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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, incomes, our own, and those facing our children down the road. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I want to begin today's show talking about consumerism. Not consumer, but consumerism. Let me explain. We're all consumers. That is, we all in our economic system have to go out every day and buy some or a lot of food, clothing, shelter, entertainment, transportation, all the things of life. Consumerism is, is when we give them more importance than what they kind of ought to have because they're one of many different activities we do besides consuming and buying things. And if we focus too much on them, if we overdo it, that's what we mean by consumerism. Let me explain it another way. It's an identity. For many people, it's become the thing that they focus on in their lives. It's why they go to work every day to get the money so they can be consumers. It's the product, for example, of the enormously powerful advertising industry, which spends all its time and all its effort trying to persuade us that whatever issues we have in our lives, our personal relationships, our career issues, our friendships, our love relationships, everything can be better handled if only we buy this product or that product or the other service. This is making us overly focused on consumption. And there's nothing innocent going on here. For example, until the Second World War here in the United States, working people were more apt to define themselves, to think about themselves as workers, not as consumers. The working people, the working class. You can see it even now percolating up. But the dominant theme for the last 75 years has been consumers. Because, you see, if you think of yourself as a worker, you right away understand that you're a worker and somebody else is a boss. It's an identity that explains and contains in it the differences amongst us. Consumer doesn't work like that because the boss consumes and the employee consumes. And this is an attempt to say we're all in it together. You know, like for the last year, we're all in it together to fight the pandemic. Except if you know anything, you understand, some of us are much better off fighting that pandemic than others. For example, those who kept their jobs and those who lost them, those who run the industries that fired millions of Americans, all of that. So worker is an identity in our society that leads you, right, to understand differences. Consumer tries to erase all of that. And here's a couple of ways it becomes important. If you Think of yourself primarily as a consumer. Then. The thing that interests you most, for example, when you have a struggle on the job, is getting more money, because that can allow you to consume more. And yet a thousand studies show that the quality of your life during the workday, you know, five out of seven days, best hours of the day, you're either getting ready for work or doing the work or recovering from the work. So the quality of that time, how it impacts your personality, your mental health, your physical health is at least as important as what you're buying and consuming. But you kind of lose sight of that, which is what the employer wants, because the employer can recover whatever it is he has to pay you in higher wage by changing the conditions of your work, making you work harder, making you work faster, making you come earlier, making you stay later. And if none of those things suffice, there's this other interesting thing that employers can do. They can jack up the price of what they sell to recoup whatever they have to pay you in a higher wage. And you're going to have to use your higher wage to pay the higher price, leaving you not that much better off. So be wary of consumerism, of focusing your life on consumption. It's what people want you to do who do not have your best interests at heart. And that's the politest way I know how to say that. I want to spend the rest of this first half of today's program talking about President Biden. And in a particular way, because President Biden has taken a position on a number of issues. He has come to be referred to as being somehow more progressive than he was expected to be, or in some cases, moving over more towards Bernie AOC and that wing of the Democratic Party. If you're a Republican, you're horrified and claim he's going in a direction of socialism. But it's always the same real issue. How progressive is Mr. Biden? So let's begin by giving the President his due. He has done some progressive things. There's no point in denying that. For example, he is proposing to tax corporations more than they were paying before and to tax wealthy people more than they were paying before. In the standard of American politics, that's progressive. Likewise, he has proposed to spend money on all kinds of social programs that will benefit average Americans way more than the Trump administration ever did. And so by using Mr. Trump, the most recently passed president of this country, he is certainly progressive, but that's a low bar that Mr. Trump has left us. So let's look a little more deeply, did Mr. Biden change? He may have. And if he did, and if he did become more progressive than he led folks to believe, than his past political record would suggest to anyone, why? What happened? How do we account for it? And I think that will also explain how progressive it actually is. Capitalism in America has changed. And that for me is the single most important reality to explain what Mr. Biden has done. And that shouldn't surprise anyone who knows much about American history. When Franklin Roosevelt won the presidential race in 1932, he was a middle of the road Democrat. His past history in the state of New York and in his political life gave no one any reason to expect what he then became as the President of the United States. So Mr. Biden is like Mr. Roosevelt in that way. And so he is doing some of the things Mr. Roosevelt did. And for the same reason capitalism fell apart in the 1930s. Mr. Roosevelt had lived during a boom time of capitalism doing his politics, had to reverse himself because he was now living in a capitalism that was busted. Mr. Biden is like that. He inherited a capitalism that is in very bad trouble, that never really recovered from the crash of 2008 and 9. And here it was in 2020, barely emerging from that calamity to have the system go down again. And on top of it, the viral pandemic that nobody prepared. Mr. Biden 4. And Mr. Trump didn't do anything to deal with the problems of capitalism. If anything, he made them worse. Unemployment took off because of the pandemic, and because of capitalism, turning down inequality got worse, much worse. Under Trump, the competition from China proved itself to be very powerful and much more powerful than Mr. Trump's. Trade wars and tariffs were able to stop or even slow down. The American economic system inherited by Mr. Biden was catastrophic. And that's why he has become a bit more accommodating to progressive responses, because the effort of the right wing in America epitomized by Mr. Trump didn't solve anything. That's why those folks on January 6th were so frustrated nothing had gotten better. And whoever they blamed, because they're big onto scapegoating, the bottom line was they had to scapegoat somebody because the situation kept deteriorating. And traditionally, Democrats respond to a caving capitalism by helping those at the bottom, whereas the Republicans tend to repress those at the bottom and distract the rest of the working class with patriotism or religion or guns or the usual distractions they hope will work so people don't get angry at the economic collapse that is their basic dilemma. But Mr. Biden is no Franklin Roosevelt. Not even close. Roosevelt had a program to deal with unemployment. The government hired 15 million Americans and gave them a job and a good income. Nothing Mr. Biden has proposed or said is doing that. And we have tens of millions of people not working who were working five years ago. So he's not doing any of that. He didn't establish a new institution equivalent to Social Security. Not even close. He couldn't even get the minimum wage raised. Roosevelt is the one who established the minimum wage in the depths of the Depression. So let's conclude this analysis by saying yes, Mr. Biden is like Mr. Roosevelt in that he realizes that the level of collapse of capitalism is so severe that it needs drastic efforts to tax those at the top to help the mass of people get through it. That's what Roosevelt did. No challenge to the dominance of the capitalists. No one took away their power to gather the profits into their hands and use them in any way they see fit. And Mr. Biden isn't proposing to change any of that either. So why isn't Mr. Biden even doing what Roosevelt did? Because there's a crucial difference between the 1930s and today. And that's the most important point I want to give you today. In the 1930s, there was a massive movement from below, the biggest union organizing drive in American history that enlisted millions of American workers in the cio, the labor movement of that time. And they were allied with two socialists and one Communist party that were at their height in American history in terms of membership and social influence. You put together the New Deal coalitionunions on the one hand, socialist, communist and social movements on the left into an alliance. And now you know why Mr. Roosevelt went much further than Mr. Biden is even imagining. Why? Because Mr. Biden doesn't have a powerful labor movement on the upswing allied with a powerful socialist, communist and social movement left. The unions are at a 50 year low in membership and strength. And the left still hasn't recovered from the anti communist, anti socialist movements of the second half of the 20th century. Until that left regroups and organizes, we will see the minimum progressive movement that Mr. Biden has shown. I don't want to take away from the pressure on him from Bernie aoc. That matters too. Just like the real competition from China where the government plays a much larger role is suggesting something to Americans about what they may need to do. Those are important factors. But I think it's important to understand how Mr. Biden is like FDR and how he falls far short even of that. We've come to the end of the first part of today's show. Before we get to the second half, I want to remind you our new book, the Sickness is the System When Capitalism Fails to Save Us From Pandemics or Itself, is available@democracyatwork.info books. I also want to thank our Patreon community for their ongoing and invaluable support. If you haven't Already, go to patreon.com economicupdate to learn more about how you can get involved. We urge you to do that. Please stay with us. We will be right back with today's guests, Professors Carlo Fenelli and Brian Evans. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's Economic update. I'm very pleased to bring to our microphones and to our camera two specialists in a topic that I have long wanted to bring to your attention. The topic is the living wage. And my guests and I have two today instead of just one are Professor Brian Evans. He's a professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. He has worked in policy positions and focuses his research on the neoliberal phase of capitalism and the austerity politics that followed its crash back in 2008 and nine. My second guest is Professor Carlo Finelli. He's a professor and coordinator of the Work and Labor Studies Program in the Department of Social Science at York University, also in Toronto, Canada. He has also published on the neoliberal phase of capitalism in Canada. He's editor of Alternate A Journal of Critical Social Research, and his writing is available at www.carlofinelli.org org. So first of all, thank you, Brian and Carlo, for joining me today. Let me start with you, Brian. Tell us briefly, what exactly is a living wage? What is the difference between that and a minimum wage or an average wage? And tell us a little bit about the fortunes of the living wage in Canada.