Well There‘s Your Problem - CROSS POST with WORK STOPPAGE POD | Shop Floor Discussion 6 - National Rail Strike w/Justin Roczniak

Episode Date: September 14, 2022

The potential for a national rail strike has been looming for a long time, and now that we have finally reached the point where one could actually happen, we decided we needed to have someone who knows a lot more about the railroads than we do on the show to help explain the situation. We were very excited to be joined by Justin Roczniak from Well There’s Your Problem to bring us historical analysis of the long road to where we are today. We discuss the history of how the railroads have operated in the US, how the national freight network has been shaped by the profit motive, and how rail executives have let the entire national rail network decay in pursuit of maximum dividends. This history sets the stage for the current crisis, where companies have merged into a few mega-carriers with no real competition, and “precision scheduled railroads” have slashed rail crews and stretched their existing employees to the breaking point. We summarize the long labor process to get to this point demanded by the Railway Labor Act, and what we might see in terms of a potential long term outcome of the current dispute. With a national strike possible as soon as this Friday, we hope this discussion provides some helpful background to understand what state the railroads are in, how they got that way, and the roots of the horrific working conditions rail workers are fighting against. Follow Justin on twitter @who_shot_jgr and check out Well There’s Your Problem on Youtube at www.youtube.com/channel/UCPxHg4192hLDpTI2w7F9rPg Join the discord: discord.gg/tDvmNzX Follow the pod at instagram.com/workstoppage, @WorkStoppagePod on Twitter, John @facebookvillain, and Lina @solidaritybee

music music Alrighty, I'm not going to bother with a cold opening this episode. Welcome to WorkStopage, everybody. This is a very special episode of an entirely listener supported show. So thank you so much for any money that you might be giving us on Patreon. It goes a long way to supporting the show. Get in the Discord if you're not already, and if you are a patron that doesn't have stickers yet, just message us on Patreon. Leave a five-star review. Yada, yada, yada.

We are really excited to have not just the three hosts here today, but also a very special guest. Do not eat a.k.a. Justin from Well There's Your Problem podcast, a podcast with slides. How you doing, Justin? I'm doing pretty good. I'm excited for this. Decovering this fast-moving development, I'm sure it'll be completely out of date by the time this episode comes out. There's nothing we like better on this show than giving away extremely time-sensitive information that may no longer be relevant by the time it hits release. Absolutely. So, I mean, just for a real quick intro for folks before we get into the discussion,

our listeners will be aware that, you know, we've been covering over the last couple of months the really awful labor situation faced by workers in the railroad industry and the potential for that to lead to a national rail strike. And, you know, now as we're recording this in the second week of September, we're extremely close to that potential deadline. And so, you know, a national railway strike or actually lockout, and we'll get into this as we, you know, get into the episode, could actually happen as early as this week. And so on our show, we've focused mostly on the awful working conditions faced by the workers

and just generally the situation with labor and how that's pushed us towards this strike. And so just as a very brief summary, like basically the big problem facing these workers is they get no time off whatsoever and they are forced by the Railway Labor Act to go through this incredibly onerous process of jumping through all of these legal hoops that take forever before they get the opportunity to use what the Railway Labor Act terms quote self-help or the ability to strike. And unfortunately, that whole process really doesn't give the railroads much incentive to actually make, to meet any of the workers' demands.

So that's the general stage as far as the labor situation goes. But what we haven't really talked about is the long history of how we actually got to this point about how the railroads have changed over time and how that's led us to this potential national rail crisis that is sort of looming as we record this. So we're very, you know, honored and happy to have Justin from Well There's Your Problem on here to help enlighten us on all that history that we are, you know, not really so much up on. So thank you again for joining us, Justin. Thanks for having me on.

I'm excited to talk about trains forever and bore everyone to death. Yeah, that's a pretty short intro for what I'm guessing is going to be a slightly longer episode. So I think that the first thing that we wanted to do is actually like kind of move into the theme of some of our more like Patreon-style content, though this is a public episode, where we actually go into the deeper history of what is going on in the situation and kind of what are the different aspects of the train industry that really influence what's going on today and the looming lockout-slash-strike. And so, Justin, did you want to kind of take the lead on that and let us know what the hell is going on? Okay, yeah, I can do that.

I think, okay, let's start with the Socratic method. What is the railroad? That's right. And one of the things that especially distinguishes the freight railroads, especially the modern ones, is they're sort of, it's a very, very, it's an opaque industry, right? It's very hard to figure out what's going on if you're on the outside, or even if you're on the inside. You know, you're told constantly, America has the greatest freight railroads in the world, and that's because you can point to a chart that says 10 miles went up, and that means we're the best, right?

So, you know, but because everything is sort of, they're all private companies. They don't share a lot of information. They don't want you to know stuff. You know, if you're an enthusiast, if you're an academic, if you work for the railroad, if you are management at the railroad, you're all blind men feeling different parts of the elephant. And, you know, you're describing the problems totally differently, but you know, there's all one elephant there, right? An example, I guess, of how bad this is, is right now there's a dispute before the surface transportation board between M-Track and CSX about being able to run a passenger train between Mobile and New Orleans, right?

And in front of the surface transportation board, in front of God and everyone, when M-Track asked, well, how many trains do you run on this line? CSX was like, oh, that's a trade secret. I said that straight to the regulators, too. It's a national security issue if the regulators know how many trains are on this line. Anyway, what wound up happening a couple months later is M-Track just set up a webcam on that rail line. And I found out the number of trains they were running per day was four. Obviously, you cannot schedule an M-Track train around that.

It's national security. Of course, no way. So this is the sort of industry you're dealing with. They hate everyone, and there's a long history of that. So I feel like historical analysis is very useful looking at how we got where we are with the railroad today. Most of what's important is stuff that happened after about 1960. I figure for completeness, no. Let's start a little earlier.

Hell, yeah. So the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened September 15th, 1830. It was the first recognizably modern railroad. And on day one, it killed a member of parliament. Wow. Railroads killing people since day one. I think that's a strong start, actually, because he was kind of a Tory guy. In America, we start building railroads pretty early.

Before the Civil War, it's pretty slow going. Just trying to get a railroad over the mountains to the Great Lakes or the Ohio River. Right after the Civil War, you see the really big explosion in railroad growth. You build a transcontinental railroad to get those sweet, sweet land grants, which you can then sell out from underneath the Native Americans who live there. Right. This is all done with terrible working conditions, expendable, immigrant labor. So on and so forth.

They were built very, very rapidly, very, very poorly. And they found out when they built the first one, no one actually wanted to ship anything from San Francisco to Chicago. But they got those land grants. So they were making money anyway. And you're in a sort of, I like to call this period sort of the alphabet soup era because there's so many different railroads. Some of them are affiliated with each other.

Some of them aren't. That even a big nerd like me, I can't keep track of any of them. Right. But we start a real boom and bust cycle here from the late 1860s to the early 1870s, leads to the panic of 1873 and the long depression. A lot of these railroads that are built or are partially built, they're either undercapitalized or they're just scams. Right.

Sure. You get a bunch of investor money with your nowhere in East armpit railroad. Right. And then you run out of money, you go broke and you go bankrupt and you reorganize. Now it's the nowhere in East armpit railway. And you get more investor money and you repeat the cycle and tweak the name slightly each time. Right. That's kind of the business model that modern tech companies have picked up on.

Yes. Yes. There's a very much a startup mentality in this era, except everyone's much more stodgy, I would say. A lot more like top hats and giant cigars. Top hats, giant cigars. Monocles. More guys with guns.

Yeah. Yeah. And weirdly also more CrossFit. Yes. Yeah. Because I know like for me, the first place like, you know, going through like labor histories where the railroads really start to become huge in US labor is like the great railway strike of 1877. Yes.

And that's where, you know, you have one of the largest strikes ever to happen in America. You know, it sort of starts on the Pennsylvania railroad and spreads East. The strike leads to riots in Pittsburgh. They burned down the entire Pennsylvania railroad terminal area and a significant part of the city as well. And this is where infamously they had to bring in the Philadelphia National Guard to essentially declare war on Pittsburgh. You know, this, this Sheets Wawa divide has deeper roots. And for the record, Sheets stands for the workers, I guess. I guess so.

Yeah. I guess so. So over the next like 20 years, I would say that the railroad industry gets much more stable, especially after it's regulated by the Interstate Commerce Commission. But that's also, it's the first regulatory body and is almost immediately a victim of regulatory capture. What a surprise. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, as soon as this rail industry started actually taking off, like it immediately became one of the most profitable industries in the country. Right. Yes. It was, it was very profitable to both run a railroad or not run a railroad. Right. And there was this myth of competition in railroads, right, which is persistent to this day. Railroads have never really competed with each other, especially not after the ICC was created, the Interstate Commerce Commission. They, they have been, you know, when you did have competition, it was destructive competition, right?

Where one railroad would lower rates, the next one would lower rates, the first one would lower rates more. All of a sudden, no one can afford to run trains anymore. And then everyone had to meet on like JP Morgan's yacht and then agree to raise the rates. That was, that was a famous incident between the New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad, where they were each building competing lines with each other. And JP Morgan was like, all right, get on the yacht. We're not coming back to shore until you fix this. The wonders of the free market. Yeah.

We're going to price fix until you boys have some bourgeois solidarity, I swear to God. Yes, yes. So we get to World War One. Because the railroads have such bad terminal facilities in New York, they can't get enough supplies out to Europe. And the railroads were nationalized for like three years under the US Railroad Administration. Some people say this was probably when the railroads were best run in all of American history, because it was one big railroad, you know, and one big railroad is a lot better than 40 or 50 small railroads who all are like fiefdoms, right? Right.

You know, it's kind of like useful to think of these railroads not so much as companies, but as, you know, warring feudal states. Well, I mean, they certainly had enough dynamite. This is true. This is true. And there was, there were a few incidents where railroads would violently sabotage other railroads while they were being constructed, mostly out west. So, you know, between the wars, we get some major upgrades to a few rights away. You know, we start seeing railroad electrification. The regulators start to get more aggressive.

There was an idea for the Interstate Commerce Commission to consolidate all the railroads at this point into more efficient systems. But again, these are warring feudal states, so no one could agree to that. You know, and after, after World War II is really when we start to see a divergence between America and Europe and how railroads were run, right? Which is in Europe, everything's nationalized. The railroads are electrified. Everything runs on tight schedules. Everything is, you know, it's a very tight and efficiently run system. And in America, we don't electrify.

We rely on diesel locomotives because of the curse of cheap oil. And stuff starts to, you know, fall apart fairly early, you know, because there's the question of, do you invest in infrastructure or do you not do that? And when you're, when you're a private company, it's much easier to not do that. Right. So just thinking, yeah, as someone who lives in the United States, I know the answer to that question. It's, it's pretty clear. Why would you ever invest in infrastructure? Well, I mean, we're talking about mostly like freight here, but like, have you ever tried to book a passenger train anywhere in the United States?

Unless you're on one of a handful of very popular routes, like it's expensive and it's also like the trains don't run very often. Yes. Yes. And that, that is the next subject here. In the 1960s is when stuff starts to fall apart, especially in the Northeast, right? You had the New York Central, the Pennsylvania Railroad, New York New Haven and Hartford Railroad. They were all sort of falling apart. They merge into something called Penn Central.

And this is the world's most massive railroad and it crashes and burns immediately. Incredible. Yes. We recorded, of course, a three-parter on that at Well Air's Your Problem. 1967, the U.S. Postal Service was, they shipped a lot of the mail on trains and they canceled all those mail contracts. They were like, nope, we're using trucks now. This meant every single passenger train in America was now running at a loss. Yes.

So you mean like up until that point, the mail contracts had been factored in to the point where they were the primary source of income and ferrying passengers was just kind of a bonus? That's a secondary one. Yeah, you would see trains that had four or five mail cars on the front and then there was like one passenger car. Yeah, I mean, I feel like, I mean, not to interrupt your history, but I feel like a lot of this, especially like when you bring up the comparison with post-war Europe during like the social democratic era there, I think at least from the public's perspective, if not from the railway executive perspective, I feel like a lot of this has to do with like the different perception of like a railway as a utility versus a railway as like any other company, which is more like how they're treated in the U.S. Even though, I mean, at any time you look at it, you're like, wait, why aren't they utility again? Yeah, why is this not considered a public good?

And this is where the railroads start to lobby Congress to say, maybe these passenger trains are a public good, which means we shouldn't have to deal with them, right? What's the least profitable part of our business? You take that part. But a lot of people, a lot of people who had influence in Congress, they wanted their passenger trains and we have this idea for M-Track, right? Which is essentially, M-Track would take over all the passenger trains in America, leaving the freight companies free to do whatever they want, right? In M-Track, the system is like, it is of course drawn up by none other than McKinsey and Company, right? The whole system, and they present the system to Richard Nixon, and the Nixon administration is like, I cut that by two-thirds. That's too much. Two-thirds? Then what McKinsey was recommending?

The McKinsey plan was much better than what we have today, yeah. That's the saddest shit I've ever heard. I consider that cities as big as Columbus, Ohio were left off the network. It's just crazy, right? So that system that was created then is very similar to what we have now. And then of course, Penn Central imploded. They had to quasi-nationalize it. And of course, again, we're leaving social democracy to the Nixon administration. So Conrail was created. That's also sort of a McKinsey and Company story. Their second CEO actually kicked all the McKinsey consultants down into the basement and then fired them all a month later.

They got the last laugh there. But what happens after that is the Stagger's Rail Act, and that really deregulates the industry. And what this allows the railroads to do is all of a sudden we have more opportunity to, let's say, prune our network, right? Maybe I have a branch line that goes to some town's lumber yard and maybe it has another customer on there, like a chemical plant that gets a tank card twice a week. And you can say, well, this is making money, but it's not making that much money. Maybe we can just rip this up, use the rail somewhere else, and tell those customers to get fucked, use a truck. Honestly, that sounds a little bit like what's happened to the hospital system in the U.S.

Because we have so many of these rural hospitals that are so important for so many people, but because healthcare companies are just like, well, this isn't run by the state. You guys can do whatever you want. They just get to the point where they're like, yeah, I know you guys need a hospital, but this isn't making us enough money, so we're just going to close it. Well, that's always why I've had objections even before I was more politically educated to the concept of like, let's take these public services and run them like a business, because businesses are so smart. And it's like, well, what do businesses do, my friend? They close pretty often. Yes, yes. We have another phenomenon in this time is demarketing. Railroads shed entire categories of traffic.

You know, like livestock, for instance, that was always very expensive to handle. They're like, nah, not moving those cows. Not going to do it. No way, no how. There was an incident where a Conrail station master or yard foreman, I guess, he was out in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and he heard that someone in the traffic department was trying to get a contract for livestock delivery from Lancaster to, I think it was like a butcher in New Jersey, right? And when he heard about it, he had the livestock pens bulldozed before the contract could go through. It's like, oh, we don't actually have that infrastructure. Sorry. That's crazy.

And there's a complete reluctance to invest in infrastructure of any kind. As an example, they discovered coal in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming, right? He Burlington Northern Railroad wanted to build about a hundred mile line out there to go get all that coal, right? And there was a massive shareholder revolt, like you can't build anything. Don't do that. You got to make the government pay for that. And they managed to make it, they managed to build it, and it was the most profitable single rail line ever built. But have you considered what if we hadn't done it? Powerful argument.

Exactly. And this is also where we start to see workforce attrition just because we're running fewer trains on less track, right? And people are getting furloughed or laid off, so you start to have a contraction in the workforce, right? Oh, yeah, unions love that. They love it when their membership are thrown out of their jobs. It's something that, you know, historically, whatever we cover, things like this, you know, it's always some... When the workers lose, I think that the people tend to get a little angry. This is true. This is true. I mean, and this is also the era of what's called the mega mergers, where these railroads really start to consolidate into, you know, from 20 or 30 railroads into like four, right? Right.

Same thing that the phone companies did in the 70s and 80s and that the internet companies all did over the last 20 years. Yeah, I mean, it's weird how capital consistently trends towards consolidation. Yes. Who could have predicted this? Somebody should write a book. And over the course of this, the railroads start making a whole big bunch of money. You know, you have the lowest... Some of the lowest operating ratios ever. The operating ratio is like how many cents on the dollar goes to running the railroad versus income.

So if I have an operating ratio of 60%, that means 60 cents of every dollar that the railroad brings in goes back to operating the railroad. And the other 40% is executive pay, dividends, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? You know, historically, that was around 80%, but now you could get something much lower because we had all these different operating practices. And up till this point, I would say there was still a way out of what was going to happen. But around 1990, well, the late 80s really, we get this guy, E. Hunter Harrison, right? He invents something called precision scheduled railroading. Oh, precision. That's usually a good thing, right? I would call him the Lenin of precision scheduled railroading because he also died before the project could be carried out and then with the shit afterwards.

So he's out here saying what is to be done and that is apparently better scheduling but smaller crews. It's primarily it was better. Labor intensification. Yeah. I mean, primarily it was supposed to be better scheduling, but that's not how it went when it was adopted in other railroads. At the Illinois Central, I believe the Canadian Pacific, it was done right. It made the railroads a lot of money. But how this changes over time is important. So there was a big railroad strike in 1992. That's where we got the Modern Railway Labor Act, which is basically the act that makes it impossible to strike.

George H.W. Bush's Congress ends that strike in two days because everyone... Right. Yeah. We can hit that real quick if you wanted to say more. I mean, just for some background, for folks who have listened to our previous episodes, this is where we're starting to get into the background that we... The little small amount of background we've had been able to go into about. Because it's one of the things for us covering this has been a learning experience because most of the strikes that we cover are under the National Labor Relations Act, the Wagner Act. Whereas learning about this issue with the railroads has been like, oh, they're not covered under that.

They're covered under this other act, the Railway Labor Act. I'm going to look into this and then reading through it. Oh, I have to fold out this flow chart that shows all of the steps. And it's this giant zigzag of cooling off periods and federally enforced mediation. And to the point where from the time you begin these negotiations, it's literally years to get to the point that we're at now with the potential for even just the possibility of a strike. And I mean, the railways have been working without a contract since 2020, right? Yes. And every time I look at something that's like a railway or also an agricultural workers issue, it does feel like, okay, we're not playing checkers anymore.

We're playing mist and I have basically no idea what's happening. I mean, because the railroads were such a big fixture in early American corporate law, everything is regulated differently for the railroads versus every other business. And then you have stuff like railroad retirement, where railroad workers have an entirely separate social security system. Right. It's all, everything's weird. And for the longest time, railroad finances were regulated by the Interstate Commerce Commission instead of, what is it, securities in exchange? Sure. So they could do all kinds of creative accounting.

Yeah, because the ICC is a much smaller regulatory body that doesn't receive the same level of public scrutiny at all as the ICC, right? Yeah. And getting into that strike in 1992, as you were referencing, that gets into one of the other big problems with the Railway Labor Act, which is that when you finally get through that whole rigmarole of a process, and you get to the point where it allows you to do quote unquote self-help, it still has that backdoor option for Congress to just come in and be like, yeah, so we know you went through the whole process, but it really would be a pain if you went on strike. So we're just going to say you can't. Yeah, you can't, yeah. I'm going to have to ask you to come in on Saturday.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, not to jump way too far ahead, but I mean, capital as of the past week has been basically demanding that the government do that and shut down any possibility of a strike at all, but we will get to that a little bit later. Yeah. So more recent history in 1999, there's a really big traffic spike from the aforementioned coal mines in the Powder River Basin. That's because of a unintended consequence of some EPA regulations that come in, basically make Appalachian coal non viable because you need a expensive stack scrubber for that. The Powder River Basin coal is objectively worse quality, but it's lower in sulfur, so everyone switches over that and all of a sudden there's this massive spike in coal traffic.

You know, they're exporting this all the way as far as the East Coast for power generation. And that's followed by, of course, the back and crude oil boom. And this means in 2004, the railroad's gone this huge hiring spree, right? And of course, all those guys are hitting about, are about to hit 20 years. So that's one of the, one of the, one of the looming disasters coming is, you know, everyone, everyone taking railroad retirement and getting out. And we have stuff like technology that makes longer trains possible. We'll talk about that in a second. And precision scheduled railroading really goes mainstream.

And that's mostly in like the last five years that happened. And this is where stuff gets really shitty really quickly. Yeah. I mean, like over the past six years, they've cut off like almost a third of all of their labor, about 45,000 workers. Yeah. Well, and the, the, the precision, precision scheduling thing sounds the way you're describing it a bit like a game of telephone where each successive railroad that adopts it kind of understands it more and more poorly. Until you get to the point where you're like, this is what you're calling precision scheduling. What the fuck?

Well, yeah. So your theory behind precision scheduled railroading, right, is you have better asset utilization. That is to say you're using fewer locomotives, fewer crews to move more trains, but you do that through tight schedules, right? And you do that through more direct routings. Like if I'm shipping, I don't know, a boxcar from Boston to Chicago. Traditionally, that would go from Boston to like Selkirk, New York, and it'd be reclassified and it would go from Selkirk to, I don't know, Fort Worth. And then it would go from Fort Worth to Chicago. I don't know if that's the right routing, but as an example, now you'd run a train that goes direct from Boston to Chicago.

You know, and. By reclassified, do you mean like put on a different class of real line? You'd put it on a different train. It would come into the yard, they'd switch the cars around to different trains, go into different locations, and that takes anywhere between one to three days. So, you know, but that that is the traditional way to do it. Now, in order to run all these trains on precision schedules, you of course need this really competent, well staffed planning department who can like target bottlenecks on the railroad and do some infrastructure improvements so that everything runs smoothly, right? Yeah, so basically like an air traffic control system, but for trains. Yes, that and well, I already have centralized traffic control.

That's old technology, although there's plenty of parts of the railroad, which are not equipped by that. You have like trains that run in dark territory, which is just rail with no signals and they have to just give people orders on paper say, hold here for the other train. Wow. Yeah. Wow. That is a very, very old system and there's plenty of railroads that still run like that. So, but you'd want to do infrastructure improvements. That's a big part of precision scheduled railroading is you should be doing infrastructure improvements, right?

At least in the theory. You'd have faster trains, they'd run on time. Your crews would have better schedules because you'd be running the trains on a schedule, right? Because prior to this, you had some trains run on schedules, others are extras, right? And if you're a locomotive engineer, right? When you sign on to the railroad, you're first assigned to the extra board and the extra board is like, you know, you're on call at any time to run any train that's an extra, right? That's not scheduled. And as you gain seniority, eventually you can bid on more consistent jobs, your life gets better because you can plan around stuff, right?

Right. So the theory would be you would reduce the amount of extra trains and that would, of course, among other things, improve the quality of life for workers. But mostly it's, you know, for, again, better asset utilization. Right. You know, your shippers get their stuff more quickly, everybody wins in this and it makes a lot of money, right? Okay, that's the theory. Now, the reality is that as this was implemented in various railroads, like you said, the game of telephone here, eventually people say, well, okay, what if we only did the bad parts of this, right? What if we didn't spend any money and just did the bad stuff and technology is sort of assists in this, right?

Because what if instead of putting down track and reducing bottlenecks, what if we just ran, let's say, monster trains, right? And the monster train is a relatively recent phenomenon. There's this thing called distributed power now where you have a radio and a front locomotive and then you can stick a locomotive in the middle of the train. And then one at the end, you can control them all from the front, right? And this reduces the need for crews. It means you can do much longer trains. You know, it used to be a long train with 75 cars. Now a long train is 250 cars.

Wow. Well, I mean, it sounds nice in terms of economics to put one person in charge of three locomotives powering however many hundreds of cars. But at the end of the day, now you've made one normal person responsible for like how many thousands of tons of metal and wood and everything that's on the train. Lots. Yeah. The safety issues seem like they would kind of grow exponentially at that point. Along with the fact that these workers are basically given what one day off a year. Yeah.

Yeah. If that. And so you have this actually starts to increase derailments, right? Because all of a sudden train makeup becomes important. Like how you assemble the train. If you put like, let's say you put heavy cars on the back of the train and light cars up front and you're going like downgrade along a curve. That's going to cause all those heavy cars to push on the front cars that are light and tip them over. And that's that's a string line derailment.

Norfolk Southern has been doing a hell of a lot of them recently. All on these all on these, you know, super long monster trains, they did it on. They've done it on horseshoe curve now twice, which is like this famous railroad landmark near Altoona, Pennsylvania. And it's got like a view. There's a viewing platform to watch the trains go by there and everything. And you know, they just they just knocked the train over right in front of God and everyone. Imagining people standing there like eating popcorn, like, oh yeah, that motherfuckers going off. Yeah.

And then they just they left it there for two months. Two months. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and there's like two. There's two M track trains that go through there each day too. I mean, I remember when I was living in Pittsburgh and a train derailed right there in station square. It sat there for probably pretty close to two months and I would take the incline down right above the train wreckage every single day. On my way to work.

America. Yeah, exactly. Now, the thing about using monster trains is, of course, now you're holding the train in the yard for longer, waiting for more cars to show up. That means this whole scheduling thing, maybe we can drop that because I got to wait for 250 cars to show up. And I got to call someone up at any time at 1 a.m. in the morning and and just say, hey, you got to go drive this train. I hope you had some rest. Right. Yeah, because that's that's definitely been one of the biggest complaints that I've seen from, you know, people working either like, you know, engineers or just other rail workers is this issue where again, despite exactly despite the name and despite the theory of precision scheduled railroading, it becomes like precision scheduled for who it's

to to to misquote Voltaire, neither precision nor scheduled nor railroading. Yeah, absolutely. Because these guys are talking about they're like, all right, so I had this shift where I drove this train from, you know, wherever to wherever I was, I was on the train for 12 hours, and we got there. And I was then on call for the next 34 hours. And I got like four hours of sleep and was called on to another train. And yeah, I'm just like, I don't understand like how these guys, I guess, is a lot of monster energy drinks. Yeah, like any any common sense understanding of precision scheduled railroading would involve the the ability to give these precise schedules to the workers fairly well in advance. You would think as soon as you had started to imagine it's time to start loading cars, you should be able to give them, you know, 10 hours notice if it's going to take 10 hours to put 250 cars on a train.

Yeah, and these monster trains, they cause a lot of problems for like just getting stuff places on time. You know, if you have like a older, older railroad, maybe it's a single track railroad with passing sidings, right? The passing sidings are like 100 cars long. You got a 250 car train. You can't use any of those passing sidings. What is a passing siding? So if there's a train going one way and a train going the other way on a single track line, one of them pulls over into the siding and lets the other one pass. But if the train is too long, can't do that, you just have to have the train hold in the yard or wherever there's a stretch of double track and just wait for the other guy to come. And this can mean, you know, crews are being brought on at one in the morning to just sit there. Right. And of course, I guess in keeping with so much of what you've also been telling us about the history of what the railroads choose to invest in and what they don't,

you would think, oh, if they decide, well, we really like running these super long trains and we want that to be our long term thing. So perhaps we should build longer sidings that would actually accommodate this, but I'm guessing that's not something they've actually done. No, I mean, they've tried to scam it off the public before. That's, that's, that's something that both Norfolk Southern and CSX are trying as part of like m tracks passenger service improvements. They're like, wow, gee, it looks like you got to build us a couple of 250 car passing sidings. That'll be that'll be $351 million, please. Just a couple of bucks between friends. Okay.

And there's other problems with these monster trains. Like, does anyone remember earlier this year, I think it was this year, there was that video of people robbing the train in Los Angeles, right? Yeah, that made the rounds everywhere about the organized gangs of thieves robbing the train. Yes. Look how bad crime is in Los Angeles. How have we fallen this far as a nation? No, that's because that's a monster train that doesn't fit in the yard. What a surprise.

It was not as characterized by the mainstream media. So not, not only are, are these relatively small, like side areas on the tracks for them to pull off, not large enough to accommodate the trains, but literally entire yards that would have to be what I imagine would be even more expensive to expand, say they're in a very expensive urban environment like LA. So it's just like, it's not only that they're not willing to invest in some of this stuff. It seems like they've kind of backed themselves into a corner where they would be functionally unable to in some situations as well. Absolutely. And who it's really bad for as well is M-Track because the M-Track train fits in the passing siding, but the freight train doesn't. That means it becomes impossible from an infrastructure standpoint to route an M-Track train ahead of a freight train.

You can't do it. It's not even like, even if you have a dispatcher who wants to, you physically cannot do it. Right. Yeah. So reducing the ability to actually coordinate the logistics, like in a way that actually is, again, precise, scheduled, or even railroad. Yes. Yes. It's a whole bunch of trains that are just stopped waiting for other trains to move.

What a brilliant system. Now, not to be too, you know, the other thing here is, of course, the railroads are trying to fix this with Beep Boop computers, right? Right. They've now invented several fuel economy focused driver assist systems for trains, right? And this is sort of like, there's one called Trip Optimizer. You have someone program in the route beforehand, but then there's one called Leader, which actually runs on machine learning. Yeah. I'm sure that works every time.

Oh, my God. I have a machine learning advanced AI algorithm GPS system that helps me navigate a fixed track on the ground. Yes. Yes. You know, these systems, they tend to run trains very slowly, but if you're a locomotive engineer, a lot of times you're required to use them for reasons of fuel economy. The other thing is they make boneheaded decisions literally all the time. And you have a situation where it's like, okay, do I disable the driver assist and maybe get disciplined for it? Or do I let it derail the train and possibly die?

But they'll consider it a mechanical failure. You know, it's a decision you have to be making. And of course, everyone's surveilled all the time in the train cab now. And it's not like you can, you know, be on your phone or anything or read a newspaper. Even when you're stopped at a red signal and tied down, you're just constantly surveilled. Yeah. And I think I was reading that they're not even like allowed to have a cell phone on them. I think you have to stick it in a locker on the locomotive.

It was that statement that you read from the worker at the beginning of the episode a couple episodes ago where they were talking about their wife who was in the hospital. Yeah. He was talking about how he was driving a train while his wife was, I guess, terminally ill in the hospital and was just like, I can't have my phone on me. So I may get to the end of my shift and find out I've missed the opportunity to go be with her. And thankfully that didn't end up happening. But I'm sure it has. Yeah. To plenty of people if you're just completely out of contact with the rest of the world.

Yeah. And it's pretty bad. Now, one thing you do have while you're dealing with Tesla full self driving beta driving your train for you. The other thing about that leader system is that they're actually, the machine learning was, it was trained on, I believe, is all simulators. They're actually real world conditions because they don't run enough trains to get you enough time. It's like, oh, we forced a bot to play 9000 hours of Microsoft train simulator. Let's see how it does on the real Mariah's pass. Well, I mean, I guess my question would be if we're comparing it to Tesla's driving system, have these like machine learning systems managed to decapitate any of their own drivers yet?

Probably. Okay. There's such a derailment epidemic right now that none of it makes the news. I mean, Norfolk Southern put like 20 coal cars on the ground on the Northeast corridor. That's 150 mile an hour railroad. And it barely made the news. If there had been M-track train there right then, holy crap. Yeah.

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, when you say it's a derailment pandemic, you're not kidding because when I looked up information about the derailment that I saw when I was living in Pittsburgh, I found out that one had just happened recently, May 29th in this year. And it's just like, are these aren't supposed to be happening in major cities routinely? Well, the fact that they're not showing up in any sort of like media. I mean, I don't know if I've even, I mean, John, you're talking about a derailment that you had to literally see to be inclined to look it up. I've never seen news on a train derailment.

Not all of them are huge ones. Like minor ones are pretty constant. I mean, I was, a couple of years ago, I was riding my bike along the Skookle River Trail and just saw CSX derail a train right next to me. And I was like, wow, that shouldn't be like that, huh? Yeah, no kidding. Didn't make the news. No one noticed it. I took a picture and posted it on Twitter.

And that was like the extent of the news reporting on it. Wow. And it was like, it was an empty lumber car, but like right next to it was a bunch of cars full of molten sulfur. I mean, yeah. Well, because I mean, that's one of the things with like the combination of making these trains so gigantic, so long. And again, as you said, like often hauling like potentially dangerous substances, I mean, even a coal, like that's, I don't have coal dumped all over my house. Exactly.

But like, you have that at the same time that they're like, what if we just only put one person? Yeah, now you don't even have a guy, now you don't even have a guy to keep you company when you're sitting there at the red signal for six hours. Right. Or even just like, what if, what if the train got person has a heart attack or they get stung by a bee? And it turns out they're allergic and they didn't know like there's so many things. Or they've been awake for 26 hours. That's the real dangerous one. Because if you're on a freight train, you do have to push a button called the alert every 30 seconds or it automatically applies the brakes.

That's, you know, the dead man's handle and sort of prevents you. If you die, the train stops. Right. The thing is, it's also very easy to space out and hit it automatically over and over again. Right. You know, and that is an issue which does occur. And, you know, with one man train operation, there's no one there for a sanity check. I mean, if you look at the case of the M-Trek derailment in Philly in 2013, that engineer, Brandon Boston, he was very, very safety conscious.

He was definitely someone who loved his job. And he just spaced out for a second and ran the train off a curve because he missed where he just misplaced where he was for a second. And there was no sort of safety equipment on that track to prevent for him from over speeding there. Now there was on the adjacent track, but M-Trek just didn't decide to put it on that track. Wow. Yeah. So this is the state of the industry. All these trains being driven by machine learning systems with also guys in there who are overworked.

They're stressed. They're sleepy. You know, you have badly run freight trains which, you know, they're too long. You know, they don't fit in yards. Everything's broken. Everything is so broken and all in the name of precision scheduling, which it notably does not happen. Yeah. And so, like, this is the setting.

This is the background that we're coming into, like, as the negotiations were continuing at the beginning of this year. Like, and I think like spring is kind of a big point here because that's when like BNSF, one of the biggest class one railways in the country, implemented their new draconian attendance system because so like, in addition to the fact that these guys are already on call all the time, they have to work ridiculous hours. They're always away from home. Like, now you can get fired working for BNSF basically for taking any time off at all. Like, because they set up this lifetime point system where basically if you get COVID just as the example because it's, you know, something could very well happen. And you're out for even just the five day insufficient CDC guidance that if that can rack up basically all of your lifetime points.

And if you had to take one or two more days off because you're still sick, you're still testing positive, you could just be fired because you got COVID, not because like you played hooky for two weeks or something. Yeah. It's just because they don't have any sick days and because this system of so-called precision scheduled railroading has been built on the backs of meaning out the crews so much that they're basically making these people all work to three, four people's jobs. That like, if you have these people out, it screws up their system. So their solution would rather than, you know, look at it and say, hmm, well, if we're having to run people like 355 days of the 365 days in a year in order to make our system work, perhaps we should hire a couple more people. No.

And there's, there's, they just double down on it, implement these incredibly draconian attendance systems that like, I mean, there was a quote that when we first talked about this a couple of months ago, like the national president of the brotherhood of locomotive engineers and trainmen, Dennis Pierce, put out a statement calling it the quote, the worst and most agree just attendance policy ever adopted by any rail carrier. That sounds about right to me. Yeah. I mean, you know, even, even back in the, in the bad old days of, you know, steam locomotives and stuff, he had days off. Yeah. I mean, just as a, like a random, I mean, like anecdote, like my uncle actually used to, like when he was a kid, well, not a kid, I guess when he was like in his early 20s. During the summer he did a short stint where he worked on this like this line that was in the middle of nowhere. It ran from like central Maine to Montreal. I don't remember the name of the railroad, but he was talking about how like, It would probably be the Grand Trunk Railroad.

Yeah, I think that that was what it was. And he was talking about where like a guy that he was on his train crew and this, so this would have been like, I don't know, 50 years ago. Where one of the guys that he was working with on the train, like really hurt himself. And because their train was just in the middle of the woods, they just like stopped the train at the first road they came to and had to flag down a car because there was no way for them to communicate with anybody. And frankly, this was 50 years ago. It doesn't sound like that situation is actually improved for these workers. You do at least have radios now. There is that. That's true. But yeah, it's it's it's remarkable how you've really gone backwards, I would say overall in terms of quality of life for workers. I mean, this is this is a second hand anecdote.

But I know a guy who knew a guy who was he worked for Union Pacific and he was like senior high ranking engineer. He was selected for the Union Pacific steam program, right? Union Pacific runs a bunch of steam trains around the country is like a public relation thing. Of course, it's Union Pacific. So you get to drive the biggest steam locomotive. Sure. It's just called the big boy. So, you know, you get you get this great job, you get to drive the steam locomotive, you get to wave the kids, you get to blow the whistle, you know, it's a prestige position, right?

And but the thing is, the regular job was so bad that I guess he's a personal trainer at a gym now, he just quit. And I was like, you've got like the dream, the dream kids job, you get to drive the steam train. And it's like, it's too bad. It's the quality of life is just so bad that you can't do it. Yeah, I mean, we've seen like in the numbers that like 700 workers at BNSF have quit just in those six months. Since they implemented that policy, which is again, largely due to the restrictions of the Railway Labor Act, because in so many other industries that are unionized like this, when you the company puts in a policy like that, you would have a strike. Yes. Which is of course what the brotherhood of locomotive and engineers and trainmen wanted to do as well as smart transportation division, the other big rail, rail union.

But they were immediately blocked by an injunction from a federal judge who's like, no, no, you haven't gone through all the steps yet. You have to go through the whole flow chart. You can't skip it just because they're putting you on a schedule. No human being can possibly do. And this whole time, these companies have been able to use the Railway Labor Act to basically just chase profits. It's not like they have a dwindling supply of incoming money that they have to like try and work around by implementing all of these insane intensifications of labor. For example, BNSF made five point one billion dollars in net income in 2020 and was on track to make 17% more in pure profit just by the third fiscal quarter of 2021, which is like, you know, we talk a lot on the show about how when companies act like this, they always do actually have the money to pay their employees more.

It seems like in railways, it's really kind of in a different order of magnitude, like it's on a different level of exploitation. One of the things I think the railroads are kind of worried about at this point is I think they are expecting some massive drop off in traffic pretty soon because coal is dying, crude oil by rail is not as big of a thing anymore. Those were big cash cows for them. But the other thing is, of course, they really have to chase these profits because, you know, who are they competing with for investment dollars? It's like a guy in a basement who made an app that makes a fart sound. It cost him a dollar to do and he made $2 billion in a week. That's a much, much better return on investment than the rather awkward position railroads are in of actually having to do things. Right.

So I think, you know, points to why their strategy has been to, I mean, more or less like, loot the entire railway system at the expense of their workers. Like, because I mean, just, it is one further thing to underline the fact that it's like, it's not as if the, like, despite the decrepit nature of some of the railway infrastructure, it's not as if they're not making money. Because like, in addition to that number just for BNSF, I found one to a stat today that was just wild that over the last 12 years, all the Class 1 railroads have paid out $196 billion in dividends and stock buybacks to their shareholders. They've been really going hard on those stock buybacks over the past like 10 years. Yeah. And it's kind of like, what's the purpose of this? What if you invested $196 billion in rail infrastructure, for instance? I mean, what if you just invested half of it?

Yeah, I was about to say, I was about to say, this is a good chunk of change. You know, you could probably, I don't know, you could build like a dead straight line from like New York to Chicago and run trains at 200 miles an hour for that amount of money. But instead, it's like, we purchased our stock back. So some guy, some guy made $6. Yeah. Well, I mean, maybe you could even stop asking the public to cover your costs to make longer segments of rail so that trains can pass each other. Yes. Yes.

Yeah. I mean, it's, the industry's really fucked up right now. It's always been fucked up in some way, but right now is a particularly stupid way to be fucked up. Well, and with that, I mean, do we want to move to like what has been happening over just like the past little bit with like the presidential emergency board or anything like that? Like directly move to what the impending strike slash lockout situation is? Yeah. Was there any other like background history you wanted to go over that we haven't hit yet? I think I'm exhausted on that for the moment.

Fair enough. All right. So yeah, like for folks who, again, if you're a bit more new to this or the first time hearing about this topic, you may not be aware that one of the last stops on that flow chart in the National Railway Labor Act is the, this concept of the presidential emergency board, which is supposed to be like... The pep. Yeah. The pep is supposed to be the last like safety valve where, all right, we've made you sit through 20 fucking mediation sessions and you still can't agree, which really means that the companies are still stonewalling. So the president is going to establish a special board that will look at what the workers are saying and what the companies are saying and will come up with a fair compromise, which practice just means like saying that whatever the companies are saying is fine.

So like... It being called the pep makes me imagine it's just overseen by like a Joe Biden Pez dispenser. I mean, honestly, probably. I mean, they pick three people to basically put together this committee that like Dan was saying, listens to the corporation and then pretends to listen to the workers. And like this time, what they've done is they've come out with an agreement that exclusively partially addresses the wage issue and nothing else basically. So over the next five year contract, which is actually retroactive to 2020 because they've been running on the older contract. They've been forced to run on the older contract over the period of the pandemic up till now. And that raise is by the pep is recommended to be 24% where the workers themselves had demanded 28%.

And then also all of the demands for like we were talking about earlier, the new attendance policy have no changes within this pep recommendation. And so now we've had... I can't remember how many unions it is. I think it's like 10, 8 or 12 different unions that are associated with all of these different train lines. And a lot of them have been kind of strong armed into agreeing to a tentative agreement where as listeners to the show will know, there's a bargaining committee and they would bring... When having these negotiations, they'll have a tentative agreement, which then is proposed to the workers. And those votes are going to be happening later this week, if not like tomorrow and the next day. I mean, I guess we're recording this on the 13th.

I know that some of the votes are happening on Thursday, but the only two holdouts are the smart transportation. We've been talking about the smart transportation wing and then also the brotherhood of locomotive engineers who are with the Teamsters. And those are the two that have not come to a tentative agreement yet, which a lot of the... If you read any of the reports from any of the capitalist sources, they're like, can you believe that these unions are just sticking the muds? They're not coming to the table or as if coming to the table means just giving in to the president's board of recommendations. They can't come to the table because they're on call. They might get called away to run a train.

Can you believe that these holdout unions didn't appreciate it when Joe Biden's pep dispenser showed up and said, I'll give you most of the wage increase you want, but I can't shake a broomstick at no attendance policy. And then a bar of soap shot out of his neck and hit you in the face. This is the thing is that they're framing it as if... Because the two unions, the BLET and Smart TD, which are the two biggest unions in the rails, as these crank holdouts, when really, if you actually go and look on like Rail Twitter, which has been a very interesting place to find myself in over the last couple of months, and actually a lot of really militant voices in there, which I've really appreciated,

the people that are in those other unions are like, this is bullshit. We didn't want to agree to this tentative agreement. And it's like, okay, these two crank holdout unions happen to be the unions of the people who actually drive the trains. Right, exactly. They are the ones affected by all this. And the thing that they're refusing to accept is that they should continue to have these horrific attendance policies that are the very thing driving so many of their own members out of the industry. The PEB literally wouldn't even recommend them to have three paid holidays. Three in the whole year. They're like, well, what if we gave you one personal day for the entire year?

That's the same as three holidays and sick days. Because I think one of the other things that folks may not realize when we're talking about, like, the workers only having one day off a month and having no sick days, that's not in addition to weekends, because they don't have weekends. That's not a thing for these guys. It's literally one day off a month, 12 days off a year for a lot of these folks. It is an attendance policy that I think the vast majority of people, you see, oh, these guys make maybe $95,000 a year.

That seems like a great salary. You want to work 353 days out of the year and never see your family. Right. And we've also been talking about how dangerous these monster trains are and the dangers of having a one-man crew. Well, the PEB also didn't say shit about that. They are just like, well, I mean, if that's what the companies want, then I guess we're just going to turn a blind eye to this really horrible practice

that's going to lead to even more derailments than the current derailment pandemic or epidemic that we're seeing. Yeah, maybe one of the only industries that is like more dangerous than health care to have unsafe staffing levels. Hey, I mean, right here in Philly, CSX or excuse me, Conrail has a line that runs straight through children's hospital and they run dangerous chemicals through it every day. So, you know, it's incredible. We can combine these two.

Yeah, absolutely. And of course, what we want as citizens of the United States is for those folks to have no weekends and be operating on like two hours of sleep over the last three days and fueled entirely by six cans of like zero sugar monster energy drink. Right. And I mean, like I was talking about the wage increase that was, you know, the workers were demanding, especially in the face of inflation, but additionally, the board recommended raising the health care costs,

which directly cuts in to the amount that the raise that they were proposing would even benefit the workers. Yeah, I mean, everything the PEP has recommended is basically like one step forward, two and a half steps back. It's that line from the movie they were watching, you know, you got to find a way to give them $1 while you take two. Yeah. I mean, the Biden administration is very good at that.

And yeah, so like that's basically where the presidential emergency board came out. They're like, hey, look, we, you know, we hear you. You don't like what the company's offering. So we'll give you a tiny amount more money and we'll also take that away by raising your health care costs. And then, oh, you have other issues. We'll just go back to the bargaining table. You'll figure them out again after it's been years of the company's intransigence, refusing to listen, because again, this whole situation that the way the Railway Labor Act is set up

doesn't give the companies any incentive because they can just do exactly what they're doing now. They can use the press and their ability to control, you know, their own company to say like, well, look, if there's a railway strike, you think you've got a bad inflation problem now. I mean, look how bad it's going to be if our rails are shut down because of a strike. Congress, you better get in there and make sure there's no strike because, oh boy, it would sure would be a problem if inflation got worse because of a strike right before the election. I like they're trying to fear monger about inflation rather than empty shelves. You know, there's a literal, a literal food shortage hits America.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, and the number that that capitol's been touting about like what this strike or even the lockout would constitute is $2 billion a day in basically... I think that's a pretty... Things not moving. That's an underestimate. I imagine because there's so many other aspects of the supply chain that will be affected by,

you know, the problems that will inevitably come from these companies, these private companies deciding that the workers don't mean shit and the safety of this rail infrastructure doesn't mean shit. And obviously it's the only thing that matters is the profits of them and their investors. Yeah, but Americans don't understand knock-on effects or consequences. All they know is lower wages, raise inflation, labor intensification, eat hot chip and lie. Exactly, exactly. Maybe the food riots might force someone's hand.

I don't know. Yeah. Honestly, I think that's a big part of why the railway companies are trying so hard right now this week as we speak to try and force Congress to prevent a strike because while the impacts of the strike would be enormous and a lot of people would get annoyed by it, I mean, annoyed I'm sure is an understatement, but I think it would pretty rapidly become clear as much as the media would try not to make it clear that the problem is the railroads, it's not the workers.

Yes, they're trying to eke out the last of their profits they can out of this incredibly unsustainable and stupid business model. And if they take out American democracy with it, so be it. They're trying to get rid of any level of democracy that exists anyway. I mean, not that it even really exists here. Not that it exists in the first place, obviously. Yeah, so I mean, I guess we've kind of been leading up to this point, but so again, for folks who haven't been following all the details of this process,

after the issuing of the Presidential Emergency Board recommendations, there's a one final 30 day cooling off period in which the workers cannot strike and theoretically the rail companies can't lock them out, although they're already making moves in that direction in a way that seems illegal, but one set of laws for them, one set of laws for us. This is true. And so that's really why we wanted to do this episode so urgently, because the end of that cooling off period is this Friday, September 16th.

And so if Congress doesn't pass some sort of preemptive bill, then there isn't a tentative agreement reached, which is of course also possible, although that would really seem to be a big retreat, and I'm pretty sure it would only accelerate the rate of quits in so many of these different railroads, but so we could see this start as soon as this Friday. So this is, you're looking at, I believe, about 60,000 workers in between BLET and Smart TD,

but really you're talking about more than 100,000 workers because you're talking about the whole rail system, so if you don't have locomotive engineers, you're not sending trains anywhere, even if the other unions have accepted it. This is shutting down parts of M-Track. This is shutting down commuter rail in some cities. This is going to shut down, it's going to shut down, like a lot of stuff will just stop running,

and you may have a situation where if they do go on strike, all those freight trains can't fit in the rail yards. They're just going to leave them parked on the main line, you have this monster train that's three and a half miles long, blocking like 45 grade crossings. Everyone's going to feel something from this if it happens. Right, and that's not even taking into account the fact that there are all of those unions

that did come to the tentative agreement, but still have to bring the vote to the membership, which as we've kind of been hearing from a lot of the workers there, are not very likely to accept these tentative agreements. The two engineers' unions holding out, I think has really shown a lot of light on the situation in a way that maybe some of the union members from the other unions hadn't had access to before.

It's definitely notable since BLET is traditionally a very conservative craft union, but they're leading the way on this one. This is a... I mean, if they mean business, they mean business. And that's one of the things that... Because one of the things that we've talked about when we were getting into this and the history is...

Because obviously I think one of the comparisons with when we get into Congress potentially intervening, declaring a strike illegal, is you always have that specter of something like PATCO, where even if you have a union that's got a militant leadership and is just like, fuck this, we are not accepting a tentative agreement that doesn't at least give our guys a couple of sick days

and a couple days off a year. Even if you get into that situation, you have, of course, the threat that the Congress just declares a strike illegal and tries to destroy the union. Now, I think realistically, they're not... I don't really think the National Guard is particularly capable of operating

the entire national freight system. There is a U.S. Army railroad, and it probably has like 400 guys tops. Yeah. Right, because that's the thing. I wouldn't put it past Congress or the president or ever to just be like, you know what, fuck it, derail them all. I don't care.

Try to get them most of the way there first. Yeah, and so one of the things that I'm really hoping that we do see, if it does come to that, if it does come to a strike or... And really, actually, because we haven't really gotten into this, I mean, because of the way the carriers have been so aggressive about this, it actually looks like if we do get to Friday

without an agreement, it's actually more likely that we're going to see a lockout before we see a strike. Yes, this is an option, which may occur. Yeah, and that's going to be... Well, I think the railroads would lose the PR campaign on that. The only issue there being, I don't think the railroads care about PR. I mean, it's kind of...

They are... They've got the power. Yeah, they have this sort of institutional capability to withstand criticism, which is second only to the Catholic Church. Yeah, and so if it does come to that, if there is a lockout or if there is a strike, this is one of these areas where I think

to take some of the lessons of Pat Coe and just be like, what was one of the things that allowed Reagan to destroy the Air Traffic Controllers Union? And it's the fact that the rest of labor kind of just let them hang in there to dry. Whereas with this, I would be at least hopeful since the BLET is affiliated with the Teamsters

that if this happens and if Congress tries to break the strike, that there would be some sort of solidarity between at least the Union truckers, which of course is nowhere near what it used to be national penetration-wise since the deregulation in the 80s and the death of the National Master Freight Agreement. But because that's one of those things where if you have,

because the Biden administration right now is in preparation, we just saw this news that came out today, in preparation for if there is a strike, they're trying to source like, okay, well, we need chlorine to treat water supplies and we normally move that by train. If there's a strike, where do we get it and how do we move it around the country?

What you do is you crash it on an urban freeway. Right, exactly. That's gonna look pretty bad for everyone involved. Yeah, so I mean, I think there's like this potential, there's this need for like labor solidarity that I'm really hoping that if we do have a strike that we see because there's gonna be that temptation to not only just use the full force of the state

to crush the strike, but also try and route as much stuff as possible around the rails through more trucks. Although again, with the like supply chains being pushed to the max already, I'm not even sure there's capacity for them to absorb even a percentage of that. There is absolutely no spare capacity

in the trucking system to take on all that freight. Yeah, well, and I mean, also like the Teamsters represent a lot of people who work for last mile delivery companies as well. So it's like a lot of the goods that are on those trains or trucks or whatever it may be, if you have that level of support from the Teamsters might not have any way to make it to people's doorsteps

at the end of the route anyway. Yeah, and I'm not even saying that you need to do like a national trucking strike or something at the same time, but just making it clear that it's like our drivers stand in solidarity with, you know, the train workers and the train workers need everything that they're asking for because again, their demands are not like

pay us a million dollars a year and give us six months off. It's literally like allow us to go to the doctor without being fired. Well, and it does seem possible, I think, because of the way that some of the Teamsters contracts are set up to not force them to cross picket lines, although I mean, I don't think that's in every single contract, but it is in some of the contracts.

Well, and it'll put them into an interesting situation if those picket lines are deemed illegal and then they're going to have to make some pretty interesting decisions around that time. Right, and so like, you've got, I mean, Norfolk Southern, I don't know if they actually did this, we were talking about this before the show, like they announced today that they were, as of noon,

this is Tuesday the 13th, that they were going to just be shutting down their whole intermodal freight network. Yes, I believe they delayed that by 24 hours as of like a couple hours ago, but that is happening most likely. I mean, M-Track's already canceling long distance trains, which aren't going to make it to the terminal

by the time the strike is scheduled to occur. The whole, the system is already starting to shut down, so I think everyone expects something to happen, maybe even if Congress decides, nah, fuck them, take the contract. This problem, if it's not addressed, it's just going to continue to fester, you know? Absolutely, yeah.

And I really liked that, honestly, because like in response to the railroads actions, basically gearing up for a preemptive lockout, like the BLET and SmartTD issued a statement in which they said, the railroads are using shippers, consumers, and the supply chain of our nation as pawns in an effort to get our unions to cave

into their contract demands, knowing that our members would never accept them. Our unions will not cave to these scare tactics, and Congress must not cave into what can only be described as corporate terrorism. Yes, that's a good phrase right there. I like it. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where,

I mean, as you were saying, I don't know as much of the history specifically of the rail union, but obviously even just with, hearing the phrase corporate terrorism, I'm like, I would expect to hear that maybe from UE, maybe from the ILW, not even from a Teamsters associated union.

Well, I mean, except for, I mean, Sean O'Brien does say, you know, or some stuff like that. I mean, these white collar criminals or whatever he calls them. Yeah, I mean, well, to be fair, the Teamsters have been getting a lot better very quickly ever since Sean O'Brien came around.

Yeah, and of course this is all happening because Congress is so directly involved in this with the railway labor act, this gets tied in with all of the political situation in the country. Obviously with the midterm elections coming up in barely two months at this point, that's of course at the top of the concern

for all of the Democrats who are in power. I always forget that that's a thing. Like, I mean, like, I don't care about Democrats. And so the fact that they're like, oh no, we can't let this impact prices too much. Otherwise, Biden's selected, you know, or the Democrats, you know, Congress or whatever,

I don't know who the fuck's being reelected. But, you know, that's the thing that they're concerned about primarily. Yeah. What will the Senate parliamentarians say? Yeah, well, the whole thing is it just like, oh well, we did our loan forgiveness thing and that was supposed to keep,

like that was supposed to be the tiny bone that we threw people to have us keep Congress. We can't have that be screwed up by workers fighting for their right to not have to work every day of the year. So, I mean, like there was a, there was a statement and there was a article in Railway Age that was just talking about like these, these updating things where I guess Labor Secretary Marty Walsh

was telling people that saying, according to the article said that he basically said, don't mess with the nation's fragile economy weeks ahead of a midterm congressional elections as neither Congress nor the Biden administration will like it. But then he said that Congress should not be expected to intervene to stop a strike or a like it lockout, which is also contradicted by, I think just yesterday,

Steny Hoyer, who is the House majority leader, came out and said that Congress would intervene. So, we're getting a lot of really mixed messages from the Democrats on this. Additionally, I mean, even if they do try to shut down a strike or a lockout, I mean, that's just gonna exacerbate these bad working conditions. And instead of seeing this sort of infrastructure,

you know, put on hold, what we're gonna see is far more of that just more derailing or because there's gonna be so many workers that just leave because nobody wants to deal with all of that bullshit. I'm genuinely surprised at how narrow the framing has been on this one, just that like, you know, it's like railroads are almost irrelevant to the economy or like if you want to be a lib about it,

national security, for instance, you know. I was gonna say, don't mess with the nation's fragile economy weeks ahead of midterm congressional elections is the most words I've ever heard used to say national security. Yeah, but I mean, it's even directly, like the military ships all its tanks around on trains. This is all kind of like, all this stuff is, it's more important than people are being led to believe,

I think, and this is, I don't know. I mean, just starting from the railroads, incredibly unsustainable business model right now, they gotta do, you basically have to give in to the union's demands if you want to still have railroads in like five years. Right, absolutely, because that's the thing, it's like they're living in this,

and it's funny because I think like you're absolutely right to point out that like, because of the fact that the media never talks about this part of like, because we use the term supply chain and then they never explain what a supply chain is. Yes. And so I think people have this idea of like, well, it's just trucks, everything is trucks,

and like, stuff comes from China on a boat and it comes to California and it goes to the warehouses at Inland Empire, and then they all get on trucks and that goes everywhere around the country and that's how everything moves. It's like, well, that's a percentage of it, but that's not everything.

Yeah, and it's like, oh, okay, maybe I get my, you know, high value goods a lot of them still go with trucks because the railroads completely seated that traffic in the 80s to the trucking industry, but okay, what happens if the grain doesn't make it to the flour mill? What happens if the coal doesn't make it to the power plant?

What happens if, you know, all this kind of stuff, the gasoline doesn't make it to the fuel distributor. You know, all this sort of, the basic level of the economy, you know, the actual, like, the large quantity commodities, these are all running, going by train and if that supply chain is interrupted, you know, it's still gonna be really easy to get an iPhone but really hard to get a loaf of bread, you know?

Yeah, that's one of the things that the unions were saying because I was listening to the working people's interview with the train union leaders and they were saying that what this will lead to is grain rotting in silos. And on top of the fact that food prices are already skyrocketing, there's going to be no, like, even less food

which is going to raise prices even more. I mean, they're going to be seeing inflation like that of the UK. Yeah, well, it's really interesting too. I mean, like, how different the view from the union side is from the company side on this, where the unions are like, we would like this industry that supports all other industry in the country to probably continue and be healthy. Meanwhile, like, the people at the top of the companies

basically, like, have financialization VR headsets on and can't see a fucking damn material thing that's happening at the bottom or even the middle levels of their companies. Those guys have really been sniffing their own farts for a long time. That's all I can say about that. Yeah, because they're sitting there at their Bloomberg terminals lighting cigars with $100 bills and being like, well, all I see is this line's going up

so I know we're doing the right thing. So I don't know what those pesky workers are saying, but it sounds like a bunch of nonsense. But I do, there is one thing, like, before we wrap up that I did want to underline about Congress's ability to intervene here. And this is not a scenario I actually think is very likely. I certainly don't want to put any faith whatsoever in Congress

at all. But one of the things with the Congress's ability to intervene is that while, like, for instance, like the GOP put in a bill, a proposed bill that would just do what we were kind of expecting to happen, which is Congress making any strike illegal and forcing the recommendations of the Presidential Emergency Board onto all of the unions, saying you must accept this as your contract, not doing so is illegal.

And if you try and strike, we will, you know, get fined, like, take all your money and throw your leaders in jail and all that stuff. But there is an alternative to that that still stays within the legal system, which is the Democrats who do, you know, at least theoretically control Congress and the presidency could tell the rail companies, OK, look, we don't want a strike. We agree with you on that.

But you got to give these people sick days. Like, they don't have to just blindly accept the P.E.B. recommendations. They're Congress, they can write anything into such a bill. Like, I mean, more or less, there's like some sort of... They could also... So technically, they could nationalize the fucking train industry. Yes.

Not that they will. Obviously, they won't do that. We know they're not going to do that. I mean, that would be... I feel like the only way to compel the changes that need to occur for us to have a reliable, functioning free rail system at this point is radical change of management. Just tear down the industry, build it back up from its foundations.

I don't think that's going to happen. I think we're going to have... We're going to continue to have a dysfunctional, self-cannibalizing rail industry for the foreseeable future. But... Yeah. Well, I mean, imagine that one of the more progressive members of Congress did actually try and propose meaningful legislation

to address this issue. The Democrats are just going to trot out cinema and mansion, again, like they always fucking do. And it's just going to turn into some kind of circus about these two freaks who have nothing to do with the railways in any reasonable capacity. Yes. Right.

Yeah. Which is actually... That's one of the things that's like, do I want a strike that cause... I mean, look, we want there to be a strike because we want the workers to have the ability to strike, for the same reason we want all workers to be able to have the ability to strike,

as long as we exist under capitalism. It's the only way of workers enforcing their collective power. And if they don't have the right to strike, then they can make all the demands they want. They have no way of enforcing it. But of course, you know, we don't want the price of bread to go through the fucking roof because that'll just lead to, you know, poor people starving, which we don't want.

But if the thing that I think is so important about the way that this is being portrayed is that right now, it's very easy for the media to ignore the workers because they're not out on a picket line. Yes. They can just take a quote from the railway industry and talk to whoever in Washington and be like, yep, we talked to the industry experts

and we talked to the politicians and we got all of the voices. But if there's actually a strike, if there are physically people on picket lines, it becomes much, much harder to just completely ignore what the workers are saying. And it's the sort of thing where their situation is so bad. The conditions they're working under are so horrific that you only got to get one or two of them

in front of a microphone. And it's instantly the most relatable, like, sympathetic story to the vast, vast majority of people in this country, which is, I think, why the companies are trying so hard to force either a lockout or a blockage of the strike beforehand because right now, people are like, I don't really know anything about the rails. I don't understand what's going on,

but I don't want my prices to go up and this says that'll happen. So that sounds like it would be bad. But if we actually get NBC, CBS, CNN, and any of the major news outlets actually interviewing the workers out there on the line and they tell them, yeah, we literally get one day off a month. We can't be sick or we get fired.

We're on call 40 hours at a time and that sort of thing. Well, that changes the public perception of the whole thing. And I think that's what the companies are trying to avoid. It's remarkable how, you know, this is a relatable story in, like, several ways. But one thing I think is notable is, you know, you're sort of a big, burly, manly man railroader guy is going on strike for basically the same reason

as your blue-haired woke Starbucks barista. This is the same problem. You know, everyone's got a lot more in common here. Pink emoji. Everyone's got a lot more in common here than I think they're going to try and portray in the media. Yeah, 100%. I mean, yeah, it's absolutely correct.

Again, I think that as awful as this situation is, there is that sort of potential silver lining there where, like, if you can merge, like, the current labor upsurge that we're seeing in the service sector with, like, at least the level of consciousness being generated by that movement. With this, you know, what, when you, you know, you have all the weird nerds on the internet

trying to argue over what is or is not a worker, all that stupid bullshit, and they're like, you're only a worker if you're that guy on the cover of, like, State and Revolution who's not wearing a shirt and is swinging a hammer or something. You got to hit a thing with a hammer or you're not a worker. Yeah, you're only a worker if you've ever laid slag. Otherwise...

Yeah, so getting the consciousness generated, you know, from the sectors exactly what you're talking about with the Starbucks Workers United movement and even, you know, workers organizing in tech, workers organizing at Chipotle, all sorts of different places, and combine that with, like, the same traditional, like, sectors of union movements that we've seen, like, again, with the John Deere in Striketober

and, like, now with the Rail Strike, I don't know, I think that's got a potential for, like, being one of the largest mass consciousness-raising events in recent history, so... I mean, I think so. But, I mean, yeah, it's... We're... Yeah.

I think we've gone through pretty much all the history here, and now it's kind of just, we got to wait and see at this point, like, what's going to happen? Yeah, is there anything else that we wanted to hit before we wrap up? I was going to, like, say, maybe wait a... put a bow on it and was like,

okay, what does actual, like, structural reform in the industry look like that addresses these issues? And you are... It is based on running trains on schedules, and, you know, if you look at workers on railroads in other countries, I think our closest peer nations are probably

Russia and India in how we run trains. They don't have these problems, because their trains run on schedules. They can predict they're weak, but you need massive structural reform, and you need to get away from the disinvestment mindset in order to do that, in order to make that happen in this country.

And I don't know if you could convince private industry to do it. I think ultimately these railroads are going to have to come under state ownership or stewardship or something in order to prevent, you know, this slow self-destruction that has been prevalent in the industry for so long. I mean, you actually need public investment in rail to correct this problem,

and I think a lot of what we're going to get at best is going to be a stop cap that's going to shove this... It's going to kick the can down the road a couple years, but it's not going to solve the underlying issues. So, in terms of the railroad, I suppose the real solution is full communism now, Hail Satan. That's right. Absolutely.

And with that, I think that we can wrap up. Justin, do you want to tell our listeners where they can find you and follow all the work you do? Hi, I'm Justin. I'm on a podcast called, Well, There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. You can find us on YouTube and on all podcasting platforms

because, again, there's a visual component so you can look at me draw over pictures with a little pen. So, there's that. I'm on a Twitter at who underscore shot underscore JGR because those bastards at Twitter took my old account away. And, yeah, that's where I am. Well, I want to thank you so much for joining us and helping us get this information kind of laid out

in a little bit clearer fashion because it is really hard to parse this with basically capital being the only voice that people are able to get from most of these situations. It's crazy. I mean, even just reading about railroad history, you know, you only get capital's viewpoint 99% of the time. All these books are hagiographies, you know,

and it's, I'm glad to be able to at least try to give a more labor focused perspective here or at least something which doesn't, you know, fawn over the railroad like it's a gift from God, you know? Yeah, absolutely. Although I do like the trains. Well, that's a great reason to have you on here. And I want to thank you all for listening.

And if you want to support our show, you can support us at patreon.com. I'll skip all the other plugs for this one. I'll just move straight to the classic line. Labor peace is not in our interest and solidarity forever. Solidarity, everybody. Solidarity, everyone. Solidarity, all.

Out of East Tennessee But the dreams of a boy Disappear when you're grown And though I may dream The railroads are gone The ties they are wrought in And the track shot to hell Along with my dreams

And the old railroad bell In my dreams I'd ride the rails to California Working diners and farms along the way Or I'd hop or ride to hide across the border With the black-eyed girl beside me all the way But now the mountains are silent And the railroads are gone And the coal towns no longer

Hear the miners at dawn But the train whistle shrills Out of memories to me The wall of thunder clouds roll Out of East Tennessee In my dreams I'd ride the rails to California Working diners and farms along the way Or I'd hop or ride to hide across the border

With the black-eyed girl beside me all the way But now the mountains are silent And the railroads are gone And the coal towns no longer Hear the miners at dawn But the train whistle shrills Out of memories to me The wall of thunder clouds roll

Out of East Tennessee