Another train derails, with freight conductor Nick Wurst
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Hello from an ongoing ecological disaster!\\xa0
Our guest this week is Nick Wurst, a freight-rail conductor and a member of the SMART-TD union, who joined Tammy and Jay after an overnight shift. Nick is also a socialist and a member-organizer with Railroad Workers United, a cross-union solidarity organization. He was featured in Tammy\\u2019s recent New Yorker piece about the state of union power in the U.S.\\xa0
On Friday, February 3, a train carrying volatile chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, releasing dangerous fumes and forcing the town to evacuate. State and federal authorities encouraged residents to return to their homes after a \\u201csuccessful\\u201d controlled release of the substances, but many are skeptical that the air is safe to breathe, given reports of animals dying en masse, highly acidic rain, and the post-industrial area\\u2019s baseline pollution levels.\\xa0
Nick explains how corporate avarice\\u2014encapsulated in the ideology of \\u201cprecision scheduled railroading\\u201d\\u2014and government complicity led to this dangerous derailment. He tells Jay and Tammy how railroad companies successfully lobbied against common-sense safety regulations, and what feels different about this disaster, despite rising rates of train derailment. Nick connects the accident in Ohio to last year\\u2019s threatened rail strike, a fight which was widely mischaracterized and eventually squashed by Biden and a Democratic Congress. How drastically has precision scheduled railroading changed conditions on the railroads? What can be done to rein in this greedy industry and the existential dangers it poses to us all?\\xa0\\xa0
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