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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, jobs, incomes, debts, our own and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I want to begin today as I have several programs in the past now with signs welcome long overdue of movement in the labor movement, so called. In other words, real movement, real initiative. Something to counter the long historical decline of organized labor here in the United States. This time I want to focus on, particularly on a strike by mine workers, miners in the Warrior Met coal mine in Brookwood, Alabama. About 1,100 workers have been on strike there, members of the United Mine Workers of America, for several months. Toward the end of July, they came to New York City to protest in front of the offices of the BlackRock Asset Management Company. And I'll have more to say about that in a moment. Here's their concern. A few years ago, the coal company came out of bankruptcy. And as part of the bankruptcy emergence, they got all kinds of concessions from the workers to help the company get back on its feet. And let's really remember, all the decisions of the coal company are made by the board of directors, by the tiny number of people who sit at the top of that company. Their decisions waltzed that company into bankruptcy. But to get out of bankruptcy, they asked for, they needed and they got concessions from the workers. The workers gave back some of what they had won in the past in wages, in working conditions. They helped fix the problems of the directors of that company, who had of course, always excluded those workers from participating in the decisions until they messed it all up. And so the workers now say that the company, having made money, needs to compensate them for the concessions they made. Reasonable request, and the directors won't budge. It's the kind of fairness that passes for social justice in capitalism normally. And so the workers are determined not to accept it. That's the important thing. Where does BlackRock come in? BlackRock takes money from wealthy institutions, wealthy individuals, and manages it for them. BlackRock happens to be the largest single shareholder in the Warrior Met Coal Company. You know, that's how rich people get richer. They siphon off the profits made by people who have to go on strike for months. That's the way our system works. And so they were in New York protesting in front of blackrock. You might be interested to know that the leader of BlackRock, the CEO there, is Larry Fink, an ardent supporter of Donald Trump. It's not the only sign of labor militants. Here's a few more to give you a sense of how the world is changing. 17,000 teaching assistants and research assistants in the University of California system have come to join a union. They're moving to join a union and to get finally the pay, the recognition of their importance in that university as TAs and RAs have that importance in every other Then there's a vote to strike, a 98% vote of the workers to strike at a copper mine in Chile, the world's largest copper mine, and therefore a powerful shaper of that part of modern industry. And here's another sign of more workers have been quitting jobs in the United States in recent months than have done so for years. The statistics are off the chart. What's that about? Workers individually, yes, are deciding they're not going to take the wages, the working conditions, the disrespect, everything that goes with it. You know, they've just come through a year and a half of being told in many cases how essential they were and their work was. Yeah, but their wages didn't show it and their working conditions didn't show it. And they understand that and they're angry. My hope and their future will depend on whether they can move from the individual protest of quitting to the organized union protest of changing the terms that every worker comes to work on. My next update has to do with the so called competition between the United States and China, a competition about which Mr. Biden and many of his officials talk quite a bit. And I was struck by a recent insight that came to me as I read all of the statements. What China has been able to do up until now has been to grow its economy. The quantity and quality of its goods and services have grown much faster than that of the United States. And likewise, the average wage, even adjusted for prices of a Chinese worker, has gone up much faster than of American workers over several decades now. But there's a new kind of competition coming and that's going to be even more profound in shaping the contest. And I don't want you to take my word, and I don't want you to take the words of any official in China or of the Chinese government. I'm going to read to you a paragraph published by Bloomberg News. You could not have a more US Pro capitalist source. Here's a recent article from Bloomberg News and I'm going to read it to China's leaders clearly have a vision for what their country should look like. Risks in the financial system should be controlled, inequality should be reduced. And as recent events have shown, they are committed to making this vision a reality. I'M reading to you from Bloomberg News. Let me continue. For the business world, that could ultimately be a good thing if markets become more stable and prosperity more widespread. But in the short term, building that vision will entail a fair amount of pain for some of the country's biggest, biggest companies. This week alone, authorities ordered all food delivery companies, Meituan being the largest, to ensure they pay their couriers at least the minimum wage and help them with healthcare and pensions. Shares of Meituan slumped last Monday and Tuesday before staging a bit of a comeback. They likewise banned for profit tutoring corporations because they widen the rich, poor, poor gap. What will happen, Bloomberg asks, to the competition between US and China, if the country not only grows faster than the US but also reduces inequality vis a vis the US that might be the most important component in determining the outcome of the competition. Think about it My next update has to do with something called the Right to Repair movement in the United States. This is a movement that is angry and targets corporations. Perhaps the most important Apple, which has such a remarkable reputation despite behaving in this kind of way. Here's what the right to repair movement is More and more companies, particularly those that make electronic devices of one kind or another, are refusing to make available the information needed to repair the device they produce and sell. What that does is deny the buyer the right the possibility of repairing his or her own purchased equipment. It denies small independent repair shops any business they could get by repairing what people are buying. And of course it allows these huge corporations, mostly monopoly or oligopoly corporations, it allows them to charge a fortune, requiring you to get it repaired where they see fit to let you do that and charging you an arm and a leg. There was a recent story of a Tesla automobile needing repair and the bill was 16,000. The right to repair movement says this is outrageous. This is simply stealing from the mass of people by using your monopoly power to force them to pay excess for what they could and should either be able to do for themselves or get a local repair person to do. The movement for the right to repair started in the 1990s. It got going in 2012 when the state of Massachusetts forced something which others have now copied, namely that automobile companies can't play this game. They cannot deny the information so that you can go to a local mechanic rather than paying five times that amount at the dealer, etc. Etc. Now of course it's still true that these companies sell the equipment, but to the local repair person. And that can of course lead to gouging at the price, but it's at least a step. Confronting monopolists. And now let me explain. So you see this clearly. What's involved here? I'm going to use several examples. Number one, those of you that have computers and printers know that there's a bizarre moment when you go into any kind of shop that sells ink cartridges. Ink cartridges are a component of every printer. Here's what you see. If you look at the wall of such a shop, you will see literally hundreds of ink cartridges. Each printer company makes its own. Those cannot be used in any other printer, and no other cartridge can be used in this way. The printer companies can force us to pay way more than we could if this were standardized, if there were three or four or five basic alternatives, and all the machines could use all of them. If you think that's weird, let me give you an example where that already exists. Here it is. It's gasoline. You don't have to worry about filling up your gas tank, do you? You can go into the gas station of any company, any of the big ones, the little ones, too, and fill up. It's a standardized product. It doesn't have to be. If Exxon could get together with the Chevrolet company, they could make sure that you couldn't put anything in your Chevrolet tank except Exxon gas. You'd have to go to an Exxon station and they could charge you pretty much what they wanted because you couldn't go anywhere else. And that's basically the same game. President Biden has now secured a unanimous vote by the Federal Trade Commission to require large corporations to provide instructions, enabling both consumers and small repair operations to fix all gadgets, large and small, not just automobiles. Other countries have gone, as so often happens now, much further than the United States. France has an exemplary system of securing, with the state support, the right to repair. And what is the big tech companies doing? What are Apple and the others doing? Threatening. They don't want their monopoly privilege to be taken away. And they're threatening, gee, if you fix it yourself or if you have a local person fix it for you, well, we may not honor the warranty and we may claim that anything that goes wrong, well, that's your fault or the repair they're threatening, as they always do. They're using the extra money they make by overcharging for repairs to make sure that they're the only ones who can make the repairs in the future. We've come to the end of the first part of today's show, and as always, I want to thank all of you whose support makes this show possible each week. In particular, we'd like to thank our Patreon community and other regular monthly supporters. If you haven't already, Please go to patreon.com economicupdate or visit democracyatwork.info to learn more about how you can get involved in supporting this show. Please remember to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And if you're watching this on YouTube, please hit the red subscribe button below. Stay with us. We'll be right back with today's special guest, investigative reporter and author Bob Hennely. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's Economic Update. It is with special pleasure that I bring back to our microphones and cameras someone who has been here before, but not quite in this capacity. This is Bob Henley. And I want to remind you not only that Bob Henley is a remarkable reporter in the old style, a real investigative reporter who digs out the news that we need to hear, even if it's sometimes hard to do it, but he appears with us this time not only as a reporter with an acute sense of what's going on, as I think you many of you know, but also as the author of a new book. So let me thank you first of all, Bob, for joining us. And then let me give you the proper introduction you deserve. Bob is an award. You're welcome. An award winning print and broadcast journalist, he's now a reporter with the Chief Leader, a New York City based newspaper covering unions since 1897. Bob also contributes regularly to Salon with stories on the economy and politics. He has worked in the past and this is quite a list. CBS's 60 Minutes, the new York Times, the Village Voice, the Christian Science Monitor, cbs, Money Watch, National Public Radio, WNYC and the Pacifica Network. He's recently been covering the pandemic through the perspective of healthcare workers, first responders and the entire workforce. That is called essential. And he has a new book just released and published by yours truly, the Democracy at Work team. The title of his book, stuck can the United States Change Course on Our History of Choosing Profits over People. It's available at www.democracyatwork.info books. Personally, I could not recommend a better book to understand what we're doing and living through than this one. And that's why we published it. So let's begin. Bob, you've called your book Stuck Nation. Tell us, what does it mean? Why did you choose that title? How are we Stuck?