294: The Ballad of Tom Odom

The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe

Society & Culture, History

4.8 • 39.1K Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2023

⏱️ ? minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Will Swaim, journalist and president of the California Policy Center, educates us on CA Assembly Bill 5 (AB5,) which seeks to turn independent contractors into employees, and how it’s negatively affecting 70,000+ independent California truckers; truckers like Tom Odom, who calls in from the road to let us know why he is A.) part of a class action lawsuit and B.) moving to Texas. Spoiler Alert: it’s because of AB5!

Will Swaim’s article about AB5 and Tom Odom

Contact Tom with your AB5 story at [email protected]

Transcript

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0:00.0	Here we go with episode number 294 of the way I heard it.
0:06.9	This one is called the Ballad of Tom Odom.
0:11.6	And you're probably asking yourself, gosh, Mike, who's Tom Odom?
0:16.6	Chuck certainly has that expression on his face right now.
0:19.2	But of course, we just met him.
0:21.2	Why don't you tell the folks who Tom Odom is Chuck?
0:24.1	Tom Odom is a long haul trucker who's, you know, had his own trucking business, owns
0:29.4	his own rig, lives in California is a native Californian.
0:34.9	And unfortunately, he's going to have to leave the state soon because of a little thing
0:39.2	called California AB5.
0:41.1	Yeah, this is a little unusual for us.
0:44.1	I try and, I try and stay in my lane, as they say, but I do think that this is my lane.
0:50.9	This is an issue here in California that's going to impact everybody in the country.
0:56.7	It's called assembly bill number five.
0:58.4	And basically, it's an attempt to destroy the gig economy or freelance work as we understand
1:04.9	it.
1:05.9	Tom Odom is not actually our guest.
1:08.1	You'll hear from him in this conversation because he's on the road driving his truck
1:13.3	right now.
1:14.5	But he called in.
1:16.0	My guest is a guy called Will Swain and Will wrote an article not too long ago that I
1:24.4	linked to last week on Facebook and started a bit of a conversation.
	...

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