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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 kids, ours. I'm your host, Richard Wolf. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life. And I hope that that has prepared me well to offer you these economic updates regarding the world. We all depend on that economic system that surrounds us. I want to begin by talking about a couple of labor struggles, partly because that's a topic that doesn't get the attention that it deserves on the mass media, but also because things are changing in the world of labor. Perhaps things have gone far enough in the inequality that besets our economy, in the injustice that is obvious everywhere in the gap between rich and poor, between corporate power and workers dependency on their jobs. So let me begin with Chicago. At the end of their contract on August 31, hotel workers made a decision. They are members of UNITE Here, a union that represents hotel workers in many parts of the United States. 26 hotels decided to go on strike early in September. They had a number of the conventional issues, but one that was particularly powerful. Turns out that the hotels, in addition to paying poorly, have subjected their workers to to two kinds of suffering that I want to bring to your attention. One, when workers were laid off in slow seasons, they were deprived of their health insurance, making the loss of their job a double burden. In our peculiar society where we apparently imagine that you don't need health insurance when you're laid off compared to when you're not. This seemed galling to the workers and they wanted that changed. And the second thing is they were sick and tired, as so many people are in America these days, about the sexual abuse and harassment that hotel workers are particularly subject to. So a campaign was formulated by UNITE Here called Hands Off Pants On. It tells you something about a society where there has to be a campaign to keep your hands off and your pants on. It followed a survey in which over half of hotel workers indicated that they had been sexually harassed on the job. Seven of the hotels have cut a deal with the union. They won health insurance, and it was very, very important. But the strike continues, and it is something all of you should pay some attention to. Workers are beginning to fight back. Like the women in the MeToo movement. The labor movement is emerging again, and that makes for big changes if it can be sustained and if it gets our support. Parking attendance in Philadelphia are another example. They're struggling to organize within the Service Employees International Union. They want some help in the unbelievable low wages and awful hours that they are Required to live with. They're organizing and it is worth our support and it is worth our keeping track. My next topic is money and politics. We're there often, but we have to talk about it because it is a corrupting factor in our political life that doesn't seem to end. The latest gross example was the primary for governor here in New York State. It pitted an old line Clinton type centrist Democrat, a person long associated with big money contributions, the party that depends on corporations and wealthy people and enjoys it. Andrew Cuomo, quite a long distance from his father, Mario Cuomo. He worked through nearly $40 million in trying to beat back the effort of Cynthia Nixon, a newcomer to politics, to offer a left wing progressive alternative to the same old, same old of Andrew Cuomo. The political issues aside, she had no comparable amount of money. Money has controlled the Democratic Party as it has the Republican for a long time. But despite that, the progressive upsurge has now begun to challenge all of that. And so the money that brought them to power is now being used to keep those folks in power. And nowhere more so than with Mr. Cuomo and Ms. Nixon in New York's primary. Despite all of that, despite the unfairness, despite the corruption that allows money to play this kind of role, Cynthia Nixon, a newcomer, was able to get over a third of the vote, an astonishingly positive achievement given her history versus his money, her politics versus his money, and her appeal to young people and their enthusiasm for a better world versus his money. To stay with the issue of politics and the issue of our economy. There was another election at the same time in New York, this one for the State Senate in New York, where a socialist named Julia Salazar not only won, but defeated a longtime incumbent. And she will become the first socialist in a hundred years to to enter the New York State Senate if she wins in November, as she is expected by everyone to do now. This is interesting. Why? Well, socialists until Bernie have not been able to raise their heads in American politics ever since the Red Scare after World War II, sometimes called McCarthyism, sometimes called the Cold War, and so on. Demonization of everybody left of center became a passion engaged in by both Republicans and Democrats. It meant that everybody trying to make a political point did so without getting near the hot wire of socialism as an alternative to capitalism. Well, those days are gone, at least in many parts of the United States. Being a socialist now is not only politically possible, but is in fact a ticket to winning office and winning elections. And Julia Salazar in New York City has just done it again. However, I want to correct one media misrepresentation. She's the first person to enter the New York Senate as a socialist in a hundred years. And the reason that's important is prior to a hundred years ago, socialists in the New York Senate and indeed in many state legislatures were not at all uncommon. I used to put a quiz to my students. Can you guess? I asked them which state in the United States had the largest number of socialists of elected to the state legislature out of all the 48 states back then? And they can never guess it. So let me give you the benefit in case anyone ever quizzes you, the state was Oklahoma. That's right. Oklahoma was the most socialist state in terms of elected officials of any sort of socialism can and has appealed to the American people in the past, and it looks to be doing that again now. And that's not so much because of the positivity of socialism as it is the clearly grasped negativity of capitalism. Capitalism is a system whose time has come and gone, and that is showing up in in the bizarre politicians that capitalism throws up at us, starting at the top and in the opposition represented by Bernie Sanders and by Julia Salazar. And hence that's an important thing to understand about where our economy is going. My last economic update that I have time for today has to do with an event that happened on September 18th in ten cities across the United States. At McDonald's hamburger restaurant workers marched, and they were marching against sexual harassment on the job. In other words, not just hotel workers being confronted by groping guests, but restaurant workers have the same problem. And they wanted McDonald's to do a great deal more about it than McDonald's has done. McDonald's talks a good bit about the issue, but according to the workers, doesn't do much. And I want to talk about the economics, not the obvious moral, ethical, simply decent human behavior that these workers are demanding that their employer enforce. I want to talk about what it means that women across the board are subjected to sexual harassment and sexual abuse on the job. Here are some of the economic we'll never know how many women quit a job in even if they were capable, skillful, more capable, more skillful perhaps than many of the men. But they couldn't get that job. They couldn't get the promotion. They couldn't show what they could do. They couldn't contribute all they had because they couldn't tolerate the level of sexual harassment and abuse, so they quit. How many women might you guess, didn't even go into whole kinds of jobs where they could have done stunning Work because it was considered to be unsafe, unappetizing, unfriendly to women because of sexual harassment. We now know, of course, that women can do all that work. During World War II, Rosie the Riveter was the image of the women who did all the work that the men used to do and excluded the women from. But the men went to war, and so the women had to step up, which they did, and they did it very well. But we keep the women out. We keep the women down. I remember going to my university classes and noticing that the professor had a different attitude to the women in the class compared to the men. They weren't considered quite as serious because they were going into a man's field. In other words, not only are the women repressed, not only does our economy suffer from not giving women the chance to show what they can do, to make the contribution they're capable of, but we already build that in, in a kind of unspoken discrimination in the very learning process, often in the very admissions process as to who gets into what kind of field in the university, in the selection of courses, in the training programs. We have suffered staggeringly for a long time in giving half of the population a hard deal when it comes to jobs and work and promotion and recognition. And we have lost all that they could have produced. Hats off to the women and the men at the McDonald's restaurant for saying we won't do this anymore. Making that MeToo movement be not only something about the just treatment of women, but also something about giving our society the benefit of the creativity of people whose offer had been rejected by means of sexual harassment. That does it for the first half of today's show. But before I introduce you to our guest, please remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Check out our website where you can learn how to work more closely with us. And finally, thanks as always, to our Patreon community for their continued support, which is vital to everything we, we do. Thank you. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic update. I am very, very happy and pleased to welcome to the microphones today two young people who have formed a new organization. The organization is called Black Socialists of America. Over here is Zee, who is a creative based in New York City, but also in Tokyo and the D.C. area. And over here is Sean, who's a socialist lawyer working out of Montgomery, Alabama. Welcome, gentlemen.