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One of these days I ain't gonna change. Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic upd, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Our jobs, our incomes, our debts, those coming down the road and facing us, and even more, those facing our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics most of my adult life. I'm still doing it if I can actually talk this morning. And I want to use what I learned as a teacher to bring these economic updates to you each week. So thank you very much for listening and let me begin, as I often do, with a couple of announcements. We are now on over 90 stations. I'll have a bit more to say about that in a moment. We're very gratified, very pleased and very grateful. But it means that this program is actually heard at different moments of the day over a two or three day period in different parts of the United States, north, south, east, east and west. And that means at the end of the month, which is where we are now, that some of you will actually hear this before the end of June, and some of you will hear this early in July. And that raises the problem that the guest I have at the beginning of each month, Dr. Harriet Fraad, will sometimes actually be heard by some of you on the second day of the month, the second day this program airs rather than the first. I just wanted to assure and reassure all of you that Dr. Fraad will be my guest next week in the normal way, early in the month of July. 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Earlier in the month, I was invited to and I went to a conference in Frankfurt, Germany. And I actually want to report briefly to you about it because of the important economic issues it raised. This conference was called Sanctuary Cities. Was a decision by the German organizers of this conference, which was for all of Europe, was a recognition by them of the leadership taken in the United States by churches, by communities, to be sanctuaries. And the word sanctuary means to keep themselves open to the free entry of immigrants, people from other parts of the world coming, in this case to the United States, fleeing the lack of safety where they live, fleeing the lack of jobs and incomes for themselves and their families. Indeed, the very reason that all of the immigrants to the United States for 150 years or more have come here, at least when we're talking about those who came voluntarily, the slaves, of course, had a different story. The people who populated the United States initially, the Native Americans, were mostly killed off by the folks who came. A not so happy part of our history, but one that has to be faced and acknowledged as well. And so, having done that to those who were here originally, this is a country populated by immigrants who came here for one reason or another. And the immigrants typically came to and settled in our cities. So that the cities of Western Europe, like those in the United States, when you look at them, are in fact and always have been sanctuary cities. They've been the places to which people came who were driven off to the mostly rural areas that they had lived in. They were driven off by economic changes there, mostly the change in agriculture, from small individual family farms to huge agricultural combines. And nowhere has that been more dramatic than in the United States. Driven off the ability to live in the rural areas, an economic change often magnified by political struggles, wars, and so on. For example, the flow of immigrants into Western Europe in recent years has been prompted by wars and bombings in the Middle east particularly. And there's no loss of irony in the fact that the very countries who led the bombings in Syria, in the Middle east, elsewhere in Libya, are the countries to whose cities the refugees flow when they don't want to be bombed, in the countries which, where they have lived for generations. The European Conference, and you might be interested to know it, was organized by an organization you can learn about, if you're interested, called Medeco M E D I C O and their website is medeco.de the DE stands for the German way of saying Germany, namely Deutschland DE. So medeco.de will give you all the information. They've been around for decades. They're interested in providing help and support to the people of the global south. And they have been engaged in doing that in a variety of ways. And they organized this conference called Sanctuary Cities to bring together all those across Europe, and some from North America, like me, to talk about the role of the struggle over immigration, the role of the struggle to provide immigrants with homes and, and jobs and incomes and respect, because they need it badly. That's why they are immigrants, after all. And I was struck at this conference by one of the many lessons I learned, and that was that in Europe there's a vast mobilization to help immigrants, not only out of Christian charity. And I might mention that this conference was organized by Medico, but took place in the Roman Catholic Conference center across the street from the cathedral in downtown Frankfurt, Germany, which is one of Germany's major cities. It shows the support of the Roman Catholic Church, partly, I'm sure, because of the new Pope, who's not so new anymore, but who's made his impact on the church clear, that this was something the Church also believed in. But it wasn't just these sorts of religious or charitable impulses. It was also, and I was struck by this, supported by working class movements who said the following, that I found what the immigrant wants who comes to our country, in this case Germany. But it was true for the others who came from other European countries. What the immigrant wants is a secure job, a secure income, safety. And that's what we all want. That's what every worker who was born in Germany wants too. And the immigrant who comes here wants what we want, what we want. That's the basis for us to have an alliance with them. We should work together to get for all of us what is our birthright. And when you add that the immigrants who come here are often coming because of the economic, political and military burdens put on them in the countries from which they come, well, then we have a double obligation to work with them. But we can together make the changes in Europe that will give us what we all seek and deserve, rather than allowing the employer class to. To set us against each other by bringing in immigrants who are paid less than the folks who were here, by making changes in those countries they're coming from that destroyed livelihoods. We have a common enemy as well as a common alliance to get what should be provided by any economy in the world that deserves the respect of the people. So it was a very valuable conference. I was proud to have been asked to participate and to give some talks as part of it. And I thought you might be interested in what was discussed there. The movement to build sanctuary cities is very strong in Europe, as strong or stronger than it is here in the United States. But they took their inspiration from those cities and towns, those churches in America that have declared they will be sanctuaries for the latest wave of immigrants into the United States. The second update I want to talk to you about is about McDonald's hamburgers. I assume I don't have to explain to you who and what they are. They have made themselves, at great expense, a household name. They announced this year that they are so excited, having had a very good year. Just for example, since January 1st of 2017, the value of a share of stock of McDonald's has gone up 25%. That's in six months. That's an extraordinary run. They are at the highest level of value of their shares in a long time. They're doing real well. And as part of doing real well, they made this proud announcement. Over the next little while, they are going to fire 2,500 cashiers at McDonald's restaurants and replace them with automatic kiosks. That's their word for it. A machine, in short, that will do what a cashier used to. Bye, bye. 2,500 people's jobs and incomes. And why are they doing that? They are doing that for the same reason that McDonald does everything, to make money, to make greater profits. And they see profits by firing 2,500 people whose salaries they don't have to pay anymore to replace them with machines, which over time will be a cheaper way to get that work done than having those people. And therefore McDonald's profits will go up, which is why they are doing this. Okay, let's talk about that. Number one, this doesn't exactly go along with creating America great again, does it? Because there's no prospect for McDonald's to lower its prices. It made no claim or, or announcement that it was doing that. If it's saving money on these kiosks, we're not going to see it. We're only going to see our fellow citizens lose their work. Number two, this is partly a response to the Fight for 15. There's a strong movement in America to get people, particularly folks like those who work at McDonald's, to get their salaries raised up to the glorious sum of $15 an hour, barely enough to live on as it is. But many McDonald's workers, among others, get paid well below that. And here's One way that McDonald's is responding to the demand of working people to get a minimum wage to live a decent Life. Basically, what McDonald's is saying to them is what the business community has always said to people looking to raise their namely, you shall be happy with low wages, because if you protest, you'll get no wages at all. In other words, if you press for higher wages, we will respond by not hiring you in the first place, by replacing you, in this case with a kiosk, with a machine. This threat, low wages or no wages, is part of how capitalism has always worked. Is it necessary for things to be handled this way? And the answer is, of course not at all. Here's why society ought not to handle it this way. Because of course, even though McDonald's is just saving the wages of those 2,500 people, we know socially that the costs of having 2,500 people suddenly become unemployed are enormous. Many of those people will have medical problems. How do we know that? Because every bout of unemployment has produced them. Many of them will become depressed, many of them will have family troubles because the income isn't there anymore. And the relations between man and wife, husband and wife, or same sex couples, doesn't matter. The tensions that are already always part of a relationship become more difficult if one or the other of them loses their job. And they will have to go for medical attention or mental health attention. Their children will be in an agitated household, their schoolwork will suffer. You get the picture. The local community, with these people unemployed, won't get the taxes from their incomes that it used to get. And that will hobble what the local communities, and indeed what the whole country, can do with revenues that are reduced. The social consequences are enormous and highly costly, but Nobody counts them. McDonald's doesn't care because. Not its problem. We live with the costs. They get the profit of this technological change. So here's an alternative. Let's have the kiosks, let's save the labor of people. But the way we'll handle it is Everybody else at McDonald's will have their work week reduced. Not their salary, just the work week. That'll mean extra work has to be done. And you know by whom. By the 2,500 people no longer needed to be cashiers. They will now work because they'll fill in for the reduced work done by Everybody else at McDonald's who has a shorter work week. In other words, we'll actually deliver the promise of technical change, that it makes life better for the majority of people. All of the people at McDonald's and they have tens of thousands of employees will enjoy a shorter workweek because technology makes it possible. That will be good for the workers. Won't change the profits of McDonald. But there you have it. Technology either improves the profits of capitalists or it improves the lives of workers. Capitalists running the show. You know how they go. They fire the 2,500 just like McDonald's said it would. But it doesn't have to be that way. My next economic update is about Travis Kalanick. Well, you may not know his name, although some of you, I'm sure, do. He was, until a week ago, the CEO of the Uber car service.