop film or a disturbing narcissistic rant from an arrogant organization.” And that was actually from a liberal Democrat MP in the UK.

But read that, read the manifesto. They are telling us who they are and we should believe them. I don’t want this creep carp near my healthcare or my information or any of my government data. I don’t want them near anything having to do with the administration of our society or what remains of it these days. And yet they are getting in there in our government. The data centers that are popping up everywhere. They’re tied up in all of that too. So I wanted to ask y’all to sort of zoom out and keep talking about that bigger picture. And I wanted to ask why you and your union are demanding that not only hospitals, but elected officials cut ties with Palantir. Why is it important for you to speak out against this kind of larger onslaught of big tech and to speak out as union nurses to stop it?

Kiera Arbour, RN:

I would say first of all, we have our own manifesto. It’s called Vision for a Healthy Society, and it’s not super villainy. We want people to live happy, healthy, self-fulfilled, self-actualized lives where they have the resources they need to not just survive day-to-day, but to thrive as human beings in the way that human beings were meant to exist and to flourish, not to be beholden to these giant unelected powers, whether it’s Palantir, whether it’s Anthropic, who was just in the news yesterday because they have their own AI building dossiers on folks like us who are opposed to what they do, and nobody elected these people. They became billionaires because venture capitalists invested money in them, and now they call the shots. They own pretty much both parties. Shout out to Rokana for giving that money back from Palantir, but for the most part, they’re heavily invested in both Democrats and Republicans.

As far as union nurses, because we can’t, because our union has our backs, because they’re going to protect our free speech rights, they’re going to protect our right to go out there and say, “This is wrong. We don’t agree with it.” And they allow me, because they are themselves, my union is itself anti-colonial, anti-imperial. They stand up for these values that I try to model myself, and so I need to stand in solidarity with my working class siblings, and I need to work for the society that I think is going to allow human beings the best chance to live the lives they deserve.

Kelli Brennan, RN:

In Maine, in January, we had operation Catch of the Day, which Maine is one of the whitest states in the country. We have a Somali population. So for us to be targeted with this operation, it was devastating. It affected our community, it affected the hospital, our housekeeping workers, our transporters, our ancillary services, and all staff felt this. You could feel the emotions throughout the hospital as this was going on. About 30% of our housekeeping were calling out because they were afraid. We were picking up food because we had a food bank, but people were afraid to go to the food bank. So our C-suite was storing groceries, so we were bringing our immigrant vulnerable community members to get food. And then one of my coworkers, who’s of the vulnerable community, I offered to give her a ride into work because everything was so escalating. So I picked her up one morning and we were driving to the hospital to go to work, and it was about six o’clock in the morning.

It was dark out. We were driving down the street, and as we were driving, pulled up to what seemed to be ice activity. There was a bunch of unmarked cars, out-of-state license plates, just seemed suspicious. So I couldn’t just drive by. So I pulled into a parking lot across the street and started filming on my phone what these officers were doing, just trying to see if they had anybody, if anybody was in trouble. But I also had my friend in the car, so I didn’t want to draw too much attention, so I didn’t honk my horn. I didn’t get out. I didn’t yell. I just sat there with my phone on recording, and the officers saw me. They flashed their flashlight at me as to say, “Hey, we see you.” And then I saw them heading to their car. So at that point, I decided that this was not a safe situation and we should leave.

So we pulled out of the parking lot, carried on down the street, and realized that they were following us. So got to a red light, and they pulled up in the lane next to me, and I could feel them staring at me through the window. So I rolled my window down because I could see that they were wanting that, and they rolled down their window and they looked at me. It was a male and a female officer, and they said, “Can we help you?” I said, “Yeah.” I said, “You can get the fuck out of Maine.” To which they replied, “Oh, looks like we have another Karen here.” At this point, the light is still red, and I’m like, “Okay, this is going to escalate.” I was worried My friend. And so when the light turned green, they looked at me and they said, “I’m going to arrest three more people today just for you.

Ha ha ha ha ha.” And pulled out in front of me, did a U-turn and carried on down back to where they came from. I don’t think anybody was abducted that morning, but my friend and I continued to drive to work and it was just like I felt so awful. It was traumatizing. And so that right there for me was like, this isn’t okay. And so we went to work and then this was happening across our town and the hospital went through so much to help and support people. They changed where they were picking up employees so that the parking lot was gated so that there couldn’t be agents in there. And they did all these things. And then we find out that they have a contract with Palantir and it’s like, wait a minute, we just went through this in January. We felt the effects of this in the hospital.

So that’s where we all kind of started to get involved. And then fast forward through the summer, we get to July and we have the murder of Johan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, which is three miles down the street from a Maine health facility. And at this point we are aware about the app called Elite that Palantir is using to target immigrants in our communities. So at this point, we’re concerned that this is really ramping up in our community. And then fast forward to August when our own nurse was abducted by ICE at an airport in Portland. And then to still find out that MaineHealth is still doubling down on their contract and Susan Collins is still holding onto her money, it’s just infuriating. And I think for us up here in Maine, you’re going to see us out and doing everything we can to try to tell the community that Palantir has no place in our hospitals, no place in our community.

And that if patients can’t trust the hospital, if they can’t trust where they’re going is safe, they’re not going to come and get care. And that’s not what we’re here for. Nurses are advocates first. We’re trained to advocate and to speak up when something is wrong and that’s what we’re doing.

Lee Barker, RN:

I mean, exactly. I think the biggest reason that union nurses are speaking out against Palantir is simply because we can. It’s the right thing to do. And like Kelly said, we’re advocates for our patients, we’re advocates for our communities.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, my God, thank you all so much for that. That was really, I think, important, really powerful. And I’m really grateful to y’all again for speaking out the way that you are and letting our listeners know why this is important. And I want to end on that and bring us back to where we started in the beginning where I learned about this Purge Palantir campaign from NNU because of the day of action in August. So I wanted to ask if you could tell folks more about now that we’ve thoroughly covered why we should all be invested in this and horrified that these tyrants and oligarchs and freaks and villains who want to control everything and everyone, why we should not just go quietly into that dark night and why people should stand up and fight back and that we can choose a different path. We don’t have to go down this path.

And that’s what I see all around me and in every kind of story we cover at The Real News. People around the country are pissed, they are fighting back, they are doing so wherever they can, however they can, whether it’s speaking out as union workers in mobilizations or it’s people in deep red, rural areas where there are data centers popping up or people here in quote unquote deep blue cities like Baltimore where data centers are also threatening to pop up. This is kind of forcing us all together and we’re going to need to work together to figure this out. And so in that spirit, I wanted to end by asking y’all if you could tell folks more about what NNU is doing to fight back and what people listening, what your message is to them about why they should get involved and what they could do to get involved.

And if you have any final words about what will happen to all of us if people don’t fight back against this now.

Kiera Arbour, RN:

So I would say that, and probably understanding that the demographic of your podcast are what we like to call fellow travelers. They’re socialist, anarchists, anti-capitalists, what have you. We need to get people off the sidelines. We’ll take care of our own business here in Chicago with this pension fund. What I would suggest that your listeners do is reach out to somebody who they would probably consider a liberal or a conservative and do something simple like, I don’t know, go take them to see the movie American Doctor. I don’t know if you’ve heard about that. It’s the story, it’s a documentary of people trying to go provide aid in Gaza in the midst of a genocide because I really feel like there is a large percentage of the population out there who just doesn’t really understand. It’s not that they don’t care, it’s just that A, they don’t understand what’s happening and B, they don’t know or don’t feel like they have any sort of political agency to change it.

And there are a lot of people who probably identify as neither any sort of political affiliation, and those are the people that we need to reach out to to let them know what’s happening around us. So go see something like American Doctor, which is really going to get you right here. Understand that Palantir and all these big tech companies played a very large part in all the horrible things that you’re going to see in that movie. And then wherever you live, I guarantee you there are people that there’s an anti-war committee. There are mutual aid groups who are going out every day and collecting donations and trying to feed the less fortunate in our community, the people who are undocumented, who are afraid to go to work. There’s so many opportunities to go out there and connect with the people in your community and that’s what’s going to make you feel safe and that’s what’s going to make you feel like you have power over this and that’s what’s going to make you feel like you have agency over this.

And that’s how we defeat this in solidarity together as working class human beings.

Kelli Brennan, RN:

I think it’s going to be really important that people get out and vote in November. I think it’s really going to be, we don’t know what the outcomes of the elections will be, but if they go the way we want them to go, there’s a chance that those results aren’t going to be accepted. So I think we have to prepare and organize and make sure that we’re getting everyone out to vote, making sure people are registered. I think there’s no hesitation on my mind about that we need a huge voter turnout this midterm. And I think if people aren’t involved, be a poll watcher, drive people to the polls, make sure your community members know if they’re registered, how to register, where the voting locations are, and notify your elected officials that you don’t approve of Palantir. Whenever I do stuff lobbying, one things that representatives in Congress or locally or wherever, they say that I don’t hear from my constituents.

No one’s called me to tell me about this. And that really matters. So I think it’s important for people to get out and vote. I think it’s important for people to join an organization, unionize. If you’re not in a union, join one, make one, connect with one because there’s so many resources. And if we’re all doing different things, we need to all do the same thing together at the same time. And we need to sustain organizing, sustain networking, talk to people that you don’t normally talk to. What I love is our candidate for Senate, Troy Jackson, one of his sayings I love is we’re not from the left, we’re not from the right, we’re from the bottom and we’re rising. This is a working class issue. They’re sayings that unions save the middle class, unions built the middle class. We’re going to have to do that again.

And even if you’re not in a union, you’ve got to link up with somebody because it’s going to take all of us to get through this. And nurses are first and foremost humanitarians, right? We’re the trusted profession over and over again. So we know what’s needed in healthcare. And as a nurse for 17 years, I’m so sick and tired of apologizing to my patients and their families on behalf of health insurance executives and hospital CEOs. So everyone get out and do something.

Lee Barker, RN:

Absolutely. Just to echo that, getting out to vote, reaching out to your elected representatives, telling them to purge Palantir. I’m going to put a couple links in the chat also. There’s a purgepalantir.com. You can get on there and find out what’s going on with the Purge Palantir campaign, Actions Near You. The other link I put in there is there’s a letter that people can fill out that will go to HCA specifically telling them to cut ties with Palantir. Anyone can sign that. Anyone can sign that. Anyone can find that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Kelly Brennan, Lee Barker and Kira Arbour, all three registered nurses, all three members of National Nurses United, all participating in NNU’s Purge Palantir campaign. And you can learn more about that campaign in the links that we provided in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring about this. We do this work for you, but we cannot do it without you. Working People is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by the great Jules Taylor and is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. 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 around the US and across the world.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Check out our great podcasts like Under the Shadow and the Mark Steiner Show and connect with us on social media and get updates on our reporting there 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 does make a difference. I’m Maximillian 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. My name is Maximillian Alvarez.

Jules Taylor:

And I’m Jules Taylor.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So you guys all know Jules as the producer of this podcast, but let me tell you something about brother Jules here. Jules is a renaissance man. He is a podcaster himself, as many of you know. He’s a writer, a music producer, a poet, and a brilliant musician in his own right. And he does all the music for working people as well. And that’s why I really, really wanted us to host this episode together because today we’re actually going to be talking about the work that goes into being a professional musician and the realities of working and trying to make a living in the music industry today. And that industry looks a lot different than the music industry that we grew up with. Those 20th century days of vinyl records and tape decks and CDs and tower records and MTV, man, those have gone away and given way to this 21st century age of MP3s and music streaming, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, TikTok, Ticketmaster, et cetera, et cetera.

You guys know what I’m talking about. And I love music just about every single kind, and I always have. And I need music to live. And life itself would be so much less, I don’t know, magical to me if I lived in a world without music. And my playlists and my mix tapes are, and have always been, I think of Frankenstein’s mix of just the cheesiest pop, the hardest hip hop and gangster rap, the most classic Motown, the rock and roll, indie, ’80s, ’90s, early aughts, Broadway soundtracks, movie soundtracks. Just like me, my playlists contain multitudes, baby, but I can’t read music for shit and I can’t play an instrument to save my life. So my understanding can really only go so far here, but I’ve always been and continue to be in just total awe of musical people. And Jules, you are a very musical person.

You live this, you breathe this. And we’re going to dig into this more with our guests today, but by way of, I guess, introducing the conversation, if you had two minutes, how would you sum up your entry into the world of music and the good, bad, and ugly parts of your life as a working musician today?

Jules Taylor:

So hey Max, glad to see you, buddy. Man, thank you so much for the invite to co-host this conversation I’m really excited to be a part of. And I guess the short and simple of why I decided to make Go Music is that I consider myself to be, to a certain extent, largely unemployable. And I sort of just dreaded the thought of having to maintain a consistent nine to five, but I knew music was something that I could wake up early if I needed to, but something I would wake up for anytime I could be a part of it. And so in some ways it’s the only thing that I can do, but in other ways it’s also led me to everything else that I do, whether that’s studio work or live sound and eventually things like photography and shooting music videos and podcasting, flying drones and everything that it all kind of just comes back to the central urge of wanting to figure out how to make a living out of taking a guitar on stage and just playing original and covers and seeing how to make a go of that.

Somewhere in there I decided to challenge myself, see if I could actually make a living out of it. And that’s ended up why I produced podcasts too. So many gigs come out of needing other gigs to support the music.

It’s something that benefits you to help support it in some ways. I mean, it’s like a dream, hope and a prayer, but somehow you’re like, “Hey, but I ended up with seven career paths.” So anyway, but that’s how I got into this stuff, man.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, let’s talk about this more, right? Because I know I have so many questions and I’m sure our listeners have so many questions. What is it actually like and what does it actually take to make a living as a working musician today? What does the music industry as it exists today take from musicians and take from the rest of us? And what are we getting in return? Is that bargain worth it anymore? And how do the working and living conditions of music makers and all these moneymaking schemes of the music industry, how do all those shape the actual music that we make and consume and listen to and dance to and think to and live to? How do they shape the ways that we relate to music itself? So this is what we’re going to be talking about today, and I am just beyond excited and really, really grateful to be talking with all four members of Veteran Chicago Rock Band, The Empty Pockets.

So they’re here with us now to dig into all this. And thank you all so much for joining us on the show today. And Jules, thank you so much for co-hosting this man. So let’s go around the table and have y’all introduce yourselves and your band to our listeners.

Josh Solomon:

Max, Jules, thank you so much for having us. That was so many insightful things you guys said already. I’m Josh. I’m the guitar player of the Empty Pockets and I started this band with Nate 20 years ago. Our singer and keyboard player, Erica, is my wife, and I have made a full-time living humbly, a humble full-time living in music and the arts for well over 20 years.

Adam Balasco:

Hi, I’m Adam. I play drums with the Empty Pockets, but also as a working band, I do a lot. We all do a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with music. So I do customer service and shipping and we do warehousing. We load our own gear. We do a lot of work outside of just our instruments somewhat, unfortunately. I think we’ll get into that at some point probably, but yes, drums.

Erika Brett:

Yes, we are all Renaissance people, as you said early in this broadcast. I’m Erika. I play keyboards, so Oregon, roads, piano. And yeah, I’ve been a full-time musician for almost 20 years, maybe longer than 20 years. And my big role with the band is graphic design, merchandise development, and social media promotions and marketing. We all have a lot of hats.

Nate Bellon:

Hey, I’m Nate. I play the bass. This is one of my hats. We have a lot of roles and one of my roles is physical maintenance. And so Josh and I actually built the studio room that we’re in, and we have built this room out over 15 years or 16 years quite physically. We literally have done all of the work or very close to all of the work. And it’s just one of the things that you end up doing to become and maintain your status as a professional musician.

Erika Brett:

You’re also the vehicle guy.

Nate Bellon:

Well, that’s true. Yeah. It’s

Josh Solomon:

A physical thing. Yeah,

Nate Bellon:

Physical

Josh Solomon:

Stuff. Nate’s very mechanical.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, let’s not sell him short. We call that the getaway guy.

Erika Brett:

Nate’s perfect for that.

Jules Taylor:

Well, Josh, Erica, Nate and Adam, Matt, it’s so cool to be talking with y’all. And I think it’s funny how immediately in this conversation, there’s a sort of vibe of anything we have to do to keep doing what we’re doing. I mean, that’s kind of the credo around that I think of from time to time. But I guess I have a very broad question and in that broadness, I’d like to invite you to get as specific as you’d like, but said very plainly, how are y’all making this work today in today’s touring climate? So rarely do we get to speak to a band that has been together as long as y’all have. And so in this shared experience of performing, how are y’all contending with this changing landscape? Where have you had to pivot? Not just in rising gas prices and inflation and the evermore difficult task of convincing folks to put pants on and leave the house, but also in the merch game.

I mean, selling your music and physical media at shows has morphed into this sort of t-shirt and trinket hustle at times. So basically the odds of an independent band being successful in air quotes, however we define that, if I’m going to use the word successful in terms of carving out a meter existence, those odds are ever more stacked against us. And so what are you doing differently today compared to say maybe 2005 and where are y’all finding the most success?

Josh Solomon:

It’s Josh here and I’m 41, so 2005, 2006, I’m 20, 21 years old, totally delusional with no perspective on. How do I totally put it? Every time we go to a town, a fan says to me, “Oh, you got to come play in this place.” We’re in a 200 seat venue. Every time a fan is like, “You got to come play this little place in my town.” I look it up. That place he’s talking about every time is 2000 seats. People have zero concept. We’re like a 200 seat theater band. People have zero concept of the amount of things between us and the eras tour. And I think from my perspective, and I’d love to hear what you guys have to say too, to answer even just a part of that question is we’ve doubled down on physical media so hard and we talk to and collect, and this is working increasingly better, I think as a portion of the population feels more and more left out by the commoditization of music.

When you put music on a streaming platform and it’s the same every single song ever made on every streaming platform, which is different than movies and TV, that becomes a water tap and it’s just a price race to the bottom. So we basically, while we put our music on those services from our perspective, that’s like a token.

Erika Brett:

Yeah. We used to kind of be waiting for our prints to come, as some people say.

Josh Solomon:

Attracting an

Erika Brett:

A&R ride. Yeah. We had a song that some radio people were like, “This could be a hit.” And then you’re waiting for that to be the case. Now that wasn’t the case for us, but we were able to, over the course of the last 20 years, but really over the last kind of how you described 10 years, diversify our income streams. We went from playing whatever gig we could get to becoming a backing band for artists with large followings and then opening for those artists to gain awareness and gain more fans and also prioritizing an e-commerce strategy, which is what Josh was talking about, our physical products. And so we’ve moved away from streaming. Streaming is great and we also listen to music there, but for our business, we are directing people to physical products and shows.

Josh Solomon:

Jules, you had mentioned one of the reasons we all get into this is because I just don’t want to go to a nine to five every day. I want to do something different every day. So a couple of years ago, this studio needed repainted. And one of the ways you stay a full-time musician is you don’t hire a painter. You buy some paint and you paint the studio. So I found myself and Adam and Nate here. And Adam, do you remember what you said as we were painting it?

Adam Balasco:

Yeah. I always say I like any job, manual labor, whatever the hardest thing you’re imagining is weefing today, right now. I like that for one day, three days. I’m outside, I’m up on a roof, it’s cool.

A week. Turning anything into a career is so daunting. But yeah, that is how we save money and kind of stay afloat is like we painted that. You were talking about building this studio and then I was like, oh yeah. And then it’s white now because we painted. We painted it and stuff like that is how we’ve kind of taken. And we’re not waiting for that lottery ticket. We would love our song to go crazy on the radio or streaming or whatever. We’re not waiting for that lottery ticket. We’re acquiring fans one at a time and we’re doing all the work or we like to think we’re doing all the work ourselves and we’re desperate in a sense. And

Josh Solomon:

We’re doing it all. Jewels had the same attitude as us in terms of, I don’t want to be a painter for a living. I don’t want to look down the barrel of that. I’m impressed with somebody who can do that. I know some amazing house painters, but I’m not above painting. I’m not above doing some electric.

Erika Brett:

Well, and the thing with owning an arts business of any kind too is that you are going to inevitably become a Renaissance person. You’re going to have to learn about lighting so that you can make videos that resonate. You’re going to have to learn about editing. You’re going to have to learn all of these things about vehicle repair.

Josh Solomon:

The myth goes that when the Rolling Stones got to Chess Records here in Chicago, Muddy Waters was painting the wall. That’s the myth that when the Rolling Stones got to chess in the early ’60s that Muddy Waters was painting. So it’s not new at all.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It’s interesting to me too, because so much of what you guys are saying, even as a self-professed non-musical person or non-musician, so much of what you’re talking about resonates with my own experience as a creative and a creator in media spaces and just that need to kind of adapt to an ecosystem that’s always changing. And there’s always opportunity in that as well as a whole host of new threats and stressors to deal with. It’s wild, man. We’re talking on a podcast I made because I was like, people aren’t reading my articles anymore. And that kind of process has sort of led me to get into audio reporting and now video reporting and any and all of the above I love to do, but there also comes a price with being able to make a living doing what you love. And I wanted to kind of talk about that too, because I can’t speak from your guys’ and Jules’ vantage point.

That is your art. That is still different from the reporting that I do. The two very much intersect. I bring a lot of my artistic heart and spirit into the work that I do, but I know just by being privileged enough to get paid to do that for a living, that it really changes my relationship to the thing I’m doing, to the ways I feel about doing it. And the love when it becomes a job takes on all of that baggage from all the unloving parts of life. So how does that affect you guys as musicians and the music that you make?

Josh Solomon:

Man, what a great question. There’s so many pieces of that. One that comes right to mind to me, and I want Nate to speak on this and Adam as well, is they both had children and we’re on the road and our dreams are kind of coming true. We’re at the London Palladium, it’s sold out, but a month into a tour doing something you love too, there’s an element of, do I love this the same amount today? And I don’t know, Nate, what do you think about, you had to leave your son at home for the first time pretty recently.

Nate Bellon:

Yeah. So my kid had just been born and then we went on tour in the UK for a month and we were in Amsterdam and all over the UK. We took the Chunnel twice. So there was a bunch of stuff where I was like, this is cool. I should be ever present in this moment. And also it’s hard because I wasn’t seeing my newborn kid and my wife and you try and balance that emotionally and then you get to play shows. So I get that sweet juice that I need in order to make it through the next couple of days.

Josh Solomon:

Jules definitely knows this feeling too. When you’re on tour, there’s the same amount of time in every day when you’re at home, except the part that you’re leading towards is like an hour and a half and the rest of the day is leading towards that moment or coming away from that moment. And it is an exhilarating but strange experience.

Jules Taylor:

Yeah. And then you get to figure out that an hour is just a completely useless denomination of time. It’s just not enough to dig into anything. It’s not enough to really relax if you need to, but you have an hour before this one critical thing happens before you have another hour or something. But yeah, I totally understand that, man. Being away from home, it’s difficult to, especially with the sort of constraints that a lean and mean tour might have on its subjects, being away from home, being somewhat restricted in that sense, and being torn between these beautiful things you’re experiencing on tour while also having the regret of having to leave. I got a buddy of mine who plays guitar with Playboy Cardy. The guy is on tour with that guy playing arenas. And even he the other day texted me, he’s like, “My wife’s due in 12 weeks and I leave for tour in 13 weeks or something crazy like that.” But I wonder also, you guys also seem like you’re very chummy, right?

You’ve been together a long time, but I would say that touring and these moments also kind of create friction amongst band members and inevitably you end up with some comical story at some point. Do you guys have a singular story you could pick out of some sort of tense moment that resulted in something hilarious?

Maximillian Alvarez:

And remember, this is a worker and labor focused show. So we’re really talking about, give us a worker’s eye view into the labor of having to go on tour with each other and deal with everything you’re dealing with.

Adam Balasco:

Well, I don’t know. No funny stories immediately come to mind. I’m sure they exist, but being in a band is like doing a group project with your immediate family, which is horrible at times and also amazing. And it’s hard to communicate the band dynamic because it’s like I deeply love these people and we live in a van and sometimes an Airbnb or a hotel. So it’s like –

Josh Solomon:

There’s an interesting balance there too, and I think a lot of small businesses have this balance, like where to put your office, how nice of a neighborhood to put it in, that type of thing. For us, it’s like how much to spend on a hotel, how much to spend because there’s a balance between sustainability, vibe, morale. Man, we’ve cheaped out a couple times and checked into a hotel and you’re only there for 12 hours and it’s just crushing your spirit.

Erika Brett:

Bloody hand prints. Oh my God. Oh my God, you guys.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Jesus, what motels are you guys staying at?

Nate Bellon:

Was that the Bay Bries Inn?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, I was going to say the Bates Motel, man.

Josh Solomon:

Yeah.

Erika Brett:

We’ve got some horror stories for

Josh Solomon:

Sure. And in terms of from a worker perspective, there’s nothing reasonable or OSHA friendly about how a band operates at our level at all, right? It’s like in the band at 7:00 AM, maybe stop for a lunch. We have a tour manager who does most of our driving. Then before that, it must have been really unsafe.

Adam Balasco:

Definitely.

Josh Solomon:

It

Adam Balasco:

Was just us.

Josh Solomon:

It was just us. And you go to an interview, you load in. The days are 14 and 15 hours. I always call on tour a processing deficit. You can’t even go through what you did today before you get tomorrow. And we’ve learned a lot about how to plan better, about how to demand more. I like to say a gig is legitimate when they offer you a meal. Sometimes you go to a gig and you’re there from 4:00 PM to 1:0 AM and you’re like, “Is there anything to eat around here?” And they’re not like, “Not within two miles.” Who

Erika Brett:

Wants to help with that? Why?

Jules Taylor:

Yeah. Yeah. Or the green room plate of mac and cheese. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a testament every time I talk to musicians, you can tell who’s really giving it a go because they have all of the ingredients for the recipe. They have all the social media, all the marketing. They actually have the website, the domain, the EPK, the video, the bio written by a third party that you probably paid someone for. All of these different things, this elaborate recipe that just equates out to a starting point, right? Yeah. It’s

Josh Solomon:

So depressing. It’s a starting point.

Jules Taylor:

It’s all a starting point. Yeah. Tell me. You

Josh Solomon:

Were using it as a metaphor, but just to exemplify, we’re the empty pockets. We take that seriously. We write about labor issues. Our next album is called Dear Billionaires. And to that effect, especially when we open for someone on a tour, back them up, there’s an elaborate rider in that deli tray and chips, whatever, all this food, fruit. We have permanent coolers. We never leave a venue without as much food and ingredients. We have banned salt and pepper. We literally stop at a picnic table on the side of the road and unpack our coolers, and that’s mostly lunch. And we’ve really embraced that. And

Erika Brett:

We really have to be thrifty in every part of what we do. Not only have the margins gotten worse, like you were saying everywhere, in hotels, gas, food, all the things that make our engine run, but I was watching the Today Show this morning. It happened to be on, and they’re giving financial advice. And without a steady paycheck, none of those things work for us. We can’t go to a financial planner in the same way somebody with a 401k or just even a regular paycheck can. We really have to take saving money and spending it carefully very seriously.

Jules Taylor:

Yeah. It’s just a testament in so many ways whenever I talk to any musician who’s making this go and making it work is that you don’t really need the bosses because the workers can do anything under any conditions with any circumstances that come up on the road with unsure pay and just questionable sleeping conditions. It’s like where there is determination and this deep written desire to create music and to do this as a main vocation, as a focus, as a primary way of living your life. It’s just a testament to the incredible sort of willpower that comes from artists who will do anything to continue being able to create art. And so I’m not worried about a dictatorship of the proletariat at all because have you seen some of the musicians we talk to people?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, that’s what I wanted to ask about actually, is because music, as far as any of us, and I say us as musical and non-musical people, but living in America, having the culture industry that we have, music was as much a potential career path as being a famous actor or a famous athlete. I mean, there is a sort of level of super stardom that was selectively occupied by people like us, it seemed, growing up. And it was possible to play music that was so good that reached so many people that you could make not just a living, but a superstar’s living. And you could have all the security you could ever need and the fight from your humble beginnings and insecurities would all be worth it if you made it to that star echelon. I mean, same thing goes for the way I thought about being a professional basketball player with my brothers for many years growing up, or even people now who are in the media and see the media as the only path for success in journalism or in the media is the superstar path where you’re getting paid so much and you have such a far reach that you’re Joe Rogan and you can kind of have that echelon that none of us are ever going to ever reach.

But I say that all to say, obviously there’s always going to be a lot of folks who still look at these industries and vocations and arts and sports this way, but I think the veil’s been lifted for a lot of us and we’re like, “That ain’t happening. I ain’t making it and no one else is making it in today’s economy in that kind of direction.” And there is a lot to be mourned about that, but I think there’s also something that’s very liberating when we are not pursuing our passions out of a place of desperation or out of desires for lavish, luxurious, ridiculous wealth. And that struck me in something that I’d heard y’all, Josh and everyone with the empty pockets is not something that you’ve been aiming for, but you want to make a good middle class living. And so I wanted to kind of meditate on that.

Once we sort of recalibrate our visions, our imaginations and our hopes for what we want to do with this, what does that give you back that a career trying to make it in a Spotify age as a superstar would take from you otherwise?

Josh Solomon:

Yeah, totally agree, man. I like to think of it also, it’s like becoming an astronaut to say, “Oh, I’m going to go have John Mayer’s career or I’m going to go have Taylor Swift’s career.” It’s absurd. More than ever, and I think it’s good, the niche-ification of taste has made it so there are even fewer superstars than there used to be. There are very, very few superstars. Like I said, when I was in my 20s, I had these delusions and I let those go and I discovered about myself. And I think you guys would agree that more than the massive success, because for the most part there are exceptions, that comes with chains, with you were successful in this lane and now you have to deliver this thing. Brilliant people like that guy Larry, the cable guy, his persona, you’re stuck there. You have to deliver your thing.

What I want more than anything else, which we have a lot of, is freedom. We make enough money to get by, but we can do whatever we want. Our biggest constraint artistically is ourselves. That’s what keeps me going.

Nate Bellon:

Jules, you had mentioned it previously, the changing landscape of the music industry. And I think one of the things, because we started as a band in 2006, so the music industry was literally falling apart or had already fallen apart and some of the gatekeepers or higher ups hadn’t admitted it to themselves. The nature of the landscape was changing. And so we found that certain people that we would hire in positions, that’s their mindset. Let’s get you to superstardom level. And I feel like going through that cycle a couple of two, three times, we were able to not only learn, but then solidify both in our minds and then out wow later, here’s what we consider success.

Josh Solomon:

It’s such a good point.

Nate Bellon:

If we can just do that, we’re a success.

Josh Solomon:

And philosophically, when Eric and I met before we got married, one of our first dates, we went on and on to each other about scale. And Adam feels passionately about this as well. There are certain things in the world that need scale, right? We shouldn’t do small businesses to get to the moon. I get that. We need a certain amount of scale to make computer chips, but that doesn’t mean every burger joint and coffee shop and bookstore needs to be scaled. And there’s an element, okay, we have economies of scale on one side, but there’s an element of massive inefficiency. And what we found, and we keep finding in entertainment in general, is that the basic strategy to make someone a superstar is brutal Millions on raw awareness. Blanket,

Erika Brett:

Blanket marketing.

Josh Solomon:

That’s why people get annoyed about hit songs because they’re hearing a song over and over again that’s not even meant for them. Nobody wrote Espresso for me. There was, but why did I hear it a hundred times? I wasn’t interested. I gave zero indication of the choices I made in my life.

Erika Brett:

Sabrina, it’s for me. It’s for me.

Josh Solomon:

And we have the ability with technology to target so accurately now. So the major labels, including big movies, Marvel movies and stuff, they’re all still doing this super inefficient. And we’ve decided the opposite. We want to build our small business and keep building it, getting razor focused. We get new fans every day and we’re trying to maximize their fandom of us and their value to us, but without worrying about getting to 10 million people a year.

Erika Brett:

What I think you guys will appreciate is that we are a band and yes, we’re making music, but we took e-commerce strategies that are not based on music, that were based on books or smaller items. And we kind of did our own authentic application of that for our career. And that has allowed us to expand our audience and find our audience through advertising, targeted ads and word of mouth.

Josh Solomon:

Touring is about 40% of our revenue. It’s something like that. A lot of our revenue is physical music and a lot of that is shipped from here. I’m talking about vinyl, talking about CDs. Not as many for us. It’s a different type of band, not as many t-shirts for us. So I’d love to do more shirts. And that’s all about just using classic commerce, e-commerce and marketing logic to build a fan base in the same way that a book company or a razor company would build their fan base.

Jules Taylor:

I love that y’all brought up Sabrina Carpenter because she was not on my radar. And then this last album dropped and her marketing was all over the place. And I just slowly got initiated into the house tour track and the one where talks about maybe it’s slow or whatever, but now I know her lyrics. I know her visual signature. And it’s funny. Come on,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Man. Manchild is a bop. The

Jules Taylor:

Whole album is great.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Manchild is such a bop. It’s such a bop. Men today need to hear it. It is an anthem for the ages. That and Olivia Dean’s Man I Need are two of the most essential songs that every fucking man who is alive today needs to hear. And I don’t think it’s an accident that our zeitgeist is producing such desperate, beautiful please from women for men to fucking be better. And I think it’s through music where a lot of men learn that kind of thing. And I think that’s a good thing. I don’t mean to stand on a soapbox here, but I didn’t realize I was going to defend Sabrina Carpenter so virulently, but you guys stirred me up, baby.

Josh Solomon:

And this newer album is fantastic and there are all these, you’re right, that thread is all around music. Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo has that same vibe. Maybe men will listen. I don’t know.

Maximillian Alvarez:

They will. And I think there’s honestly, and I’m just speaking personally here and then we’ll kind of bring things around the final turn here because I can’t keep you guys for too long, although I could talk to you for hours. I think I had reached a state of exhaustion recently and it felt like almost a decade long period of cultural exhaustion. And I don’t think I’m alone. I think a lot of us felt that and we receded into it, especially with COVID. We watched the same series that we already had seen, movies we already knew, songs we already had on our playlist. I know for myself as a lifelong lover of art and culture and new things, I really retreated. And I think part of it, not all of it, was fueled by the sort of feeling that it’s like nothing’s good anymore or the quality of everything is sucking just a little bit more each time and I’m not participating in it damn. I’m going to hang on to the things I know are good and just listen to those for the rest of my life. So that’s the kind of petulant place that I was in as a modern music listener. And again, I feel like I’ve talked to a lot of people who felt that same way. And I think that actually the Spotify algorithms and stuff sort of reinforce that sense of just playing the hits or trapping us in these silos, these cultural silos, instead of getting to explore and experience and find bands like yours that we would like but have no idea exist.

And I know that people are looking for that, they’re hungry for that. And I am so goddamn grateful when I hear it coming out of my speakers. And I guess to just tie a bow on the point, I’ve been hearing that of late with some songs that have given me some hope in pop culture of late. And I think a lot of it goes back to Olivia Dean, Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter and the somber. I think there’s a lot of necessary cultural discussion that is happening in and through those songs that needs to be had and isn’t happening in enough places. So I thank music for that. And I wanted to sort of bring us back around to that sort of beautiful, necessary part of what music is for all of us and what we look to music for. And I wanted to ask y’all, all of you, Jules, you’re included in this.

I’m roping you into our final round, but let’s start with what is your least favorite part about being a working musician and what is your favorite part that makes that and everything else worth it?

Adam Balasco:

I’ll start and say my least favorite part of being a working musician is that it made music work. And this was alluded to earlier, but I leave here a lot of times and I put a baseball game on or sports talk radio on or something like that because this saps a little bit of my musical energy. And so anyone who has a nine to five job and you get a pizza and some beer on a Friday night, you play music with your friends, know that I am so jealous of that. And the magic in that is a little bit lost, I will say. We’re

Josh Solomon:

Almost chasing that vibe.

Adam Balasco:

Yes. And paradoxically, and I love paradoxes, again, the strength, the weakness, the pro, the con. I always say we are band. We’re arts kids. We all committed to being artists. We’re artists. And the irony is we ran headfirst into running our own small business. And I was playing around with spreadsheets and exporting CSVs this morning as Ari was doing her design work as Nate is patching a hole in the- The

Erika Brett:

Asphalt.

Adam Balasco:

In the asphalt in the parking lot. And Josh literally has his hands on all of that stuff. And to me, it’s both. I like that. I like doing the spreadsheets, but also we do this, we do the drums and stuff so, so much less. It’s like a fraction of what we do is play music. Mostly we’re running a small business.

Josh Solomon:

What a great answer. I think my least favorite part or one of my least favorite parts is feeling like I’m getting in the way or looking down on or condescending in any way to the hobby musician. So it’s a similar thing to you and while not getting invited into the hobby musician world anymore, both the combinations. So it’s really similar to what you’re saying. You know what I mean? And when I do get invited to the dudes who didn’t great musicians who now do other stuff, maybe it’s just in my head, but I feel a little bit like I’m intruding. I don’t love to do. Erica is such a great singer and she doesn’t love to do karaoke and everybody goes crazy, but it feels like, am I intruding on this space? The paradox.

Nate Bellon:

Yeah. The least favorite part for me I think is early mornings, late nights while you’re chugging it out on tour. And sometimes those can become never ending based on the schedule. I don’t deal well with life without my, I don’t know, 10 hours of beauty sleep. You don’t get this good looking without a lot of sleep is what I’m saying. And so everybody out in audio land, I’m gorgeous.

Adam Balasco:

Very attractive mate’s very good.

Nate Bellon:

I’ve been compared to the Greek gods of old. And so the early mornings, late nights, it just kills you after a while. Every one of us, if we’re out for long enough, you get sick. And then you’re spreading sickness around the van because you’re all just sitting in a dumb van for hours. I don’t like that part, but it all pays off because while you’re on the road, you get the purest of the sweet juice, which is you’re playing music live and you all enter this flow state together and you’re creating art that may never exist again in this moment. Worth all of that early morning, late night stuff.

Adam Balasco:

And let me just cut off Erica really quick because we’ll get to Erica. Nate went there. So let me just say in case my wife listens to this, I miss my wife and children when I’m on a road. It’s the real answer. Sorry, Erica, go ahead.

Erika Brett:

Good job band. Good job. Mine is similar to dates whereas he was talking about late night, early mornings. What we do, the travel and the carrying of equipment and gear and bags that we do is hard on the body. And we went in age order in this wrap up and I’m the oldest. And as we get older, taking care of your body has become much bigger of a priority. And it turns out it serves the music part a lot. A lot, a lot, a lot. You need to be in good health. You need to be in good shape. That’s

Josh Solomon:

Such a labor issue across the board.

Erika Brett:

You

Josh Solomon:

Have to take care of your body to keep being whatever profession it is you are.

Erika Brett:

And I had to do a lot of doctoring personally. I have a lot of chronic health stuff, so it’s been a lot to navigate. You come home from tour and you’re rushing appointments in and you’re trying to do things that you can apply on the road. So it is really difficult. But that being said, it’s led me on a path to be stronger physically, mentally. And the best part is being on stage, connecting to my best friends up there, the new friends in the audience, and feeling this cosmic moment that we share and no one can take away from us no matter what happens. It’s a radical act of joy and in a time where there’s fascism coming our direction in many ways, what we can do is create and give and be with one another and love one another.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well said.

Jules Taylor:

Excellent. Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Beautifully, beautifully put.

Jules Taylor:

Man, well, to follow all that up, man, I guess my least favorite thing about being a professional musician is that everyone sees the work as play and then. So one instance of this is that I think of myself somewhat like a carpenter in the sense that I have a truck and I have all of my tools in it. And I drive around and it’s a beat up vehicle that takes me from contract to contract where I unload my stuff and I plug in and I do what I do. Right. But if I get pulled over, I’m not a worker all of a sudden. I’m a long-haired guy that probably has some weed in the car and I ain’t out doing shit. I’m out playing is what I’m doing, not working. And the whole small business thing behind stuff, man, it gets rolled real fast being the envy of every married guy being like, “Oh, you have so much freedom and you just go play music.” And it’s like, “No, man, I have bills, dude.

This is work.” But not only that, it’s like, “You must have so much fun doing this.” I was like, “Oh, you think I have fun trying to write heartfelt poetry?” I take this work more seriously than anything else in my life to where this pen and paper has ruined me. Putting pen to paper to put down some sort of heartfelt poetry that can also be abide by attaching melody to where I can go out and project that into the world for that singular cosmic moment that I live for, that is work. And people somehow think I’m enjoying the process at times. So yeah, it’s a weird paradox, man, because it’s like you’ll always be a disappointment to your parents who wanted you to become a doctor, but somehow you have to hold the knowledge of a doctor and train yourself physically to get to this apex of performance and you’re 40 now.

And you do this and somehow there’s still people that look at you and they’re like, “I don’t really understand what this guy does.”

Josh Solomon:

So spot on, Jules.

Erika Brett:

Someone said that to me in a mall once. You’re still doing that?

Jules Taylor:

Yeah. But it goes like, “Oh, you’re still doing the photography thing?” “What do you mean I’m still doing the photography thing? “That’s a vocation. It’s a career path. It’s a form of art. Yeah, I don’t know, man. But when you do have a choice in this world of pouring over Excel sheets or breathing in toxic chemicals, it’s like I’d rather the Excel sheets be my Excel sheets. I’d rather all this stuff be for me and that’s where I’ll work 80 hours for myself so I don’t have to work 40 for somebody else. Yes.

Adam Balasco:

Give me some toxic chemicals with those excels.

Josh Solomon:

I want to do it for myself.

Erika Brett:

You could talk about the baseball card gum that he ate that was like 10 years old.

Josh Solomon:

Great point, Jules.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Amen. Sadly, if you listen to a lot of the interviews we do on this show now, you’ll realize that we’re all getting blasted with toxic chemicals, whether we ask for it or not, but we’re all going to be part of the fight to stop it. And we all got to be part of the, I think, solution to our own critiques of the culture industry and the music industry especially. And I would say the same is true for media and journalism. You are right to not like a lot of the things that are unlikable, but if you want the things you like to continue to exist and flourish and give you what you get out of them, you got to support them. I mean, that’s true whether you’re talking about this podcast, The Real News Network, Jewels’ musical work, The Empty Pockets is musical work, independent creators everywhere.

If we don’t have your guys’ support, there is a very real chance that we’ll go away or stop being able to do what we do, even though we love what we do and we love doing it for you and for anyone who will ever hear it, see it, learn from it, get something from it. We’re in it to win it, baby, but we need you guys to be part of it. We do it for you, but we can’t do it without you. And so ending on that note, I wanted to just say that for any journalists and media makers and people who are interested in making a career out of that, since it’s the one part of this discussion I can speak on, the advice I tend to give people is that don’t commit yourself to doing this for a living, commit yourself to doing it to fight for life and follow where that leads you.

And in fact, it may be right and good and better for you to have multiple sources of income so that you don’t have to make the object of your devotion and your skill serve all these other ends, which means you’re not going to be able to do it the way that you want to. The work is going to suffer, you are going to suffer, but there are still some pathways available to come join me at the table of the suffering and do this work professionally. But they are so few and far between and the ecosystem is changing so much. So I can’t in good conscience advise anyone or coach anyone on that. I can just tell you that I am what I did to get where I am, what I think we all need to do to do the work that needs to be done, but the future is never assured and we don’t know what the landscape is going to look like in the coming years.

So that would be my central advice is you got to make a living however you can. And if you’re committed to this, do it, but don’t make it all dependent on your ability to make a living from it because that may actually be more of a devil’s bargain than you’re looking for, and it may take the love of this from you. So just be very mindful of that. And now to all the musicians, the artists, the creators who have been listening to you brilliant people talk about your working lives for the past hour, I wanted to kind of give y’all the last word on that, like any sort of advice you would give to other working artists out there or other folks who want to make a living making art. And also please tell our good listeners where they can find more of you and your art.

Jules Taylor:

And the new album.

Josh Solomon:

We’re the empty pockets everywhere at theemptypockets on Instagram, theemptypockets.com. And we have a new album out on Friday, October 23rd called Dear Billionaires. It’s our musical letter to the 3,600 billionaires in the world. I would say to all musicians aspiring of any kind, I increasingly agree with you, Max, and I have met more musicians, younger people that are saying, “I’m going to commit my life to music, but not commit my financial earning to that.” And I think there’s a lot to be said there. And I think it’s worth saying from our perspective, we are a very middle class band and yet still, I can think of dozens of times where we were so lucky where I look back and I think, oh my God, that happened and that happened. And then we toured the UK three times or that one thing got us 200 gigs.

So you got to be there. You can make your own luck, but still nobody’s getting anywhere on their own. A ton of people have helped us and we’ve gotten very lucky.

Adam Balasco:

I would tell artists, anyone trying to make it have realistic expectations. And I think for a lot of people that means coming to grips with you’re going to make $20,000 or something like that. You’re going to have to live on that if you want to be an artist for a good amount of time. And the harsh reality is, well, I think it’s kind of, again, paradox is uplifting and it’s harsh. A lot of people, I would say your art is fine. There’s great art everywhere that you’ve never heard of or seen. There’s great artists everywhere. A lot of people, if you really want to make it work, if you’re committed, you need to kind of treat it like a small business or something and treat yourself as an artist like a small business. And we don’t want to do that. We hate pricing of our artwork out.

It’s hard, it’s tough. But that’s the reality is good art’s everywhere. If you really want to make it a business, make it a business. Good luck. Stuff.

Erika Brett:

Yeah. I would say to piggyback off that, that balance is really important. Commercialize what you can so that you can keep making art, but don’t lose the joy if you can’t.

Josh Solomon:

Or find the perfect balance.

Erika Brett:

Or find the perfect balance. And I also agree that artists need support and that could change the world.

Nate Bellon:

And let’s not forget, the album comes out October 23rd.

Erika Brett:

You can reorder it now.

Nate Bellon:

If you want to pre-order from us, you can go to our website, pre-order it there. I have also been telling people to go to their local record store that they like to go to and request the album, pre-order it through them. Keeps the local economy going. We love local record stores. We want to build relationships with them. And we also want you to spend your money at a local record store.

Josh Solomon:

And we can say exclusively here, we haven’t said this publicly at all, we are going to be releasing a special variant pricing. So I want to make it clear, the physical CD is exactly the same. It’s not signed, it’s not deluxe, but we’re going to sell it to billionaires. If you are a billionaire, you can get our album, which we’re selling for $20 for $285,000. So that’s going to be on our website next month, and I’m pretty sure some billionaires are going to want that. They know they’re superior, and so they know they need a superior version, which is actually the same, but costs $285,000.

Nate Bellon:

I would welcome billionaires of all stripes to go ahead and take advantage of that billionaire pricing. And we handle all the packages. So if we see any billionaires buying the regular, we’re going to see that and we’re billing you. I’m not sending that

Josh Solomon:

To you, Elon Musk.

Nate Bellon:

No way. Jamie Pritzker, come on, man. What are you doing? The right version. We have a billionaire version for a reason. And to all the musicians out there, I would say continue to practice your dream, go after it, but also diversify your skillset as much as you can because you never know, A, what skill is going to become handy at a gig, on the road, dealing with merchandise or recording people, dealing with people inside the business. Diversify your skillset as much as you can and get ready to make a lot of bean recipes for 10 or 15 years. You can live on a lot of beans. It’s going to be fine. You’re going to make it just beans.

Erika Brett:

Yeah, be a learner. Be a learner and eat your beans.

Nate Bellon:

Eat your beans.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank all of our guests from the great Chicago rock band, The Empty Pockets, Josh Solomon, Nate Bellin, Adam Belasco, and Erica Brett. You can go learn more about the Empty Pockets and you can check out more of their music. Just use the links that we provided in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you guys for caring about this. We do this work for you, but we cannot do it without you. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network, and it’s brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by the one, the only, the great Jules Taylor. And man, Jules, thank you so much for doing this episode with me, brother.

I though that was awesome.

Jules Taylor:

Yeah. I always love talking to musicians in the sense that they have their ear to the ground for alternatives to wage slavery in this cursed system, man. And so however they can gain traction, however they can get ahead, however they can make things work, it’s not so much a picking of the brain of music theory or what music you’re listening to that happens within conversations with musicians. It’s more like, “How are you doing this? What are you doing? What’s working for you?” So it was really great to hear that from a band that 20 years, that’s a long time to be together. So definitely some cool advice in there and some really cool moments as well. I really appreciated being a part of this.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah, man. It was great. We got to do more like this. And before we wrap this thing up, I wanted to ask where can people find more of your music?

Jules Taylor:

You can search my name on any of the streaming things or you just go to my website, which is julestaylormusic.com.

Maximillian Alvarez:

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 different podcast feeds, our website, and our 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 does make a difference. I’m Maximillian 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. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are in Gary, Indiana with an urgent update on the ongoing nightmare tens of thousands of residents are living through after having to survive 10 days without power as of this recording. And we’re recording on Saturday, August 22nd. So yesterday, the Associated Press reported this. “In Gary, Indiana, schools remain closed after the deadly August 11th storm down trees and power lines. Residents turned to social media to find open laundromats and working wifi while others sought food, diapers, and cleaning wipes for low income neighbors. Meanwhile, heavy rains in central Ohio brought flash flooding that covered roadways Thursday morning in Columbus, the state capitol, where emergency crews rescued motorists from stranded cars and saved a 12-year-old boy who was swept off a bridge.

Northern Indiana public service companies said that 68,000 customers were still without power as of Thursday morning, the majority of them in Lake County besides the Illinois border. The utility said it has restored power to 306,500 others since August 11th, but power is not expected to be fully restored until Tuesday in some places, including Gary. Like Baltimore, Gary is a majority Black town that has been through and is going through a lot. And it is frankly a national disgrace and a moral outrage that it isn’t a bigger news story and a national emergency that an entire chunk of the country and tens of thousands of our neighbors have just been living in darkness for 10 days and counting. And the stories that I’ve been seeing and hearing from working people in Gary are so strikingly and unbearably similar to the stories that I’ve been seeing and hearing from working people in Cuba who are being strangled by the oil blockade imposed by our own government.

It is all just devastating and horrifying and it’s unacceptable. And working people are being crushed and abandoned and they need help. And people in and around Gary, Indiana need help right now. And I’m really grateful to be joined today by three guests who are going to help us understand what is happening, what is and isn’t being done, and what you can do to help. Please introduce yourselves to our listeners and tell them what is happening, what you are seeing around you, what you and your community need, and what they can do to help.

Freida Graves:

Hi, good afternoon. My name is Freida Graves. I’m a lifelong resident of Gary, Indiana. I am director of Food as Medicine for Faith CDC and a member of Progressive Community Church. What I see going on and what I feel went on, this is unprecedented. We’ve never had this kind of damage from the derecho tornado that hit, the land-based tornado that hit. For my prospect, there are certainly things that could have been done to prepare ourselves for this kind of weather event that we felt was coming. For our part, our church is solar. So at our point, we knew that at some point, and we have a solar backup battery. We’ve been fearing that for 10 years because we knew at some point as the weather changed, the weather events were going to get worse and worse. And we’d been speaking about this for years, probably to deaf ears, but some people pay attention to the environmental people pay attention, but the people that need to pay attention and make some changes could have previously done so had they listened.

But right now, I’m not saying we’re the end all be all, but I am saying that there’s some things that we could have done to prepare ourselves a little bit better. Now, as for the second part with the trees down and the poles down, I definitely think NIPSCO could have did a better job over the years of maintaining some of that. Some of this could have been avoided with some maintenance and paying attention. Gary was named Tree City several times. So to let you know how many trees we have and how many old trees and how many trees that are native and not native. I do think that some of this could have been possibly avoided had NYPSCO over the years, maintained it and kept up with what was going on, cutting down the trees that need to be cut down and maintaining the wires and the base.

So I’m not going to say total blame is with NIPSCO because it’s a lot of things that Gary sometimes gets ignored on certain things. But I do think with my mindset, they could have absolutely done a better job and we probably would not be in a position. We might’ve had some outages, but not to the point we have now. My power’s not on after 11 or 12 days. And everybody can afford generators. And we have senior buildings where today our church for two days has been passing out water and household supplies and all these kind of things like that for people that are coming down. Yesterday we did over a thousand people. Today I sent $500 worth of stuff to senior buildings. That’s just one senior building that has no air conditioning, no power, and the people are suffering. So from my point, I think things could have been done better on NIPSCO.

And I think for the mayor and administration, yes, they’re trying to get out there and work, but he can’t do it alone. It has to be NIPSCO. It has to be downstate. It has to be all these things that are regulated and made to be better. So I’ve been trying to keep positive. That’s why we’re doing the giveaways. That’s why we’re doing everything we did. Yesterday was 12 hours today. I’ve been out here 10 hours doing giveaways and sending them to seniors apartments. So because all of us are coming together here, churches, faith-based organizations, people are coming together. That’s what’s made everything better. That’s why we kept maintaining our positive spirit because people are coming together and moving together and working together. Thank you pastor for letting me go. And thank you, Ms. GlenEva, for letting me go. I’m going to have to go back outside, but things definitely could have been done better if they had maintained these trees and poles and all these things.

And I thank you for that. Let me be on the show and everyone have a blessed

GlenEva Dunham:

Day. All right, I’m GlenEva Dunham, president of Gary Teachers Union, AFT Local Number four, also president of State Federation of AFT in Indiana. When the tornado or the storm came on the August 11th, we were in school. And so our whole focus was trying to get the children out safely, and we were successful in that, and that was great. All of our schools, we have 10 buildings. They have been down with power. Right now, six of our schools do have power. So we plan on going back into the buildings on Monday, but no students. Four of our buildings will go into our career center and they will just do some professional development and just getting ourselves together before we bring the students in. So what I’m finding about the whole situation, so School City has been feeding the children. We’ve been having drive through lunches every day since school has been out, and that’s been a great thing to make sure they’re fed.

The city opened up the YWCA where a lot of our children have been going, and that has been a 24-hour service. And a lot of our teachers have been to the YWCA and have found some of their students and able to give them work as well. And so that’s been the focal point. Mayor Melton, we’re good friends. We worked together when he was a senator, getting our schools back. Our schools were taken over by the state. And so he’s been working really, really hard. Social media has really been hard on him, but he’s really been working really, really hard. And so I’m proud of the administration. I’m proud of our city. I’ve been driving around. I’ve been here at Gary all my life. I’ve worked all over because I’ve worked in many schools. I’ve been teaching 48 years, and I’ve really seen the devastation. I’ve never seen anything like it.

As far as the comparison with the neighboring communities, are they getting their service sooner than us? It looks like they are, but I know that Gary has more square footage than any of our regional cities, East Chicago, Hammond. Matter of fact, I’m the state fair president. I have 27 locals and 10 of my locals are right here. Lake Station, Porter County, East Chicago, Hammond, Whiting, Griffin, all of those are my locals. So I’ve been in touch with all of them. And also, there was devastation on the south end of our state, which is not really included, but me being a State Fair president, they had a lot of flooding down there. So they didn’t get it like we got it, but they got it pretty bad. But I’m proud of the city. I’m proud of, like Frida said, people coming together. Now that the folks have got a word about it, people are coming from all over the country and helping us.

And so sometimes bad things happen, but in bad things, good things can come out of that. And that’s what I’m seeing, and that’s what I’m hoping. And I’m praying that we all get our power on. I mean, 10 days for us was hard. We did have a generator, but still when the lights came on, Reverend Jackson, I though I was in heaven. It was so bright. I was so happy. So I’m saying I’m a positive person. And so it’s been a lot of back and forth about on social media, should you be positive? Can you express your feelings? Can you say what you think about the administration or whatever? But at the end of the day, we’re going to get through this because I lean on big shoulders. I always go back to my ancestry. Our ancestors, they went through a lot of stuff. And so we have to go back and think about how did they get over?

And we also have to put God in the picture. We can’t just leave God out and think that he’s forgot all about Gary Indiana because I’ll never believe that. So I believe that we’re going to get through this. I’m praying that it won’t be Tuesday because if it’s Tuesday, a lot of people will lose all hope because that’s just too, too long. The mayor was kind of a positive this morning saying that he hope he got the message through on the front page of the Post Tribune, our daily paper. Bron, the governor was on the headlines pushing NIPSCO to do better. And so like I say, I’m seeing a lot of trucks, so I’m just hoping that we’ll get our power before Tuesday.

Rev. John Jackson:

I’m John Jackson and I pastor the Trinity UCC congregation in the great city of Gary, Indiana. I also write a column in the Gary Crusader spiritual column that connects spirituality. I try to show the merging of the secular and the sacred in those columns. And I’m framing this this way as kind of a Katrina 2.0. Gary and Northwest Indiana, from my vantage point, are experiencing a Katrina moment. And as we know, the hurricane that hit in 2005, it did massive destruction. But what it really did in addition to that was pull the covers off, as I think Gleneva was saying, pull the covers off of the lack of maintenance in New Orleans for the levees. As the levees broke, it showed that in the working people’s area of Black, brown and poor whites, what they had been dealing with all along. And so it pulled the covers off of the same thing I see happening here in Gary, Indiana and Northwest Indiana.

Bulgaria, Indiana in particular because it is an older city, if not the oldest city. And as Friday said, it’s a lot of space, a lot of area. And as Gleneba pointed out, there’s a lot of trees. And what it showed is that the maintenance on the trees really had not been done. And so NPSCO has not been faithful in doing the maintenance, which it would have lessened the effect of trees falling on wires and then power outages. And so that’s one issue. But then it opens up the other issue of the rate hike. NPSCO just got a rate hike. And so when you look at that, and now you’ll hear some of the executives talking about how much money it costs for this, how much money it costs for that, well, those things don’t line up together. Then you put in, and I’m staying on the area of rates right now, because there is this legislation called Construction Work in Progress.

And what that legislation allows NIPSCO to do is bill customers for work they plan to do in the future. So that’s part of our bill. And I don’t understand how you bill somebody for something that you’re not doing right now. I don’t understand how that goes. The other part is that if a tree falls on the wire and the wire connected to your house pulls your meter out, my understanding is that the resident has to hire an electrician to affix and get that meter back. Then NPSCO comes out, connects to power.

There’s some disconnect here, there’s some problem here. And with that, in this time, there are not all electricians, but there are some that see the opportunity to gouge people. So there’s a need for electrical engineers and electricians who are honest and who will take care of that. And in fact, it’s really NPSCO’s responsibility, in my humble opinion. I was in a meeting that Good Mayor Melton had called on Thursday with a couple of NIPSCO executives, the president of NIPSCO, and I think the vice president or something of night source. And so he had leaders in the community, political leaders, religious leaders, grassroots persons, civic organizations were in the room. And so one of the things that was said by the NIPSCO executives is that they’re not coming on your property to trim the tree. And my thought was, “Well, if I give you permission to do that, you should be doing that ahead of time.

But when the tree falls on the wire, you got to come in there anyway.” So these things have exacerbated this moment where you have people who have been sitting. My church is still without power. People have been sitting in hot homes and apartments for 11 days now. And when the first estimates of restoration came out, Gary wasn’t on the list. Now, this is in conjunction with a tornado that came through in June that did massive destruction and a lot of the same things were happening that we’re experiencing now. So there are people that have been recovering from that. And then you have this now and this extended delay in restoring power. I know that ComEd in Illinois has more people, but still, I don’t understand why Gary is always last on the list to get restored. So after the meeting Thursday that Mayor Melton had called with the executive, then they said that very night we’re going to put a new list of days and times for power to get back on.

Once again, Gary last on the list with the prospect of being restored on Tuesday. Why does Gary always have to take the backseat for other areas? And knowing that it’s an older city and the infrastructure needs restored, how come the infrastructure was not taken care of five years ago? Three years ago? How come they haven’t been working all day? These are questions that I’m just relating questions that persons in my own congregation are raising. And then again, people have lost food. And so we do a lot of food giveaways. So as best we can without power, we’ll get food and we have to give it away right away. But people without food and without just the ability to have decency and hygiene, everybody’s not able to have generators. And those that have generators has spent close to a fortune in getting gas for it in 11 days.

And so what compensation will NIPSCO offer? Here’s another question I’m getting from a congregation. So for 11 days, there’s been no power. Why do we got to pay a bill? Why isn’t a moratorium on paying a bill for the next month or two? Because the objective in a transaction is that if I pay my money, then I’m going to get the goods or the service in return. Now, if I pay my money and I don’t get those goods and services, then I’m expecting that there’s going to be some compensation that will help reduce the difficulty that I’ve been placed in because you don’t have the ability to provide what I’m paying for. So these are questions that I’m just fueling for my congregation with what happened in June and then now and this extended thing and all of the excuses that we have now. It was a massive storm.

It was unprecedented. But as I think GlenEva pointed out, we’ve known for years now that the tornado alley has been shifting because of climate change. That means I know the executive of NIPSCO have been apprised of that too. So therefore there is been opportunity to beef up the infrastructure that can help reduce the level of challenge that people are facing.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I appreciate y’all so much for laying that out for me and our listeners, all of us. It’s really helpful information, even if it’s hard to hear. You’re right. It’s like the echoes of Katrina are just so loud and like Katrina and not just Katrina. I mean, I’ve been going around to places all over this country where working people are experiencing toxic explosions, constant pollution, or huge blackouts like this, or they’re being locked out of their jobs at poisonous facilities. I was just interviewing the BP workers over in Whiting who have been locked out of their jobs for five months. And for listeners, we’re talking about the same area that’s all right around the same area. And so I wanted to hook that into a question. Pastor Jackson, you were laying out the conditions that set Gary up for failure. The conditions that weren’t addressed by the company to mitigate the vulnerabilities that were there in case a major storm hit and certainly prepared for an emergency if this many people are without power.

How the hell are they going to get help? How are we going to reimburse them for the costs and how are we going to make this right? That’s a question that I think is on everyone’s mind right now. But I wanted to hook that into the conditions of Gary itself and life for working people in Gary as well. I wanted to ask if you guys could say, because Gleneva, you’re president of the teacher’s union, and we interview working people in education and all over the place, including BP oil workers in Whiting, Indiana, because we just talk to people about their lives, their jobs. And what we hear from folks is life’s getting harder. We’re working longer for less. Schools are more packed or they’re under-resourced. So that also makes our communities vulnerable to these kinds of catastrophes. I mean that also amplifies the burden that poor and working people have to bear in an economy that’s already asking them to bear too much.

And so I wanted to ask if you could just also help listeners understand what working people in and around Gary have been going through up until this as well. Are they making enough money? Is the air safe to breathe? How are people doing before a catastrophe like this hits?

GlenEva Dunham:

We have to remember, we go back about maybe about two months ago, NISCO was on strike. And I don’t know if you know that, Mr. Alvarez, that they were on strike. I was on the picket line with them and it was for working conditions. And I believe some years ago they did lay off 200 linemen. And so they’re working short-staffed. I sit on the board of the AFL CIO and one of my brothers, he just retired 35 years with NISCO. So he came on Facebook and did a diagram of how the process goes, how the trees and all of this. And then I want to say a couple of things about what Reverend Jackson said. So Mayor Milton did say that the governor, I did get a copy of his declaration because my whole thing was getting my teachers and my paraprofessionals paid. Although we didn’t work, we have in our contract, if it’s anything beyond our control, we get paid.

So that’s part of our working conditions. But there’s a $5,000 per household from the government if you can produce receipts, which is going to be hard because my husband’s been getting gas every night, but the gas stations haven’t had receipts. So that’s going to be hard from your food, if you have receipts from food that you threw away also. And we also have a foundation called the Legacy Foundation where they’re going to help with those monitors or meters that Reverend Jackson is talking about too. So I’m just trying to say there aren’t things working in our favor as far as things that’s not working in our favor. So working conditions, I mean schools, Gary schools were taking over for five years. We just got our schools back last year. This is the second year we’ve been out of state takeover. Then Mayor Melton was Senator Melton, and he was very instrumental in getting our school corporations back.

And it was all about money, but then that’s all about the state. I’m a State Federation president as well. The formula for funding, public education is like trash. Indiana has a, what, $4 billion surplus. And so always people talk about Indiana, I always just say, “Hey, Mike Pitce was our governor.” So it’s always about them being conservative, fiscal, so they can get on Trump’s bandwagon. Bron is, I call him baby Trump. So we’re not getting services. He just passed a law where his children won’t get fed next summer in summer programs, didn’t get fed this summer. When churches have their programs, they usually can rely on the government to bring in lunches. So all of that has been snatched away from us. So yeah, all of that. Big government, NPSCO, people talk about the monopoly. People have said we need another company. NPSCO has been around since I’ve been born, so I don’t even know how that works.

I know it’s all about big money, money talks. But working conditions, like I said, NPSCO was on the picket line. They went back in, their clericals stayed out because they didn’t get. But from my understanding, they really didn’t get what they were out there about, but they just came on back in. Well, BP Amico, theirs was much different. They’re trying to take insurance, everything. They’re trying to strip them and still, still trying to. So they had a bigger fight. So that’s a picture of economics and education. And Gary is always just, people look down on us. I thought Richard Hatcher was the greatest mayor ever, but if you listen to people talk, the detriment to our city started with him. But then it was about the black and white thing. We had the big convention here, the Black convention in West Side, and that’s when we gave the platform for Black America to go forth.

And a lot of people got elected after that. And so that’s on Gary. And then we had the great white flight. I was part of the integration movement. I lived in the projects, was bused to Glen Park, which is our white part of town back in the day where they thought that was better for us. So I mean, it’s a lot of history in Gary about why we are where we are. But I like to think about in the moment. In the moment, I sit on the Redevelopment Commission now appointed by the mayor. I finished one term. We have a lot going on. I hate this happened, but I just see it as a bigger picture. We have Glenn Robinson, one of our NBA players, he just donated $100,000. He did not cancel the Jackson weekend. So I’m sure they’re coming in town. I mean, we had the premier of that movie here.

So that second generation of Jacksons are friends with our mayor. So I can’t, being a union leader, I have to look at it on a positive because I deal with kids. I taught kindergarten for 31 years, so you have to be positive. And so that’s where I am. And I get it. I know the history of Gary. I know Hurricane Katrina. I saw all of that. But still where I sit, I have to think that better days are coming. We’re going to get through this because I’ve never seen what I’ve seen. I’ve never seen all these people coming together. A 18-wheeler truck out of Tree of Life. My husband just left from over there and people on Facebook saying what they got, Pampers and all that. I mean, lay people, a lot of my teachers who got little organizations, nonprofits, they’re meeting on corners, giving out supplies.

I just think it’s going to get better. I see in my own neighborhood, my husband is 80. I see the young man, they helped him pull his choke on his generator. They helped him get his generator fixed. So I’m seeing that in our communities and our communities have always come together in hard times. And I’ve seen it year after year after year. And so that’s what I’m relying on. Yeah, we got to get to the core of what happened. I believe Eddie, he reached across the aisles. He knows how to work with the people across the aisles. That’s how we got things that we’re getting now. That’s how we got all this money for demolition of the blight. Things are going down, things are coming up. So he’s a smart man. And so I put my money on him any day. No matter what anybody says, I know his heart, I know his spirit.

I know like attracts like people coming to our city because tomorrow Jamal Bryant will be here from Atlanta. My son is talking about the Keith B or whoever his name is. I don’t know him, but my son is 33 and that’s exciting. The young folks, the other young folks want to come and do stuff for us. And so I’m looking at it like that. I’m passionate about all of this, but I was out with power for 11 days too. And so I had no ideas. And I got senior citizens, I got retired teachers who I’m looking at. I’m like, how much more can they take? And so I’m glad Reverend Jackson was in on that meeting. I know my superintendent was there, and I know they put a word down in ISCO. And I’m just, like I said, 20 new trucks in our neighborhood. So I don’t know if I answered the question, but there you go.

Rev. John Jackson:

Yeah. GlenEva really set the stage when she went over the challenges Gary has had. Another framing point I tend to use is historically, Gary is similar to what happened in Haiti. When Haiti in 1804 was the first nation to liberate itself from oppression and servitude to France, it sent shock waves throughout the hemisphere. And after that, France, America, Britain has been punishing Haiti ever since, to the point of even forcing Haiti to pay restitution and reparations to have the unmitigated gall to declare that they’re human beings and would not be subjugated. But the people in Haiti are resilient people. They are a positive people. They are hopeful people, which is why they have been able to endure some horrific conditions that have been forced upon them. Like you mentioned And Cuba and how Cuba’s being strangled by this country as we speak. And so Gary has been under attack ever since.

It had the unmitigated gall to declare that Black folk know how to run stuff too and elected Mayor Richard Gordon Hatcher. And so that is when the vicious attack came from downstate in Indiana and then from after the Carter administration, then from the national government. And so the resilient and prideful and strong people of Gary have been enduring this for all of these years. So that’s part of the backdrop of it.

The federal dollars and all of the corporate dollars have not flowed in over the years. So people have had to use gum and duck and everything to put things together and have done a pretty admirable job. But the fact of the matter is we pay taxes and those taxes are supposed to go to making sure that working class people, poor people can have life with dignity. And so one of the other challenges that has been already lifted up is there has been not enough attention to Gary in this moment. This is an incredible moment in the sense that an unprecedented storm comes through and does massive damage and you don’t have national news. Now, Gleneva mentioned that Pastor Jamal Bryant is coming and then there are a lot of social media folk that are moving and using their resources. I’m getting calls from all over Chicago and whatnot because I work with an organization that’s a social justice organization, the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference.

And so there’s mobilization among people, grassroots organizations, everyday people, residents, helping their neighbors get through, cutting down trees so that they can get it off of people’s cars and help folk get the trees off their houses as much as possible, getting the streets clear as much as possible. Of course, folk do this in crisis because of their resiliency and their strength and their love for living and humanity. But the fact of the matter is we shouldn’t have to bear this burden like this. We shouldn’t have to bear the neglect that has happened. It’s not just NIPSCO. It is broader than that. And the line workers for NYPSCO, the people that are going out, getting on the poles and all of that, these people are working hard. They’re working. So it’s not about them. It’s about the institution itself. Because what we’re talking about is institutional.

You were talking about predatory capitalism, these things. So that’s why from this spiritual as a pastor vantage point, I see my faith and as a follower of Jesus Christ who also was a community organizer against the empire of Rome so that he could create an alternative community against the predatory nature of the Roman Empire, which had created society of oppression for people extracting from them profit and not caring about people. And so this is where the vantage point that I come from and therein is the hope because people are going to resist. People are going to build. People are going to help each other get together. But my focus is, okay, the lights are going to come back on. We can’t go back to business as usual. And a lot of people, all of us, you get happy when the light comes on. And again, that’s another metaphor for the light of our faith.

We get joy when the light comes back on, but the light also brings heat. And that heat then has to be applied so that we don’t get to this point again so that we can have a utility company that works better for the people. Now, I really hope that the executives have been listening and hearing the people so that they can take back the changes that need to be made. We’ll see. But we have to not allow the moment to just die down.

We got to keep pushing so that Gary can get the attention and the resources and the work that needs to be done so that again, there’s going to be another storm. It could be another storm in another few days. We are in this season of storms. Now, if things go the way they have been going, we’re going to do this again. And this is something we can’t do. It shows again, it covers all that there’s some stuff that needs to be done to strengthen. One of the executives, because the question was ask, well, how come the wires, the lines are not underground? There are places in Northwest Indiana where the lines are underground. They experience less outages than other places where the wires are on top of the ground. Well, the executive said it costs 10 times more to do that than to do what they’re doing right now.

I understand that, but NIPSCO is recording record profits. I’m going to leave it at that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I’m not because I’m like, they’re recording record profits and they’re saying it’s costing more to put the lines underground. And what they’re also saying is that that cost is less tolerable to us than the cost of tens of thousands of people going two weeks without power. That is what they’re saying is that costs, they could pay that cost, but they would rather working people, poor people, regular people bear that cost ourselves of their negligence. We are bearing the costs not just of their negligence, but of their profits. Those profits come in our expense. I don’t know if you could get a more clear cut example than this. Record profits for the same company while people that pay for their service are left without power for 10, 11 days and counting. So sorry, I’m just so fired up and frustrated about all of this. I was even going to say, well, we got to wrap up, but no way we can wrap up on that because I wanted to give y’all just one more chance to hop in because I appreciate you so much for your time.

I know I got to let you go, but I wanted to ask if you could just finish with any final messages you have for listeners about what they can do to help folks in Gary now and what advice you have to them about how they can put that lesson into practice Reverend Jackson spoke of, that there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to make sure that this kind of catastrophe doesn’t happen again or keep happening or keep getting worse every time the news cycle resets.

GlenEva Dunham:

I just want to say, if this is going to our Gary residents, first and foremost, we have to vote. We have to vote. Our voting record is dismal. So we have to get involved. We can’t just wait until crisis and things like that to want to come out. We have to get involved. We have to go to the meetings. We have activists like Carolyn McCrady herself who they have meetings all the time and they call the NPSCO execs to the meetings. And those meetings are not attended by the people who are in line right now. And I know sometimes it’s hard to get to meetings and stuff, but we have to become aware of what’s going on to us. So we just got to put our voice out there. That’s number one. Number two, I know the city has on their website, they have all kind of paid.

They have set up a fund. So there’s people because a lot of people are talking, a lot of people have platforms, and we are suffering. Some people are suffering and need help. And so if you can’t get to Gary, there are places where you can do donations and make sure that the donations get where they need to be. One of them is a legacy foundation that is a not-for-profit in our community.

Just continue to pray for us because I believe in the power of prayer. Tomorrow is Sunday. If you are gathering and worshiping, make sure Gary is spoken out loud, that you pray for us, that we get our power on, and that also we pray for folk like CEOs. We can’t forget them. We need to pray that their hearts are touched, that they would do a better job of the people who keep them living. Like Reverend Jackson said, we pay their salaries. And that’s where we fight all the time as a union leader. We have to tell the people we are taxpayers. These schools, that’s a whole nother thing, they belong to us. So we have to let people know that we are taxpayers and we do know how to protest. And Reverend Jackson again is good at that. His church is Afrocentric and they are a cornerstone in our community.

So we just want you to keep us in your prayers financially if you can, because it’s going to take a lot. I have a neighbor across the street who’s waiting, he has a tree in his yard, and he said that he’s in the queue. We have a 311 that you put your name in there, but I don’t think that they’re going to get his tree out his yard. I don’t think that he’s going to have to get somebody to do that. And I know financially he probably can’t. And so come to the community, get online, see some of the people who are talking, DM them, see what they need, the schools, all of us. So just offer us the assistance that you can.

Rev. John Jackson:

Frida and Gleniva, they are examples of ordinary people who just love God and who love our people and who love to be of service to people, just ordinary people who take on these roles because they want to help people’s lives be better. They are replicated by hundreds of thousands in Gary, Indiana. And so that just gives you an idea of the quality of people that we have. I forgot to mention when you asked about what has the residential Gary had to put up with. I work with a group called GUARD, Gary Advocates for Responsible Development. And just a couple of months ago, we had a town hall meeting dealing with the steel mill, US Steel that has been purchased by Nippon Steel, Japanese company. The town hall was about challenging Nippon Steel who pledged something like $4 billion when they purchased Gary as investments and challenging them to use funds to update the blast furnaces from the toxic furnaces they have to the clean steel.

Because that’s another issue in Gary because of the steel mill, because of a lot of factories and things like that, which there’s a high rate of health problems from breathing problems to cancer. It is a high rate because of this. So you’ve got this going on and now you got this going on. It is a heavyweight to carry. So one of the things that going forward, there is no Citizens Action Coalition for Gary, CAC, which help monitor to help put some accountability to NPSCO. So that’s one thing that needs to happen, that the Citizen Action Coalition would get established. And as Gleneba pointed out, prayer is always necessary because that’s the engine that drives us, that’s the connection that gives us strength because we are a believing people. But also going forward, the right attention and not always trying to find a negative and magnifying it.

Every community has negatives in it, but there has been campaigns to try to magnify a few negatives and not look at the great work and the great citizens of this great city. And so we need more persons like yourself, Brother Alvarez and others and the national attention to point out what actually is missing here. What is not being provided in this city of 60,000 plus people and the needs that they have from the schools to. And we can, as Laniba said, these are other areas that we could have a whole show on. Because again, it comes down to we are taxpayers and our taxes should be used to make sure that life is better. It should not be profit over people. It should not be price over principle. It should not be money over meeting. It should not be those things. And so from the federal government to corporations on down, we need more of the attention to point out that people are enduring and they’ve got joy, but they shouldn’t have to bear the burden alone.

That’s why we pay taxes. And voting, yes, voting is connected to these things. Voting is connected and we have to exercise. It’s one tool in the toolbox, but like a good carpenter, you use all the tools in the toolbox. So voting is important.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank all of our guests from Gary, Indiana. GlenEva Dunham, president of the Gary Teachers Union, Freida Graves, Project Director at Faith Farms, and Reverend John Jackson, Pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring about this. We do this work for you and we cannot do it without you. Working People is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by the great Jules Taylor and is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. 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 because we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of working people’s struggles around the US and across the world.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Check out our great podcasts like Under the Shadow and the Marc Steiner Show, and connect with us on social media and get updates on our reporting there. And please help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter now. It really, really does make a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.