More than 500 Freedom Way Union workers striking for the first time ever in a company's history.

This strike comes after Union workers complained of poor working conditions and a lack of pay raises despite other plants raising wages.

Those of us who are out here every day is a sacrifice we are making.

Yeah, I'm tired, but at Freedom it was a totally different tire like you just wanted to shut it down.

After being on strike for nearly three full work weeks, the strike at a Topeka Kansas plant is over.

From the home offices of civic ventures in downtown Seattle, this is pitchfork economics with Nick Hanauer, the best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.

I'm David Goldstein, Senior Fellow at Civic Ventures.

Last week, workers at a Freedom Way plant in Topeka Kansas settled a three week strike, a rather remarkable occurrence in an anti-union state like Kansas.

And with me to talk about the horrendous working conditions at the plant and the terms of the settlement is state representative Jason Props, a Democrat from the state of Kansas. Welcome to the podcast Jason.

Thank you for having me. Let's start off like the workers there go on strike.

Well, you know what we started to learn over time was just how awful the working conditions were there. We heard about 84 hour work weeks.

People weren't getting any time off working seven days a week doing these suicide shifts where they work 12 hours, get a few hours off and have to come back for another 12 hours.

Just unconscionable work conditions and then when they, you know, tried to negotiate the contract, they couldn't get time off, they couldn't get pay raises.

And I think the employees had finally had their fill of that.

How unusual is it for a strike like this in Kansas? You don't we don't often hear about it in the national news. I assume it's not often going on.

We don't see strikes very often in Kansas. I mean, we're a right to work state. We're very tilted in favor of employers in this state.

So we just don't see a lot of, you know, there's some bargaining that happens, but we don't typically see a full on strike like this with hundreds of workers saying we've had enough and we're going to leverage our collective ability to force change.

So let's say a right to work state. That's, that's the other side's language that actually means that it's very hard to organize a union in a state like Kansas in state like Washington.

The shop unionizes everybody has to join the union and pay their union fees in the so called right to work states. You can opt out of the union and basically, you know, people freeload why pay your union fees. It's much harder to organize it's much harder to fund a union. So it's an anti union state. Let's, let's put it that way.

That's accurate. And every year in the legislature, the business and industry lobby comes to us trying to make it a union. They've made the argument in the last couple of years that taking dues from people and having a union is unconstitutional and violates free speech, which is nonsense.

But every year they come and try to make it harder for workers to organize and unionize.

Right. So, so let's be here clear. We talk about Frito Lay. It's actually owned by PepsiCo. So giant conglomerate. What was the reaction locally to the strike there? Was there a general support from people criticism in the press surprise?

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