Taya Graham: Pennsylvania’s 7th District is a diverse community stretching across the Lehigh Valley, but just before the midterm election, there is a common theme from residents that we spoke to.

Kathy: We are not liking what we see in our country.

Taya Graham: Anger and the desire for change.

Kathy: We’re not liking the effects of the things that are taking place in Washington, and therefore people are out trying to make a change.

Taya Graham: And how voters feel here could be critical to who controls the House. It is one of more than a dozen battleground districts, which is why we spent several days speaking to the people who will determine the outcome. Many said high prices, lack of affordable housing, and a disconnect between Washington and the concerns of working people were motivating their vote.

Valerie: But from what I see, a lot of people, including people that were always Trumpers or used to be always Trumpers, are actually changing their mind. They’re really upset. When they go to the grocery store, my grocery bills in the last year have tripled.

Taya Graham: But we also learned there are other more specific issues that could sway the election. Data centers have become a national issue, but the impact is truly local. Last week, the Bethlehem City Council met to approve more restrictive zoning regulations for data centers. The law would create wider setbacks from residential neighborhoods and limit noise levels. For some, data centers were the deciding factor on how they would vote.

Darcy: I actually see this as it being forced on us, it being forced on us quickly, it being forced on us without the proper studies and concern about the environment that honestly, I think it’s across the board, people don’t want them. And this is an issue that I think Republicans, Independents, and I think this is our stamp act.

Taya Graham: A unifying issue in an otherwise fractured electorate.

Mary Collier: Doors and on the phones across our turfs in Pennsylvania right now, affordability, housing and data centers are the top issues. I think there’s a lot of reasons to hate data centers, but the fact that 40% of Pennsylvanians can’t afford their bills right now, knowing that these things are going to raise their utility bills is a huge reason that it’s on people’s minds and they’re thinking about it going into this election.

Taya Graham: The race between Democrat Bob Brooks and Republican Ryan McKenzie is tight. The Cook’s political report gives Brooks a five point lead, but 16% of voters remain undecided. Neither attended the hearing. Brooks did make an appearance when the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial bookmobile visited Bethlehem. It’s a moving repository of Epstein investigatory files and emails that has traveled across the country. We asked Brooks if he thought that the Epstein scandal would impact voters.

Bob Brooks: I think they’re a huge factor. People of all walks and want to see these things released. I think it’s a huge issue. I know within my union, I’ve watched my union members feel like they’ve been lied to, and this is one of the big topics that they voted that way in the beginning and now they’re feeling lied to. So I think you’re going to see it be a really big factor.

Taya Graham: At another stop, residents agreed.

Krista: I wanted to see the 3.5 million books. I wanted to see what it was all about and that I can’t believe our leaders in our country are saying this is a hoax.

Taya Graham: However, looming over the district were other more foreboding concerns that democracy itself was on the ballot and that their vote would not be counted.

Cathy: I am going to vote by mail, but I’m going to put my ballot in a drop box as opposed to the mail because I don’t trust that process, which is ridiculous. The United States Postal Service, we feel like we can’t even trust that anymore.

Thomas: I think that there’s a strong possibility that they would block as many votes as possible.

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

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

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

James “NDN” Gardner:

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

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

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

James Quigg:

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

You had a low rider?

James “NDN” Gardner:

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

James Quigg:

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

You got to earn your keep, baby.

James Quigg:

It took a couple years.

James “NDN” Gardner:

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

James Quigg:

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

James “NDN” Gardner:

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

James “NDN” Gardner:

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

What were you doing back then for work?

James “NDN” Gardner:

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

James “NDN” Gardner:

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

James Quigg:

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

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

James “NDN” Gardner:

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

James “NDN” Gardner:

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

James Quigg:

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

Speaker 4:

Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

James “NDN” Gardner:

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

James Quigg:

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

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

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

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

James “NDN” Gardner:

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

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

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

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

James Quigg:

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

James “NDN” Gardner:

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

Jesus, man.

James “NDN” Gardner:

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

Sounds like hell.

James “NDN” Gardner:

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

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

James “NDN” Gardner:

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

James “NDN” Gardner:

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

James Quigg:

What’s the MSDS?

James “NDN” Gardner:

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

James “NDN” Gardner:

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

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

James Quigg:

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

James “NDN” Gardner:

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

James “NDN” Gardner:

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

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

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

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

James Quigg:

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

James “NDN” Gardner:

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

James Quigg:

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

Speaker 4:

Yeah.

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

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

James “NDN” Gardner:

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

James Quigg:

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

Indian’s always been that person to support others.

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

James “NDN” Gardner:

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, James Indian Gardner and James Quigg. You can get in touch with them and keep up to date with Indian story by using the links that we’ve included in the show notes for this episode. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring about this. We do this work for you, but we can’t do it without you. So thank you. Working People is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. The show is produced by the great Jules Taylor and is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle across the US and around the world.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel and check out our other great podcasts like Under the Shadow and the Battle for Free Speech and connect with us on social media and get updates on our reporting there and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

I’m here at Red Emmas at the Baltimore Book Festival, and I’m sitting with Dr. Mark Anthony Neal. Brother Mark, it’s so great to have you back here in Baltimore, man. I know I only got you for a second, and we’re talking about your incredible new book, Save a Seat for Me, Notes on American Fatherhood. And I was thinking as another father in America in 2026, I wanted to ask you, it doesn’t take PhDs like we have to know that we’ve got a real fricking crisis in this country with men and masculinity and masculine culture and fatherhood, or we have a whole lot of crises that men are experiencing but aren’t dealing with well. So what do you make of all this? What do we do about it? And how can your book help us get there?

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

I think we have tried, America has tried to raise generations of warriors, if you will, to be on the front lines of American imperialism. And you can’t be human to do that. You can’t think, you can’t question, you can’t be vulnerable. So what we have done is raise two or three generations of men in America who don’t know how to be human, who don’t know how to lead into full range of who they are. We’ve been socialized to show up only certain kinds of ways, anger, rage, the ability to follow directions. Things like vulnerability are made fun of at the highest levels.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And those of us who are very vulnerable people have been made fun of.

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

Because of that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Because of that.

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

We’ve been made to think that our responsibility in a capitalist system has literally been reduced to only making money, that our only value. And I think about this a lot as a Black father, my own father, that I’m sure he thought that his only value to me was making sure that I was fed and clothed and taken care of. And I get all of that, but I needed much more from him. As a father, I needed to be more than that for my daughters. And so I think when we look at young men who are clearly feeling so much with no outlet, their outlets become dangerous behaviors, self-directed violence,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Toxic online cultures,

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

All kinds of addictions, alcohol, Percocet, weed, porn. I mean, we can name all these things and understand it. And the fact that so many of the young men in the world today, their lives are what they can connect with on their handheld device. They don’t actually have relationships with people in the real world, don’t see a value in that. And I don’t know how we sustain that. I don’t know how we sustain our humanity in a situation where we don’t value human relationship anymore.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and it’s like you see that the path that we’re on as a society or what’s left of a society is being driven by the sociopathic, psychopathic, bloodthirsty –

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

Or just plain evils.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Just plain evil maniacs who want a future where they get all the benefits of human society, but don’t have to deal with any of the humans in it. Whether they’re thinking of like, oh, AI is going to replace all their jobs and we’re going to get all the money. They’re not thinking about what the heck that’s going to mean for us. They’re just going to push us into slums and prisons and police us, hunt us, surveil us. That’s their big goddamn plan. And I think you put it so powerfully that it’s like so many men out there have the same human needs that we all have and we’re feeling them so acutely the more isolated we are, but we’re looking to find, we’re seeking inhuman avenues.

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

I mean, think about all the folks who are in relationships with chat bots. I mean, it’s surreal. I can’t have a relationship with an actual person. I don’t desire a relationship with an actual person. I need to have a relationship with some facsimile, some avatar that somehow that’s more meaningful to me than having a relationship with a person.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. And I think even as a editor in chief and co-ED of a media network, as a media star, we recognize there’s only so much you can do online. You got to get the hell offline and you got to meet each other back on that level of shared humanity and shared reality because that’s the only way we’re going to deal with anything, anything in this country.

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

And that’s why the Baltimore Book Festival is really important. First of all, not only just a reminder, someplace that’s celebrating the written word, obviously, but folks coming together in community. We have to get back to a culture where we share in community. We read together, we listen together, we debate together instead of these media silos. I’m going to have this debate over here on this network and you’re going to have this debate over there and never the twain shall meet.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and final question, but it goes really to the heart of your book. Here in Baltimore, I see this every day. I feel it as a father, but right down the street from where I live in Mondamin, earlier this summer, there were six youth who were caught on camera just beating the hell out of an elderly member of the community, a former Black Panther. It was horrific. I’ve interviewed this man and the community that’s trying to help him, but clearly everyone who is showing up to help is seeing in that video the deficit of guidance, of fatherhood, of love.

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

Of respect. Basic respect.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So what can we do about that in our everyday lives at the person to person level?

Dr. Mark Anthony Neal:

We have to be willing not just to be witnesses to these experiences or commentators.

We have to intervene and feel comfortable enough to intervene. Whoever sat down with those young men, first of all, to explain, because the easy part is to say, no, this man was important to our movement in the past. The more difficult thing is like, no, this man is important because he’s another human being and you should value life and his humanity. But if they are young men who do not value their own humanity, don’t see their own humanity, they’re going to reproduce that behavior over and over again. And so we have to have the willingness because it’s real easy to go, I’m just going to build my life in this silo and protect my family and I get it. But to take that next step to say, okay, I might not be able to talk to all six of these brothers, try to talk to two of them.

Begin that process, that one-on-one conversation that can blossom into something that’s much more significant.

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

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

Cole Rockarts:

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

Hassan Husseini:

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

Tina Oh:

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

Alex Raymond:

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

Cole Rockarts:

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

Alex Raymond:

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

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

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

Hassan Husseini:

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

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

Tina Oh:

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

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

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

Cole Rockarts:

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

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

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

Tina Oh:

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

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

Alex Raymond:

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

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

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

Hassan Husseini:

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

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

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

Cole Rockarts:

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

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

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

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

Hassan Husseini:

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

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

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

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

Tina Oh:

I want to hear from you, Alex.

Alex Raymond:

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

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

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

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

Cole Rockarts:

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

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

Cole Rockarts:

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

Cole Rockarts:

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

Tina Oh:

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

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

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

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

Alex Raymond:

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

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

Hassan Husseini:

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

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

Tina Oh:

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

Cole Rockarts:

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

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing weekly at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories of people on the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Check out our great podcasts like Under the Shadow and The Marc Steiner Show, and connect with us on social media and get updates on our reporting there and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really, really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

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

News Clip 1:

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

News Clip 2:

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

News Clip 3:

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

News Clip 4:

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

News Clip 3:

OSHA teams are now involved in the investigation.

Sara Locker:

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

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

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

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

Mike Balonek:

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

Dr Brittany Jones:

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

Sara Locker:

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

Kris Ramsdell:

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

Sara Locker:

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

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

Kris Ramsdell:

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

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

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

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

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

Dr Brittany Jones:

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

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

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

Mike Balonek:

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

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

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

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

Kris Ramsdell:

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

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

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

Sara Locker:

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

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

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

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

Kris Ramsdell:

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

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

I mean, that’s nothing.

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

Mike Balonek:

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

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

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

Dr Brittany Jones:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kris Ramsdell:

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

Sara Locker:

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

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

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

Kris Ramsdell:

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

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

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

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

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

Mike Balonek:

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

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

Dr Brittany Jones:

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

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

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

Kris Ramsdell:

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

Dr Brittany Jones:

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

Kris Ramsdell:

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

Sara Locker:

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

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

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

Kris Ramsdell:

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

Sara Locker:

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

Kris Ramsdell:

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

Sara Locker:

This is our new norm in this household.

Kris Ramsdell:

Yeah.

Sara Locker:

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

Kris Ramsdell:

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

Mike Balonek:

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

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

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

Kris Ramsdell:

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

Maximillian Alvarez:

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

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