Music

Music

Music

All righty, I'm not going to bother with the 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 aka 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 covering this fast moving development. I'm sure it'll be completely out of date by the time this episode comes out.

But 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 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 now as we're recording this in the second week of September, we're extremely close to that potential deadline. And so a national railway strike or actually lockout and we'll get into this as we get into the episode could actually happen as early as this week.

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 for joining us, Justin.

Oh, thanks. Thanks for having me on him. 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.

I'm 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.

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 I guess 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 secratic method. What is the railroad, right?

That's right. And one of the things that especially distinguishes the freight railroad, especially the modern ones is they're sort of it's a very, very, it's an opaque industry, right?

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