It Could Happen Here - Why Our Supply Chains Still Sucks

Episode Date: November 19, 2021

We talk with Alexis about how just in time production and lean manufacturing have destroyed all resiliency in our supply chains and the effect keeping the supply chain running are having on the workers who form the real basis of the economy. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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and occasionally how to maybe deal with that, maybe try to steer things in a better direction. We talk about a bunch of stuff. Today, we're going to be talking about more supply line stuff. And in order to kind of introduce this episode, we wanted to bring in Alexis, who posted a thread on Twitter about some of their experiences in the industry

in which they work that we all found very interesting. And so we just wanted to bring Alexis on and first off, have you kind of go over what you went over in that thread and then kind of zero in and talk about that. So Alexis, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm going to let you take it from here and then we'll drill in once you get through your piece. All right, so I'm just going to go ahead and read the thread that I posted and then, yeah, we'll go from there. So, labor shortage discourse time.

I work for a food manufacturing company, specifically bottling and canning various beverages, and we are desperately understaffed. The wages are competitive, but they can't keep anyone on after they hire them. Why? Because we're short on people. As soon as someone is trained, they start throwing massive amounts of mandatory overtime on them to try and cover the missing pieces while they look for more people to hire in. Folks get burned out and quit. And this is where my hate of just-in-time manufacturing comes in. Now, obviously, in food manufacturing, you can't just stock a warehouse with stuff and let it sit for a year, but you can keep a couple of weeks of stock rotating at all times if you devote the warehouse space, employees,

etc. to doing so. This would give you some flex time to train your new people without having to run everyone into the dirt. So even with a place that is offering decent money and benefits, because this is a union shop, we can't keep people because we're making a conscious decision to only ever have one to two days of stock on hand to increase profits. Meanwhile, thanks to lean manufacturing, we don't keep a ton of spare parts for our equipment on hand. Thanks to the supply chain disruption, we've got packaging equipment that's been waiting on replacement parts for six months, which further fucks our productivity due to downtime, which makes the company schedule even more overtime to try and make up for the lost cases from equipment downtime, which burns out more employees, which puts us in an even deeper labor hole.

I've been warning about just-in-time being a time bomb in the making for over a decade now. When it works perfectly, you're fine. A single interruption causes cascade effects, and since everyone has been doing the just-in-time thing, there's zero slack anywhere in the system. Grocery stores don't have any extra soda in the back. They get behind. Demand builds up. Distribution doesn't have any pallets in the warehouse. Ha, what warehouse? So they can't answer the surge in demand from grocery stores. Manufacturing doesn't have spare parts for aging equipment, so we can't boost production. Spare parts makers don't have stock buildup.

So on and on it goes. The actual proximate cause of this is deregulation of capitalism that has incentivized quarterly profits and made long term thinking anathema to CEOs. But sure, conservatives blame California for not letting old trucks offload at the ports. That's it. And that's that's the essence of my thread. I then plug myload at the ports. That's it. And that's, that's the essence of my thread. I then plug my podcast at the end. Right. Yeah.

So I wanted to, I'm curious as to kind of like, uh, to what it, like, I'm trying to understand like what the solution is. Like we've talked a bit about, okay.

Just in time, manufacturing is, is problematic for a lot talked a bit about, okay, just-in-time manufacturing is problematic for a lot of reasons. Keeping more like on the shelves is going to allow you to avoid these crunches and it's going to like make supply line issues like the ones we've been experiencing since the start of the COVID pandemic less severe and less common. But how do you actually make that happen? Because I guess the traditional free market thing is that like well because this has been such a problem for companies um you know they'll naturally change the system in order to avoid this in the future i don't feel like that's likely to happen

um and i'm wondering like what do we uh what what do you think is the the way forward here well because some of the problem is is now, like most companies, you will pay taxes on stuff that you have stored in a warehouse, things like that. So no company is going to voluntarily lower their profit margins if the other companies don't do it themselves as well. So really, there's going to have to be some sort of forcing of companies to have that on hand. And I don't see just being able to write a law that says, oh, well, you're required to have this much backstock on hand as being a functional way to work. And really, as I'm sure, Robert, I know you're well aware, capitalism itself is kind of the problem. But as far as I guess a solution to this sort of thing,

you would have to disincentivize the quarterly profits above all in order to force companies back into long-term thinking. Now, from a purely mechanical standpoint, I guess if you did something to incentivize companies having backstock or flex stock on hand, that might help. But I mean, I'm just a cog in the machine getting ground up. So as far as big solutions, I've been looking at it ever since I worked in a fricking casket factory and we started doing just in time there. And just every time that I've been in a place, a manufacturing place and seen it happen, I'm just like, oh, this is going to go wrong because you can't, you can do just in time

if all of your suppliers are local, but having it stretched across the global supply chain, it just, it's inevitably going to collapse in on itself i'm sorry that i'm not more helpful no no but i mean this is this is like the problem because there's a lot of reasons why the supply chain is global some of them are like labor related reasons some of them are cost cutting some of them are just like pure pragmatism um but it's trying to like i i don't i feel like it's it's one thing to say, like, well, part of the problem is that, like, all of these different pieces come from different countries. Um, and there's a number of shady reasons for aspects of that. Um, but it makes for greater problems when there's a supply line shortage and then like, okay, well, what are we, what are we going to, are you suggesting that we make everything domestically?

Cause I, I don't feel like that's a realistic solution. Um, yeah, no. Yeah. And it's just it's I'm trying to get a handle on. There's a couple of angles on this. There's there's what we think is going to happen. And then there's the question of, like, is there a way that the system as it exists could make this whole thing less vulnerable? And in a lot of ways, that's going to be separate from the question of what would be better for

everyone to happen. Because a lot of what would be better for everyone to happen is a wide, a significant chunk of these things that we have constantly stocked on the shelves are no longer parts of our life. Right. There's a lot of things that are made that we do not need. And that are, there's an environmental cost and a social cost and yada,

yada, yada. But I guess first I'm kind of curious to drilling in, like, how realistic do you think it is that the system as it exists is going to, like, mitigate this and come up with better ways to do this that render us less vulnerable to these supply crunches? Like, is there, I don't see a great financial incentive in it for them yet because they they don't seem to be hurting. Right. Like, that's that's the thing. Well, actually, and again, please keep in mind, this is limited anecdotal evidence. Yeah, because it's going to be like John Deere, I know, was making record profits before all this union stuff happened. But like, that's not everyone. Right. Right. So again, I work for a soda manufacturer. So every time you're enjoying your Schmepsi Schmola or your Schmago, whatever, I'm not going to explain which company I work for because I don't want to get in trouble. And we're actually a captive bottler, which means that it's a separate company, but we work for the big soda corporation. I think that in certain instances, those things will change because for example, just last week,

we had one of our four lines go down. So 25% of our production capacity went down because we had a motor burnout on the rollers that would move a full pallet out to be picked up by a forklift. And there was no replacement motor in stock. And so we had, I think, 48 hours of downtime on this. Now, all the way up at the top, the company executives, we're one of 30 some plants. They don't care about why it was down, just that it was down. So in our position here, the people a little higher up the food chain than me are insisting like, hey, we've been after you guys for months that we need spares like this. And I think that as that sort of stuff happens, as it cuts into potential future profits, it's not dropping their profits, but it's keeping them from being even higher. Maybe

certain companies are going to be like, okay, maybe we do need a couple more spares on the shelves. As far as on the production side of it, I don't see that happening. I think we're still going to be shipping out pallets of, you know, pallets of corn syrup in infected carbonated water as fast as we can make them. Which you, and you were talking about the environmental costs. Like you do not want to know how much water it takes to make a single liter of soda you really don't yeah um but on this on the production like input side i think that

companies are going to start stocking spare parts because it has been and i still have friends who work for other companies that I used to work for, it has been all throughout the system. And I live in the Midwest. Every company is going through this where they're having huge amounts of downtime because things as small as a gasket or an O-ring are not on the shelf. And companies are finally going to listen to what their maintenance people have been screaming at them that we can't just stagger along and then, oh, well, it's next day delivery. Yeah. And then you freak out that this line was down for 24 hours. Now that it's not even next day delivery, it's next week delivery. I think that side of it, they're going to probably try and fix. But the other side shipping to the consumer,

I really don't see that they're going to change that. Yeah, I mean, that makes that makes sense. And we are you are kind of led thinking about this inevitably to like two conclusions. One of them is that I have my I'm sure parts of this, the the system will adapt as it already has been, in fact, which is why, like, you haven't seen toilet paper run out as bad as it did at the start of the pandemic again, right? There is a degree to which the system is capable of adjustment, but kind of in a larger sense, this is number one, I'm kind of left with the feeling that because of the way the system was set up and the fact that it was disrupted so severely, it's kind of impossible to get 100 percent back on track, especially considering the disruptions are going to continue, not just waves of covid, but, you know, natural disasters and whatnot. Shortages of things like truck drivers like these different little hits are going to keep coming.

And I just don't know that we're ever going to, like, catch up everywhere enough that like shortages of some sort aren't an aspect of our lives kind of forever. And this is one of those things that if you've spent a lot of time outside of the United States, that's something a lot of people have been dealing with for years. It's just not something Americans are used to dealing with. And I think I kind of feel like that's just where it is now. Like I don't feel like every aspect of our our production and consumption system is going to get backward to where it was February of 2020. I think maybe that's never happening again. No,

absolutely. It will not ever happen again. You were saying earlier that, you know, there's some practical reasons for the global supply chain. Like one of the things that we've had such hard time getting in is any of our concentrates that contain real vanilla. Obviously we can't grow vanilla in the united states yeah that's the thing you have to i mean that's part of why colonialism exists right is you need to go get

vanilla yeah so yeah so like there are certain things that are going to be stay have to stay global if we're going to continue to make the things that we make and just from my side of it being able to see oh well why can't we get this concentrate in oh because it has vanilla as an ingredient and there's been a bunch of droughts and shit and so vanilla is in a crunch you know that sort of thing so i just um you're right in that yeah we're going to have shortages there's it's you know and it's not just the mechanical side on ours. It's like we can't get cans in. We can't get concentrate in.

We can't, you know, whatever it is that we can't get in is going to slow us down and demand will build up. I did have somebody in that thread respond and say, I don't see how demand for soda will build up. And I'm like, no, I have a friend who's like a diet Dr. Pepper fiend. And as soon as diet Dr. Pepper shows up now, I'm like, now I have a friend who's like a diet, Dr. Pepper fiend. And as soon as diet, Dr. Pepper shows up now, she buys like eight, 24 packs.

Demand will absolutely build up for stuff. When people feel like they're being deprived of something, when it becomes available, they are going to hoard it as best they can. Yeah. And that's again with soda, just kind of an annoyance, although that can,

because individual people can react in extreme ways, can snowball. I'm not going to be surprised if one of these days we have somebody shoot up a fucking grocery store because their whatever was out. But that's also not a necessity. The concern is that especially when you look at stuff like – there's a couple of states that have like their wheat harvest and corn harvest that were like half or less than half of normal. In big chunks of Iraq, it was like down by I think like 70 or 80 percent, like these massive shortages of growing basic foodstuffs. And that's all tied into this. Like it's not the same business that you're in, but it's all tied into aspects of this. And it's all tied into like a lot of our ability to get that food out of the field is reliant upon different kinds of mechanical harvesting equipment. The materials to which to like fix and replace it are often like caught up in this whole just in time problem because they don't make enough of them. And sometimes they don't have them in stores.

And then there's like a strike at John Deere and so more aren't getting made and so there's not what you need to repair the equipment in time to get stuff out of the field everywhere and in a year when you already have a reduction of harvests like that cuts down on it further um like i i think i don't know it's it's this there's always a couple of things to look at which is like number one as we've talked about like how is the the system going to try to handle this? What ways are they going to be successful? What ways are they going to fail? What things are you going to have to endure?

And what things I think what I want to talk about next is like, what things do we need to change in order to like as communities be more resilient to this stuff, which has less to do with soda, which, again, is not a necessity, but more to do with figuring out how to anticipate and endure supply line disruptions. Right. Absolutely. And while I'm currently in soda, I have been in everything from automotive to, I think, as I mentioned, more casket manufacturers. So, you know. Well, and I can go through a casket a week, you know. Especially when you're driving your uh your well yeah when i'm drunk driving in a oh boy right right through a trailer park i mean

you're you're i mean your casket order has got to be through the roof uh it is it is a lot a lot of people yeah i mean i i do actually wonder how fuck um i mean like i i do actually wonder how much like the casket industry and something that has been affected by the pandemic with the you know an influx of dead people and how that's affected things that's something I've been wondering about but I've not actually spent time looking into

I can't speak to the pandemic specifically I quit the casket industry in 2008 but I do recall my boss the owner at the being very, very upset that Hurricane Katrina had a lower death toll than he anticipated. Oh, that's really, yeah. He had overordered the sheet metal to make the caskets, and he was very pissed off about having all that extra stock because they were trying to transfer to just in time. That's incredible. I love our society. Yeah, that's good to hear yeah great yeah he he was in a bad mood

for like a month after katrina because god it hadn't reached his expectation well sure that's a real problem for for absolutely no he's got that's all the sympathy critical support i mean that job was grim i'm just gonna say that that sounds like it. I have, through a loved one, a connection to somebody who works for a company that makes body bags. And 2020 was amazing for them. They did incredible in 2020. I didn't hear any ghoulish stories. It's just like, yeah, of course you guys made a bunch of extra money. Like, yeah.

Sounds like that was great for you putting it putting in a mental note to uh go through a bunch of the campaign contributions of people who make body bags to check if they're supporting anti-mask yeah see if big corpse got into this at all i mean honestly the thing to the thing to do is you know i'm not a big fan of the stock market in general, but next time there's a pandemic, find out which companies make body bags on the stock market and invest in those as soon as the pandemic starts. I mean, I can tell you what. I'm putting money into big corps as soon as the next pandemic hits.

That's absolutely going to happen. Oh, boy. All right. Yeah, that's grim. I think it's fine there's a reason why after after i started working there i immediately uh told my husband hey uh make sure if i die before you i'm cremated so yes yes i don't want to give these monsters any of my money what i'm looking into is just full full body stuffing that people can pose me around. But that's a separate topic.

Yeah, you talk about that a lot, Garrison. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Son enter. Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. As part of my Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast.

And we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse, and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge, and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every

week to understand what's happening in the tech industry, and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez.

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available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your

Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What I did want to mention is like actually when you were talking about how they hire in a lot of employees and they make them work horrible hours and then they quit.

This is kind of a constant process. And this isn't exclusive to that industry at all. One of the worst offenders of this is actually the Postal Service. The Postal Service has the lowest employee satisfaction out of any shipping company. My father worked for the Postal Service for a bit. And when you first join up, you join as like, you join as a, on like a non-career employee path. And then you can get promoted to a career employee path after a few years.

But the turnaround for the non-career employee paths is massive. Like local branches can say up to like 90% of people who start working at the Postal Service will end up quitting within the year. Now, that number can be different based on, like, nationally and based on, like, you know, based on what state you're in. But across the board, it's always around at least 50% for employee turnaround, for people who join up the Postal Service on these, like, city carrier assistant positions. That's fascinating.

Yeah, because when you're a non-career employee path, you have to work seven days a week, and you can be called in to work basically any time, usually working around 10 to 12-hour days. All of the career employees, all of the rates... Oh, that sounds like what I put you guys through. But all of the regular carriers get to work their specific route, and that's their whole day.

For the people who are new to the job, they're forced to work tons of routes, fill in whenever someone else can't, and constantly be doing overtime and working basically nonstop with only two holidays off a year or something. It's pretty intense, which is why when the Post the postal service comes have problems and because and because there's so there's generally not tons of employees i mean like there is lots like comparatively like like the postal service is one of the bigger employers in in the whole country but for people when when employees drop off filling those positions can be really hard in times of like crisis so like you know last year when there was all these problems with the postal service all of these kind of issues around the supply chain and around how people treat their workers all of them like like you know compound to create one like much bigger

problem which we saw last year with the postal service and like late in like the late summer um so i just find it interesting how it's like you know these same issues around like how we treat workers is adding on to this problem of like supply chains and getting stuff delivered and all this kind of stuff. And so what I find interesting there is, so we're talking about the employee issue, and yeah, churn. So I've been, the plant I was working in,

which is 20 minutes from my house, closed down, and now I'm working 90 miles away, literally an hour and 45 minutes drive away. Jesus Christ. Jesus H. Christ. I am working 90 miles away, literally an hour and 40. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. I am. I am working for 12 a week and I'm crashing at my parents house, which they live about 60 miles away. So it's a little bit better.

But also, that still sucks. Yeah. Yeah. And my parents are hard right evangelicals who do not agree with, you know, this. So that's fun. But the plant that I was in was a non-union plant. And the one I'm in now is a union plant. And one of the things that I've noticed that's actually kind of different is for once in the non-union plant, things were actually better because what we could do, what could be done is, all right, we're all working seven days a week. We have enough staffing

that if nobody calls in, we have one spare person who normally goes around and gives breaks and stuff like that. Well, we could basically all take turns taking a day off during that seven-day week. At the union plant that I'm at now, though, it's all seniority-based. So anytime that they force overtime, they go from the bottom of the seniority list on up. Yeah. So yeah, people, the people who are being forced into those, which I described in the thread, I think it was, it was split off in the thread, but the, the, the people who were being forced to stay over four hours and then come in four hours early where you, oh, you were working six to two. Now you're working, you know, six to six. And then you're coming in at two in the morning

instead of six in the morning the next day are always the people who are the lowest on the seniority list, which is why. Same thing with the postal service, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's not, there's a number of different, I mean, I've heard that complaint from a couple of different union gigs. And it's, yeah,

it's a problem. Yeah. And it's, that's why we get these new people and they get trained up and now they're trained and they're signed off. And then they immediately go from, cause when you're training, you're not,

you can't train on overtime or whatever, but now it's, oh, okay, well now you're working every weekend. You're being forced over. You're being forced in early, just nonstop.

And so, yeah, they get trained for a month and then a month after that, they quit because they went from working a relatively sane amount to an absurd amount. Yeah. It was a week. We went 58 days at one point without a day off yeah

like my dad went like almost i think like 300 days without with without a day off when he started the postal service a kind of funny thing is like when you hear the postal service talking about this like from the in their own reports and on their own website what they find a problem with is not not the turnaround in and of itself but how they're basically wasting money on trainings for people that don't end up working it's like that is their main concern is that they're spending all this money on like training for people that don't stick around often um and like yeah well maybe you should address why they don't stick around often that's that seems to be kind of the actual issue here yeah and what i've been pushing for and i know this is more on the labor

side than on the on the supply chain side that we were focusing on i've been pushing for and i know this is more on the labor side than on the on the supply chain side that we were focusing on i've been pushing for instead of three shifts where we keep just getting just hammered with this stuff i want us to do four shifts 12 hour days and do like a two on two off three on three off type swing shift where you have like one shift that works you know you work three days one week four days the next week and you work 12 hour days but really you wind up getting a bunch of days off you know like that's if you're gonna work seven days a week that's the best way to do it in my opinion yeah i mean like you know it's there's a lot of resistance to well what

will then we have to hire these extra people well Well, you're hiring those people anyway, and then they're quitting. You're not even getting your value out of them, slave drivers. I mean, you said this is more the labor side than the supply chain side. But honestly, these are like the same side, right? Because if you don't have employees – this is a fundamental thing in how capitalism works, right? You need to have workers to make there be any value at all, right? So if there isn't any people to working, then there is no supply chain. It's gone because we need people to do it,

both on like the production side and both in like the transportation side. That's like, you know, UPS, USPS, you know, FedEx, you know, so like the mail carriers and stuff is very important to all of this because you need, in order for there to be a supply chain, there needs to be the chain part, right? you carry it from one place to to another so it's both it's both on the production side and on like the transportation side for how all these problems you know get and one and one of the things that i in the replies to my thread which i got into was that part of the only slack in just-in-time manufacturing is the employees. They've pulled all of the slack out of the system on the mechanical side and on the production side

of it, on all the physical side. The only slack left is people. And they have stretched us all to the absolute breaking point. Now, I'm lucky, relatively speaking, in that I'm salary. So, like, I'm more on the inventory side of things. So I'm not doing the hourly production seven day a week thing. Like I said, I work for 12. But I can still, you know, and that's this job, every other previous job, not the same thing, but I can still see where they've taken out. Like, once again, we used to have spares on the shelf so that when something broke down, we could fix the machine and keep running. Now, instead of the spare, the spare is people working weekends.

That's the spare part. And that makes total sense, right? And that makes total sense, right? You're the capitalist. A better spare that is a part on the shelf costs you money in terms of like you need to have that space. That's extra rent you're paying. You need to have bought that part. Having your people just kill themselves is much cheaper. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of Michael Duda Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people

in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day 1999,

a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story,

as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parente. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Toot, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single

year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year. But if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting 8, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. you get your podcasts. people out of work was like okay well what if what if we just we re-extend the work day again and sort of you know reverse all of the gains that have been happening well okay i say have been happening reverse all the gains that happened between about 1930 and like 1970 and just oh well what if we just make everyone wear 12-hour days again and that that was you know one of those things that would struck me both listening to this and reading the thread was that it's it's not even just weight, it's just

it's just the fundamental power of balance. And then it's the fundamental power of balance that's gotten so bad that even like, you know, sometimes the remains of the union system, it's like it's not even, you know, the unions, like, in this particular case like this, it's not even

really helping, it's just creating, like, you have a small labor aristocracy that you have everyone else getting just like ground down in this case it's that we've got a we've got a small core of people who've been there 20 or 30 years yeah and and whereas before maybe even 10 years ago they might have viewed the union as a vehicle to help everybody things have gotten so bad that now it's just okay i'm going to use this system as much as i can to cover my own ass because things have gotten so damn bad and obviously you know reagan destroying the unions and stuff like that help with that but yeah it's that i and i feel like the union in in my job could be very helpful, but it would require certain people in it to instead of looking out for just their own interest because, hey, I've been here 25 years, so I'm in the clear. Maybe I should, you know, sacrifice a little bit of of that power or that privilege to help the people who are just hiring in so that we can keep them so that that this doesn't have to keep happening.

Yeah. And it's you know, this is one of the things that has made the John Deere strike that made it so powerful was these those older workers who I mean, they had a tiered system. Right. So you had workers hired, I think, before like 97, got a full pension. And then like after 97 was like a third of that. And then workers hired in the last couple of years weren't getting any pension at all. And a big part of the strike is like all of the workers saying that's not acceptable, including the ones who had a full pension, who had some of a pension, like saying that like the fact that the newer people are getting screwed over isn't acceptable. The fact that the newer people are getting screwed over isn't acceptable. And I've heard different reasons for why that happened, because this is this tactic, what you're talking about and kind of like what happened to John Deere. It was a common tactic. You know, it's the thing we talk about in colonialism all the time. You want to divide the population against, you know, each other one way or the other. Give them like make make them feel as if their interests are not necessarily aligned, you know, so that people who. them feel as if their interests are not necessarily aligned you know so the people who um and there's reasons i've heard different reasons for why john deere was different including the idea that like a lot of these are family jobs so it was not people it was people being like well my kid's

not gonna get a pension and that's bullshit um anyway yeah i just it's it's it's important to talk about like that as a problem and also to highlight different strikes where that seems to have been overcome by the workers, like this fact that they were attempted to be played against each other didn't really work out. And where in my case, it very much is like another another example being. So we'll have people who are lower on the seniority list. And like, let's say, for example, one weekend we're running lines three and five and not the other two. The, the newer people might only know stuff online for, but if the new people don't get scheduled to do something,

even if they're just being forced into sweep the floor, the people who have the higher seniority will throw a fit saying, well, they're lower seniority. Why aren't theyity will throw a fit saying, well, their lower seniority, why aren't they in here? As opposed to, well, because they can't run that machine. And then they don't want to train them to run that machine. It's very, they've managed to succeed where the John Deere capitalists might've failed in making this all about like, all right, working. And I don't blame the people who have the higher seniority on this, because if my you know, if your working conditions are hell and you have the option of, OK, well, on a short term scale, I can screw over this other person and actually see my family once in a while.

most people are going to do it. And especially if that person is somebody who just hired in that you don't know, well, screw that guy. And that's where, once again, if unions were stronger, if they was more than what is it right now?

Like two, 3% of jobs are a union job, but unions have been so like just weakened that this sort of situation is allowed to happen. I guess you could say. Yeah. And I think, yeah, that comes back to this like the the salute the solution to the supply chain problem isn't really a like it's it's it's not it's not a logistical solution it's not even really like a capital gain solution like a tax solution the solution is that you know you have to fundamentally change the balance of power between capital and labor and you know i mean that and that that can be like you know think things will get better if it's if

it's more unions but like things are going to continue to suck until like the capitalists cease to exist as a class yeah and i think that's like that oh yes that's kick us yeah that's always the and it's one of those like we get we get critiqued on the internets sometimes because I think people will say like, well, you know, is your only solution to this? You keep talking about like mutual aid and anarchism and like, I just don't feel like that's a big scale solution. It's like, yeah, but the current system isn't going to work very well on a big scale. current system isn't going to work very well on a big scale part of what we're always talking about is like how to how to get your how to get yourself and your people through the situation because that's also important and it's the same thing with like a union right unionizing you and your fellow laborers in your factory or or making your union more effective and more able to like

advocate for everyone that's not going to fix the bigger problem that's not going to deal with the the issues that like that's not going to stop climate change that's not going to fix the bigger problem that's not going to deal with the the issues that like that's not going to stop climate change that's not going to stop supply line crunches in a grand scale it's not going to stop creeping authoritarianism but it can make life more bearable for you and the people around you and that's that's also part of like getting by in a crumbling world absolutely yeah and yep it's it requires a bit of more foresight, which I think goes one of the other purposes behind working us as many hours as they do is when you're so fucking tired all the time from working what you're working. You don't have time to stop and think about the larger implications of things. And yeah, and that's part of what they're going for yep yeah so i don't know anyone else got anything well i guess just the clear solution to this is

that i need to just stock up on bang right i just need to buy all that i can because i i i love bang i i can't stop drinking bang i i will say Are you scared of how much you love Bang? I'm scared of how much Bang I drink. I will say one of the wonderful mutual aid solutions is if you're very, very nice to the syrup mixing people, they will be kind to you if you are working a double and they will give you a shot of the energy drink syrup before it's been mixed.

Oh, my God. Oh, wow. Oh my God. Oh boy. You should not have told Garrison that. I have developed a problem. Garrison's going to quit his job podcasting just to be able to get two shots of energy drink. I am just going to be shooting up energy drink here on out. That's all I'm doing with my time.

I'm leaving leaving the call right now finding the nearest factory and i hope you're happy my second day on the on the job in the soda manufacturing thing i had a 24 pack of energy drink uh explode all over me i didn't have a change of clothes and that's when i learned that caffeine and taurine can soak through your skin oh yes oh yeah. Oh. Oh, no. I mean, basically. I was seeing sound. Okay, so I've just been looking up inflatable hot tubs,

and I feel like if I could order enough pure energy drink syrup in an inflatable hot tub, I could build basically the equivalent of Baron Harkonnen's rejuvenation bath. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But with, like, pure bang syrup. Yeah, that is my plan. Just B12, caffeine, and taururine it's just gonna be we're all gonna quit our jobs we're just gonna have the same amount of money they get slower over time uh because we're again spending it all on bang sir obviously you need you need the inside person to supply you with the syrup

so we'll just have sort of an oceans 11 situation where you guys pull up to the loading dock and So we'll just have sort of an Ocean's Eleven situation where you guys pull up to the loading dock and with a tanker and I'm just hooking the truck up. You know, it's going to be like Scarface, but we're selling pure syrup. And then Garrison loses his mind and winds up in a machine gun fight in a mansion. Instead of burying his face into a mountain of cocaine, he's instead got just a large bowl full of syrup. into a mountain of cocaine. He's instead got just a large Pyrex bowl full of syrup. He's just sticking his hand into a bowl of syrup to absorb the caffeinated nutrients. When I pee, it's just going to be straight syrup now.

That is, yeah. Anyway, well, that's the episode. If people want to find you online, where can they find you? So I host, along with my husband and our friend Justin, we host a trans comedy and pop culture podcast where we also interview interesting people. It's called The Violet Wanderers.

So you can find us on Twitter at Violet Wanderers or TheVioletWanderers.com or email TheVioletWanderers at gmail.com. And that's basically, that's my Twitter handle and I just slowly got sucked into the Twitter hellscape where I originally went on just like, oh, I'm going to just promote my show and then I started

responding to people and before you know it, I'm writing 20 tweet rants about Justin Time on my stupid gay podcast account. I got onto Twitter to converse with a Young Justice podcast, and that's why I created my Twitter account, and here I am now. So, be kind.

I was trying to get a Planetside 2 beta key, and I got it, but the consequences were, I am now here. Yeah, Twitter and its consequences have been a disaster for us. You're such a child child I remember the first planet side beta oh no day Chris

it was an age undreamed of oh Chris and you all are welcome to come on the show anytime I will I will bother you to come on my show sometime and excellent yeah good good plugs plugs probably yeah yeah like I said

the violent wanders were're on apple we're on spotify we're on podcast addict whatever you know it's all your major podcast platforms uh the tagline of the show is uh made for no one so um expect a lot of queer humor a lot of me uh calling my husband a slut and us talking about video games, comic books, movies, and then occasionally just randomly interviewing really interesting people who I harass into coming on the show, like which Robert, I know, you know, Daniel Harper from I Don't Speak German. I sure do. He's been on a few times. We've had him on and had some fun talking about Nazis, which seems kind of counterintuitive.

But there's a lot of humor that can be found in Nazis if you know the right places to look. And yeah, I you know what? I just watched a German language movie about Hitler that was made in 2007 by a Jewish German comedian that includes I've watched a lot of Hitler movies. You know, periodically I just get on Netflix and Hulu type and Hitler just kind of watch whatever's there. by a Jewish-German comedian that includes... I've watched a lot of Hitler movies. Periodically, I just get on Netflix and Hulu, type in Hitler, just kind of watch whatever's there.

This is the first time I have seen Hitler fucking in a movie. I've never seen anybody who had the courage to do that. And he is just... Yeah, it's uncomfortable. Him and his one ball just swinging in the wind. It is an uncomfortable scene,

but not the most uncomfortable scene in that particular movie. It's quite a film. I was going to say, that's pretty amazing. Come on sometime. We'll play a round of Inselmageddon, which is a game that I've created. If you guys don't want to kill yourselves

afterwards, then hey, you survived the game. As long as I can get some syrup out of the deal, that's all I want. I will smuggle you some syrup out of the deal, that's all I want. I will smuggle you some syrup out and mail it to you, okay? Perfect. That's gonna do it for all of us here today at It Could Happen Here. Until next time,

I don't know, go read The Dawn of Everything. It's good. It's worth reading. Check it out. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com.

Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of riot. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into Tex Elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better

Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking música, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers.

Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only Nuestra Gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? you get your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

New episodes every Thursday.