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Welcome friends to another edition of Economic Update, the weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, incomes, our own, our children's. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life and in a way been preparing to offer these economic updates each week. Before jumping in today, let me quickly announce that we have a new mailing address, a new post office box, and we'd urge those of you that are mailing anything to us, check with our website democracyatwork.info for that new address. And likewise, those of you interested in starting or joining an action group based on what we do that may already be in your city, please go to our website. Again, address is action.democracyatwork.info and there you will get all the ways to proceed along those lines. So, turning now to the economic updates, there's a theme for today's and the theme might be best described as how and why we can do better than capitalism as a system. And much of what we do today will illustrate that point. I start with a remarkable experiment undertaken by a capitalist enterprise in New Zealand. It basically went from a five day work week to a four day work week. Salaries were not reduced. Workers simply had four days rather than five days to do their job. And the result? By the way, the name of the company is the Perpetual Guardian, a financial company that employs 240workers. It did the trial in March and April of 2018 and the Guardian newspaper covered it, as did other newspapers around the world. But I want to make sure you get the message. The company loves it. The company reported better results that way than in the old five day week. In other words, workers had a better, what they call their life work balance because they had the extra weekend day Friday off. They worked better, they worked harder, they had more energy. It turns out that the old capitalist system of making everybody work five days a week just convenienced the employer. It wasn't even good for them and it sure wasn't good for the workers. It's a failure of the system to have taken this long to discover what this New Zealand company found out. Here's another example of how capitalism is something we surely can do better than it has to do with the capital of the country of Austria, namely the city of Vienna. And there's something about housing in Vienna that I want to talk to you about, because my guess is you probably don't know, which is itself a reflection of something important that we don't know about these things. 62% of the citizens of Vienna live in public housing. Housing built by, owned by and operated by, by the city of Vienna. In other words, public housing is the dominant form of life in that city. Nearly two thirds of the people live in public housing. And let's now talk about it. It turns out for example, that a average monthly rent paid by folks in there is between 470 and $600 a month. Yeah, you heard me right. That's because it's not profit making housing. It doesn't have to profit the builder, it doesn't have to profit the operator, it doesn't have to profit the maintainer. And because it doesn't have to make profits because it's a public service, the benefits are passed on to the tenants whose rent is far, far below the average percentage of a homeowner, a home renter, excuse me, in Vienna, the percentage of rent out of their income is 27%. I checked. And in New York City it was 58%. In other words, the percentage of your income you have to spend for rent is twice in New York City what it is in the capital of Austria, one of the great cities of Europe, Vienna. It turns out that if housing isn't a profit making business, you can do much better for people. And if you ever go to Vienna, as I've done, and you visit the public housing as I've done, you will understand what the difference is. The homes are well kept, the landscaping is beautiful, the comfort is obvious and, and the happiness of the people clear. A hundred years ago this project was started. Ever since then, ever since the 1920s when conservative and liberal and left wing and right wing governments came and went, none of them ever dared do anything about that public housing structure because it is so popular and so satisfactory. Nobody wants to go back to private enterprise housing. It's a little bit like the state of North Dakota here in the United States, which has a publicly owned and operated bank. And despite lots of right wing, left wing Democratic Republican governors, nobody dares to mess with their public bank. Here's another example of how we can do better than capitalism. Fordham University in New York City, a Jesuit institution, just signed a contract with their non tenure track faculty, usually called adjuncts. The contract gives these adjuncts teachers who teach one or two courses, raises between get ready 67 and 90%. The SEIU union representing these faculty adjuncts says that they will be getting at the end of this three year contract between 7 and $8,000 per course they teach. Despite anti union sentiment, despite the hostility of all kinds of forces, when the Unions got the adjuncts together, which they did, and they voted 16 to 1 to have this contract and to fight for it. The university decided it's wiser to come to terms than to try to defeat something when workers are that unified and that determined. Now, of course, let's be fair here. Is it a victory for labor? For sure. Is it a recognition of the grotesque underpayment of adjuncts across the United States? For sure. But let's be real. Adjuncts remain, even if they are paid 7,000 or $8,000 per course. Much cheaper as a way of providing instruction than having the old system of professors teaching two to three to four courses and getting a proper salary you can live on. So universities are still moving to the cheap, but they're not as able to exploit when workers begin to push back. Who knows, if the adjuncts keep at it, we may reconstruct the really fine educational system at the higher level that we once had. And now some more examples of how we can do better than capitalism. The next one has to do with the Burberry Company. You know, the ones who make those famous British style raincoats and plaid outfits of one kind or another. They were recently caught and exposed in the press for having burned tens of millions of dollars of goods they had produced. Coats, clothing of various kinds and so on. Why did they do that? To protect our brand. See, they were afraid that these perfectly good new coats could, jackets, boots, you name it, would get into the hands of discounters and become available at discount clothing shops. This for them would threaten their profits. So here's what they did. They burned clothing that could have helped countless people. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people could have had important clothing. And it wasn't destroyed because of Burberry. I'm not interested in attacking Burberry. They did what other companies do because it's the logic of capitalism to make a profit. If you're a high end producer, you've got to make sure that folks can't find your stuff at a lower price. And if that means destroying what could clothe people, that's what you do. The fault here isn't Burberry. The fault is a system that makes that irrational action, destroying brand new clothing logical. The system is the problem. Here's another sad statistic that suggests we can do better than capitalism. 25 to 34 year olds in the United States have been dying annually from alcohol related liver disease in record numbers, growing rapidly over the last few years. And as per the reporting of the NPR system, the economic troubles of The United States are the logical conclusions making it capitalism can kill. Does it pay us to find alternatives to a system for that drives young people in the prime of their lives to die from alcohol related diseases? We can't do better than a system that works that way. Sure we can. And now the last one, and I leave it for last only because in a sense, it is so grotesque a critique of capitalism that I want to say it slowly so it sinks in. Airlines in the United States, who have been doing quite well in recent years partly because of organizing their routes so that airplanes are full because we just don't have that much choice as we once did, have decided they can make even more money. And so here's what they've done. And if you don't believe this, let me urge you, NBC News has a big nice spread on this. Go look it up. You'll get the details. What the airline companies, the producers, together with the airline companies at Fly you have worked out is they have narrowed the walls of the lavatories. They've not only narrowed the wall to enable us, I guess in the rest of the airplane to hear what's going on inside there, but they've also narrowed the space. So you better learn how to do what brings you into the bathroom in a narrower space than you're accustomed to. You won't just be a sardine in your seat in the main part of the plane, you'll now be an even greater squeezed sardine when you're in the bathroom. And why they have no shame. So they tell us why it will allow them to to squeeze in another row of two to three seats right there in the back of the airplane where the lavatory for most folks is. Yes, it's a way of profiting the airline and the 1% of Americans who own most airline stocks at the expense of the millions of people who ride the airplanes. And, and yes, once again, capitalism divides us. Because if you have enough money to sit in business class or first class, rest easy, those bathrooms aren't being shrunken. Just the ones where most of us sit. That's where they're being shrunk. That's a system called capitalism, driven by profit, that constantly finds ways, mostly hidden. But some of them, like this one, you can't really hide. It finds ways to hide or disguise, prioritizing profits over people's needs, over people's comforts. Of course, we can do better than that, especially when we see clearly what that is and where it leads as a system that does it for the first part of the show. But before we meet today's guests, folks associated with the Toys R Us toy chain, please remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and be sure to check out our website, democracyatwork.info and as always, I want to thank our Patreon community for your continued support. It is a big part of what helps us bring these insights and updates to you each week. So please stay tuned. We will be right back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update. For today, it is my pleasure and my honor to to welcome two guests. We normally have one, but today we're doubly fortunate we have two. And both of them have been involved with something that occasioned today's program, namely the clothing of an iconic store here in the United States, Toys R Us. So I want to introduce my guests and then we'll get into a conversation of what happened to that remarkable nationwide store. My first guest is Cheryl Claude. She is an assistant manager, or rather she was an assistant manager at Toys R us in Woodbridge, New Jersey. She's been with the company for 33 years and is one of the thousands of Toys R Us employees who have not received severance pay since the store closed. She is helping to lead the movement for severance pay for 33,000 laid off employees of the Toys R Us company. This movement, backed by Rise Up Retail, also calls for greater accountability of the Wall street private equity firms Bain Capital and KKR that were responsible for the bankruptcy and liquidation that we're going to be talking about. Our second guest, Charles Kahn, is an organizing director at the Strong Economy for All Coalition. He has many things to his credit, but the one that caught my eye that I want to share with you is that he is a leader with the Hedge Clippers, a national organization dedicated to shining a light on the damage that private equity and hedge funds have on our communities and making sure that they are held accountable. Welcome, Charles. Welcome, Cheryl.