Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Sam. Saint gonna change. Welcome friends, to edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, our incomes, our jobs, our debts, those of our children and those looming down the road. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life and currently I teach at the New School University in New York City. Before jumping into the Updates for this October 2016, I wanted, as I sometimes do, to remind you of the benefits and the possibilities of our websites. We maintain two of them, democracyatwork.info is one and rdwolf with two Fs.com is the other. They are both available at no charge 24. 7. They're filled with materials, updated every day. They offer you a range of ways of engaging with what we do in this program with bringing us to your community. If you'd like to getting this program on a local public or university or community radio station. All these things are available at these websites at as are ways for you to communicate to us your interests, your criticisms. We read every one and we use them to design and plan this program. But I want to particularly draw your attention to some special pages on these websites, particularly the democracyatwork.info website. The first has to do with going to the democracyatwork.info website sponsors. If you're interested in sponsoring some of the activities we do, please go to that website, look it up under sponsor democracyatwork.info sponsor and you'll see ways to do that that would allow us to partner with you in building what this program is. Number two, we have a calendar. It's very simple, democracyatwork.info calendar that will tell you where I will be speaking, sometimes alone, sometimes with people you've heard on this program. For example, in the first week of October, I will be speaking in the Bay Area, in California, in Oakland, in San Francisco, on October 2nd and again on October 5th. A week or so later, on the 17th, 18th of October, I will be in Sarasota, St. Petersburg and Tampa, Florida, speaking at a number of places there. I would love to meet those of you that are interested in this program, that are interested in what democracy at work is all about. And these would be chances for you to meet me and vice versa. And I look forward to them. And perhaps most importantly, I'm very excited about a new initiative democracyatwork.info has undertaken. It's called Co Op Talk and it's going to be launched in the next week or two and it wants to become the go to place for anyone interested in worker co ops. Worker co ops is a new way of doing business. Worker co ops as an alternative to the capitalist hierarchical top down enterprise co ops. Worker co ops as a way to bring democracy to our economy. Worker co ops as a new social movement becoming more and more important in the United States and and around the world, which is a very exciting prospect. We're going to bring together reports, news, analysis of all of these developments in partnership with worker co ops around the world, in partnership with people interested in starting them, interested in developing them, interested in understanding them. All of this material we will be gathering at the website. If you want to be involved as a volunteer, as a provider of news, as a provider of your own thoughts and experiences with worker co ops, please get in touch with us. And the easiest way to do that is to write to us at blogemocracyatwork.info once again, blogemocracyatwork.info and we will respond and bring you in to this exciting new Democracy at Work project. Let's then jump into our updates for today. The first one is a report by me to you about research done by the Federal Reserve bank of St. Louis, well known for the quality and the timeliness of the research on the American economy that it provides. They have a variety of publications, most of which are available at their website and and again at no charge, Federal Reserve bank of St. Louis. And you can find the research@research.st.louisfed.org on the web. What struck me as interesting is what they describe as the economic history since the 2007, 2009 recession, as they call it. I like to call it the capitalist crash of 2008. But we mean more or less the same thing, the terrible hit that American capitalism took in 2007, 8 and 9, from which it has yet to recover. And that's my point, and that's why their research is interesting. Here's what they show. They have a graph and they compare on that graph what has happened to labor productivity in the period since 2009. That's roughly the last seven or eight years. And how that compares to what has happened to the compensation of working people, wages and benefits paid to workers. And here's what they show from the beginning, that's from 2009, without interruption, the labor productivity has grown faster, has been higher than what has happened to wages. In fact, labor compensation, the total of wages and benefits paid to workers on the average, is lower in 2016 now than it was at the worst Point in the recession, 2009. 8 and 9. Let me drive that home again. The average compensation to an American worker has gone nowhere since that recession. We are worse off as working people in terms of what we actually get in the way of wages and benefits at our job than we were on average in 2008 and 9 when the crisis hit. We haven't recovered at all. But as if to make the point even more sharply, productivity has gone up. The amount of goods and services per hour of an American worker's effort has kept going up. Well, let me be very clear and simple here. What this means is, over the seven to eight years since the depths of the crash of American capitalism in 2008, what workers give their employers has kept going up. That's what it means to say productivity is higher. What the worker gives his or her employer per hour of his or her effort has gone up. But what the employer gives the worker, the compensation, average compensation per worker has gone down. Not by a lot. It's mostly stagnant, staying where it is, slightly lower than it was back then. But if over the years since the recession, what we give to our employers has gone up every year, but what they give to us has not, then you get an understanding that not only did inequality help to create the collapse of 2007 and 8, but nothing has been learned from that. The inequality continues to get worse, meaning that we are building towards another and worse kind of collapse because we have an economic system that is favoring capital over labor systematically for the last 40 years and continuing to do so despite the dangerous implications and consequences of precisely that. My next update has to do with corporate tax breaks. A great deal of nonsense is spoken about corporations paying taxes. To listen to them, you'd imagine they're spending too much on taxes. The reverse is the truth. And there has been more and more reports. The one that I'm going to be using is from the Economic Policy Institute in Washington that did a recent report dated September 19 in partnership with Americans for Tax Fairness. You can find the Economic Policy Institute at epi.org and take a look for something they call the corporate tax chart book. There are many findings here. They all go to the same point. So I'm just going to read to you a couple. Here's the one that I found most stunning. It compares 1952 with today. So we're looking at the last half century of American development. Here we go. In 1952, corporate profits were five and a half percent of the total value of production in our economy. The GDP that again. Corporate profits were 5 and a half percent of total GDP and corporate taxes were 6%. A little bit more. Corporate taxes were 6% of GDP. Corporate profits 5 and a half percent. What is today the situation? Corporate profits today are 8 and a half percent. An enormous increase, over 50% increase in the portion of our production that goes to profits. But what about corporate taxes? They once were 6% of GDP. Today they are 1.9%. That's right. Over the last half century, corporate profits have become a bigger share of our economy and corporate taxes have have become a vanishing share of our economy. Corporations haven't been paying too much. They haven't been paying more. They've been paying less and less. As if to drive it home, they point out to us that corporations used to contribute $1 out of every $3 in federal revenue. Today it's $1 out of every $9 of federal revenue. The role of the corporation in paying taxes has virtually disappeared. And there's no mystery as to why it's done. Corporations take advantage of loopholes to keep enormous amounts of profit overseas. They're allowed to do that, and when they do it, they don't have to pay taxes. Here in the United States, pharmaceutical companies and high tech companies take a special advantage of this. Is it important? You betcha. It's currently estimated $2.5 trillion of corporate profits are sitting out there. They're not coming home. They're not being brought back by those corporations because they don't want to have to pay taxes on them. If they did pay the taxes on them, even at the current low rates, it would make 6, $700 billion revenue to the United States government more to do all the things politicians claim we don't have the money to do. They have the money if they're willing to tax corporations. And that's what corporations give them money for. So to make sure that they don't do that, they could, but they won't. And until we change the political system in this country, that's what we're going to get. The problem isn't the money, and the problem isn't the wealth there to do what needs to be done. It's the political punch to get that job done. And that's what all the statistics show us. My next item is one that is really extraordinary for me. It has to do with billionaires in the world. And it allows me to make clear something that I hear all the time from people is very poorly understood. First, let me tell you where I got this from U.S. news & World Report, a very conservative mainline American magazine that I'm sure many of you have seen. And the article in question was dated August 9, 2016, U.S. news and World Report, and the title is 2015 was a big Year for Billionaires. And what's in the article is material taken from a website that I'm also going to give you now if you would like to pursue this story, and I imagine many of you will. The website is called simply Billionaire Census.com it's all one word, BillionaireCensus.com so here's what this article in the US News and World Report taken from BillionaireCensus.com tells us. In 2015, in the total world, the planet we live on, there's a record of 2,473 billionaires. So roughly 2500 billionaires. Let's talk about them together. They have a collective net worth. That is the property they own, less, whatever debts they have. Their net worth is roughly $7.7 trillion. To put that in perspective, the article points out that if those 2,500 billionaires got together in one country of just them, that country would be the third richest economic unit after the United States and the People's Republic of China. It would be the third biggest economic unit in the world. Well, why am I telling you about this? Those 2,500 people have $7 trillion. The next time someone says to you there's no point or purpose in taxing rich people because they don't have enough to make a difference, think again. 7.7 trillion is way more money than the total amount the United nations has budgeted for the poor of the world for the next 10 years. $7.7 trillion would do something for the mass of people that is far and away greater than any and all foreign aid that all the world's country have budgeted to help the poor of this earth. Let me remind you, let me remind you that the Oxfam report that I've reported on repeatedly on this program issued earlier this year pointed out that the 62 richest people in the world, all of whom are among these 2,500 billionaires, that the 62 richest people have more wealth than the bottom half of the population of this planet, three and a half billion people. And I pointed out then what could be done if you took half away from these 62 richest, still leaving them among the billionaires of the world, and you made that money available to the three and a half poorest, three and a half billion poorest, transforming their health, their lives, their jobs, their homes, everything so the answer is, oh, yes, if you really did something about the unequal distribution of wealth, if you did something to the 2,500 billionaires there are, you could transform the lives of billions of people. Try to square not doing that with whatever moral, ethical or religious commitments you have. Next item I want to report to you on the results of and an interpretation of a recent Gallup poll. For those of you not familiar, Gallup is one of the oldest and most respected polling institutions in the United States. And here's what they reported. On September 20th of 2016, they asked Americans, a huge number, do you believe that you're in the middle or upper middle class of the American people? In other words, where do you think you fall? In the years 2000 to 2008, the average answer was that 61% of Americans, almost two thirds of Americans, believed they were in the middle or upper middle class. Now, in fact, by all the usual measures, they weren't. The number who were was actually quite a bit less. But we're not talking about what the reality was. We're, we're talking about what people believed. Well, so what was the result in 2015 when the Gallup poll went again randomly selected, a large number of Americans asked them the same question. Here's what they discovered. 51% said they were in the middle or upper middle class. Wow, that's a 10% drop. Those are the people whose economic situations have crashed. And we're talking 30 million people. That's a drop of 10%. 10% of Americans is 30 million people. These are people whose economic situation has really taken a hit. When you talk to them about an economic recovery, they look at you as if you and they live on different planets. Well, what's the issue here? And the person at the Gallup poll, a leader of that institution named Jim Clifton, who wrote the article that I'm talking about, he had three explanations for what's going on in the American economy that he derives from from the Gallup polls that actually talk to a cross section of Americans about how they're doing. The first thing he wants us to understand is that we've seen over the last 20 to 30 years a drastic drop in the proportion of the population that's actually got a full time job. He says this is kind of amazing because in the years before 1983, for example, it was a much higher percentage. Today, 48%. And it's been true now since 2010. 48% of the total US adult population has a full time job. Less than half the majority of adults don't have a full time job, they're making do with a part time job. They're making do by relying on friends, neighbors, relatives, the community. 48% have a job. What's going on? Number two, he says, we have savaged people because in the last 20 years, American corporations have not grown by producing more, particularly not grown by hiring more people. None at all. They've actually spent much of their money buying one another, getting rid of competitors. And in the process, he notices that if you look at the companies listed on the stock exchanges in America, they over the last 20 years have gone from about 7,300 to 3,700. In other words, they've dropped by half. No wonder. As companies merge and buy one another, lots of middle class and managerial jobs are basically gotten rid of. Two companies that become one don't need two headquarters, don't need two sets of corporate executives. They can do with many less. The jobs, particularly the good jobs at the upper level jobs are disappearing. And then he brings forward another statistic which I thought would interest many of you. New business startups are at historical lows. That's right. Contrary to a lot of public noise, Americans who can't get good jobs anymore are not developing into wonderful new small business entrepreneurs. That's a lovely story. It just isn't true. Let me give you the statistics that drive it home. 2008 was a watershed year. In the 30 years before that, the United States consistently averaged a surplus of almost 120,000 new businesses each year. In other words, for the 30 years before 2008, every year there were more little small businesses starting than there were small businesses dying going out of business. The difference was 120,000 net new small businesses a year. But from 2008 to 2011, the last statistic for we have there was an average. That's the years of the so called post 2008 crash, we had the opposite. We had an average of 420,000 businesses born every year, but there were 450,000 every year that died. So we had a NET loss of 30,000 small business jobs. In other words, the notion that small business growth is going to solve the jobs problem in this country is silly. It's not the case. Everything is pointing exactly in the opposite direction. The mergers of companies, the monopolies are getting rid of jobs, the number of people who can find a job is shrinking. And the number of small businesses isn't growing, it's shrinking. In the United States, the failure of jobs to be in big corporations has not led to an explosion of creative young people with startups that we read about every day. The truth of it is they're not starting up. They're dying off small businesses. And the sooner we face the that reality and recognize the economic downturn since 2008 hasn't been solved and hasn't been corrected and hasn't given way to a recovery, the sooner we will actually come up with some real solutions. Last one for today. In the way of short economic updates, this is a wonderful study in the contradictions of capitalism. When the crash hit in 2008, as we all know, one of the first things most central banks did in all the affected countries, Western Europe, North America and Japan, was to flood the economy with money and to make the money cheaply available by lowering interest rates so that today not only are interest rates near zero, but for a number of countries, including the United States, there are now negative interest rates less than zero. Okay. This idea was if you make money available and you make it available at a low interest rate, well, then the hope was individuals will borrow to buy things and companies will borrow to make those things. We will have a recovery. Well, it hasn't happened either there is no recovery at all. That would be Europe and Japan, or the recovery is very limited to the top 10%. That would be the United States. But there have been other consequences which economists are now very worried about. And I wanted to make my audience aware of it, too. When you drop interest rates to record lows barely over zero, you're basically inviting everyone who's thought of taking out a loan for any reason do it. And so companies around the world, including many who are in poor shape, have been borrowing money. The level of debt of corporations, both in the advanced part of the world and in the developing part of the world, is off the chart. And the great anxiety around the world is if we enter into a downturn, which we're due for, and these companies can't make the money, they still have to pay back these enormous loans that they've taken out. And we're going to see a default of those loans that's going to make the subprime mortgage default of 2008 look like nothing in comparison. We are following bad policies putting us at enormous risk. The crisis is far from over. We've reached the end of the first half of our program. Please stay with us. We're going to deal with some major topics in the economy we face in our next half. Stay with us. We'll be right. Yeah, Yeah, we're still on Living in the same old life yeah, I feel too cold to live too young to die Will you walk the line? Like instead of truth just forget the wins it's the best to use. Won't you follow me into the jungle Streets. Follow me into the jungle. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of economic update in this early part of October 2016. In this second half, I want to deal with a number of topics that you've inquired about, that you've asked about and that indeed deserve attention. And I want to start by addressing a question that keeps coming. And even though I've tried to answer it, I'm going to try again in the hopes that I'm more successful than I was in my earlier efforts. The questions have to do with how would worker co ops as an alternative to the capitalist system, as a way for democratically organized workplaces to come into existence, where workers, all of them, have one person, one vote to decide what happens at the what gets produced, how it gets produced, where it gets produced, and what's done with the profits that everybody helped to bring home by what was done in the enterprise. So there are many questions about all of this. This is a new way of organizing an economy. It's the next stage, I believe, after capitalism, especially now that capitalism has proven itself so dysfunctional for so many people. But let's deal with the question, where would the capital come from? Where would the money come from? And let me make it very concrete. Suppose we have a situation which is indeed what we have across the world, and particularly here in the United States, that I can describe as Mr. And Mrs. Smith have together built up a very nice enterprise somewhere in the United States. There are many such Mr. And Mrs. Smiths. They've worked for 30, 40, 50 years. They've developed from a small business to a nice sized one, maybe 50 employees, maybe 500 employees. They've worked hard, they've been successful, and now they've reached retirement age. And it turns out that their children are busy with their own lives going in other directions. They don't want to continue in this particular business. And their parents, Mr. And Mrs. Smith, understand and support their children in finding their own way. So what are Mr. And Mrs. Smith going to do? Well, let's examine their options. Number one, they can close the enterprise. They don't want to do that. After all, they've spent their entire creative lives building it up, and they didn't do that in order to shut it down. Number two, they're good people. They care about the 50 to 200 to 500 folks whose jobs and lives depend on them, on being employed in this going successful business. They don't want to destroy those people's jobs, incomes and wreck their lives. And all the people that depend on those employees don't want to do that either. Okay, they don't want to close it. Then let's look at option number two. They can sell to another, a bigger company for example, or sell out to a competitor. But they don't want to do that because that puts the fate of all their employees and indeed the survival of their business in the hands of other people whom they don't know that well and who they have no basis to trust. Particularly so they don't want to sell to somebody who typically will come from some other community, so will not have roots in the area, et cetera, et cetera, etcetera. Okay, well, is there a third option? Well, they can try to become what's called a public company, sell shares to the public and make it instead of a company run by Mr. And Mrs. Smith and the people they've hired instead be run by whoever buys shares in the company. It's called going public. They could do that if they're big enough and if they could find folks to buy shares. But that's a little like selling out to another company because you have no idea who these shareholders will be or what decisions they will make. And they become the controllers of the life and future of the business. Well then do they have any other option that is, can they do anything other than close the business, sell it to somebody else or go public to shareholders? And the answer is yes. They can meet many of their goals as citizens of the town, as employers, as friends and neighbors of the people they employ. Here's another option. They could sell the business to the workers in it. That's right. They could convert it from a top down capitalist enterprise owned and operated by Mr. And Mrs. Smith into a workers co op owned and operated democratically and collectively by the 50, the 200 or the 500 people that work there. They could do that. The workers could get together and make that co op and in doing so, buying the enterprise from Mr. And Mrs. Smith, continuing to give themselves jobs, continuing to pay taxes to the local community that pays for the public services all those people and their neighbors and friends make use of, they can keep it going and they can grow that business collectively and democratically. All they need is the money. Where is the money going to come from to enable the workers to buy the business from Mr. And Mrs. Smith? Well, rather than give you a lovely story of what might happen, let me tell you about a country that you know well and a political party, one of the two major parties in that country that is committed now to a way to deal with this problem. They figured it out. This is what they're going to do. I am talking about the Labour Party in Great Britain. The Labour Party is the second major party of that country. It is like the Democratic Party here. And the Republican in this country has an equivalent in England in Great Britain called the Conservative. So they call it Conservative. In labor we call it Republican and Democrat but otherwise it's quite similar. Two major parties. Furthermore, in the Labour Party there have been two elections over the last year or so that have elected and then re elected a new kind of leadership. The name of the leader, and he was just elected a week or two ago for the second time is Jeremy Corbyn. He was elected with 62% of the vote. His opponent got 38%. So we're talking about a massive victory much larger than these sorts of contests usually do. Okay, Mr. Corbyn, the new leader of the Labour party and John McDonnell, one of his top co leaders of the Labour Party have the following plan. That is the official party policy of the Labour Party if elected to become the next government in Great Britain. If the Conservatives are defeated and labor wins, they are committed to developing, I'm now using mostly their words, developing a significant worker co op sector of the British economy. And how are they going to do it? They're going to pass a law which says any company in England organized as a capitalist enterprise by the Mr. And Mrs. Smiths of Britain is free to function as long as it wants in that way. But if, if it gets to the point where it wants to either close the business or sell it to another company or go public with shares in just the way I described Mr. And Mrs. Smith and their options. If a company gets to that point, the law will require it to do what's called give a right of first refusal. And what that means is they have to go. In Britain, if the law passes which the Labour Party endorses, if that law passes, that company will have to first offer its workers the opportunity to buy the company. The workers will have the right to be first asked to do that. Only if the workers are either unwilling or unable to buy the company will that company then have the right to close it or sell it to somebody or to go public. And where would the workers get the money? Government money will be provided. The British government will make loans, grants and other sorts of financing available to workers in that situation to convert their company from a capitalist top down hierarchical enterprise into a democratic workers cooperative. And if any of you are wondering, gee, doesn't that give some sort of unfair or excessive privileging to a worker co op, the answer is not at all. Capitalist enterprises over the last 300 years of capitalism, wherever it has come to exist, and certainly including Britain and the United States, has seen the government help capitalist enterprises in countless ways. Giving them tax holidays, giving them tax reductions, giving them subsidies, building roads and highways where they will be useful to the company and make it save money on costs and make more profits. Training their workers in a variety of ways, bailing them out when crises of capitalism make them fall apart just the way they did over the last eight years since the crash of 2008, capitalist enterprises have gotten favors, support, help, loans, you name it, from the government countless times. What worker co ops are simply saying in England and here is we are becoming a sector of this economy, we deserve the supports we need to be able to fairly develop in the face of all the government supports capitalist enterprises have gotten since time immemorial across the United States. There are countless legal suits currently in the courts about governments who have given in addition to all the legal help to capitalist enterprises, all of the illegal helps to them. So we know that this is doable and the British are showing us how to go about doing it in a fair, well organized way of providing the capital that worker enterprises need. Worker cooperative enterprises to get off the ground, to show what they can do and to be able in a serious way to compete with the capitalist enterprise. So we can all decide which kind of enterprise do we prefer? Do we prefer to work in one versus the other? Do we prefer to buy products of one versus the other? Would we like the dollars we have to spend support one or the other way of organizing workplaces? Let's have an open, free and honest competition. Let's give our people freedom of choice between top down hierarchical capitalist enterprises and democratic worker co ops. In order to do that, we have to enable the co op sector to grow, to be strong enough to give us examples so we can have the freedom of choice to choose between them. Now another question about worker co ops that arises from time to time. Should we allow worker co ops by themselves to make decisions like what products to produce, what technologies to use? Well, in the shorthand that I often use to discuss this, I say how important it is to let the workers decide in order that a few People at the top, the board of directors and the major shareholders decide. For me that is an enormous democratic advance beyond capitalism. But of course, when workers become the owner operators of their own cooperative enterprises, that does not relieve them of the same responsibility to the larger community that ought to have governed all business enterprises, however they were organized, but never did. Capitalist enterprises have, from day one tried to have government policy do what they want and not to be restricted. That's why we don't have half the laws governing pollution that we need. Because capitalist enterprises don't want to be regulated, don't want to have to spend money on costly cleaning systems so they don't pollute the air or the water, etc. If workers cooperatives replaced capitalist enterprises, they would have to work out a mutual decision making apparatus with democratically run communities that they interact with. Of course they would. They wouldn't make the decision all by themselves. It is not responsible. It is not acceptable for a group of workers to decide, for example, to use a technology to produce a product that causes pollution of the larger community. That would be unacceptable. Why? Because it denies the democratic rights of the community to have a say in the quality of their air. If you're committed to democracy, which the whole worker co op movement is based on, then of course that extends to giving communities the right to share in the decision making of what the enterprises do, and vice versa. The enterprise has a role to play in the community's decisions and vice versa. That's what democracy means. And nobody who seriously advocates democratic control of the workplace by the workers would use that as an excuse to not be democratically co respective with the larger communities. And let's remember that the worker who lives in the community is the same person as the worker who works at the workplace. So the same people living in both worlds, inhabiting the home for part of every day and the workplace for part of at least five days a week, is going to be immediately sensitive to and committed to making this a democratic decision of both communities and remembering that there are people in the community that don't work at that workplace and people at that workplace who don't live in that community. So you have to be sensitive to how to manage this in a democratic way. But it isn't really serious to imagine that worker co ops would want or pursue decisions regardless of, and not taking into account the democratic commitment they have, not just at the workplace, but to the neighborhood, to the community as well. Let me turn next to a different topic, one that you've also asked about and the way One of you put it, which is the way I'm going to respond to it, goes like. Capitalists are often in the position of introducing new technology, technology that makes production more efficient, technology that saves on labor, allows us to produce goods and services with less human effort than it used to take. Because we have a new technology, for example, robots, we can make a machine that can do various tasks that used to require human effort, brains and muscles of a human being, but now can be done in an automatic way by a machine. Okay, the argument goes, capitalists want to introduce it. And workers, whether they're in a union or not, are frightened, scared, hostile, resistant. And then they get a lecture from the employer, gee, you're against progress, and progress has to be given priority. What's going on in this conversation? Is it really about technology? Is it the case that capitalists are progressive about technology and workers are not or less so? I don't think so. And I think I can show you how and why it works. But to do it, I'm going to make an example and use that example to make my point. So let's assume a company. It's got a bunch of employees, let's say 500, just to pick a number. It makes something, the company sells that something on the market, earns a revenue, uses part of the revenue to pay wages to those workers, and part of the revenue to take profits for itself. Typical normal capitalist enterprise. Now the company discovers, the executives discover, because someone brings it to their attention, maybe a salesman for a robot company, that you could use robots in your production process, they're told, and if you do, it'll save 10% of your labor costs. That is, you'll need 10% less human labor every day, and you'll still produce the same number of output units that you produced before, which you can sell in the market at the same price. So everything is the same. To make my example manageable here, everything is the same except for this one fact, that the company can become more technologically modern, more progressive by using robot technology. And that will save on 10% of the human effort. Now let's see how the corporation decides what to do in this situation. Well, if it's a typical capitalist corporation, here's what likely is going to happen. They're going to sit around in the boardroom and say, oh great, we can buy these robots simply replacing the equipment we had before with this new equipment that's robotic, and we can fire 10% of our workforce, saving us 10% of our wage bill. So we'll be selling the same number of things for the same price. So the money coming in will be the same, but the money going out to pay workers will be 10% less because we laid off 10% of our workforce. If we had 500 workers, we told 50 of them, don't come to work on Monday. We don't need you. We've got robots. Well, if that were the way the company goes, it would be understandable because they're gonna make more profits since they're getting the same revenue, producing the same stuff, but have 50 workers, they don't have to pay anymore. That money coming in that used to pay those 50 workers is now available for them to keep as their profits. Is that what capitalists do? You betcha. Is that what they usually do? You betcha again. And what does that mean for the workers? Well, for 50 workers, it's horrible news. They've been replaced by a robot. They have no job. They have no income. They have to go home to their husbands and wives. Explain this situation. It's a problem for the children. It's a problem for whether they can make their mortgage payments. If they don't, the house is abandoned. It's bad for the neighborhood. You know that story. Is there something else the company could do? And here's what I want you to understand. The answer to that question is a roaring yes. Let me give you an example. If you need 10% less labor, there are two ways to get it. If you're a capitalist enterprise, one you choose and one you don't choose. And indeed, one you pretend isn't even possible. And it's my job to point out, oh, yes, it is possible. Here we go. The capitalist says, I'm going to save 10% of my wage bill by firing 50 workers. My answer is ju. Wow. Stop a minute, you capitalists. Here's an alternative. You could save 10% of your labor force not by firing 50 people. Keep all the people there and have everybody work 10% less hours a week. That's right. Everybody could work 36 hours instead of 40 hours. Everybody goes home after lunch on Friday rather than staying that afternoon four hours less work. That solves the problem. You now have 10% less work done. You don't need it because the robots are doing it. But you haven't had to fire anybody. You pay the 500 workers exactly what you paid them before. Wow. That would mean that the enterprise took advantage of the technology not to make more profits for the company, but instead to create more leisure for the workers. 500 people have every Friday afternoon Off they get the same pay they got before. The company earns the same money it did before. It gives the same portion of it to the workers that it did before. It keeps the same portion for itself as profits, just like it did before, so that the technology has gone to the benefit of the workers in the form of. Of leisure. Could that be done? Of course it could. Will it be done in a capitalist enterprise? Almost never. The capitalist wants to use technology for profit. The workers want to use technology to have free time. Time to be with their families, time to pursue hobbies, time for recreation, time for rest, time to work on their relationships with their spouses. You know what we need time for? The promise of technology throughout history has been to make our lives better. When capitalists use new technologies, new systems of automation, whether they're robots or anything else, they do it for their own profit. And that terrifies the workers. Because the extra profit for the capitalists, as in my example, was a disaster for at least 50 the workers who were laid off. But you can bet the other 450 could see what was happening to those 50. And there, but for the grace of God, they all went. They're all afraid. That's why workers are hesitant, resistant, questioning progress in technology, because that progress has been used for profit at the expense of workers. The alternative would have been to use it for the benefit of all 500 workers. 4 hours more free time per week. The profits would still have flown into the hands of the company just as they did before. But they would have done something magnificent for their workers. You want workers to embrace technical change? Give them a big share of the benefits from it and stop making them pay a terrible price for it. If you don't understand that, you will always wring your hands about workers resisting technical progress. But the problem is capitalism, not technology. And that has always been the case. Thank you so much for your time, your attention. It is a pleasure designing and presenting these programs. And I look forward to doing it again with you next week. Even as I enjoy thanking not only you for your attention, but truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis that is our partner in producing this program. And as we invite all of you to consider being partners with us, I look forward again to talking with you next week. Change, change, change, change, change, change. Thing gonna change.