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.

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we’ve got a very special episode for you guys. And we’re talking about the work, life, and legacy of a very special person, the late great Barbara Ehrenreich. 25 years ago this year, Barbara published what is still to this day one of the most essential and impactful books about working class life in America ever. And the book is called Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America. And if you listen to this show, then chances are you’ve probably heard of it or you may have already read it.

But if you haven’t read it yet, and if you haven’t dug into Barbara’s incredible body of work, then frankly, I kind of envy you because you have a feast before you, a feast for your mind, your heart, and for your soul. And to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Nickel and Dimed, the Nation Magazine just published a really beautiful and vital forum with folks from around the worlds of labor and journalism testifying to the enduring power and relevance of Barbara Aaron Reich’s work today. As author and friend of the show, Alyssa Cort writes in that forum, “The first thing I discovered is that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly unskilled.” This is from Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 masterwork, Nickel and Dimed. I read it that year when I was 29. Eventually, Barbara became my good friend and colleague as we created a media organization, The Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and wrote and edited articles together.

To recap, for that book, Barbara went undercover, reporting as she worked as a housekeeper, nursing aide, a home cleaner, a waitress at Jerry’s and Hearthside Restaurants, and a Walmart worker all in her later 50s, wrestling with cleaning products, carrying huge diner orders, and sometimes living in motels. The book was a departure from her earlier acidly funny and sociological work, ranging from midwifery to middle-class anxiety, but for which she rarely interviewed a soul. It’s hard to underestimate the effect nickel and dimes vacuum cleaner’s eye view of what it means to work a minimum wage job in this country had on so many of us. For those blinded by America’s late 20th century comforts, Barbara’s book helped us to stop unseen low wage workers. It also showed us what anyone who has ever made a pizza or taking care of a child already knew, but had perhaps not articulated that there is no such thing as “unskilled work.” As Barbara wrote, “The working poor, as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.” And Nickel and Dimed also helped precarious creatives like me and my ilk, freelance writers, art handlers, grad students, bookstore clerks, all paid hourly and shabbily, see themselves more clearly as being on a continuum with other working people.

Now, we’ve linked to the Nation Forum commemorating Barbara Ehrenreich and the 25th anniversary of Nickel and Dimed in the show notes for this episode. And you should definitely go read it when you have some time. And it goes without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway, that you should really, really go read Nickel and Dimed. And hopefully by the end of today’s episode, you’ll see why. There’s really so much that I want to say and could say here about Barbara Ahrenreich, but to keep it short and sweet, I’m just going to say this. I never had the honor of meeting or knowing Barbara personally, but I know that I would not be here doing the work that I do on this podcast, on the Real News Network and beyond without her. Her work has inspired generations of working class journalists and non-traditional storytellers just like me.

Her advocacy and institution building has made it more possible for people like us to have places to publish our work and for working class stories and voices to be heard. And I am so grateful to Barbara for that and to all who carry on her beautiful vital legacy today. And I am so grateful to all of our amazing guests on the show today who are doing just that. Thank you all so much for being here. Please introduce yourselves to our listeners.

Deirdre English:

I’m Deirdre English. I’ve written three feminist and class-conscious books with Barbara Ehrenreich, the former editor-in-chief of Mother Jones Magazine and a professor of journalism at the University of California Berkeley.

Alissa Quart:

I’m Alissa Quart. I created the Economic Hardship Reporting Project with Barbara. I’m a journalist and a poet. I’ve written seven books and edited one anthology. My last book was called Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream. And the one before that was Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America.

Ann Larson:

Hi, my name is Anne Larson. I’m the author of Cleanup on Aisle five: Essential Work: Poverty Wages and The View from Behind the Supermarket Register. I’m a fellow with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and Barbara Ehrenreich is one of my intellectual and journalistic heroes and mentors.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. Well, thank you all so much for being here. It really, really is an honor to be chatting with all three of you, and all three of you are my journalistic heroes, and I think you are all living testaments of the incredible legacy of the incredible Barbara Erin Reich. And I wanted to start by asking more about that. Whether you got to know her in person or through your work, tell us and our listeners more about Barbara and what she and her work have meant to you.

Deirdre English:

I got to know Barbara because we were both on the faculty of an experimental radical college called the College at Old Westbury with a mission of social justice and a very multiracial student body and teaching staff. And we taught women’s studies courses together, some of the first back in the ’70s, and then we spent seven years writing three different books together. Perhaps the one I’ll mention is called For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Expert’s Advice to Women, which is about the impact of health and mental health professionals on creating stereotypes about women based on gender, class, and race, and helping to authorize those stereotypes to make them seem as though they were scientifically based and authoritative. So Barbara and I were really more than friends and coworkers. We were really sisters. I lived in the same house with her for periods of time.

I’m the godmother, or as she called me, the goddess mother of her two children who I am still very close to and who are remarkable testaments to Barbara’s influence too. Her kids are both extraordinary writers and activists. I’ve had a lifelong relationship with Barbara and profoundly influenced by her. She influenced. And then when I was at Mother Jones, I became her editor and she had a column. She did a cover story on one of her books, and she was a frequent advisor. And then finally with the founding, we’ll be talking about Nickel and Dimed and that whole period. But then with the founding of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, I certainly consulted with her then, and now I continue that role with Alyssa by being on the board. And so Barbara’s just had a profound lifelong impact on my thinking and my commitments. So

Maximillian Alvarez:

Deirdre, I got to ask from one editor to another, going from friend to editor is not an easy transition to make, especially when you’re editing Barbara Ehrenreich. How was that transition for you guys?

Deirdre English:

Pretty smooth because Barbara was such a great writer. It’s actually the best writers who are the easiest to edit. They get the big picture and they get back in the day when we had a paper publication before it was digital, sometimes you just have to cut for space and the professionals know how to do that. So no, no, no, we never had any arguments. But I’ll just say one more thing though. An editor should always remember that the piece belongs to the writer. So your role is to help the writer, not to impose yourself on the writer. So throw that in too.

Ann Larson:

I never met Barbara Ehrenreich, but I read Nickel and Dimed pretty soon after it came out. And I think I was the graduate student at that time, maybe my first year in graduate school. And this was 25 years ago, this was still sort of end of history type era. We just had Bill Clinton for eight years, and there was this sense that everything had worked out how it was supposed to work out. Capitalism was great. It had defeated all the other alternatives, and everybody got what they deserved in life. If you worked hard, you could succeed. And meritocracy was the name of the game. And so Nickel and Dimed just sort of punctured that myth so profoundly and so completely that it was so necessary at that time. I taught the book or portions of the book in a class I was teaching at the time as a graduate student.

And I remember being struck by how funny it was that students that I taught, we were reading these about poverty and low wages and living in motel rooms and cleaning shit out of toilets, and yet we’re all just laughing and hooting and hollering through the whole thing. And I just remember thinking, “What an amazing writer that you could write about these topics that are so dark, and yet we’re all laughing the whole way through.” I just think that’s a very rare talent that she had. And then we can talk about this a little bit more, but at that time I was a graduate student. I was planning on a career in academia. The idea of service work was not something that I worried about for myself, though I had come from a working class background. But a few years later, I found myself working in a supermarket.

And I remember thinking about nickel and dimed and seeing it differently once I’m doing the service work and a line from the book, I hadn’t read it in several years at that point, but I remembered a line from the book. I’m working behind the cash register and I’m tired and it’s weeks and weeks and I’m struggling to learn the job. And Barbara Arenak’s voice popped into my head and it said, “What you don’t necessarily realize when you’re selling your time by the hour is that what you’re actually selling is your life.” And I just thought how apt that was and how accurate it was that she’d really captured that I was now living, I was now experiencing. And so that influenced me and made me think I should write about this job because Barbara did it. She sort of forged a path for me.

Alissa Quart:

I read it when it came out in 2001, but my favorite book by far was Fear Falling. So I had been introduced to her earlier than that. I had been, like Ann, at CUNY Grad Center in English and Sociology and had been adjuncting. It was the introduction for me to what I would later call the middle precarious, this kind of precarious middle class where we were making, I don’t remember what it was, Anne, it was 2,000, $3,000 a class, and we were somehow supposed to also go to graduate school. So I started to see after I read Nickel and Dime, a continuum for the first time between my own experience as a kind of unstably middle-class person and the people around me who were serving food and taking out the garbage and making people’s beds in hotels. And I saw the connection, which I think had been purposely obfuscated by third wave Democrats, which is part of what Anne was saying also.

And I too had gotten lost in the aestheticism of the ’90s in its attitudes, in its stances. It was a very alluring decade for Generation X people who were into alternative culture. You could just lose yourself in Sleeter Kinney or something and in poetics and theory and get disconnected from the experience of class even when you yourself were living it. So what it was, it was both a reminder and a form of self-knowledge reading it because I suddenly was like, “Wow, my time here adjuncting at Kingsborough Community College where people are screaming at me and I can’t afford my rent even in the East Village is being stolen in a way.” And so I actually wound up dropping out of graduate school for better or worse as a result. And then years later, obviously I met her. I was working on a film called The Last Clinic, which is about the clinic at the Center of the Dobbs case in Mississippi, women’s health.

And I was the producer and the writer with the great director, Macy Crow, and I was raising money from Barbara. And I called her and it was unbelievable. I was sitting in the middle of a magazine office. She said, “Hi, Alyssa.” And she starts talking about Jane, which I believe she had firsthand experience with. And I just was like, “My God.” I mean, I fell in love, I think. I felt like I had finally found not just a mentor, but family, a mother of sorts, a spouse of sorts, a place where I belonged as a person, but also as a mind and a kind of politics, which in journalism is hard to find, let’s be frank. This is not a field filled with activists or unusual poetic people or people who are incredibly moral. And she was all those things. And also as a woman, she was incredibly generous to other women, and we can talk more about that.

I feel like she didn’t have some of the conventional gender identifications of a lot of boomer women who might see themselves as internalized masculinity and all this kind of stuff. She really was about women and about encouraging women. I mean, she had a lot of male friends and male colleagues and men in her life. But I think she wasn’t competitive and defensive in a gendered way, which really set her apart, honestly. So after this love match, I started working for her at the Economic Hardship Reporting, and she insisted we call each other co-editors, which of course was a marketing person’s nightmare. She’s like, “We have an anarchist socialist nonprofit.” I was like, “Okay, but I better not share this with our funders. Flat hierarchies.” I was like, “Okay.” But I knew also that this was the only way I could actually do this was with somebody like this.

And the idea of our organization was to fund people who were truly working class and fund people like she and I who were journalists who wanted to write entirely about income inequality and no longer had the resources. So actually, yeah, Max, you were one of the people I encountered early on.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, baby. I mean, like I said, we are all in some way or fashion living proof of Barbara’s incredible legacy, and that includes me and this show. I mean, not only would I not be doing this work, there wouldn’t be a market for this work without someone like Barbara. And on top of that, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project has sponsored episodes of the show. They’ve connected us to folks that we’ve interviewed on this show. It’s an incredible, incredible organization and legacy that you and Barbara built from the ground up. And it’s touched so many of us and helped tell so many of our stories. And I think I’m honored to be in the struggle with all of you to carry that legacy forward however we can. But I want to go backward again because I think you guys have really touched on something that is super important for folks to understand about Nickel and Dimed itself and everything in it because you can’t understand it just by reading it today.

You have to understand who we were and where we were at the time that it was published. And it was published in 2001 and written in a turn of the millennium America that feels so incredibly far away today in many respects. I mean, I was still a teenager then. I was a conservative, middle-class, dipshit, mixed race kid in Orange County in Southern California who still didn’t really know a whole lot about life and who had no idea how bad things were going to get over the next 25 years. I identify with the stories that y’all were telling because when this book came out, my family was part of the middle class in that post-Cold War boom. And then we lost our middle-class status in the post – 2008 crash Great Recession, including the house that I was raised in. And so I read the book very differently later on in life than I would have had I picked it up in 2001.

So I want to really take listeners back to that time. And I wanted to ask if you could say more about who you were then, what the country was like then, and what working in America was like then.

Deirdre English:

Barbara never bought into the boom myth. I think that certainly throughout the Reagan years, which were the 1980s, Barbara was continuously aware that wages were still stagnant for the working class. The postwar boom really ended by the ’80s, and the boom was for the business elite and corporations, and it was Reagan deregulation. And then moving forward a little bit in time, Barbara never fell in with the Clintons. And in fact, a lot of her concern with poverty came about because during Clinton’s regime, the push to eliminate welfare, welfare as we know it, and to force women mothers into jobs to justify their welfare payments, that was actually the impetus of writing nickeled and dimed. I was actually part of a group with Barbara that I think was called the Committee of 100. It was 100 feminists who were protesting Clinton-esque welfare reform, and we failed to stop it.

And then Barbara was left with the question, well, what is actually going to happen to these working women who are being pushed off welfare and into the workforce? And so if that’s supposed to be the answer, get a job. Let me go out and look and see whether you can support yourself on a low wage job. And that was the genesis of nickel and dimed. So that would be some part of my answer to your question.

Ann Larson:

I mentioned earlier this idea of the end of history and the meritocracy had went out and everything was as. We were in the best of all possible worlds and how nickel and dime sort of punctured that myth. I do think also one of the things that I remember from that period is this kind of looking back, it seems like we were all living in this myth, in this kind of dream world, and our feet weren’t really on the ground in a way. I really thought I was going to get a job in academia and be a professor. I mean, I think about that now, given my background and the fact that I went to CUNY and I studied English, and that was never going to happen. That was always a failed venture. But I believed it. I got on that path and people told me it was going to work out.

If you work hard, it’s all going to work out. And so one of the things that I think nickel and dimed does is it not only punctures the myth, and I’m talking more about Barbara’s work in general, books like Fear of Falling and Natural Causes. She wanted to see the world as it really is, not how we wish it would be. She was really a critic of delusion in all its forms. And this goes from in Bait and Switch, she talks about the myth that just by updating your personality or getting a new wardrobe is going to be the key to a new job. Or in another book that she wrote, kind of busting the myth that positive thinking can cure breast cancer. She sort of refused to succumb to that kind of thinking. She was really insistent on science, on evidence, on rational thinking.

And even in one of the last books she wrote, if not the last, she wrote about these mystical experiences that she had as a young person that sort of hinted at something supernatural beyond the realm that we live in every day. But even that didn’t change her mind about the fundamental class divide in the world and the fundamental reality that we live in. And I just find this very inspiring. To me, it’s a very kind of socialist way of thinking without. Barbara didn’t wear her socialism on her sleeve. She wasn’t out there pounding the gavel. What she showed is a way of looking at the world in a concrete and material way and an insistence that we not be diluted about how things really are. And that way of thinking, that really grounded concrete way of thinking is the foundation for political change.

Alissa Quart:

Yeah, I love that, Ann. When I think about what was going on in 2001, I mean there’d be a terrorist attack six months after Nickel and Dime came out, World Trade Center buildings falling, killing over 3,000 people. There’s the Enron scandal. There’s all those accounting crises. And Wikipedia launched that year and kind of a notion of unskilled expertise, which I think is important too, because she was really pushing in nickel and dime for rethinking what unskilled labor was. And I think the knots had a complex relationship with what skilled and unskilled labor was, especially thinking work, what had to be done by amateurs and what could be done by professionals. And I also think one of the things that was interesting about that time, not just this forcing us to see what the Democrats, the centrist Democrats were masking with the end of AFPC and so forth.

It was also a moment when people could publish these kind of books. Which is less and less common. I mean, Anne, who’s on this panel, just did. I do. A few other people do, you do Max. But I think there was a time when No Logo was a bestseller, Fast Food Nation, Michael Paulin’s early books. And these were mega sellers, as was Nickel and Dimed. There was an audience for them. And there was also a real hot critique of commercialism and a lot of these factors. I mean, my first book branded The Buying and Selling of Teenagers was in this vein. And I do see Nickel and Dimed as part of that as a kind of materialist account. The years that transpired after the Forever War would say, oh, do we have the energy to worry about the consumer economy and labor? Shouldn’t we be worried about the threat against our nation?

There was all these different enemies that have been constructed since then. But it was pretty clear in that ’90s knots period, even though it was being masked, that those were the polls. It was like this flushed consumer economy that rested on the backs of workers, that rested on the brainwashing of teenagers to buy shit, that rested on people being fed terrible meals, supersize me, and Michael Moore’s films were about that. So I think that’s part of the scene that I think of. And I also think of just the level of consumerism in that time. You can’t even imagine. It was very go-go before there was a crash.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and that’s what I remember. I mean now it’s like I tell my daughter, it’s like, yeah, that was the era of what I would call free range capitalism, where we were allowed to run around as consumers and stretch our legs a little more. We had a little more buying power. And the consumer felt like an important thing in the economy, whether you were going to a restaurant or staying at a hotel. It felt like you could still vote with your wallet as the proverb goes. That we still had some power to determine what the economy looked like and get what we could from it. We could still make enough to earn a good living. Like Ann was saying, our feet weren’t even really touching the ground. But that bubble burst for me at least after 2008. And in the years that have followed, I feel like I’ve only come to see more and more what Barbara saw back then that me and my family couldn’t.

Because when we heard about worker issues like that, we saw them as consumers. And we saw them as, well, I’m the fast food consumer going in paying for my meal, or I’m the student going to get an education. Why is it my job to care about the employee on the other side? They should be doing their job kind of thing.That was such a prevalent way of thinking in America and sure as hell in conservative, middle-class, Orange County, California. But again, that really came crashing down for me and for so many of us over the next 25 years. And frankly, reading Nickel and Dimed in the America, in the world that we’ve got here and now in 2026 is quite a trip. And I wanted to ask y’all, why do you think it is still important for folks to read Nickel and Dimed and Barbara’s work in general today?

What can her work still teach us now? Or what has it been trying to teach us for years that we still haven’t learned but really need to?

Deirdre English:

Well, the economic pain has spread. And I think that Alissa really was speaking directly to that when talking about the middle-class precariot and the fact that a middle-class way of life has become increasingly unaffordable to the working class and to large parts of the middle class. I mean, of course in America, everybody thinks they’re middle-class, so it becomes very hard to talk about class for that reason. But basically the great increase in unaffordability since first the enormous crash of 2008 that wiped out so much value and showed that all that home ownership was based on a bubble economics, and then the rise of the forever war, so absorbing so much of our economy in military spending. So we’ve just seen so many social failures during this period of time. And I just want to also mention that the rise of what you were talking about, the consumer economy is also the rise of the service economy from the worker point of view.

And that was a big shift in the working class because it was largely women who got those service jobs, as Anne has written about so brilliantly in her book about grocery store work. I mean, obviously there are men working in grocery stores too, but the “opportunities for women that are often blamed on feminism,” like that feminists encourage women to go into the workforce. Well, no, economics forced women into the workforce. Feminism tried to make circumstances better for them. I don’t think we’ve succeeded. But Barbara was just very aware in nickel and dime, those are all jobs of women workers in the service economy. And so that was really burgeoning while the kind of extractive industries were all being outsourced and technology was coming in and absorbing a lot of those kinds of jobs. So Barbara was just so aware of the shifts in demographics and economic policy and economic reality so that she always saw under the surface of what people thought was going on to what was really going on.

Alissa Quart:

I sometimes see her as sort of like an ultra violet light, like forensic dusting where we can see things that we wouldn’t otherwise see. I love what you just said. That was so smart, Deirdre, and about the consumer economy being a service economy being female. And when we’ve been assigning Looking at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a lot of the pieces we assigned were people who have taken low wage work writing about what it’s like inside of that, including Anne, but also Joseph Williams, Danelle Alexander, Daryl Wellington, a bunch of other people. And that to me was part of what Barbara also wanted to do towards the end of her life was she didn’t want to just be the sort of co-pastoral woman underground, my man Godfrey, I’m going to go into the supermarket in a mask and become the worker. It was like she wanted to hire the person who had actually been that, who was a writer and a reporter and an active mind who could name and wasn’t doing it as a stunt.

And I think that to me, that was part of the understanding of the line between journalist and practitioner that started to expand in the knots when experts in amateur started to blend a little more. Publications like The Global Post started assigned to local reporters rather than to have white dudes fly in to cover shit. And I think she was doing the domestic version of that. Let’s not have people parachute in. Let’s have people write from their own place. And I followed that to the letter. I mean, I just thought it was really important. And also having people who could think critically. Anne here is such a great mind and you really are. And she can interpret a lot of the things that she was experiencing structurally. And that’s another thing that Barbara was really interested in.

Ann Larson:

Just wanted to note that one of the things I’m thinking about hearing this conversation is that Barbara was a baby boomer. And I don’t know, that seems important. Somehow we have this whole, hey boomer where we make fun of the boomers, God love them.

Deirdre English:

Okay, boomer.

Ann Larson:

Right, that they’re just like these clueless. And there’s some truth to it. They grew up in this time where there was more opportunity and you get education and it’s going to work out for you. And there was room for upward mobility in a lot of cases thanks to government investment and public goods. And we all know what the French call the tant glory is, these 30 years after World War II when working class was making gains. And so for Barbara to be in that generation and yet recognize all the things that people on this panel are talking about and just see through that mythology and to see, as Deirdre put it, what was under the surface, I think we should pause on how extraordinary that is. I mean, I think one of the reasons that was the case is because she had working class roots herself.

I grew up in Montana and I believe her dad was a minor. But then her dad, if I’m remembering correctly, ended up becoming an executive. He advanced in his career and ended up leaving the mines and became something of a professional. And so she got to see this upper mobility, this transformation. But it wasn’t just that she had a really good memory for that period of her life when she’d been working class, but she really just, she saw welfare being cut. As Alyssa mentioned, she saw what was happening to aid to families with dependent children. She saw free trade agreements sending jobs overseas and that expanding the service economy that she wrote about. And so it wasn’t just a good memory, although that was part of it. She just never lost her talent for recognizing the way the material world was the foundation for what was happening in people’s lives.

And in terms of what’s changed, I mean, I think there’s no better example of what stayed the same than the minimum wage has been stuck at 725 since 2009 or something like this. I mean, this is something out of just the dystopian universe that we have not raised the minimum wage since 2009. And I just think Barbara saw that this was the way things were going. And she was able to see not only through this and of the mythology that we’ve described, but even in her own generation, in which so many people had a different experience, and even in her own experience, her own family kind of crawled out of the working class. She still stayed true to her vision and to herself. And I think that’s very rare.

Deirdre English:

We baby boomers, we came of age in the ’60s and there was a vast movement to be a part of. And Barbara and I were both very much a part of it. The anti-war movement where I really came of age in my college days doing that and worked on two documentaries about the anti-war movement, about anti-war Vietnam, and working with Vietnam vets. And then the women’s movement that Barbara and I both really kind of shared our journey into that world and into what was missing in the women’s movement and what was missing in the labor movement, which was a lack of feminist consciousness and on the left. So all of those, there was this big thing, the movement, and we felt very much a part of it, supported by it, buoyed by it, but also the productive arguments that happened within it. And so Barbara wasn’t a lone figure, she was a standout figure, but I think she always felt part of a much larger community and with multifaceted elements in it from the labor movement, from the women’s movement, and many others.

Alissa Quart:

Yeah. I mean, I think it’s important to note, like you just said, she didn’t see a different distinction between advocacy and journalism, like that thick line that we’ve been taught in J schools for decades, the voice of God and NPR and neutrality and all the major newspapers. She thought it was really important to bring the movements into writing. And that I hope is also another part of her legacy. And honestly, I mean, look at the DSA. I mean, she was the first co-chair with Michael Harrington. So it’s not just what she’s done as a writer or what she’s done institutionally, it’s politically. And I think that is also a legacy within journalism to not forget politics on that level.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, I think that’s all beautifully and powerfully put. And it really reminds me of Barbara and the rare writers and people who see and fight and write the way that she did, have taught me ever since. Like y’all said, you don’t necessarily need to see the world through socialist goggles, but once you stop seeing them through the kind of capitalist goggles that are welded to our eyes from birth, then you start seeing things how they really are and you become a socialist real quick. So that’s what it was for me is I was so conditioned for so long to see the country I lived in a certain way. And it was a massive financial crash that taught me otherwise. It was our government bailing out the banks and big corporations while families like mine fell through the drain that taught me that. It was working on a warehouse and factory floors with people I had been taught to say were dumb and deserved to be in those jobs because they couldn’t do anything else.

And here I was with a degree from the University of Chicago doing the exact same job in 2010. I mean, life taught me a lot of what capitalism and America tried to keep from me for many years. And Barbara taught me a lot more about that. And I was so grateful when I kind of lost that innocence, that American innocence of realizing the world and the country that I actually did live in, instead of believing I lived in the fiction that had been presented to me. I was so grateful to have a book like Nickel and Dimed to help guide me from that point to a greater consciousness and to more answers and to more hope about what can be done about this for families like mine, for people like me, for the hundreds of people and workers that I’ve interviewed on this show over the years, their families.

I’m so, so grateful to Barbara, to Nickel and Dimed for all that they have helped provide me in my long sort of recovery from the hangover of the capitalist fiction that I and my family had lived under for the first half of my life. And I wanted to sort of turn that into our final question here because I could talk to y’all for hours, but I know I have to let you go soon. And I wanted us to sort of finish by talking about the legacy of Barbara Ahrenreich herself and of course her work, including Nickel and Dimed, whose 25th anniversary we are celebrating this year. And so I want to frame the question this way. We now have the benefit of hindsight to see in our past what we frankly could not see coming in the future that lay before us 25 years ago.

With our life experience and with all the lessons that Barbara Ehrenreich has taught us, what wisdom can we offer through the gift of foresight to ourselves today with everything that we’re facing and to our descendants 25 years from now?

Deirdre English:

Well, I mean, I would say Barbara actually foresaw herself the advent of AI on middle-class jobs. And she actually very presciently wrote in an essay in Time Magazine that I haven’t read since it came out, but it struck me so much at the time that maybe the middle class was soon going to be facing the downward mobility that the working class was experiencing. And that when the robots came, when technology came for writing jobs, journalism jobs, teaching jobs, white collar jobs, the way it was already coming for so many working class jobs, definitely factory jobs, that maybe the middle class would wake up and understand their commonality, which Alyssa has been speaking to and which Alyssa is very alive to talking about the precariot. Maybe they would begin to understand that the bosses were not their friends and that the scraps that they were getting from the owner’s table were getting less and less and that they would begin to experience a sense of unity and class consciousness and fighting spirit.

And so that’s happening. It’s going to accelerate. And one hopes that what will also accelerate is what Barbara called for, which is that unity and oppositional spirit.

Alissa Quart:

Yeah, I’m hoping for this unity. And I’ve been talking to people about how they’re affording America. I wrote a book called Squeeze Why Of Families Can’t Afford America almost 10 years ago now. And I’ve been returning to some of those topics because it seems very of the moment, the middle precarious. And what startles me is people saying things like middle-class people, people who earn six figures saying things like, “I don’t feel like America likes me.” And just that emotionalism of that, I feel like that is where this kind of emotional politics is going to start, where people feel like they’re part of a gradient, a range of class positions that are being kept down by people who are manufacturing insecurity for really the 99%. And that concept is no longer just pablem, but it’s something that people actually live and vote by and connect to each other around.

Ann Larson:

I’ll just end by, I really want to emphasize something Deirdre just said, which strikes me as really important about movements. I think just one generation after Barbara as a Gen Xer, I didn’t feel like I was part of a movement. It was like all individuals who were working hard and trying to make it work in the professional class or whatever. And I think what Barbara would want us to do is rebuild these movements that used to serve as a foundation for social action, for thinking, for camaraderie, for solidarity. I’m also the co-founder of an organization called the Debt Collective that is trying to organize the debtors to bring some sense of community and collective strength to people that are drowning in debt. It’s why I’m so proud to be part of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project where I think the organization publishes people that are writing as part of movements, that they see journalism, like Alyssa just said, is not just something that you should be objective and talk about facts, but as part of a movement building work.

And to me, this is, I think, a real key to. We can’t think of individuals. You can do your best as an individualism, but there’s a limit there unless you have a movement behind you, unless you have a culture that supports the kind of thinking and work that Barbara did and that we should all be trying to do.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, the great Deirdre English, Alissa Quart, and Ann Larson. I also want to thank the Nation Magazine and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project for all the vital work that they do and for helping us put this special episode together. Go check them out, subscribe and support them using the links that we provided in the show notes. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our 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, and rest in power, Barbara Ehrenreich. Solidarity forever.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners just like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are headed north to the state of Vermont, where frontline healthcare workers and the patients they serve are facing a major crisis at the University of Vermont Health Network, the state’s leading healthcare provider. In an article published in the Rake Vermont, which is an independent worker-owned news outlet based in Vermont, writer Matt Moore breaks down the situation like this. “In June, UVM Health eliminated over 140 positions across its network, a third of which were union positions, according to AFT Vermont, which represents workers there.

The cuts which the hospital estimated will save $9.5 million comes as the network faces a $300 million budget shortfall. Rules set by the Green Mountain Care Board, which regulates Vermont hospitals, will require UVM Health to cut expenses by that amount over the next three years. Later that month, UVM Health handed down a speed up order to its medical group, which includes outpatient clinics and more than a thousand physicians, which practitioners say will result in briefer appointments with patients. Owen Foster, the former chair of the Green Mountain Care Board, took aim at what he saw as the excesses of UVM Health in a board meeting last September. “It’s essentially an expensive and ineffective layer of overpriced and unnecessary corporate bureaucracy that has proven itself both physically and spiritually distant and unconnected from the mission of our flagship academic medical center and the needs of Vermonters,” Foster said.

Foster found that the surplus revenue earned by UVM Medical Center was being siphoned off by UVM Health to subsidize its hospitals in New York State that the network has been unable to manage profitably to the tune of over a hundred million dollars over the last several years. He noted that at the same time that UVM Health was shutting down kidney dialysis services in St. Alban’s, Rutland, and Newport, it was moving $10 million from UVMMC to its New York hospitals. Multiple executives, many of whom had received a combined $3 million in bonuses in 2024, were laid off in October of 2025 as part of a restructuring process. However, the most recent round of cuts and likely future cuts are aimed directly at the caregiver and support levels, leading to reductions in the quality of care for a majority of Vermonters.” To talk about all of this, I am really grateful to be joined on the show today by two guests.

Melissa Lavalle is secretary of UVMMC Support Staff United and VP of Healthcare for AFT Vermont. And Teagan Cook is lead outpatient chemotherapy scheduler at her hospital and a chief steward in UVMMC Support Staff United. Melissa Teagan, thank you both so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. And I know we got a lot to dig into here, and I want to talk to you about everything that’s happening now at the UVM system with these devastating cuts or restructurings or whatever we’re calling them and the events that led to this point. But before we do that, I’d really love to start by getting to know more about you all and the work that you do. Every week we strive to remind listeners that there are flesh and blood human beings and fellow workers behind every name tag, every job title, and every one of us has a story worth telling.

So please tell us more about yourselves and how you got into this work and the kind of jobs that you do.

Melissa Lavalle:

Thank you so much for having us. I’m Melissa and I’ve lived in Vermont my whole life. I was born here. My family lives here. I was the kid that moved furthest away because I was 45 minutes from mom and dad. I’ve worked retail. I’ve been a grocery store clerk. I was a photographer inside a Kmart for Holy Mills. And when they were going to cut my health insurance, I decided it was time to get into a job line that would give me health insurance. And that’s what brought me to working in medical. I’ve been a medical assistant and I am currently the finance and admin assistant for the psychiatry and mental health departments. There’s a lot of backend bureaucratic needs, paperwork, vacation time, continuing education stuff. And so I am the department Santa. I love my job and love serving the folks that are giving wonderful and such needed mental health care to our community.

Teagan Cook:

Thank you so much for having us. I’m Teagan. Like you said, I’m the lead outpatient chemotherapy scheduler here at UVMMC. And I got into my job after previously working in law, which is where I have a degree. Not the one you can actually do something with, but still a degree in law. And the industry of law has just so many miserable soul-sucking problems without a lot of real emotional reward, at least that I was feeling. So I ended up moving into healthcare, which is a place where you can actually make a real difference to real people. And not all of it is couched in a bunch of pseudo-Latin nonsense. A lot of it is just making real connections with your patients, understanding what their daily lives look like. A lot of what my day-to-day looks like, if you came behind my computer, it would look like I was playing Tetris a lot of the day because I’ve got the blocks of each person’s treatment that we’re trying to all stack together to make fit to get as many people as possible safely treated in the amount of time and the amount of space that we have.

It’s very rewarding. I get to make contact with a lot of different people from across the state. I’ve got patients in New York, I’ve got patients in New Hampshire, I’ve got some patients in Canada. And working here has been really incredibly rewarding. But unfortunately, as time has gone on over just the past three years that I’ve been here, sometimes the stress and the weight has started to outweigh that reward in some ways that are really specifically related to the way that our labor as workers here is treated.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I want to really talk to y’all about that at the shop floor day-to-day level. But I guess I need your help here because I want to talk about the crisis that is happening right now in the UVM Health Network. And first we need to help our listeners understand what is this crisis exactly? What do folks need to understand? Is it a budget crisis? Are you facing draconian cuts? Is it a shortfall? I guess we don’t have to get too far into the weeds that we lose sight of the whole plot, but help us understand what exactly the nature of the crisis that y’all are facing there at UVM is right now.

Melissa Lavalle:

It is incredibly complex, and I can kind of scratch the surface. For years, for decades, management at the top was kind of left alone to do what they want. And what they wanted to do was give incredible salaries to the folks at the very top. We went from being Fletcher Allen to University of Vermont Medical Center, and then the Health Network was formed. So now the network encompasses five hospitals in Vermont, and I think two or maybe three in Northern New York as well. So that necessitated an extra level of administrative folks at the top, and they’re not the ones making $20 an hour by any stretch of the imagination. Vermont’s really unique that we have what’s called the Green Mountain Care Board. It came out of the work of activists in 2011 in the passing of Act 48, which ostensibly created universal healthcare in Vermont.

We never had a governor that was able or willing to find funding for that. So instead this advisory board was created and yearly Green Mountain Care Board reviews and either approves or denies budgets for hospitals in the state. About three years ago, Green Mountain Care Board really put their foot down. Vermont is the most expensive state in the country to buy or get healthcare. And they said, “This is insane. UVM Health has an obvious monopoly on the state. You folks have been making way too much profit for too long, and now it’s going to be a cut.” So the budget, instead of having any growth to it, actually had a reduced amount of profit that was allowable. So now that they’re not able to charge the most exorbitant prices for literally everything, they are saying, “We’re losing money every day. Austerity measures need to go into place.” And what that looks like is those 140 cuts and staff just being overworked in almost all locations.

Teagan Cook:

Yeah, Melissa has a much more of a bird’s-eye view of it than I do because Melissa is much deeper into the daily goings on of the union. So she’s much more well-briefed than I am. But as far as how I’ve seen this in my day-to-day work, it’s been, for example, in my clinic, which is the outpatient cancer clinic at the flagship hospital in the network, the scheduling team is about three weeks behind at any given moment, which doesn’t necessarily sound like a big deal if what you’re generally familiar with as far as healthcare scheduling is just a primary care physician’s office. If you’re three weeks behind looking at that, generally it’s not going to be a huge deal for scheduling. But here in the outpatient cancer clinic, these are patients who are coming in twice a week or every single day, five days long once a month, or they’re coming in every other week, which means that if we get three weeks behind, we are operating so far behind the patient’s actual reality that it functionally doesn’t even make sense for us to be doing our jobs because we are working with outdated information that we then have to crosscheck with the more up-to-date information that we’re seeing in the chart.

Everything takes longer because we have to do that. We get further and further behind. Patient care falls further and further behind. And we’re all very concerned about the safety of the care that we’re able to deliver because of this. And this could be solved with safer, better staffing by increasing our numbers by just two or three more people. And we’ve been refused for months and months and months. Even while going through an official grievance process to try to address the issue, we have continued to be denied.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, I want to ask one more kind of clarifying question here because it seems like in all the kind of research I was able to do before we started recording this episode, there’s some competing narratives going on here, and that’s sort of muddling the picture and making it hard for folks to understand what’s going on here and why it’s so egregious. So I wanted to ask who is behind the narrative that this is a $300 million budget shortfall that requires squeezing people at the bedside level, people in the office level, and cutting back the most essential labor and piling more work onto the most essential workers?

Melissa Lavalle:

So there’s always yours, mine and theirs, but Green Mountain Care Boards saying, “You folks have made way too much money off of Vermonters for way too long. You need to lower your prices.” UVM Health is saying, “Oh my God, we used to make this much money, but now we’re only allowed to make this much money.” So normally in my mind, folks would lower the prices of things. What they’ve done instead is lower the number of available inpatient beds. So they’re seeing fewer patients, so therefore less money is getting made. And there was a law that went in that said they had to drop their prices on cancer infusion drugs because those were just astronomical through the roof. So care board says you’re making too much. Hospitals says we’re not making enough any longer. And from the union’s perspective, we’re saying this was poor management over decades and you’re now asking your lowest paid workers to bear that burden.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, let’s talk about that sort of how we got here question. Because sadly, this is a story that I have heard from healthcare workers across the country in different contexts. I’ve talked to workers on the picket line at a private Catholic hospital here in Baltimore saying very similar things. I’ve interviewed workers on strike at Kaiser Permanente in the Pacific Northwest saying similar things. Workers in Chicago at a university healthcare system there, very similar story. But the devil is also in the details and not every story’s the same. But it feels like the effects that people are feeling are very similar, which is that workers are being burnt out because they’re being asked to do more with less for less while either hedge fund type corporations are buying up their hospitals and forcing them to speed up production for the sake of more profits. Or you got a system like your guys’ system where you’re being forced to claw back your operations to sustain an unreasonably poorly managed from the top down system.

Again, those are different situations, but the effect is very similar on the workers and the patients. But as you said, Melissa, that didn’t happen overnight. And so I wanted to ask how the hell did it happen? And how did you all as rank and file workers experience this over that time?

Melissa Lavalle:

A fact I heard once that really blew my mind was most hospitals used to be owned by the doctors. They were kind of co-ops that the doctors owned. And so if something terrible happened, you know whose door to knock on to complain. But letting hedge fund managers, letting private equity into healthcare. And even in Vermont, UVM Health is a nonprofit network, but letting business managers run health decisions does not work. And every other industrialized country in the world has figured it out that it’s most effective not to be paying these insurance middlemen to do nothing but mostly deny folks. Are governments capable of administering Medicare, which folks are generally happy with. With Medicaid, folks are generally happy with. And this introduction of the business element into health is where things went wrong, to be totally honest. Folks are making money off of something that should not be a money-making enterprise.

Teagan Cook:

I mean, I think what it boils down to, to your point, Melissa, is the fact that hedge fund managers, extremely well-paid executives in the healthcare industry, it’s kind of like the final frontier of late stage capitalism. This is the last way that you can profit off of not only your workforce, but the physical bodies of your workforce and the people around you. UVM Health has a monopoly on healthcare in Vermont, which means that all of their workers are here receiving care from them for the vast, vast majority, which means that not only are we struggling to get them to pay us wages that are meaningful in the economy of Vermont, which is total trash garbage right now, but there’s also the fact that we are functionally handcuffed to whatever decisions they’re making about what our healthcare is going to be like. I know, and I’m not alone in this, my fiance and I have been having to have really serious talks about when we get married, what’s going to happen to his healthcare?

Is it going to be worth it? Are we going to have to delay our wedding? I don’t know when I’m going to be getting married until we get a new contract for our union because I don’t know what my healthcare is going to look like. I don’t know what guarantees I’m going to have, and I’m not going to be able to get married if I have to pay $800 a month for me and my fiance to both have care as chronically ill people.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Jesus, man. I don’t know how people can hear stories like that from everybody everywhere all over the place. And we all just accept it as like, well, I guess that’s just the way things got to be, but that’s not the way things got to be. And I do want to talk about in the end, what can be done? What can folks listening do? But by way of getting there, I wanted to bring things back down to that worker and patient eye level. Can you tell us how, since those initial cuts, what this is translating to for frontline workers providing healthcare and for patients seeking healthcare?

Melissa Lavalle:

Patients seeking healthcare are definitely experiencing waits. They know it. They know why. When my husband goes to his primary care that’s part of the network, there’s one person to check in and check out folks in an office with 25 providers. You’re waiting longer when you call in to try to talk to a nurse to get a prescription refilled from your primary care. It’s just more work, more stress. You know that the cuts happened. And it’s so weird how they always seem to happen a couple of months before bargaining. So we have been in bargaining. And when we did our pre-bargaining survey, we’re doing combined bargaining between our support staff unit and the technical professionals unit of the VFNHP nurses union. So your radiologists, your respiratory therapists, those sort of folks.

But the layoffs really also energized our members to see that this is why we’re bargaining. And when we did our pre-bargaining survey, 3,300 members across the board, the priority was safe staffing. And our folks are not in great economic shape. We know wages are a thing, but we work in healthcare because we care about our patients and because we know we are the patients as well. And that was far and away what folks cared about, that when community members are coming to us, that we are safely staffed and they’re not going to get worse because they came to UVMC for care.

Teagan Cook:

Yeah, I think that the staffing is really the critical issue. And some of those layoffs did affect union members and some of them were non-unionized staff. For example, folks in IT, folks who were in MGET, which is medical group education and training. Those are the folks who train newly oncoming doctors how to use our health record system, which is byzantine and complex. So you know how it is. The money that the people at the top are getting is never going to trickle down, but the consequences that the people at the top impose trickles down. So it takes longer for these doctors to get appropriately onboarded. It takes longer for them to get the hang of how things are supposed to be done in these systems so that things are going through workflows correctly so that people like me are making sure that you are getting scheduled out for your treatments appropriately and safely.

People in IT getting laid off. I have had a ticket out for a fax machine that my unit uses to get looked at since April, and nothing has happened about it. And that doesn’t sound like a big deal except for the fact that not all outside facilities will accept electronic faxes. And that means that we are not able to, until that gets addressed, send imaging orders to those other hospitals because they won’t accept them because they’re only e-faxable right now because we don’t have a fax machine, which can result in patients getting delayed care in something as important as getting imaging done to figure out if their chemotherapy is working or not.

It’s difficult. The layoffs and the threat of more layoffs has created such an environment of paranoia and distrust, which is the exact opposite thing that anyone needs. We’re already all struggling enough, but it’s just created an incredibly difficult work environment from the things that are tangible, like the stupid fax machine, to wondering every day when you come into work, is this the day where I find out that I don’t have a job anymore and that my patients are going to call in and just end up waiting on the line for three hours to get a simple answer.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So where do things stand now and what can be done about this? And what can anyone who is listening to this conversation right now do to help?

Melissa Lavalle:

The base of the problem is the for-profit healthcare system. That just has to be the foundation that we’re working from. In our bargaining, like I said, priority safe staffing, we’re fighting for safe staffing committees. The hospital came proposing takebacks from our first contract. So that is one of the places where we’re kind of far apart. But one of the things we’re also doing on top of joint bargaining is a common good platform. We’re asking for protections for our immigrant coworkers. If they get detained, they don’t lose their jobs position, they don’t lose their health insurance. They get time off to go to these appointments when they need to, even if it’s short notice, like we know is happening more and more often. We’re asking the hospital to join our local community group as Migrant Justice, and they have a Milk with Dignity program to only source milk from farms in Vermont that treat their workers appropriately, give them safe housing, give them safe work conditions, pay them fairly.

And we are also saying that the hospital, in all its poverty, stop using its very high paid lobbyists and publicity folks to fight us in our plate for universal healthcare. Act 48 is on the books. We intend to get it funded and enforced. And every time we’ve tried in the past, the hospital, which is a huge economic driver in the state, has had their people at the state house pushing back, pushing back. And the time has come to stop. We cannot cut our way out of this. And I would encourage everybody listening, if they don’t have a union that they can get involved in and push them to fight for universal healthcare, get involved with a grassroots organization. They are just literally everywhere. Folks see this problem, and we know what the solution is. It’s a single-payer healthcare system.

Teagan Cook:

Yeah. I mean, what Melissa said, what it comes down to is that the for-profit healthcare system is functionally a vampire that is sucking us out of money without any real significant payoff. I don’t know anyone who has gone from being on Medicaid or Medicare to being on private health insurance and gone, wow, this is so much better.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Melissa Lavalle, Secretary of UVMMC Support Staff United and VP of Healthcare for AFT Vermont, and Teagan Cook, lead outpatient chemotherapy scheduled at her hospital, and a chief steward in UVMMC Support Staff United. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our podcast feeds, our website, and our different social media pages, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today.

I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. I’m 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. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we are going to Whiting, Indiana, where for the last five months, oil giant British Petroleum or BP has locked 800 workers out of their jobs at a crude oil refinery on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan. This is the last unionized BP refinery in the United States, and this is a really important struggle and a really important story. But with everything in the world and the news being so crazy these days, it has not gotten the attention that it deserves from national media.

But that is why we are so lucky to have someone like Sarah Lazare, a brilliant journalist and the editor of the excellent Workday Magazine going where others won’t and lifting up the stories that need to be told and heard. In her recent report titled Locked Out Refinery Workers Say BP is Trying to Starve Us and Crush the Union, which was jointly published by Workday Magazine and the American Prospect. Sarah writes, “British Petroleum, one of the 10 largest oil and gas companies on earth, kicked out its workforce at the Whiting Crude Oil Refinery, which at its peak produces 440,000 barrels a day on March 19th. The previous contract expired in January and United Steelworkers Local 7.1 declined management proposals that workers say would existentially threaten the local. The union has been locked out for over 140 days, and it says it is fighting for its survival against an employer that wants to cut pay in jobs, undermine workers’ ability to strike and tear the local away from national bargaining.

The lockout is illegal,” the union says. By late May, United Steel workers had filed 15 unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that the company is refusing to bargain in good faith and using threats, coercive statements, and surveillance. The fight has become a test of endurance. On one side are workers who are not receiving the equivalent of strike pay, though members can ask for help from an assistance fund financed by the United Steel workers. On the other side is an oil company that brought in $189.2 billion in revenue in 2025. In an email to Workday Magazine and the prospect, BP spokesperson Cesar Rodriguez said that the company is pursuing, “Modernized job structures, training, and upskilling.” But workers say that this is just code for greater disposability and degraded conditions, and they declare a new pay progression would make it easier for BP to fire people and harder for workers to get to the highest rates of pay.

They’re also concerned about the proposed loss of dozens of jobs from the bargaining unit. On March 2nd, management presented the local with their last, best and final offer and the union membership voted it down. A revised settlement was offered the next day, but it too was rejected. On March 17th, the union gave a counter offer. Just four hours later, the company rejected our counterproposal, issued notice of the cancellation of rolling extensions and a notice of intent to lock us out of our jobs effective at midnight on March 18th, according to the United Steel workers. To talk about all of this, I am really grateful to be joined on the show today by three guests. Eric Schultz is the president of United Steel Workers Local 7.1. Leno Miller is an assistant griever for USW Local 7.1. And Tim Powell is a 19-year member of USW Local 7.1 and a volunteer for the Lockout Assistance Committee.

Eric, Leno, Tim, thank you so much for joining me today on the show, especially with everything that you guys got going on. I really, really appreciate it. And I do wish we were meeting under less horrifying and infuriating circumstances. And we’re going to talk about the lockout and everything that’s going on right now. But before we do, I’d love for listeners to get to know you first because most people have never met or spoken to folks in your line of work. So tell us more about yourselves, how you got into this work, and the kind of jobs that you do on a day-to-day basis before this lockout began.

Eric Schultz:

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for taking the time to have us. Again, my name’s Eric Schultz. I’m a machinist in the refinery. I hired in October of 2009. I started off in our machinist apprenticeship program. So that was a four-year apprenticeship where you learn the refinery inside and out from a mechanical standpoint. What machinists do out here? It’s kind of an amalgamated trade. It’s more like a millwright machinist. We’ll do anything from repairing pumps in the field, turbines, compressors. We have shop work where we repair relief valves, the pumps and the turbines inside the shop. So we do a lot of things from A to Z as far as a maintenance millwright mechanic would do. And then so that was 2009, about 2014, July of 2014, I came onto the union board as a divisional rep. I represented our machinists and our instrument in electrical groups.

And then about five years ago, I became president of local.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, man. You machinists need to rebrand as the MacGyver union because you’re out there fixing things that I didn’t even know existed or that are taped together and you got to have an intimate knowledge of this machinery and the kind of machinists I’ve talked to from the railroad industry to the gas and oil industry to Kellogg’s. There are just so many nuances that none of us understand. So I can only imagine the kind of stuff that you guys are doing out there in the field.

Eric Schultz:

Yeah. Especially in an oil refinery, it’s a very niche market. You run into equipment that you wouldn’t run into in many other fields. We’ve got equipment from the 1940s and 1950s all the way up to incredibly modern equipment. So you kind of need to know the gamut. And we’ve got some amazing machinists out here that they’re absolutely experts on their units. They’re the ones that our operators will turn to to ask for help troubleshooting. Even our engineers walk into the main shop where our pump mechanics are, turbine mechanics, and ask them to help diagnose what went wrong and what they could do to fix it. So we’ve got some amazing mechanics out here, machinists. Hey,

Leno Miller:

My name’s Leno Miller. I’m a operations specialist for the refinery. I grew up in the area. I’ve carried a card my entire adult life, first of which out of high school, I carried a Teamsters card for a couple years. I worked at the local UPS plant. After that, I ended up in an automotive plant. I carried a UAW card before I got into the refinery. I hired in just shy of 20 years ago. So if BP refuses to come back to the table and bargain in good faith, I can get 20 years on the outside locked out, which not a good feeling, but that’s where we’re at. Inside the refinery, like I said, it’s been almost 20 years. So I started out as an operator, which do rounds, take samples, monitor the equipment on a day-to-day basis. We work 12-hour shifts, swing shifts. From there, I became a board operator, a council operator, which is a specialist by trade what’s referred to in the refinery.

And then I ended up becoming a chief operator as well, a chief operator and a council operator, which is a cross-qualified position, which is one of the positions that the company is proposing to do away with. So I would essentially get bumped down from a chief operator and a board operator to a technician. I would lose my specialist qualification and my pay that comes with it.

Tim Powell:

I’m Tim Powell. I started almost 20 years ago. It was 19 years this January. Started at the Cats and it was spent just about 10 years.

Eric Schultz:

No one’s gonna know what the Cat is…

Tim Powell:

Yeah. So I started over at basically a gasoline processing unit. Spent 10 years there. Had an opportunity to transfer to another part of the refinery where we were basically make diesel using high pressure hydrogen and crude oil. And I was an outside operator for most of that time. About six years ago, I got onto the console board operator job as well. So specialists, we take training every year. We do training every quarter going through computer training. Now they’re trying to say that we need to interview for these jobs again and see if we’re still qualified to be there if they’re even going to keep the job. I’m third generation USW on both sides of my family. There’s been union people throughout my family from coal miners to steel workers, city bus drivers. I mean, my family has lived on a union paycheck for generations.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, let’s talk about that.Because I started this show eight years ago not knowing much about unions at all. I did not grow up in a union family. In fact, back in the day, we were more of an anti-union family. We didn’t know anything. And to be honest, the few union jobs that my brother had had at a Rite Aid just weren’t good. And so I think now that we’re at a point in this country where less than 10% of the workforce is actually in a union, it’s important to talk to folks out there about what being in a union means. And so I wanted to ask you guys, why is it important for workers in this industry especially, and workers in general, to have a union? Tell us more about why being in a union is important to you and your family. And then let’s sort of unpack some of the nuances of labor relations in this industry that listeners need to know about.

Because again, we’re talking about the last unionized BP refinery in the United States.

Eric Schultz:

Yeah, sure. I mean, from my perspective, the first thing that most people come to, they think about is pay. Pay, retirement, when they think of a union. For me personally, I feel like in this industry, it’s more about the ability to collectively bargain, meaning we have 800 people that get to stand shoulder to shoulder, elect representatives, the representatives, then go sit down with the company. And you’re on as close to equal footing as you’re going to get. Without a union, it’s each man or woman for themselves. So the byproduct of that collective bargaining, yeah, it gets pay and it’s retirement, but to me, most importantly, it’s having a voice on the working conditions inside the plant, safety issues. We’ve got a contractual joint health and safety committee where members of the union sit down with members of management monthly to identify safety issues and then create programs to try to address those issues.

So at the end of the day, we do make good money because we work in an incredibly profitable industry and it’s a highly complex job that all of us do out here. But what good does that do if at the end of the day, you’re going to go home and you’re not going to be the same way that you left? You’re going to go home injured or even worse. And this is an industry that when things go wrong, they can go wrong real fast. Incidences can turn into fatalities very fast in this industry. An incident that spirals out of control inside of an oil refinery is highly likely to affect the community. And if you follow along in the news in the last year or two, it seems like once a month we’re reading about a refinery fire in which the community is ordered to shelter in place because of toxic releases that are getting into the community.

So to me, the most important piece of a union is to make sure that we go home safe and that when you retire, you actually can enjoy your retirement and not be struggling with debilitating injuries or diseases, which are very prevalent in this industry. You look at the cancer rates for an oil worker versus any other line. You look at mesothelioma, different issues. We have asbestos is all over the refinery. Everywhere you look, there’s stickers on piping that say warning asbestos. So we live with these things every day. And that’s to me the biggest thing that a union could do is help protect its workforce.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and just to sort of underline everything that you said in red pen, listeners are going to have the hairs on the back of their neck standing up the same way I am because I’ve interviewed on this show a worker, Leo Linder, who was on the deep water horizon when it blew in the Gulf. So if folks are wondering how bad could it get, that’s how fucking bad it can get. Pardon my French. But it can get bad in so many other ways like we’ve been covering on this show. We talked to folks in Roseland, Louisiana near the Smitty Supply Plan where that massive explosion in fire happened and people said it was raining black sludge all over the place. I mean, we’ve talked to residents of East Palestine, Ohio where that Norfolk Southern train derailed over three years ago. And you’ve heard the hell that they’re going through.

You’ve heard the hell that railroad workers are going through and how they are being crushed into oblivion while all of our communities, our supply chain are being put at long-term risk for the sake of short-term, massive profits for Wall Street shareholders and company executives. This is part of the same horrible, vicious cycle that we’re hearing about from working people in different industries in different parts of the country all over the place. So please, I beg you, pay attention to what these guys have to say. Leno, sorry to hop in there. Please hop back in.

Leno Miller:

No, you’re spot on. And the refinery operates not only in Whiting, it’s basically in the center of three communities. It operates in Hammond, Indiana as well and also East Chicago. So it’s in the middle of a very populated area that has accepted the risks of operating a large crude oil refinery in the middle of it. But the promise that was made was the community was going to get some of the benefit of that. We were going to get the jobs. And it’s like you said, that’s where they’re breaking the promise. So if you’re bringing in workers from out of state to try to replace us and you’re trying to extract wealth out of the community, not even wealth, you’re just trying to extract a basic income and a basic way of life from the area in order to send it to shareholders and wealthy executives, especially it’s a foreign oil company.

So I mean, that’s the goal, right? And that’s what people need to understand. They’re trying to take from our community and from people that actually live and work here in order to send it elsewhere.

Tim Powell:

To build on something that Eric said too about the equal footing to have when we’re talking, when we’re negotiating with this company, a union honestly to me is the only way that everybody who has a particular job is going to get that same pay. Doesn’t matter how much the guy next to you is kissing ass to the company. It doesn’t matter if you’re a bad woman or what color you are. You’re getting that pay. It’s not that your friend across the aisle is going to get an extra 20 bucks an hour because he’s buddies with the boss. Everybody gets the pay for that work. And that’s the only guarantee honestly to me in this country that you have that.

Eric Schultz:

Yeah, absolutely. One of the company’s large proposals that they have on the table is to eliminate seniority as a means for promotion. And they view it as, well, it’s a flawed system. It’s not always the best person that gets it with seniority. They want to go what they call merit-based. Well, you look at, well, let’s look at reality. Let’s look at outside of a union facility. Do women and men in this country make the exact same amount of money for doing the exact same job? Why not? Because the merit-based system is so effective. Do minorities make as much money as white men in this country for doing the exact same job? Absolutely not. I mean time and time again, no one would even argue that case. Well, is that a merit-based system? It is. So merit, they act like merit is some great system that only the best and the brightest rise to the top.

And they’re full of shit and everybody knows that. The guy who plays softball and goes to the bar with the supervisor afterwards is more likely to get the good jobs and get better pay. The executive’s nephew that gets brought right into the plant and gets to go to the front of the line, that guy is more likely to make more money than everybody else. That’s what merit-based systems are. So absolutely, that’s one of the main issues with them. And back to the safety piece, another one of their issues, and I don’t want to get too much into the nuances of the proposals because we would need a three-hour show probably. But what one of them is the reclassification of all of our jobs. So as Leno was saying, right now he’s risen to the level of an operations specialist. We have operation specialist field, operations specialist board, and then operations specialist cross qualified, which is you do them both.

That is the top of the top. So they want to eliminate those roles, but then still have us do the same work. But they want to call us tech threes and tech fours, and then the company would get to pick the tech fours. But then they also, for our operators, they want them to have to know five different jobs throughout the refinery. Places that are, it might take you 15 minutes to get from this unit to the next unit, and that’s hoping there’s not a train stopped in the middle of the refinery. So they want to spread everybody out and make them the term jack of all trades, the ace of none. Well, if you just go back a few years ago, our sister refinery in Toledo, Ohio, which BP has since sold, it’s no longer a British Petroleum facility, but there was a double fatality.

Two brothers were killed in a fire out there. And the Chemical Safety Board, when they came back, when they finally concluded their study, one of their findings that they punished the company for was rotating the operators too much so that they didn’t just get good in one area. So the company’s taking credit for, well, I’ve got this many operators that can handle this many jobs, but they can’t do it. They necessarily can’t do it well. You do it better when you specialize. So flash forward, so the Chemical Safety Board says that the company was wrong for the way that they were handling operations. So what does this management group decide to do? They decide to put a proposal on a table to do exactly here what they were doing in Toledo and spread our operators too thin. And people just saw the proposal, the average person in the community, they wouldn’t understand the implications of the company’s proposals.

And it would make it incredibly unsafe out here. Not to mention making these guys do a lot more work for less money, but again, more importantly, you’re going to have a bunch of people who just aren’t going to be as familiar with the equipment. When stuff goes wrong, you need the people that just know instantaneously, instinctively how to get out there and what to do.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I mentioned earlier that this is the sickness that we’re seeing spread to industries all across the board. And even though people may not understand the nuances of y’all’s contract, they understand that sickness of the corporate-minded Wall Street-minded obsession with cutting costs year after year, piling more work onto fewer workers, removing important layers of security to save a buck, and all at the expense of the workers who are being asked to do way too much for less than they were getting before. That leads to hazards all over the damn place. That’s the same stuff that we’ve heard from your fellow machinists at Boeing who described like, “Hey, how did job conditions and planes get so bad at Boeing over the years?” Well, this is part of it. That worker that I interviewed on the Deepwater Horizon when it blew in the Gulf, he said the same thing.

BP was pushing speed over safety and look at the results. I mean, the same thing was said to us by the railroad workers. They’ve been cutting jobs. They’ve been making the trains longer and heavier. They’ve been making workers be on call twenty four seven, running them into the ground. And it’s only a matter of time until those short-term profits run out and you end up with a massive, massive, dangerous problem that’s going to take years to fix. And that is, again, I really, really want to stress for folks, those are the stakes of what we’re talking about here, not just for frontline workers in these industries, but for fence line communities living near these industries or living near a railroad track, living near the Gulf of Mexico or any coast where your ability to go outside is basically in the hands of wealthy corporations that are making disastrous decisions that could impact you and your family.

But I don’t want to belabor the point because I know we have limited time here. And I wanted to, before we get really into the lockout itself, Eric, I wanted to ask if you could unpack for our listeners the baseline of understanding that we need to have for labor relations in this industry, how this is working with bargaining with BP. I mean, because we had to learn that four years ago when the railroad workers almost went on a national strike. I had to become a PhD in the Railway Labor Act and explain quickly that there are 13 craft unions. There are four major rail carriers. Everyone’s bargaining in sort of different fashion. So listeners of this show are a little familiar with hairy labor questions like that. But I guess just for your average lay listener, what are the things that folks need to understand about how bargaining works in this industry so that they understand everything that we’re going to talk about with the lockout?

Eric Schultz:

Yeah, sure. So in the oil industry, we bargain at a national level. Not every facility, but every USW facility is in one way or another part of the national oil bargaining pattern agreement. And that’s been since the 1960s. Since the 1960s, there’s only been. We haven’t had a national strikes. We had one in 2015. Prior to that, 1980, I believe. So there’s really, yes, how is the labor relations in the industry? National oil bargaining, it’s been a stabilizing influence for both our members and the companies. Usually when we’ve got our final settlement offer on the table, the top table will bargain it and then it gets passed out to everybody else across the country and we put it across the table locally. Typically, you always feel like, “Man, I wish we got more. It wasn’t great, but 90-something percent of the membership votes yes for it.” And that’s probably how good bargaining works is neither party walks away feeling like they absolutely got the whole hog.

Both parties feel like, yeah, we got something, we gave up a little bit of something and we move on. So that’s how it’s typically been. Now this is a lockout, and there’s only been two lockouts in the oil industry in the last 25 years that we’re aware of. And there’s one common denominator between the two lockouts is there’s one guy that was at ExxonMobil on the HR team, on the negotiating team that was part of the lockout in Beaumont, Texas. Again, it was an Exxon refinery in Beaumont, Texas. They were locked out for 10 and a half months. While they were locked out, British Petroleum liked what they saw. They hired one of the guys from that team, his name’s Jordan Marks. They hired him and he came to Whiting and started working in the background. He wasn’t at the table with us in the first round of bargaining, but he had been there looking at the contract and trying to devise a way to do here what he did in Beaumont, Texas.

And so that’s where we’re living right now. Part of the reason that we believe that we filed so many labor board charges is that it was apparent that the company was at best surface bargaining. They had no intent to get an agreement this round of bargaining. Their intent was to push us into a strike. And then eventually if we didn’t strike, then they were just going to lock us up. So this was preordained. The company had this in mind the entire time, and that’s absolutely apparent. Now, national bargaining, everybody else, every other corporation that’s a part of it agreed to the patent. There was only one other site. There’s a site in California that’s having issues too. But the rest of the country, the membership all voted yes, and the companies all voted yes on national oil bargaining. We are in an absolute different spot than our peers.

When we get together with our sisters and our brothers from other locals, people that work for Marathon, people that work for Exxon, Chevron, they don’t have these problems. Most of their negotiations were not contentious. Obviously they didn’t get everything they wanted, but they all got a deal on time. So that’s kind of where we’re at is we’re just in this spot where British Petroleum chose years ago to go down this road in an effort to break the union here, to eliminate the union.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s talk a little more about that. Let’s talk about how we got to this point. And what are the key contract issues and working conditions that you’re fighting with the company over right now? And how far back does this fight go?

Eric Schultz:

So it started, I mean, they kind of tested the waters in our last round of bargaining. So our last contract negotiation period was in 2022. It was another round where the rest of the country, the companies and the unions all agreed to national pattern and moved on down the road. We had to roll our contract for weeks after the expiration of the contract because British Petroleum had a 120-day strike and lockout notice on the table, which is something that they also did. Jordan and his cronies in Beaumont, Texas, there was a little bit less, but they put a strike and lockout notice on the table for them, the previous contract. So again, it’s lazy just bringing the exact same lazy playbook. So that was last round of bargaining. And eventually we had enough people in management that had a spine and could push back against corporate interests that were pushing for that 120-day strike and lockout notice.

And they pulled it off the table and we went down the road. So really it started last round of bargaining where you could see the items on the walls. Our smaller bargaining units, we also represent a plant right across the street called White and Clean Energy, which is a British petroleum plant. We represent our plant guards, our pipeline employees. And we’ve seen the company coming just absolutely trying to gut their contracts. And that’s what we saw this round. I mean, it’s hard to answer what are the issues because it’s everything. They basically took the contract book and went from cover to cover. And they’re proposing to change pretty much anything that benefits a union worker. Again, with the job reclassifications, we have decades of memorandums of agreements, letters of understandings, side agreements that govern how our job classifications work and how they’re policed. They want to eliminate all those and start all over again and then put management’s rights on everything.

Once we ink the deal, their proposal is going forward, the company can make any changes they want that they see fit. So who would sign a contract that the very next day it’s rendered useless because the company could go and change it however they want? And that’s where our job classifications, how we’re trained, what kind of work we have to do, how they can eliminate someone, how they can terminate someone for the company’s, their interpretation of lack of ability. So that elimination of seniority for the bidding into higher positions, elimination of plant seniority for the purpose of layoffs. So right now their proposal is they could basically, once we sign the deal, if they wanted to eliminate one of our groups, our lab, we represent our laboratory employees. As soon as we sign the deal, the company could then give us a piece of paper saying, “Oh, by the way, we’re going to lay off 50 people in the lab.

And then it would just go by that. Whereas right now we have plant seniority. If they wanted to lay off 50 people, it’s the 50 junior people, which makes it painful on the company. But what it does is it forces them to come sit down and be reasonable and have a conversation about how can, okay, you have to reduce headcount. We don’t want to talk about it, but we will. We’re not afraid to have hard conversations. And then we’ll work out a way to try to help them meet their goals, but at the same time protect our members. They want to eliminate that. I mean, it just goes on and on and on. Management’s rights for the use of AI. Their original proposal was that the contract language would survive the life cycle of the contract. They said it would go into perpetuity, meaning you’re going to agree to something that forever you’ve given up your rights, your local, state and federal rights to bargain over the use of artificial intelligence forever.

And that’s just ridiculous, absolute ridiculous language. But again, it just goes on and on and on. Any one of these issues during a regular year would’ve been a very contentuous issue that could have led to a strike or a lockup. And instead, they decided to throw the entire kitchen sink at it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And the way that they’re trying to sweeten this deal is offer one time payments to you guys. Basically blood money to say like, “Hey, take this couple thousand dollars and sign away your collective bargaining rights.” I mean, that’s nuts. And that’s me speaking. That’s just me editorializing, but this is kind of making my head spin. And I know I could talk to you guys for hours, but we don’t have that long. And so with the time that we have, I wanted to go back around the table and just ask if you guys could sort of tell listeners how this whole lockout situation has unfolded as you’ve experienced it. Give us a worker’s eye view breakdown of events on the ground since the lockout began to now. How are you guys holding up after five months of this?

Tim Powell:

Well, with me being on the assistance committee, we’re meeting at least three days a week, sometimes more, usually six to seven hours a day. And everybody brings in their necessity bills. They bring in your mortgage, your rent, your car note, your car lease, your medical bills if they’re broken down in the monthly things, insurance, our medical insurance. The things we need to live that we can no longer provide for ourselves because BP took away our paychecks. We on the assistance committee hear the sad stories every day of like, “Well, we had to cut this back. We weren’t able to do this with the kids this summer. We weren’t able to do this. I had to sell this.” And you get jaded to it because you’re hearing it all the time, but every day there’s another heartbreaking story that you’re hearing because this person put in between.

I’ve got guys who have put in two years, I’ve had families that have come in, the guys have been here 25 years and they can’t provide how they’ve been providing for their family for the last 25 years. It’s crazy.

Leno Miller:

Yeah, it hurts. And that’s by design. I mean, that’s what BP is the company that we’ve, all three of us have been here on average close to 20 years. And by design, the company that we’ve. I mean, we’ve all missed holidays, birthdays. We’ve been dedicated workers for 20 years. And in order for short-term gains to be able to take from us, this company just posted in three months they made $5.7 billion and they’re paying a bigger dividend. We’ve been here sacrificing our personal lives for 20 years and they are intentionally hurting us and our families. So it’s shameful.

Tim Powell:

Now just are the holidays we’ve missed, but you mentioned 12 hour shifts, 16, 18 hour shifts, 12 to 19 shifts in a row. I mean, yeah, it’s great money when we’re working, but you don’t see your family for 19 days. You go home and you say hey to the wife and you fall asleep. For them not to think that this is a sacrifice every day that what we’re doing for them to then make a sacrifice even farther on this, it just drives you out of your mind.

Leno Miller:

That goes back to you asked the benefits of a union. We’re the union. The union is its workforce. The union is voted by us. It represents us. It is us. It’s the workforce. A Fortune 500 company, the workers are a line item. You’re a number on a spreadsheet. You mean absolutely nothing to them. Nothing at all. So Bernie’s Petroleum has no loyalty to us whatsoever. The only thing they care about is their shareholders. That’s it. It’s short-term value. Like I said, they made $5.7 billion in three months and increased their dividend while we were locked out.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So where do things stand now? Like what can be done and what can folks listening to this do to stand in solidarity with y’all and the other 800 folks who have been locked out here?

Eric Schultz:

So unfortunately, we’re at a standstill right now. Again, as Leno just mentioned, that’s by design. They didn’t lock us out with the intent to hurry up and get a deal. They locked us out knowing that they have a number in their mind. They know how many months that they wanted this to go. They’re going to want to put as much economic stress and pain on families as possible with the intent that eventually will crack. Eventually enough of the membership will be. When they’re visiting the assistance committee asking for help, those conversations will turn from uncomfortable right now, painful, turn to hostile and panicked. That’s what the company wants. We’re not there yet. We’re not even close to there yet, but that’s their design. We don’t foresee, unfortunately, this ending anytime soon. The things that we’re trying to do, we’re hoping to make some headway is public pressure, try to make sure that the community understands what’s going on and then try to ask the community to be vocal, to stand up and support us and tell British Petroleum to end the lockout and get back to the table.

And for the first time, actually come seriously with the desire to bargain. We’re asking the same of our local leaders, whether it’s political leaders or community leaders. We’re asking the same of state officials, federal officials. We feel like if we can get enough public pressure, enough political pressure, enough economic pressure on maybe somebody in London will finally say, “All right, enough’s enough. Let’s go. Go get a deal.” So that’s kind of where we’re at right now is just in this holding pattern and doing everything we can to keep our membership and their families propped up. Just yesterday, one of our representatives, Carolina Ramsey, she’s also the one that runs our. She oversees our entire assistance committee. She helped organize a school supply giveaway and backpack giveaway. That was really well attended. We had a lot of local political leaders pitched in and put the word out to get these supplies sent in, book bags and everything that would be needed to go inside of them.

So between things like that, the food pantry, we’ve had our local food bank, Northwest Indiana Food Bank, teamed up with the United Way and we had four mobile distributions where they came out to the union hall and dropped off food. Like Tim was talking with our assistance committee. We’ had our assistance committee up and running since about maybe a month into this. And we’ve given out quite a bit of money, and we’ll continue to do so. And everything we’re doing is with the intent to try to make sure that people stay calm, that people have at least their basic needs met and just kind of supplement them while at the same time asking them to go out and find work because that’s how we’re going to win this is by being able to withhold. And we’ve had numerous people go out of state to find jobs.

It’s an interesting spot to be in. Some people had no problem right away going to find a job. It depends what field you came from. If you were in the local pipe fitters union before you came and worked here and you still paid your dues in the background and still kept your car, you probably went right back to work. Same thing if you were in the electrician’s union, carpenter’s union. But some of our operators are in a much different spot because this is such a niche field. Where do you go to the next refinery to go find a job? And that’s where people are having to go out of state to go find work. And a lot of people can’t because we’re almost, it’s like we’re toxic to them because they know, “Oh, well, why would I waste money to hire this guy or gal if they’re going to leave and go right back to British Petroleum once the lockout’s over?” So we’ve had a lot of people say, “They told me they loved me.

They loved everything about the interview and my resume. They’d hire me, but they ask that I commit to I’m not going to go back to the refinery when the lockout ends.” And when people would honestly tell them, “I can’t promise that,” then they’d say, “Well, thanks. If you change your mind, let us know.”

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and what you’re talking about goes the other way as well. I mean, for folks out there listening, the question of why should anyone stand in solidarity with 800 union workers who’ve been locked out by their employers? Because you stand with your fellow worker. I mean, you do it because it’s what’s right to do. That’s our policy on this show. It’s been our policies from the beginning. But on top of that, I think anyone living near this facility in Indiana or Illinois would want to know that that dangerous, complex facility is being operated by undertrained scab workers right now. And we don’t ever want to punch down and say your fellow worker is your enemy. I mean, those people who have taken those jobs have their own bargain with God that they’re going to have to kind of deal with. But the point of fact is, is that the trained specialists that you’re talking about are not operating the specialized machinery in that oil refinery right now.

Leno Miller:

Yeah. To expand on that too, one of their proposals that’s a sticking point for us, as Eric mentioned, that they brought to the table last time as well is the strike and lockout. Right now we can serve 24-hour strike notice. Currently, they want 150 days. Their BP stance publicly that they keep repeating over and over is that they need that. They need at least that 120 to 150 day strike notice to be able to continue to operate the refinery safely in the event of a work stoppage. How much notice did they give us when they locked us out? 24 hours. So both things can’t be true. Either you don’t need it or you’re lying, right? Or you are operating unsafely currently in the community. If it’s unsafe to operate without that much of a notice and preparation, then that’s how you’re currently operating unsafely.

Eric Schultz:

And to point out the 24-hour notice that we have, that’s not Wildcat 24-hour notice. That’s not mid-contract. That’s only after the contract expires. So I think a lot of people in the community don’t see that, don’t understand that. So they think just on any random Tuesday, I could just wake up in a bad mood and serve the company 24-hour strike notice. No, no. This is after you’ve spent months negotiating a contract. You knew that February 1st was the contract expiration. And our goal is to be as early as possible to hash out any issues so that by February 1st, you got a deal. You get that national agreement comes down from the top table. You take it to membership, you vote on it, and you move on. What they want to do is make that February 1st where we’re now that once February 1st comes, now we can serve notice.

And it’s something that we don’t take lightly. We could have done it this round of bargaining. And a lot of our members were upset that we weren’t serving strike notice when the contract expired because of all the ridiculous proposals that the company had on the table. So it’s something that we’re not going to just flippantly serve strike notice. We understand that people, it’s painful for us to be on strike. We’re willing to do it, just we don’t take it lightly. Well, so February 1st comes, now what they want to do with this 150-day strike and lockout notice is they won’t even start really bargaining, seriously bargaining until about 148 days into that 150-day strike and lockout notice, because that’s how they’re working it now. Our contract expires February 1st. They’re not serious about the proposals until the end of January. They just keep wanting to play mess around and they want to do this art of the deal stuff where they just put crazy things on the table knowing that, hey, we’re going to pull them off and we’ll meet in the middle type of thing.

So that’s all they’re going to do. They’re going to shift us 148 days down the road. Now maybe they’ll start to bargain. Meanwhile, the rest of the country, the national pattern folks all went back to work.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and Tim, I wanted to toss it to you to have the final word here. Being a volunteer for the lockout assistance committee, any final notes that you wanted to give for folks out there listening? Folks in the area or folks listening from around the country, anything that they can do to help?

Tim Powell:

You touched on a point about not punching down on your fellow workers, whether it’s in your union or out in the community. This is 800 families who don’t have the money right now to go out to eat. They’re cutting down on all of their summer projects, their summer vacations. Things aren’t getting the jobs that you normally do around the house during the summer, like doing your deck, your fence, and that kind of stuff. We’re not able to spend that. We’re not able to employ a contractor. We’re not able to tip the waitress at the restaurant because we’re not even going to the restaurants. Everybody is seeing a reduction in the wages because we are cut out. We have a couple of websites. I’m sure that we can share those, but I can’t remember all of them right off the top of my head right now, but Eric can get to that.

But we gladly appreciate any donation that we can get. Any help is helping. I was here yesterday handing out backpacks and notebooks and all the school supplies yesterday. It’s not just taking that money off the people’s hands. It was also like your wife isn’t having to freak out at the store trying to figure out how she’s going to buy the stuff.

Eric Schultz:

Yeah, I will say to your point, the website, you ask how people can help. The easiest way is we propped up a website specifically for what we’re dealing with. It’s called supportoilworkers.com. On that website, it answers all those questions. If you wanted to send a check to help our assistance committee help pay bills or that money also goes to help just run the hall on a day-to-day basis, making sure that we have food for picketers, making sure that we’ve got the toiletries and things like that at the hall. So there’s an address and a way to send a check there. There was a link to an Amazon store for us, and that’s been fantastic. Every day we get shipments in here of diapers, formula, non-perishable food items, toiletries, things like that. They go, we stock them on the shelves and then members are free to come and take anything that they need.

So support oilworkers.com. And then today, hopefully today it’s going to start. We’ve been working with a company that we’ve used for years for all of our swag, our t-shirts and hats, ImagePoint. And today, hopefully we’ll have this store up and running. We’re going to have a pop-up store. There’s two shirts that people can pick from, and it’s going to be nationwide. We’ll be blasting this out every which way we can. It’s only going to be up for two weeks. And you can pick either of these shirt designs and a multitude of colors and styles, anything from a hooded sweatshirt to a tank top to a regular t-shirt. And then the proceeds for that will go help our strike and defense fund. So again, today I will send you that link once we get it up and running. We’re just getting the bugs ironed out of it.

There’ll be a couple of shirts. It’ll run for two weeks, then it’ll shut down. They’ll print, they’ll go into production, and they’ll start mailing out all the shirts to whoever purchased one. And then a couple weeks later, we’re going to pop up a second store with two different shirts. So all in, there’s going to be four different shirt designs for people to pick from. And we’re kind of hoping that some people that if you have the means and you really want to show some support, we hope that some people will choose to try to collect all four of those shirts.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Eric Schultz, President of United Steel Workers Local 7.1, Leno Miller, Assistant Griever for USW Local 7.1, and Tim Powell, a 19-year member of USW Local 7.1, and a volunteer for the Lockout Assistance Committee. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our podcast feeds, our website, and our different social media pages, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today.

I promise you guys, it really 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.

Taya Graham:

Hello, my name is Taya Graham and welcome to the Inequality Watch Report, a show that examines government policy and action through the lens of extreme economic inequality, the existential issue of our time. Today, we’re going to discuss a technology which we’ve been told will transform our lives, an invention that has been touted as the ultimate arbiter of our collective futures, whether we like it or not. Of course, I’m talking about artificial intelligence, but with the promise also comes doubt and questions and most of all, a lack of clarity on how we’ll impact the working people of this country. AI leaders have casually warned us that their products could eliminate 40 to 50% of white collar jobs more than the losses in the Great Depression. They’ve promised that technology will be so disruptive that even staunch capitalists have discussed providing a UBI or universal basic income for Americans who will be left out.

They’ve borrowed money at such predigious rates to fund data centers that even Wall Street is beginning to just say no. And now some of the biggest names are saying it’s not working out as planned and an America’s already historic wealth imbalance and government hamstrung by the self-interested impulses of a single man. And you have a situation that could brew a toxic stew of making the already rich even richer and leaving the rest of us even further behind amid all the societal chaos and upheaval. And are the cracks just starting to show? Just this week, one of technology’s greatest apostles made accusations that AI has become a nemesis for his business and others. And capitalists who have gladly loaned billions to build data centers throughout the country are now starting to push back at the ever increasing demand for cash. Of course, the point of this show is to examine this topic through the lens of inequality and how it affects our political and social institutions and what it means for working people.

And to do so, we are about to be joined by an economist who has been thinking and writing about this very topic with insight and clarity, Dean Baker. But first, I want to check in with my co-host, Stephen.

Stephen Janis:

Oh, hey Taya, how you doing?

Taya Graham:

Steve and Janice, it’s great to have you. Thank

Stephen Janis:

You for having me on.

Taya Graham:

Now first, can you give us a broad overview of how inequality and AI are teaming up?

Stephen Janis:

I think in a way, this is the greatest American kind of ripoff in the sense that they’ve spent about the past four or five years mining all our data, taking everything we posted online, and they’re regurgitating it back to us and want to charge us for it in some way. And so to me, I think what is most missing for me besides the promise of huge economic disruption is what the value proposition is for the American people. I mean, they took everything that we wrote and now they want to repackage it and sell it as some sort of deity that we have to worship. And so I’m a little worried, a little worried, a lot worried that we’re all going to be casualties of a great wealth concentrator, which remember, OpenAI was supposed to be a nonprofit. Now it’s a for-profit company. All these huge IPOs, I’m afraid they’re just taking everything we’ve created, sell it back to us and become even richer, and there’ll be a greater concentrate of wealth and power.

So it’s just a bit concerning to me.

Taya Graham:

Actually, Steven, when you mentioned it turning into a deity, we already have some issues with AI psychosis. Maybe we should discuss that on our next show. Yeah,

Stephen Janis:

We’re just going to be praying to the AI deity and offering 19.95 a month to it. So yeah.

Taya Graham:

Actually, that’s about right. And now I want to introduce our guest, Dean Baker. Dean Baker is the co-founder and senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. For decades, he’s written about inequality, labor markets, financial bubbles, corporate power, and economic policy. He’s also written extensively about AI and how it’ll affect everyday workers and even journalists just like us. He wrote the book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy were structured to make the rich richer, and its newest project is the AI Bubble Monitor. Dean Baker, thank you so much for joining us.

Dean Baker:

Thanks a lot for having me on.

Taya Graham:

Well, we’re glad to have you. Yeah, absolutely. And I have the honor of doing the first question. And so my first question for you is this. Artificial intelligence has been described as the biggest technological revolution since the internet, and yet you’ve argued that the economic data simply doesn’t support a lot of the claims being made. What are people missing here?

Dean Baker:

Yeah, so I think to a very large extent, we have people who are really good at hype. People like Sam Altman, of course, Elon Musk, absolute master of hype. These are the Donald Trumps of the business world. They’re selling this stuff and they’ve been very successful. I mean, Elon Musk just had his SpaceX initial public offering, which is primarily AI. I mean, that’s their own assessment. I’m not trying to attribute things to them. If you read their registration statement, they say 90% of their expected market is in AI. So SpaceX is an AI company. So they’re looking to get rich by this. And I don’t mean necessarily because they’re going to have huge profits. They have huge stock prices. So Elon Musk became a trillionaire, not because SpaceX has enormous profits. It actually loses money hand over fist. He became a trillionaire because the stock price is ridiculously high.

So step one, is it creating inequality? Absolutely. By a stock bubble, bloated bubble. Now, in terms of what it delivers, they’re saying this, is it going to have massive impact? I’m sure it will. And the model I look to is the internet. Had massive impact. Does that mean that it’s going to lead to mass unemployment? Well, a lot of people lost their jobs to the internet. I mean, Amazon put a lot of small sellers out of retailers out of business.

Taya Graham:

Absolutely.

Dean Baker:

But you still have a lot of retailers there and everyone didn’t lose their job. I think think of AI the similar way. It will change the economy in a lot of different ways, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s going to lose their job. And if we look at the data, we look at productivity, which is what that means. If people are losing jobs, that means we’re producing more in an hour of output. They’ve actually been very weak the last three quarters. Now it’s erratic. So I’ve followed the data for a long time. So I know you could have real weak quarter and next quarter could be really weak. And then we’ll come around the second half of 226 and who knows, be 5%. Very rapid productivity growth. Could happen. But the point is we’re not seeing it. And there have been a number of economists I’ve tried to look through this very carefully and look at sector by sector, look at retail, look at healthcare, look at the different sectors of the economy.

And invariably, they find relatively modest impact of the studies I’ve seen. And I’m sure we missed some, but these are credible studies. The highest number was a half percent a year increase, half a percentage point a year increase in annual productivity growth, which matters. I mean, that’s noticeable, but that’s not massive unemployment. And one of the leading economists in the world, Darin Asamiglu, Nobel Prize winner, he had it at just seven hundredths of 1%.

Taya Graham:

Wow.

Dean Baker:

These people could all be wrong, but they’ve tried to be very careful in it and they find very modest impacts. I shouldn’t say very modest. I mean, again, a half percentage point a year. If you had that, that would be a big deal. But the internet, when we had the internet in the ’90s, the internet boom is about one and a half percentage points a year. So we’ve seen this.

Stephen Janis:

Wow. Dean, that’s kind of. But these people are hyping valuations. They’re borrowing billions and billions of dollars, I think, based on a higher rate of return. I mean, is this like a house of cards? I mean, they’re hyping this over and over again saying it’s going to be transformative. But now you’re saying the impact so far has not been. Does that put at risk all these billions of dollars they’ve thrown at this problem?

Dean Baker:

Absolutely. And this is why I’m calling it a bubble. I’m old enough, I’ve been through two really big economy moving bubbles. In the ’90s, we had the tech bubble. And I was out there saying, “This is bad news. It’s going to burst. It’s going to burst.” And it did. It burst in 2001. The S&P 500 big stock index fell 50% from peak to trough. The NASDAQ where you had most of the tech stocks, that fell 80%. And it had a huge impact on the economy. I mean, for stock investors, I go, “You should know what you’re doing. Many don’t, but you should know what you’re doing. So I can’t cry too much.” But it had a big impact on the economy. We lost jobs into the 2000 recession. We didn’t get them back till 2005. That was the longest period with our positive job growth since the Great Depression.

We had a longer one after the Great Recession. But that was a big recession from the standpoint of the labor market. Also, real wage growth just stopped. We’d been seeing good real wage growth in the late ’90s, just stopped almost instantly. So that was a really bad story. And then we had the housing bubble. Again, same story. And that town in turn was more severe. We had close to 10 million people lose their home to foreclosure. The unemployment rate peaked at near 10% in 2009.

So bubbles can have very bad consequences. So that’s why I’m very worried about this one. They’re selling this and Elon Musk undoubtedly is stuffing his pockets. And Sam Altman and the others, they’re stuffing their pockets. But no, I don’t see that these stock prices make sense. And when does the music stop? I don’t know. Both those bubbles went way longer than I expected them to. But all I could say is the sooner it bursts, the better it will be for the country.

Taya Graham:

It was really interesting that you compared the AI investment boom to the dot-com bubble. Maybe you could just go into a little bit more depth about some of the similarities that really concern you. Yeah.

Dean Baker:

Well, there are two things there. One, from the standpoint of the firms, that you started to see companies that were just pushing nonsense in essence. I’m going back to the dot-com. So it became almost a joke. And I shouldn’t say almost a joke. It was a joke. And this was in the business press. So the Wall Street Journal used to highlight the most ridiculous initial public offerings. So people were coming up with crazy public offerings and they could still raise hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars in their first issue. There was one company even that took the cake. I wish I could remember the name. They said, “We don’t know how we can make a profit.” So you work from the assumption, okay, they’re not profitable today, but they have this great plan, software, whatever it is. And two years, three years, four years, they’re going to be a next Microsoft.

That’s what people were betting on. And of course they weren’t. But you had one literally said, “We don’t even know how we’ll make a profit.” So you had a huge amount of misdirected capital. And that was, of course, a huge voice for the economy. But the standpoint of the stock market, again, I was saying we want stock investors or we think they should be knowledgeable. They aren’t. And people were spending based on their stock wealth. So you had a lot of people that were saying, “Oh, I had money in the NASDAQ and just doubled,” which it might well have. A lot of people owned stocks in the NASDAQ and over two years they would’ve doubled. So they said, “Oh, I’m going to buy a new car, get a bigger house, go on a big vacation.” Well, when those prices plummeted, that consumption stopped. So it was a very, very big hit to the economy.

And I worry very. I should add one more thing on the craziness that companies discovered that if they added dot-com to their name, their stock price would go up five or 10%. We’re seeing that today. If you add AI to your name, and someone did that, I’m trying to remember what it was. I think it was- Was it like

Stephen Janis:

Diapers.com? I think, wasn’t there like diapers.com or something or something?

Dean Baker:

Yeah. And their stock price went up five or 10%, which tells you. I mean, it’s utterly nuts. You’re the same company. It doesn’t matter whether you call yourself. Com AI or anything. You’re the same company. It shouldn’t make any sense.

Stephen Janis:

Well, now speaking of a bubble, Palantir CEO, Alex Carp, had kind of a meltdown on CNBC. Let me play a little bit of it so you can watch it. And maybe you can explain what he saw. It sounded to me like he was panicking, but it was hard to figure out what he was talking about. David, if you could play that clip and we’ll just watch it and we come back, we’ll talk about it.

Alex Carp:

Everyone who uses LLMs on the battlefield runs on top of our ontology. And our clients are just, to say they’re unhappy with the Frontier Labs is to say I’m welcome at the Berkeley faculty. It’s like there’s just a level of discomfort and loss of trust that also made it really, really –

Stephen Janis:

Okay. Unpack that. What do you mean by that?

Alex Carp:

Well, you have, okay, so when you’re using large language models, at this point, everyone technical realizes they’re like a critical resource. To make them valuable in an enterprise like battlefield context or regulated context or manufacturing, you have to have what’s called an application layer. We have this thing called ontology that now everyone’s copying, but defacto, it takes a large language model. It makes it safe and useful and precise. So safe because it doesn’t touch your unlearning data, safe because it prevents the large language model from caching your data and replicating your business. Safe because it doesn’t transfer your IP of how to fight secret data, top secret data or in a clinical context. So the general way these things were sold, and again, these people are. Sam and Dario, there’s nothing more fun than debating Dario in private. So I’m not throwing shade at them,

Taya Graham:

But

Alex Carp:

Something has gone completely wrong. And the basic view among enterprises in this country is I’m going to chill lax and waste my time with tokens. I’m going to get no value and they’re going to get my IP.

Stephen Janis:

Okay, Dean, like I said, I haven’t heard the word ontology since my religious studies class in undergraduate, but it sounds to me like there’s buyers remorse or panicking among the top people, including Mr. Carp. What’s your take on what he’s saying? Does he sound like he’s panicking?

Dean Baker:

He sounds panicking. And just to be clear, I don’t know Alex Carp, never met him. But as best I could tell, he’s an odd guy. But as best I can tell, his complaints are first and foremost that you have companies spending a lot of money on AI and you had a lot of companies that were spending literally hundreds of millions a month. And they weren’t getting anything obvious for that. So they were actually encouraging their staff, their mid-level staff. So I was mentioning, I was talking about Amazon, where they literally had a leaderboard where people were posting how much AI they were using. And I don’t know if they got a bonus or whatever it was exactly, but the more AI, the better off you were. And just like to me, Amazon’s obviously a big business in any ways very successful, at least from their vantage point of profits.

Why would you ever encourage people to use AI for the sake of using AI? And the analogy I’ve

Taya Graham:

Made is

Dean Baker:

It’s like using paper. Oh, I used five reams of paper today. And you go, okay, great. What’d you do? I mean, that’s kind of nuts, but that’s what they were literally doing. So you’ve had companies looking to cut back hugely on the AI they use because they want to see that they’re actually getting something for it. And in many cases, their conclusion was that they weren’t. The other part of the story that he’s raising, Carp is raising, is they’re worried. They don’t know what’s happening with their data. So when you’re running your programs through Anthropic, through OpenAI and whoever else, they have your data. So using the example of Amazon, that data’s worth a huge amount. We know, we complain about that. Amazon, they know everything we’ve purchased, what we’ve looked at. They have an enormous amount of data on us. That’s a lot of money to them.

They don’t want to give that away for nothing to Anthropic, to OpenAI, whoever. And they don’t know whether they are or they aren’t. So that’s what he was talking about. He’s saying you need software that regulates the usage. And as it is, a lot of companies don’t have that. Again, I’m not going to advertise for your software. I have no idea what it does, but you probably don’t want to give these AI companies all your data.

Taya Graham:

Actually, Steven and I go and cover Capitol Hill, and we saw Senator Bernie Sanders arguing that if AI creates extraordinary wealth, then the public deserves a share of that wealth. And he announced an AI sovereign wealth fund proposal. And I think he’s talking about a 50% stake for Americans. Now at first glance, this sounds like a progressive idea, but I read your article. Why do you disagree?

Dean Baker:

Yeah, I’m a big Bernie Sanders fan, known him for years. I have enormous respect for him, but I really think this goes down the wrong path. To start with, just from the word go, if you’re giving the US government a large stake in the AI companies, you’re giving Donald Trump a large stake in AI companies. I know that’s not Bernie’s intention, but look at what the Supreme Court has been saying. I’ll guarantee you, this isn’t even a debatable point given the recent Supreme Court rulings. If we get the ability through an ownership stake to put people in top positions in Anthropic and OpenAI, whoever else we might buy a stake in or take a stake in, Donald Trump is going to pick those people. It doesn’t matter how they wrote in the law. That’s what the Supreme Court has said. The unitary executive, he decides, I can’t imagine in the current environment wanting to give more power to Donald Trump.

In general, I’m not sure I want the government to have a 50% stake, but certainly not Donald Trump. So that to my mind’s a no-brainer. Secondly, from the standpoint of regulation, we know there’s all sorts of ways we need to regulate AI. It’s not an option. They want to build data centers everywhere. Do you want a data center in your backyard? Should we be able to tear down Grand Canyon to put a data? That’s their dream. That’s what they want to do. We already are having massive battles on this. I don’t trust that with the government having a direct stake that we would get the right outcomes. I don’t trust we’d get the right outcomes anyhow. But I think we really tilt the playing field and just the environmental issues, that’s just one of them. When you’re talking about ownership of data, access to privacy, there’s a whole range of issues that come up with AI that are unavoidable.

I mean, it’s not a question, oh, we should leave it to the market. There is no market. We’re setting the rules. So I worry very much about that. The third point is just what I was saying before. A huge amount of this is hype. And unfortunately, I think Bernie’s feeding the hype. Oh, they’re going to have massive wealth. I don’t see that. I think there’ll be big profitable companies here, just like going back to the ’90s. You look at the providers of internet, Cisco and Verizon and Comcast, they’re big companies. They’re profitable. They aren’t earth shaking. They aren’t the biggest companies in the world. So why are we contributing to the hype? I don’t think that’s a productive thing to do.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. Yeah, go ahead, Ed. No, go ahead.

Taya Graham:

I was going to say, when I was reading your article on your substack, Dean Baker, that your first objection wasn’t really economic, that was more political. And I was just wondering why you think having a government-owned AI investment fund would be particularly dangerous under the Trump administration? Or could you just not trust any administration with it?

Dean Baker:

I’d have problems with any administration, but let’s just focus on Donald Trump. Donald Trump has made it clear. He sees the government as his tool to enrich himself, to enrich his friends. So he will put his friends in top positions there. He will have his friends, people contribute to his campaign or give him kickbacks. They will be the ones that get contracts from these companies. He’s anti – DEI. Well, women in top positions, forget it. Blacks in top positions, forget it. He’s applied that through government as much as he could. You’re just giving them a whole new area to apply this in. And again, if AI, I don’t think it’ll be the massive thing, at least these companies will be the massive things that they’re hyping. But again, I don’t want to give Donald Trump yet more power.

Stephen Janis:

Wow. Well, listen, to your idea of Bubble Watch, which I think is kind of fascinating, well, also terrifying. So for example, in the private credit markets, people started to panic and private credit is lending a lot of money for these data centers. Last week, IBM lost 20.% of its value in one day because people were panicking about software. Where do you see this starting to unravel? I mean, we’re not economists, but we’re people that read. What should we be looking at? What should anyone be looking at actually to see where this bubble’s going to start to unravel if indeed it does?

Dean Baker:

Okay. Well, let me be as honest I can be on this. I didn’t know until this date, I can’t tell you what caused the collapse of the stock bubble or for that matter, the housing bubble. I mean, I could all point to all sorts of vulnerabilities, but when they collapsed and why? Both went on much longer than I ever thought they would. I’ll say that. So I’m saying that now what I have been looking to and will continue to look to is increasingly the companies, and these are big companies, these are Meta, Alphabet, the biggest companies in the world. They’re having to borrow. So even though they’re very profitable, they’re undertaking such massive investments that they’re having to borrow. And you’re seeing a very interesting story here that investors in bonds are starting to get worried. We actually saw this with SpaceX. It was really striking.

One of my AI bubble monitors was about this, that SpaceX bonds are being sold at a discount, meaning that bond buyers see a risk that it actually could default, that they might actually go bankrupt. So here on the one hand, you have stock investors going, “Oh, SpaceX is going to be the most profitable company in the history of the world.” You have bond investors going, “It might go bankrupt. It might not be able to pay its bills.” So I would look at the bond market and it seems to be. I recently saw some data showing that there’s much less interest in Alphabet, Meta, the hyperscalers are called, that are involved in building the data centers for AI. There’s much less interest in their bonds than for other investment grade debt. And that’s who I’d look to first, because if it ends up being the case that you can’t get the bond issues to finance it, then it’s going to fall apart.

We may be seeing the beginnings of that. I mean, it’s a little early, but we may be seeing the beginnings of that. So if they start to cut back their lending, this thing could collapse fairly quickly.

Taya Graham:

If we can, I just would like to pivot for a moment to affordability. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one out there seeing their gas, their car insurance, their groceries going through the roof. There are so many Americans that are struggling with housing costs and healthcare costs and groceries and childcare and utility bills. And I was just wondering how much of today’s affordability crisis has to do with AI, will be impacted by AI, and how much stems from our much broader economic policy?

Dean Baker:

I would say most of it is broader economic problems, but I will say one that I can pin on AI, and that’s a housing market, particularly in areas like the Bay Area. So you actually saw this when you had the SpaceX, their initial public offering, you suddenly had all these people that were doing well, obviously, were highly paid engineers in positions at SpaceX, but they’re maybe getting hundreds of thousands a year. Maybe some are getting low millions. They suddenly have 10, 20, 30 million because there’s SpaceX stock, and that’s what the evaluation would be. They suddenly turn around and go, “Oh, I want a really big house.” Well, there’s only so many really big, really nice houses in the Bay Area. So those go through the roof. And there is a trickle down here. Trickle down not in a good way. So if you’re a lawyer, you’re doing well, you make three or 400,000 a year.

Well, suddenly the home that you were looking to buy, which would’ve been a million you might have been able to afford, now it’s two or three or four million. So you look at a middle-class house and you’re suddenly prepared to pay one and a half million for that. So then the person who’s a teacher or a firefighter that maybe, maybe, maybe could have scraped together enough to buy that for five or 600,000,

No way on earth they could pay one and a half million for that. So there is a direct impact on housing, not necessarily nationwide. I don’t know how much it affects things in Ames, Iowa, but certainly in tech centers like in the Bay Area, like Seattle, other places where there are likely a lot of people involved in the AI economy.

Stephen Janis:

Dean, when the Great Recession hit, even though it was caused by bankers’ greed, a lot of it really the working class suffered. Do you think AI could have the same impact if it does start to collapse, that it will hurt working people and that the bankers will catch a cold and will catch the flu or whatever? Do you see it trickling down again to people who had nothing to do with this, what I would call a mess at this point?

Dean Baker:

Yeah, because that’s the problem with bubbles when they start driving the economy, because our economy does not turn well. So what happened in the ’90s, we were being driven by the tech bubble. Tech bubble collapses. Nothing else to come in its place. In fact, what came in its place, it took a couple years to do it, a few years to do it, the housing bubble. And then that collapsed and well, that took a long time to recover from it. We really didn’t get back to a strong labor market, lower levels unemployment till 2016, 2017. So what I worry is that the AI bubble’s definitely driving the economy, both through investment in AI stuff, AI related stuff, and then also the consumption effect that people go, “Oh wow, I now have five million in the stock market,” which some of these people do. And then they go out and spend a lot of money, housing being one thing, they get cars.

So those stocks go through the floor. Suddenly nothing’s driving the economy and we start to see the unemployment rate rise. Wages don’t keep pace with prices. It’s a bad picture.

Taya Graham:

I actually just went to a doctor’s appointment to go to radiology, just getting exams, and they said to me, “Oh, would you like to get the AI version of this and pay an extra $40?” And I said, “Well, how’s it different than my normal exam?” And they said, “Well, actually, technology is pretty much the same.” So I’m wondering how much are they overselling how beneficial this technology actually is and how much of it is just pure hype?

Dean Baker:

They’re hugely overselling it. Again, I’m not down on the ground in all these businesses, but you hear accounts of this. So you have a lot of companies where software coding, where it’s probably at the biggest impact, where they do AI and it’s often very useful, but the problem is it makes mistakes. So you still need someone who really knows the coding to check it. And I think that’s a good story really everywhere. You could use the AI, it could be very helpful, but you still have to check it. I know my own usage, which is very limited. I had it do a reference section for me. I was writing a paper and I was going, I can type up. I’m sure there’s software that could do it too, but I was going, okay, if I type it up, it’s going to take me two or three hours and I’ll make mistakes because I’m a sloppy typist.

So I’ll have AI do it and did it for me in, I don’t know, 20 seconds or something. I still had to review it because it had some references that were improper, but it was certainly much, much faster than if I had to type it myself. So I think there’s going to be a learning process. We will be able to use AI, use it beneficially, and there will be a productivity gain, but nothing like what they’re telling us.

Stephen Janis:

Dean, why do, in your estimation, we’ve heard all the incredible stories about tax incentives for data centers. If these companies are going to be so profitable and so amazing and going to create all this value, why do they need whopping tax incentives to build out these data centers? I just don’t get it. I don’t understand. And I’m not asking you to explain for them, but what do you think is the operative motive here of having all these tax breaks?

Dean Baker:

Well, there’s a crude joke with the punchline I could use because they can.

But there is a logic that from the standpoint of a state or county, they’re saying, look, we have people lined up that want our data center and we’re taking bids from all of them. So you have to beat the others. And from the standpoint of the county or state, they’re going, “Well, this will create some number of jobs.” They lie about the number. And it’ll create some amount of tax revenue. And they might go, “Well, we’re better off even giving them an incentive. Give them 50 million off on their taxes.” And you can’t say that’s necessarily wrong because in some cases it probably is right. In many cases it will be wrong. And certainly if they end up going under, it almost certainly will be wrong because having a big data center sitting there that does nothing is not going to make your county or state more attractive for people to live in or for other businesses to come and invest in.

Taya Graham:

We’ve talked about a wealth fund and even a UBI. What do policymakers need to do to protect workers and make sure that if this actually really makes generational wealth, that working people can benefit? Or maybe I should just say, if you have a magic wand and you could design your own AI policy, what would you want it to look like? Or what do you want policymakers to do?

Dean Baker:

Well, I’d go into the old bag of tricks and just start using them and ramping them up. So one of the things we used to do shorten the work week. We haven’t done that. We had the Fair Labor Cancan Act 1937. It’s almost a hundred years now. We’re getting close. So we thought 40 hours was right then. How about making it 36, 32? That would be a great thing to do. Raising minimum wage, make it easier for workers to organize. We have it so stacked against workers organizing unions now it’s become near impossible because employers could. It’s illegal to fire people, but what’s the sanction? What’s the punishment? So someone’s organizing a union. Elon Musk says you’re out the door. You could file a National Labor Relations Board complaint. Good luck. Maybe they’ll rule for you two years later, you’ll get your job back.

Kind of moot at that point. So we have a basket of things. Also, again, finishing the welfare state. Every other country in the world has universal healthcare. We should have universal Medicare. So those are some good steps. Again, I’m not opposed to UBI, but I just think back to under President Biden, he wanted to have the expanded child tax card. He put it in as a pandemic measure. He wanted to extend it and he couldn’t get that. He had Democrats opposing him. So the idea, this is children. We’re talking about a relatively small sum of money for children. He couldn’t get that through. So can we get a UBI through? Yeah, maybe, but that looks like a real uphill battle for me. I’d rather stick to the old favorites that we know work. And there’s a Well, lot of political support for them.

Taya Graham:

Okay, Steven. Well, obviously I’m in the wrong line of work because it turns out that you can lose millions or even billions of dollars and somehow make money. Is this dystopian enough for you? I mean, what are your thoughts here? I’m obviously in the wrong line of work. Well,

Stephen Janis:

Like I was kind of alluding to before, I feel like we’re kind of participating in new theology. The value here is purely theocratic, that there’s some divine power that is being burked in a lab that we’re going to have to pay penance to, whether or not it makes our lives better or not, and whether it has any influence on anything we do. So I was really glad to hear Dean kind of cut through all that BS and give us sort of a pragmatic view of what’s actually going on. And one thing, I don’t want to refer to the Tower of Babel, but that was an awfully tall tower of cards. And when AI comes bursting down on all top of us, I think it’s going to be quite cataclysmic. So yeah, apocalyptic is probably in line there.

Taya Graham:

That’s a great point. I mean, everyone is so excited. They’re hoping for artificial general intelligence where they’re going to be curing cancer and saving the world. Which would be great. And all I just do is see people losing jobs.

Stephen Janis:

Yeah. I’m waiting for the cure for cancer. I

Taya Graham:

Would be so happy to see it. I would be so happy to have AI genuinely help people. Not just help students cheat on their home.

Stephen Janis:

Or not just create 100,000 songs on Spotify every day. I think it would be more useful for humanity. Just my opinion.

Taya Graham:

Steven, you know me, as always, whether it’s on our show, the Police Accountability Report or our coverage on Capitol Hill, my concern is the working people of this country. And just like with all the other tech upheavals, the elite who taught them, forget those who are going to be impacted by them. And this particular iteration could really be devastating. And that’s why we have to remain vigilant. If AI actually lives up to the hype, the concentrated power it would confer would be absolutely death to a democracy. I mean, that much wealth in so few hands is simply unsustainable. I mean, it will literally adulterate the process of governance with self-interest, and it’s going to warp accountability around the curvature of a technology that seems more and more singular in its appetite for resources. And I do mean a literal appetite for land and water. And that is why we’ll continue to report on it and have discussions with innovative thinkers like Dean Baker.

And that’s why we will continue to report to you from the nation’s capital, asking questions about how the government by and for the people will actually protect them from the ravages of AI Avaris. And that’s why independent journalists like Steven and I will continue to investigate and try to comprehend and share with you the truth because that’s all we have in the end, for better or worse. Thank you for joining us for our inequality watch report. And as always, we’re reporting for you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jay: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

Jay: Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

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

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

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

Steve Mellon:

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

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

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

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

Natalie Duleba:

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

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

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

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

Steve Mellon:

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

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

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

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

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

Natalie Duleba:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

Steve Mellon:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Natalie Duleba:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

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

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners just like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we’re talking about an urgent crisis and a scourge that is affecting working class communities around the country. Today, we’re talking about data centers. And we’re talking about what it means for you and your community when one of these loud, polluting, energy and water guzzling behemoths comes to your town. And we’re going to be talking with people who are experiencing this firsthand right now, but we’re also going to be talking about how we talk about data centers and the communities that they’re affecting.

Because recently I was scrolling on Instagram and Facebook and I saw this viral clip from a news report that was going around with a recognizable face at the center of it. Now the clip was from an MS Now report and just take a listen to it for yourself.

Speaker 1:

A quarter mile away, Cheryl Shadden says the noise is as loud as ever.

Cheryl Shadden:

It’s like living on the edge of Niagara Falls or you’re on a runway next to a jet that’s taking off, but this jet doesn’t take off.

Speaker 1:

Morning, noon, night, she even hears it in her bedroom and it’s changed everything about how she lives her life, including her politics.

Cheryl Shadden:

Red or blue, if you vote against data centers, we vote for you.

Speaker 1:

A lifelong conservative, she’s so angry, she refuses to vote for Trump backed Attorney General Ken Paxton, who clinched the GOP nomination for Senate Tuesday. Instead, she’s all in for James Talarico, a Democrat seeking to flip a seat controlled by Republicans since 1993. You’re willing at this point to forego basically every conservative issue and let the Senate fall into the hands of Democrats if that’s what it takes to kill data centers.

Cheryl Shadden:

Yep. My entire community’s going to break rank. Everybody. All of us. We’ve had enough.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Now, as you guys heard from that clip, the original report named the woman being interviewed there, but in the viral post with that clip in it, the woman was simply named as a “Republican voter.” And that just pissed me off. And the kind of comments that people were leaving on these posts by the hundreds and thousands were just so absurd and gross and so stupidly and unhelpfully partisan. So many folks seem to think that the explosion of data centers is only happening in one type of community and that those communities somehow deserve it if they voted one way or another. But listen, how people respond to this crisis in the next election cycle will be very important, but we also need to get it through our skulls that this is bigger than what happens in the next election. And data centers are not just red state or blue state problems.

This is a working class problem and we all need to take it seriously. And when I was seeing that clip going around, all of the discourse around this has been especially gross and infuriating for me because we actually know the so – called Republican voter in that news segment. Her name is Cheryl Shadden. She’s a human being, not a quote unquote, Republican voter. She’s a registered nurse anesthetist and a resident of Granbury, Texas who lives right next to the site of a massive Bitcoin mine. And we’ve had Cheryl on this show before, and we’ve spoken with her and other members of her community about the hell that they are living through after this giant, loud, environmentally destructive Bitcoin mine moved into their neighborhood and more data centers are now invading their area. And I’m really grateful to be joined today again on the show by Cheryl and more of her neighbors from Hood County, Texas.

But we are also joined today by folks who are living here and fighting against data centers here in our home state of Maryland. So let’s meet our incredible panel of guests and I want to shut up and ask y’all if you can start by introducing yourself to the audience here.

Cheryl Shadden:

Hi, Max. I’m Cheryl Shadden. I live in Granbury, Texas. I’m a certified registered nurse anesthetist. I live in a rural area. I am also born in Maryland. I was born in Bethesda, Maryland. I lived there until I was in my 20s. And so I remember Maryland quite well and I remember Texas quite well before this happened to all of us as well.

Karen Pearson:

I am Karen Pearson. Thanks Max for having us again on the show. I appreciate you and your passion. I am a licensed professional counselor. I live in Granbury, Texas too. Actually, Cheryl is my neighbor. I live about 800 feet as the crow flies to Marathon Bitcoin. And then just a little bit further right next door to it is Wolf Hollow Gas Power Plant. I live out here on 12 acres with my parents. They have been here 30 plus years and I’ve been here 21 years. Most definitely this has come in and really just unraveled our peace out here, shaken us as far as what it means for our rural area that we invested in retiring at. Also too, just water supplies, noise pollution, vibrations, things that it also has contribute to as far as health-wise. So it’s definitely something that in this area, I say it’s more like environmental euthanasia that we are experiencing.

Definitely a concern, especially with more in our future that is moving in right on top of us here.

Craig Jackson:

I’m Craig Jackson. I live in Granbury, Texas as well. Actually seven miles from Karen and Cheryl, but I’m also 300 feet from a proposed data center that’s going to be on 2,000 acres in the city of Granbury. I’m actually listed as a plaintiff on a lawsuit against the city for Breaking Open Texas Meetings Act as well as several other violations. But as far as this whole situation, it’s been a full-time job fighting this and along with all my other neighbors that have been battling the Bitcoin mine, we’ve actually started a homestead and lost several animals due to the infrasound and noise that’s been produced off of it. And you wouldn’t think seven miles would have that effect, but we can get more into that conversation later. But all of this is basically it disrupted our way of life and why we moved out here to be away from the city and to start a homestead in the process.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

I’m Dr. Shannon Wolf and I’m also the precinct chair in the community that Karen and Cheryl live in, and that’s how I met them three years ago. And so I live in Granbury, Texas. Part of what I’ve looked at over three years is a lack of awareness by so many people at just the devastation that the Bitcoin mines can cause, often cause and then the data centers that are coming in. There are eight or nine data centers coming into a very small community or very small county rather, and there seems to be no way of stopping them. And I don’t know that Hood County is a lot different than any other county in America. I hear reports of the same kinds of issues happening in Oklahoma and in Mississippi and in places up north. And so I think it’s going to take all of us working together to stop the onslaught.

Micaiah Lloyd:

Hi everyone. Thank you Max for being here. Thank you all for inviting me. My name is Micaiah Lloyd. I’m a resident of Charles County, Maryland. A data center was proposed in my neighborhood November 17th of last year. And me and my county have been fighting tirelessly to make sure that they don’t even have the zoning rights to be in our neighborhood. So that’s where we are in the fight in Southern Maryland. I’m just a girl. I’m 24 years old. I’m trying to build my own wealth. I’m trying to build my own career. And I talk about generations a lot because I feel like my generation is in the fight for our lives right now. I feel like we’re in the fight for our future. I used to coach little kids. I played soccer my whole life and I coached four, five and sixes. And I’m also fighting for them right now.

We’re fighting for them. We’re fighting for them to be able to grow up and breathe clean air and not be surveilled and to drink clean water. I don’t know what the future will look like in about four years if data centers take over this nation.

I’ve been an activist my whole life. When Trayvon Martin was killed, it really radicalized me and I’ve been in the streets protesting since I was about 15. I’ve always been wondering what is it going to take for the working class to unite? What is it going to take for us to come together? What’s going to be that one issue? And I know that data centers are that issue, so I’m very happy to be here. I’m very happy to be networking, especially with people who could possibly be red and who could possibly be very different from me, but we’re all human beings and I think this one issue will really connect us. So I’m very excited about that.

Hillary Gonzalez:

Hi everyone. My name is Hillary Gonzalez. I am an eco poet and author. I’ve lived in Maryland for the past 10 years now, though I originally am from Southern Virginia. For the purposes of this interview, I’m going to let my accent slip. I’ve been fighting Johns Hopkins DSAI Institute, which is their Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Institute for the past three years now. I can step outside of my front door and literally look at where they’re constructing it. And from the very beginning they told us, “Oh, this is going to be so good for your neighborhood, so good for your community.” I have yet to see that. I’ve only seen environmental harm that their construction has caused. And now we’ve learned from the Baltimore Business Journal that they’re also planning a data center for East Baltimore. So my fight has switched from fighting just DSAI to now fighting for the entire city because I don’t want this in any part of the city.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, my God, thank you all so much for being on this panel together. It is really incredible to have you all here together, even if it’s just for an hour. And I want to make the most that we can out of that hour. So I wanted to go back around the table and ask, starting with our neighbors in Granbury, if y’all could give our listeners and anyone out there listening now a sort of quick and dirty reminder of what the hell has happened to your communities in these recent years with these Bitcoin mines and data centers? How is it affecting people? What does it look like over there and how are you living your lives when these behemoths are coming into your communities?

Cheryl Shadden:

I’ve lived here in my home for 35 years. It was nice and quiet. I could walk outside of my home at any time of the day or night. You could hear birds chirping, you could see your animals outside, and it was just a quiet, peaceful environment. Now sitting here in my office, I can hear the crypto mind churning through my walls. I myself personally have had permanent conduction hearing loss. I will never get that hearing back. We have motion sickness, dizziness, nausea. We don’t sleep at night. Even trying to go to sleep with a TV on or a radio on and fans on high, you can’t go to sleep, you can’t stay asleep. This noise, sound and infrasound, it travels through your walls, through your windows. It shakes your home. And this is just the noise from the crypto mine that’s turning into a data center now adding two more hyperscale data centers.

This doesn’t include the gas plant that they’re powered into. This doesn’t include the explosions from their valves when they can’t carry a load. This doesn’t include a third gas power plant coming here and building and traffic twenty four seven and literally 5,000 trucks per month.That doesn’t include the dust clouds. This doesn’t include the air pollution. Here in the state of Texas, because Texas so special, we only test air pollution and they don’t really even test it. They model it. It’s modeled in isolation. So even though the gas power plant that’s directly across from my home, even though their pollutants go right to threshold like 0.4 from being above a dangerous threshold, so that power plant is looked at individually versus the power plant that’s right next to it that rolls out acid rain and all of that. That’s looked at individually as well. And so even though both of these two power plants operate right at threshold, they’re not looked at in combination.

And now a third gas power plant is coming in here that we fought hard against, and they’re going to be an eight-turbine gas power plant. They’re going to roll out some acid rain as well. And this doesn’t even begin to account for the water use. Right now, just the two power plants across the street from me use 1.5 million gallons of water per day off of our lake and our river and spit it back out. When they spit it back out, it’s minimally treated. It’s still hot water, so it’s causing problems in our lake and in our rivers. And that flows on down from here. So the pollution here in Granbury, the water is actually cleaner up above Granbury. It becomes seriously polluted right here at Granbury where we have three gas power plants that are pulling off of the water sources here and dumping back in.

We’re going to have four. And so if you calculate the water usage, even though you’ll have the crypto mine and the data centers telling you we’re not using water, we’re not using water. You are using water by proxy if it’s taking two and a half, three million, five million, 10 million gallons of water to provide you power. So they are using water even if not directly. And if you look closely at all of these hyperscaled data centers and they’ll tell you they’re closed loop water systems, well, that’s like saying your car is a closed loop water system. You do have to flush the radiator out in your car and you have to refill it. That’s not closed loop if you do that. And if you look at all of these hyperscaled data centers coming in, they all have retention ponds behind them. That’s basically a big septic tank.

A retention pond does not mean closed loop. It means we’re going to let this nasty water sit here and draw mosquitoes and every other problem known to man. And that doesn’t mean we’re going to protect the rivers and the tributaries and your health. So air pollution, light pollution, water pollution, erosion, and it doesn’t just affect Republicans, it doesn’t just affect independence, and it doesn’t affect just Democrats. It affects us all, all of us. And

Maximillian Alvarez:

I got to tell any of y’all listening, those types of retention ponds filled with toxic stuff, they are all over this country, baby. Whether it’s coal ash tailings ponds that have toxic heavy metals in them, whether it’s lagoons full of hog waste that has so many nitrates in it that it causes massive algae blooms. You don’t want to know how much of a toxic soup we are all living in, but it’s our job to try to educate ourselves about this. And so please, folks from Granbury, keep educating us. Let’s toss it to Karen. Tell us more about how this has affected you guys and your lives.

Karen Pearson:

Thank you. Yes, I probably want to speak more towards my parents than anything. They’re both 83. And for anyone who has been out here, everyone knows that their front porch is a gathering place. I enjoy sitting out there watching the birds, the deer, just a menaseri of wildlife. My mom’s a big bird watcher. And so many of those animal populations that were thriving out here at one time are not so much anymore. A couple of other things, and Cheryl mentioned this, balance issues, the noise pollution. So again, on our porch, sitting out there and having conversation in the evenings with my parents, it’s very hard to do. My dad’s lost about 70% of his hearing and we can’t sit out there and just have a typical conversation like what we used to without him either not hearing any of it or constantly having to repeat.

I think some of the other issue is because of the noise at night, and if the wind is blowing just right, especially if there’s a south wind, it is like at megaphones over to our place. So my parents don’t sleep and they have an upstairs, their bedroom is upstairs and it’s kind of eye level with the plants.

It’s a megaphone. I mean, it’s so loud in their bedroom at night that they don’t sleep. And so then obviously during the day, that causes a lot of fatigue. I think mentally on them, it’s extremely hard to think about what their future looks like. This is not what they planned for retirement. It’s hard on me to watch what they go through because they’ve invested everything into this property. This is where they though that they would live out the last parts of their life, which has been my commitment to them is to help them with giving them the best quality at the end of their life. And so I feel pretty helpless a lot of times. I can’t help them. I can’t make the noise go away. I can’t help them sleep better. I can’t help them. And so being in the fight with my neighbors, with Shannon and government, trying to just have people to understand what this is doing to us on a personal level.

What this do? And man, it’s like you can’t get anyone to understand that. You can’t get anyone to, I don’t want to say anyone, but as far as government and stuff, it’s like there’s no empathy. On a daily basis, no one sees the mental decline of my parents. No one sees that they can’t sleep or why. And that’s just real hard. It’s hard to watch them go through that. So that’s where, I guess again, I go back to that environmental euthanasia. And I feel bad for my neighbors who really don’t speak out for themselves because they can’t for one reason or another, maybe lower socioeconomic purposes. But this is in their backyards in their back bedroom. And so I know I’ve talked to them how the impact is on their lives. They don’t sleep. There’s other health issues. I don’t want to labor all the time for that, but there’s just so much on a personal level that it ruins lives.

It really does. And it’s not what you expected. It’s not what’s being talked about. There’s no transparency about how this impacts personal lives. It’s just not there.

Craig Jackson:

Yeah, absolutely. So I think if anything, this whole battle’s not just pissed off a bunch of people, but brought a whole bunch of people together. So speaking on the Bitcoin mine, we noticed in 2024 we moved into our house at the end of 2022. So we got immediately, my wife’s dream’s been ducks and chickens. So we got ducks and chickens, set everything up. All of a sudden more eggs than we can get rid of. In 2024, marathon takes over the Bitcoin mine and we noticed production decreasing and chickens dying and ducks dying. And slowly, and then one morning we woke up and it was almost like a massacre because we had micro chickens and micro ducks. Within 24 hours, all of them had passed away. And what we discovered was that the infrasound coming off the Bitcoin mine that Cheryl and Karen and everybody else in the area is hearing is actually traveling with the wind.

But also when we have heavy cloud cover, it creates a sound barrier wall that is basically just bouncing off. And low frequency sound bounces differently than high frequency. Low frequency actually travels and I’m actually uphill. So it just really, as sound waves get tighter and tighter, if anybody can visualize it, it just literally we hit it and there’s nights I hear it and it’s like a whale that is outside just moaning and it’s in spurts. And there’s been several nights. My kids, they’re five and eight and we have a elementary school just a mile down the street from me, a high school two miles away. And so there’s kids in this entire neighborhood. I’ve talked to other parents that are like, “Man, my kid’s just not sleeping through the night or my kids are having a hard time sleeping.” Turns out that whale sound is what they’re hearing.

And so fast-forward January of this year, we discovered New Year’s Eve night that there was a data center being proposed for our city. And lo and behold, it’s 300 feet from my house. And so literally from the corner of my property to where it meets the fence line, the Dallas Cowboys could play and they might lose that game, but they could play there. And so either way, what’s been frustrating for us is my entire life now revolves around research, which I do in my job daily anyway for other people, but now I’m doing it for something that is literally threatening our way of life. And so not just we have a community well and so one small tap in the wrong direction, our wells dry and we’re going to be Meta in Georgia all over again. Turns out this is a Meta-funded data center project, Patriot, which as more information has been coming out, we have been seeing the audacity and arrogance and maybe even some ignorance from our city council or city manager, city attorney.

It’s been nothing but propaganda coming from the city side as well. So all this positive benefits about data centers and they couldn’t even get our own state representative to say something positive. They had to get the state representative from Fort Worth to say something positive. And he said, “Well, data centers are how your alarm clocks work. That’s the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard. My alarm clock lives internally on my phone if I use my phone.” And it just shows the audacity and how far they’re trying to propaganda all of this to the point where we as a community have been coming together and now I’m listed on the lawsuit against the city. One of those things I never thought I would have to say that as a county resident, I am suing a city that is affecting my everyday life. Now my home and neighborhood is a county island.

I don’t vote for these people. I don’t even get a say in what these people do, but they’re affecting my home. And so we’re fighting back and we’re even doing a recall. Hopefully we get enough signatures by that deadline, but we’ve done as far as signatures for no confidence in the city manager and city attorney. And every time we turn around, we’re just met with arrogance or just careless attitudes of…

People can go back, look at the city of Granbury, excuse me, city council meetings. And you’ll see on the January 6th meeting, it was literally everyone in that room was frustrated because we were told specifically only talk about the dirt when it came to annexing this property. And that was the shot heard around the entire county of like, okay, this fight just became personal for all of us.

Karen Pearson:

I was at that meeting and that’s where we also heard the city manager, I guess that’s what he is, saying that he did not care about us and something along those lines. So yeah, I heard all of that at that meeting and it was mouth-dropping.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

Yeah, I think what he actually said was I’m not scared of you, is what he said. Karen, I think you and I were sitting next to each other.

Karen Pearson:

We sat next to each other. We sure did. Yeah.

Craig Jackson:

And to add to it, we have so many emails from the city manager, from the former director of development, about meetings at a data center where all the city council members were there, all of them in the same building, same time, same place. How they all got there is a different story, but we have all of this data and all of these trails and all this communication that shows all this was premeditated. And we’re seeing now other cities are fighting this. And so one of the things, our hope and prayer is not just to undo the annexation, but just undoes all of it. But if we can establish that, hey, this is how business should not be done, hopefully we can help other towns in this fight as well.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

So as I said before, I’ve been in this fight for about three years, maybe a little more than three years. And I met Cheryl when I was running for precinct chair and she asked what I was going to do about the data centers and I had no idea what she was talking about. And so I went to look at this data center that was causing so much grief. And I had this aha moment because I thought there was a train track near my house that I just hadn’t found yet. And I could hear it really well in the wee hours of the morning or sometimes really, really late at night. My husband and I would talk about, where is this train? Because it was this rumbling that we heard. And my husband and I drove past this Bitcoin mine and we had this light bulb moment.

We don’t have a train. We have a Bitcoin mine. And Craig was talking about waking up around three, somewhere between three and four o’clock in the morning on some mornings. And I will have a migraine just all of a sudden I will have this migraine headache from this Bitcoin mine. And so we’ve been fighting this thing for about three years. Cheryl and I with just some other people have even gone down and spoken at the state capitol to a subcommittee. We have written letters. We have had town halls. I can’t even begin to list all the things that we have done to raise awareness. And I would say for the past two and a half years, Cheryl, I can’t talk for you, but it feels like I’m beating my head against the wall. It seems like people say, “Yeah, that’s tough, but that’s not me and I’ve got my life to live.” And they go on and do their thing.

Well, now that it’s all of Granberry, people are waking up. Now I don’t blame them. People have lives to live. But now we have eight to nine of these hyperscale data centers coming into one of the very smallest counties in the state of Texas. We are very small and these hyperscale data centers, one of them is about the same size as a small city. We’re talking massive data centers taking over ranches. They’re taking over areas where they There is protected wildlife. There’s one area that they’re trying to industrialize where we have bald eagles nesting there and we can’t even get EPA to pay attention to them paring down the trees and displacing these bald eagles. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. So with these hyperscale data centers that are coming in, we’ve realized that our county does not have the, or we thought our county didn’t have the right to zone or to protect ourselves from them.

And I think that there have been some people that have truly dropped the ball in elected officials who have truly dropped the ball in this and they have not protected citizens.

I see things happening in my area that I think it’s going to change this beautiful, beautiful area. And I think there’s no coming back from that. And we’re talking about endangered species that live here. There’s a species of bird that lives here that’s endangered. And I have no idea why people who are supposed to be protecting don’t protect. And that Cheryl brought up the gas power plant and when your listeners are maybe facing some of these things coming in, you cannot separate these data centers from their power source. Those two things are two parts of the very same conversation. So the data centers in our area are having to bring in their own power source. And so they’re building gas power plants, but they are using the very bare minimum of standards in protecting the environment from any type of pollutants. And so one of the other things that Cheryl was mentioning was that these, I’m sorry, gas power plants, the permitting entity in Texas only looks at each individual power plant and not take into account the cumulative impact of multiple data plants.

I’m sorry, multiple power plants. So for example, in Tarrant County, which is Fort Worth, Texas, it’s pretty large. They have one gas power plant inside Tarrant County. And right now in my very small precinct, which is five, six miles square, we have three gas power plants with another one coming in. So that’s four gas power plants now. We have two battery energy storage systems, which are the best plants or facilities. We’ve got a solar farm that is coming in and all of this has been happening within just a very short period of time. And the residents are trying to stop it and we have no way of stopping it. So that’s what we’re facing. But I’m hearing people from across the nation say the same thing.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and speaking of which, Makaya, Hillary, that’s how I met both of you is because you two are both folks in communities here in Maryland fighting these things coming in. So could you tell us more about how you got involved in those fights and what’s actually happening in your communities with these data centers?

Hillary Gonzalez:

For DSAI, it’s been a roundabout fight to get me into the data center fight. I’ve always been against them, but for the longest time, Johns Hopkins was claiming DSAI isn’t a data center. And so we have been fighting them by saying, “Well, you can’t study AI without a data center being involved. So it’s the data center. Where are you going to build it? Where is it being planned for? ” And as far as the construction itself, you’ve seen massive stormwater events just constantly every single time it rains. And I think when people hear stormwater runoff, they think like, “Oh, who cares? It’s not that big of a deal.” Except that we are located directly next to Stony Run Park, which is a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. So everything that goes into Stony Run eventually goes out to the Chesapeake Bay. And stormwater is very harmful because it has pollutants in it like diesel, oil, microplastics, a lot of sediment, which can eventually kill a riparian area like Stony Run, one of the few green spaces that we have in Baltimore.

Actually, just this evening because of the storm, we have what we call on our block the storm watch where if it starts raining, if it starts storming, everybody waits and they go outside and they take photos and they take videos of the runoff that’s coming from the construction site. And then we send in our 311 reports to Baltimore City. We send them into the Maryland Department of the Environment. We send them to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. And it’s just exhausting to have to do this every single time it rains. And we’ve met with city leaders. We’ve met with city officials. We’ve had them come out to the site to see the stuff that’s still there after it rains, to see the pollutants. We have videos of it going directly into Stony Run. And one such meeting, we actually had our city council president Zeke Cohen come out to the site and we told him, “Hey, this is what we’re experiencing every single day.

And these are our very real environmental concerns. The city spent $10 million of taxpayer money repairing Stony Run so that we could have a healthy water system in Baltimore City so that we could have a healthy harbor eventually as well.” And he basically heard all the concerns and he basically said, “I don’t care. We’re going to aprove this project anyway because I think that this is going to be good for Baltimore.” So this whole project has really just opened my eyes to what the city is allowing Johns Hopkins to get away with and what they have in the past as well. Ultimately, I had to help found a nonprofit in Baltimore City so that we could sue Johns Hopkins to try to stop this project. But ultimately this isn’t just about one data center project. This is about our governor wants to ramp up data centers in Maryland, which is really scary because we unfortunately have all these rural communities who are facing terrible consequences of these data centers.

And we have them as examples for what we don’t want in Baltimore. And we have so many communities that are at risk that we know that they’re going to try to build these data centers in. And I don’t care that this is being built in my neighborhood. I do care, but what I’m saying is it’s not just that this is affecting my neighborhood. I don’t want a project like this in any neighborhood in Baltimore. It doesn’t belong in any community while you fall under regardless of what your economic station is in life. It doesn’t matter. This is truly something that can unite all of us and it’s something that we should all be fighting against.

Micaiah Lloyd:

I’m absolutely distraught hearing about what you guys are going through and I’m a crybaby. I’m also a crash out. And my messaging and my militancy in my area, I get a lot of critiques on it, but it’s because of stories that I hear like this where these people just do not care. And I just don’t know what it will take and how many cuss words I have to spew out of my mouth to get these bozos to care. And I am so spiritually connected to the earth. It’s part of my mental health practices, how you guys talk about just wanting to sit outside with your family and sit outside with your parents. I’m with my baby boy right now and all we do is just sit outside while I crochet and I sit outside, I sit under my tree. I know I saw your baby too.

I was trying to say hi.

About the dead chickens and the dead ducks, it sounds so dystopian. And if this is my future, I don’t know what to do. And all I know is to fight like hell. And what we have been told, there’s this district commissioner, he’s the district commissioner of district four in Charles County and we were at a district, I think it was a town hall meeting. And members of my coalition, I don’t know if they directly addressed him, I don’t know. But basically he said that we have funding issues. He’s made a metaphor, a stupid metaphor about a barn. This is the barn we’re trying to build and if you don’t want to build the barn but this thing, we’re going to leave you behind and stuff like that. Just nonsense, ridiculous nonsensical bull crap. And then eventually he said, what has stuck with me is you’re going to have to stay in fight.

That’s what he says as it relates to data centers. He said, you’re going to have to stay in fight. This man is running unopposed in my county and our governor Westmore endorsed him. Westmore didn’t say it himself. He was supposed to be here in Charles County. I made a call to action about it. Excuse my language. He pussied out. He canceled it for unforeseen circumstances. And then just minutes before we start this call, I see that he had a private event in our county and spoke to some of our district commissioners and Ralph Patterson, the man he endorsed, and Ralph Patterson’s mother, Edith Patterson, who was a dinosaur elected official in this area. And yeah, it’s just been a fight. It’s a lot of political manipulation. People have data center money in their campaign contributions, but they want to tell us they’re not going to put a data center in our community and people believe them and people still vote for them.

And it’s just very frustrating. I’m very frustrated. I’m very emotional listening to you guys talk about what’s happening. And I would hope if people who didn’t look like me listen to you guys speak, they would take your concerns seriously. And I really hope that they do because it’s so dystopian what I’m hearing. And I have neighbors who have chickens. I’m a mile away from farmland and that’s what I love about this area. That’s what I love about Charles County. I feel like a country girl next to a city 45 away from DC. It’s really weird and I love it and I love that I can play both sides. So yeah, it’s a fight and it’s a lot of political manipulation and I just hope that people don’t listen to it. Right now, my biggest issue is being a lou, audacious Black woman speaking on behalf of the issue and people not wanting to take me seriously and my concerns seriously.

And that will be the detriment of our community.

Karen Pearson:

The chicken thing, I had totally forgotten until Craig mentioned it. My parents also had chickens and oh my gosh, we had so many eggs, more than we could give away. And then all of a sudden they just stopped laying one day. We quit getting eggs and we had several to die too. And it’s like, can you really believe this stuff? Is that really what happens to the animals and stuff like that? And then you start hearing others say the same thing and we don’t know each other. I didn’t know Craig. I didn’t even know he had this issue till this call. And I had forgot that we had the same thing. So my parents had to get rid of their chickens. So a lot of things like that out here have also happened. Domestic animals dying. Cheryl can talk about this too. Again, it’s some of those things that you don’t really realize.

And I think Craig spoke to some of this. The levels of the noise that are just not noticeable as we talk and communicate, it’s that decibel level that you don’t hear. And there’s another doctor, I believe she’s in Lesbon, and she’s done research on the vibrations and what those types of vibrations do to your inner body and the way it calcifies cells and stuff like that. And I haven’t even gotten into my mom’s health issues that have evolved over the last three years, but all of this didn’t were fine. All of this just happened in the last three years. And so you just cannot tell me that it’s a coincidence. There’s too many of us that have the same going on.

Cheryl Shadden:

So when infrasound hits your body and it doesn’t matter if it’s an animal, it doesn’t matter what living being it hits, it starts causing tissue damage to soft tissues. And so it can be noise that’s not even audible to the human ear. When one of my dogs started ripping her fur out until she was a bloody mess, I tried everything under the sun, worked with my vet, and I finally had to let go of her life. And when you see this happening with your friends and your neighbors and even people in California or Maryland or Texas, it’s heart-wrenching. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a young woman raising hell in Maryland or you’re an old lady in Texas raising hell, it’s still not okay. It’s still not okay to be harmed like this. It’s just not.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I hate to pile the misery and horror on, but I mean I have to also mention that I hear these kinds of stories in so many other parts of the country that we keep calling sacrifice zones because it’s just areas where people are being left to live in conditions that threaten life itself. So you know who I heard working class people like yourselves talk about this kind of thing? People in East Palestine, Ohio and in the surrounding area in Ohio and Pennsylvania when they blew up the five cars of vinyl chloride in those trains. And then they told everyone after that big toxic death plume blasted them all with toxins, they said, “Okay, you’re fine. Go back home.” And it was because everyone’s chickens and cats and it started dying that they were like, “We’re not fine. The fish belly up floating down the rivers.” They said, “You’re telling us that’s fine?” They do this everywhere.

And this is why I always tell people, I feel like I’m investigating a serial murderer because I hear the same stories coming out of the mouths of working people in so many different communities who are being polluted by this crap, who are being killed by this stuff. And we’re all being set up for sacrifice whether we voted for one party or another. So it’s kind of like, what do we do about this as working people? Can this be what y’all have been mentioning on this call? Can this be one of those things that really gets us to get over our differences and forces us to work together to fight this scourge that is coming for all of us? Let’s talk about that in this final round. Because we have an incredible panel of folks who are fighting data centers and Bitcoin mines in Texas that are already there and new ones that are being proposed.

You folks here in Maryland who are seeing these data centers go up in Virginia and around the country and you’re trying to fight them in your area. So what can we learn from each other? And I guess going back to that central message in the introduction, what do we need to learn so that we don’t fight this the wrong way? So that we don’t get caught up in the, you’re on the red team, you’re on the blue team, you’re in this state, so you deserve it, you’re in that state, so you don’t deserve it. How do we get past that crap and actually fight this and win this? So let’s go back around and any sort of advice that y’all want to offer each other or anyone out there listening who may be dealing with this now or soon in the future.

Cheryl Shadden:

When I started on this battle plane, I never once went up to somebody and said, “Are you a Democrat or are you Republican? And I need you to listen to me. ” This is a humanity issue. It’s a humanity issue all the way across this nation and into Europe. And so like we had talked about before, if my next door neighbor, and I don’t care who you are, if you come to me and ask me for help, if somebody’s invading your home and you need me to come and help you, I’m coming to help you. I don’t care what your politics are. I don’t care if I have a big dog and you have a little dog. I don’t care if you drive a red car and I drive a green one. I don’t care. I’m coming to help you because that’s a humanity thing you should be doing is caring about other people.

And what the governor of Maryland is doing is the same thing that our politicians are doing all around the country with very few exceptions is you’re not listening to your constituents remotely at all. Excuse me.

Hillary Gonzalez:

You’re so right. And I come from a small rural town in Virginia and really the only reason that I’m here today is because of mutual aid. Because we had to talk to our neighbors. We had to ask our neighbors for help whether we needed clean water because our well at one point was infected by Eli. Whether the food stamps run out, so we had to have one of our neighbors bring over some place for us. And I think we’re living in a time where people are afraid to talk to their neighbors, but I know every single name of my neighbors in my neighborhood, every single person. I knock on their doors all the time. I ask them how they’re doing. I’m like the unofficial mayor of Remington at this point. They come to me with every single issue and I listen to them and it doesn’t matter what side of the board they’re on.

I’m disabled, I’m queer, definitely leftist. But if you come to me and you need help and this is a humanitarian issue, I will help you. And I think that this truly is something that can unite all of us because this isn’t just a human issue, this is a land issue, this is a water issue, this is animals, this is our environment, this is trees. It’s everything. And that’s something at the end of the day that we can all be united on.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And it’s also our energy bills, right?

Hillary Gonzalez:

It’s also our energy bills. That’s right. Yeah. But also on the flip side of that, I’m sure that our governor in Maryland is going to say the same thing and Makaia can probably attest to this as well. They want to start building many nuclear reactors with these data centers, which is just absolutely insane.

Cheryl Shadden:

Little baby nuclear reactor.

Hillary Gonzalez:

Yeah, that’s insane. It’s completely untested tech. So I think another thing that we all need to start working on is when I see these data centers and the politicians who are approving them, what keeps connecting itself for me is that all of them are receiving APAC money. And I think we desperately need two individuals who are not accepting any funds from APAC.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And you know what else we got to throw on here is we need to ask ourselves as working people, what is the payoff here? What are these data centers and Bitcoin mines giving to our communities? How are they helping us? Are they providing all these jobs beyond a few construction jobs for the people who are building them? And then what happens to them afterwards? I mean, we get all these data centers and the payoff is that all of our newsfeeds are filled with fake AI slop, that AI is in all of our electronics surveilling us, taking people’s jobs, that they’re using AI to bomb people in Iran and other parts of the world. Hat the hell do we want that for? And is that worth sacrificing our lives and communities and environment too?

Hillary Gonzalez:

I think overwhelmingly, the first question that people have started asking themselves when someone proposes a data center for their town, the first thing that you’ll hear these politicians and these developers say is, “This is going to be so good for you. This is so good for the future.” A future for who? Who is that future for? And the second people start asking that question, the whole thing falls apart because it is not a future for us. There is no part of this that we have a future in. This is a future for them.

Craig Jackson:

I would invite anybody to look into the Project Stargate in Abilene, Texas. It’s about half the size of two of the proposed data centers for our Hood County Grayberry area. It’s 1100 acres. The one going next to me is 2090. The one further down the street across from Dinosaur Valley State Park, which has dinosaur tracks in limestone that will erode away due to acid rain over time is going to be about 2,100 acres or so. Anyway, that one is interesting in itself. And then next door to that is going to be one for Black Mountain Energy. And so as far as Project Stargate’s concerned, there have been so many interviews with the sheriff, with locals that have proven that infrastructure, whether it’s Texas, Maryland, wherever, we can’t handle the construction infrastructure. Not only the construction infrastructure, the infrastructure for hotels, for rental, for housing. It’s just not there.

And we’ve been seeing over the past generation that home affordability is out through the roof. Rental affordabillability is out through the roof, and that is coming for our town if we don’t fight and stop it. And so something that somebody proposed to me is just run, run for office. That is one way we can fight this is if you have an open election coming up, run. Because there are so many people that have recently been elected on this issue, whether you’re red or blue that are winning. We have an ag commissioner nominee that’s a Democrat that is killing it because of this whole issue. And I am proud to say that yes, I am excited to see somebody young regardless of what party they stand for, that is standing for the beliefs that I believe in. And so that’s one huge way. But the other thing too is anybody is questioning this, look at Abilene because it is a perfect example of prime going through the roof.

These are not just temporary construction jobs. These are jobs that are going to last three to five years. And then with those jobs, you’re going to bring in all sorts of people that are looking for work, all sorts of backgrounds. The dust is going to be a huge issue. They spend about, what is it, a hundred million gallons a day just spraying water to keep the dust down. And so traffic is a nightmare. It’s abysmal. And so we’re inviting this into every single neighborhood that has a proposed data center right now. There’s so many other issues we can tap into. I know we’re restricted on time, but ideally, if there’s something that we’ve been learning is learning your state’s laws, if you have an open meetings act, anything you can use because the Bible says your sins will find you out, numbers 23. Anyway, have found so much dirt behind the scenes that we are using the courts for our advantage for.

And whether our elected officials want to listen to us or not, at some point it’s going to court. And we already have two of the data center campuses that were proposed that are now suing our county that they’re going to lose because of how they’re trying to use a warp and distort the law. And then the other thing, follow the money. Greg Abbott, our governor, has received over $500,000 in donations from one single tech entity and a tech pack. And so it’s disgusting how much money tech is putting into whatever party will follow them and allow them to do this to us.

Hillary Gonzalez:

It’s so interesting that you bring that up because after one of the last hearings that we had with the Board of Estimates in Baltimore City, they approved a big part of the project for DSAI. And then I think it was a few weeks later after that decision, we saw campaign money from Johns Hopkins officials flowing into the pockets of the Board of Estimates people.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

One thing that I would like to add to this is I have worked a little bit with a petition to recall the entire city council and the mayor except for one council member. And I have seen Republicans and Democrats working shoulder to shoulder on this issue. And I think that’s what it needs to look like. We’ve talked a bit about politics here and there are some pretty bad people that are in office and they’re pretty good people that are in office. And I want to say that just like the people that might be listening to this, they don’t always know the details about how bad these data centers really are. And I want to give them time to learn, but they better hurry up because we don’t have time to wait for them to eventually figure this thing out. I don’t want this to be a Republican Democrat thing.

I think that too much of our country talks in terms of politics. I really wish it would be more of we’re neighbors, we live in the same community, let’s work together to make this thing happen. I heard Cheryl say that before, not today, but I’ve heard her say before, as a nurse, she doesn’t ask somebody their political affiliation before she helps them in an operating room. It doesn’t matter to her. And when I look at another human being, it doesn’t matter to me. If you need help, I’m going to try to help you. I don’t care which side of the aisle that you’re on. Now, I wish that this would be one of those things for everybody, that it just doesn’t matter what side of the aisle you’re on. It’s coming for all of us. And if we don’t all wake up and work together, we’re lost.

Micaiah Lloyd:

I am radically black, black, black, black, black, black, black, black black, black, black, black. Talk about everywhere am I going? And my parents never talked to me about race for real when I was a little girl. They just let me, because I was just so whimsical. I have stars tatted on my face. They’re the Neverland stars because I just love Peter Pan. I don’t ever want to grow up. And the world just beat me up. The world just beat me up. I played travel soccer, like I said before, so I was mostly an all white environment. So I didn’t get confidence until maybe my freshman year of high school. My racial self-esteem was low, just a whole bunch of things. So when I look at the world, it’s not that I’m trying to see racism, it’s just what I see because I’m looking for myself and I never see myself.

So me entering this organizing space, I blew it up. I blew it up. And it was after I was at a planning commission meeting and they said, “Let’s put all the data centers in the heavy industrial zones.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s where all the Black people are, isn’t it? And it was. And so I went in my coalition chat and I’m just like, “Y’all, I’m about to blow these people up.” I told them everything I was about to say. I said, “I’m doing this on my own platform. I’m just letting you guys know. ” And it hasn’t been good since. There’s been a huge divide in our county, unfortunately, between people of the more Southern part and people in the Northern part of the county. So I would say if you’re entering an organizing space, sometimes it is best for your mental health, just so many tears have been shed and it’s been a waste of time trying to get people to understand me and my point of view.

So sometimes you have to protect yourself and you have to organize with people who align with you more. But in terms of regular day-to-day conversations, no one who would talk to me would know about all of this crazy stuff I got going on in my head. I am a very personable person. All of my jobs have been more so blue collar. So I’m in the service industry a lot. I love elderly people. I don’t care what color you are. I love all people. And when I talk to people, I talk to them as if they’re the only person in the world.

So you need to go out and you need to talk to your neighbors. One of my neighbors, I’m looking at their house right now, he voted for Donald Trump. I don’t care. I didn’t even know he voted for Donald Trump until a year ago, but I’ve looked at this man face-to-face for 23 years of my life and I wouldn’t even have known. He’s always very nice to me. When I walk my dog, he lets my dog poop in his grass as long as I pick it up. It’s just like you need to go out and you need to talk to people and we have to find common ground and we have to be able to listen to people. And class solidarity is so important right now. And there are poor white people in this area who have been silenced and who have been bamboozled into voting for people consistently who do not care about them.

And I really hope that this issue wakes people up that all of these politicians lie and we need to follow the money. And if they have weird people in their campaign contributions, you should probably pay attention to that and you should stop making excuses for people.

And like Mr. Jackson said, we need to start running for office. Regular everyday people have to be in office. We have to clean sweep our government, our local governments. After God willing, I really am praying that we will ban data centers by November. I’m praying we can bully us more collectively into banning data centers. And if that happens, we’re clean sleep in the government. All of our local governments just need to be investigated because how did you allow this to happen? Why are you so susceptible to corruption? Why do you have an affinity for selling out your constituents? Why do you have an affinity for looking us in our face with attitude and lying to us and not taking our concerns seriously? Everyone has to leave. Everyone has to go. Everyone needs to be fired, as Donald Trump will say. All of them, you’re fired.

Everyone has to go. So I would say in terms of advice, get your boots on the ground, get out, talk to the people you know, get out and talk to the people you don’t know. Start showing up to planning in district commissioner meetings, go to your local government meetings, look these people in their face. These politicians, I can tell they’re scared when I walk in the room because they know I’m about to insult them. Start bullying these people. They really need to know that they work for us. And a lot of people don’t like my language, but at some point you have to stop caring and you have to really start embracing your own radical Black politic and start crashing out. And that’s my advice. I feel like if we would all crash out, they would not act like this. We need to start put…

And I don’t want violence to happen to anybody, but what they’re doing is violent to us. The stories that I’m hearing, it’s violence. It’s terrorism to me. It’s domestic terrorism. That’s what I hear.

Cheryl Shadden:

That’s what it’s like living here. It’s like living in a war zone. It absolutely is.

Micaiah Lloyd:

That’s what I’ve heard. I listened to you guys’ podcast about two times and just so I could really understand everything. And this sounds like just a horrendous… I’m sorry, I know it’s a beautiful place, but it sounds like a horrendous place to live. It sounds horrendous.

Cheryl Shadden:

It is.

Micaiah Lloyd:

I’ll be damned. If that happens to my beautiful… I’ll be damned. Oh my God.

Cheryl Shadden:

And people tell us all the time, just move. Well, my home and my property are paid for. I couldn’t sell my home or property if I wanted to. And so what do we do? You stand and fight.

Micaiah Lloyd:

That’s all you can do.

Craig Jackson:

Yeah. And to follow up with Cheryl, I have to disclose there’s a data center coming next door to me if I decide to sell my home. And we have a neighbor, their house has been sitting because it has to be disclosed. So you don’t have a choice. I mean, the worst case scenario for me is Airbnb my house to data center employees, but where am I going to go? Because I grew up in Houston and so I lived next to the highway. I know the highway noise. It’s embedded in my DNA at this point. And that’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s like you’re living next to a highway that just will not stop. And there’s nights, there’s not a car on the road. I’ve literally walked over to the highway. I say highway, Texas highway. There’s not a car on the road, but you’re hearing that droning constantly.

And the only way we are going to stop this is to not just educate politicians, but we need educated people to run for this. We need to stop just believing. So one of the things we’ve come across in our area is developers making false personas and going on Facebook groups to hype up all the positive benefits of data centers or people who are invested in data centers going on and playing the positivity side. And as neighbors, one, you know your neighbors, you know who’s true and who’s not, but the reality is we can only do so much on social media, but we need to be the louder voices in all honesty. We need to be the voices of reason. And one of the things we see all the time is, well, you’re on Facebook, you’re using a data center, you’re on TikTok, you’re using data center.

And part of that education is there’s a difference between an enterprise data center and a hyperscale data center. And what’s coming in our areas is hyperscale, which is what we don’t want. We’ve been using enterprise data centers for years. I used to work in a building that had its own data center within, and the room was constantly kept at 70 degrees, but you couldn’t hear the fans because they sound walled everything. It didn’t disrupt anything. It didn’t use any water. It was all air cooled by air conditioning. This is an entirely different beast that we’re fighting and that’s where the education outlet comes in. So if we just have smart people running, if we do more education, do what we can be the voice of reason, not just the voice of opposition at the end of the day.

Karen Pearson:

I think the level of secrecy and deception, I guess, I mean, I’m not a naive person. I deal with all sorts of people and I love people too. I like to get to know different people. And I mean, I feel like we all bleed the same color red. And our skeletal makeup, we have many things in common as far as color, race, none of that matters language. For me, one of the things that has been the most shocking is how people have just so easily lied and deceived and a lot for the sake of money. There for a long time we said out here that we were kind of the redheaded kids of Hood County because, and again, me and Cheryl, some of us have talked about this. There’s quite a few of us that are in this fight that are very highly educated.

But what they’ve done to this community is because of lower socioeconomic. I think Mikaia mentioned this about the industrial part in the city, that’s a lot of Black people there. Well, out here there’s a lot of Hispanic people in our community and they’re not going to speak up for themselves for various reasons. I don’t care if you’re here illegally or undocumented or whatever. I have some wonderful neighbors across the street that I would go help in a heartbeat. The deception to pile this onto the communities like that and to think that you can get away with it, it is, like you said, that sacrificial zone. It’s showing me that there are some of us who are worth sacrificing for a dollar. There are some of us who regardless of, “Oh, let’s look at that community. It doesn’t look like it’s very well-deserving. Let’s put it all there.” And I don’t know, I guess just the way that other human beings treat human beings is beyond me.

I don’t think that way. My heart is not like that. And so it’s just really hard to comprehend the deception and the lack of transparency and how so easily we can lie and how we can sacrifice another human being for the sake of money. I cannot wrap my head around that. And that’s part of why I want to keep fighting.

Micaiah Lloyd:

These are called the paths of least resistance, these specific neighborhoods, and it’s a microzoning and it’s redlining. So for the audience, if there’s a data center being proposed in your community, it’s probably in a community that would have the pathway of least resistance. If we’re in a state like Texas and we’re worried about ICE, probably Hispanic people aren’t going to speak up for themselves because they’re scared. So yes, let’s put it here. So we do need to pay attention to not only Black and brown people, but poor people as well because they don’t have the resources to fight for themselves.

Hillary Gonzalez:

100%.

Dr. Shannon Wolf:

You are right about that. What I have found recently is that I think even middle-class people are no match for these data centers because they have really deep pockets and they can litigate for forever. And I think a normal everyday person is not going to be able to fight that because they’re going to take it to court and they will tie you up in court and they will take everything that you have and then some. Cheryl, I know that with yours, they were asking questions that they had no business asking you. So they were wanting everything and the paperwork was just nonstop. So that’s been my experience with these data centers.

Craig Jackson:

We can also say it’s expensive. We had to retain a lawyer which costs 10,000 upfront and it’s not even probably the lawyer we’re going to go with at the end of the day. There’s several other communities that have gotten lawyers that it is expensive. So if there’s any lawyers listening that want to help, we would appreciate the help. But at the end of the day, what it really is coming down to is money. And just anybody that wants to take five seconds to Google Marathon Digital Bitcoin, they sold off a lot of Bitcoin and made a lot, a lot of money at the profit of this neighborhood. And it’s frustrating because we don’t receive any of that, but our property taxes go up, our electricity goes up, our water bill, everything else goes up. We’re fighting just for daily life, but yet they’re profiting off the backs of our health.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests from Granbury, Texas, Cheryl Shadden, Karen Pearson, Craig Jackson, and Dr. Shannon Wolfe. And I want to thank our guests from Maryland, Hillary Gonzalez and Mikaya Lloyd. This was such an important discussion and this is such an important issue and I’m so grateful to all of our guests for being part of this panel and for everything that they are doing to fight back for their communities. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring about this. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle.

Check us out across our YouTube channel, our podcast feeds, our website, and our different social media pages and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves and take care of each other. Solidarity forever.