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Sam. Saint. Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, our jobs, our debts, our incomes, what we're looking at coming down the road in our future and that of our children. I'm your host, Richard D. 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. Well, here we are a few days after Labor Day, the typical beginning of the regular work season, not just in our schools, but in our jobs. And so on the summer sadly behind us, a couple of announcements before we jump into the abundant news for us to analyze today. First, I want to remind those of you in the greater New York, New Jersey, Connecticut area, and any of you from elsewhere who might be visiting in the greater New York area that our once a month monthly Economic Update is scheduled, as always, on the second Wednesday of the month. That will be September 14th at 7:30pm at the historic Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square, a very famous part of New York City, easily accessible by subways, buses and so on. If you're in the area, join us 7:30, Wednesday evening, September 14th, at the Judson Memorial Church in Washington Square. There's a theme for today, and it's Labor Day, because that's the holiday we've just had and because labor is a central part of the economic system, in many people's perspective, the central part of any economic system. It's certainly what most people do in their relationship to an economic system. So you'll see it's the theme of today's program. And I don't mind sharing with you one of the reasons why I made it a theme. I decided on Labor Day itself, September 5, Monday, to take a look at what is arguably the newspaper of record of the United States, the New York Times. So I opened up my edition of the New York Times, Monday, September 5, Labor Day, to see how that newspaper dealt with the national holiday of Labor Day. And it was a wonderful example in how sometimes silence speaks more loudly than anything you can say. The New York Times on September 5, Labor Day, had absolutely nothing to say on the front page about labor. There was no story devoted to the history of Labor Day, the meaning of Labor Day. There was no story devoted, as I'll make clear later today, to what is arguably the largest strike by workers in the history of the world. It had taken place two and a half days earlier in India, where tens of millions. That's right, you heard it correctly, tens of millions of people went on strike mostly public employees striking against their government and their government as an employer in staggering numbers. You might have imagined that Labor Day and such a historic event might have had the New York Times say something on Labor Day. And when I looked at what's inside the newspaper that day, the financial section, the business section, nothing. Nothing. The New York Times wants us to be unaware that there is such a thing as Labor Day. And they want to make that clear on Labor Day. And that's why I'm going to spend a lot of time on it. All right. Let's turn to our economic updates. The first one is following up on a story I've been covering for a while having to do with the California Senate, which was considering bill number AB700, which is a courageous step by the state of California, an attempt anyway, to control the quantity of money being spent on public elections by at least requiring that some light be shed on what is often called, quote, unquote, dark money, money where you can't quite figure out who's giving the money because they're hiding behind innocuous names and so forth. Well, the bill failed in its final reading in the California Senate, but it only failed by one vote. So the activists who've brought it this far are determined to come back next legislative session and push for it again. And they have good hopes and a good grounds for their hopes that this time it'll pass. Losing by one vote is very, very close. By the way. In the last two election cycles in California, $640 million is the amount that is estimated to have been spent on ballot measures alone. That doesn't even count candidates and parties. You're talking about a mammoth effort by those with money to shape politics. Here was a bill to try to begin to close down that process, at least by shutting light on who's giving the money. It failed, but only by one vote. So my expectation is we will hear about and see more on this subject. Another story that we've covered earlier has something further to be said. This has to do with Heather Bresh. She's the chief executive officer, the CEO of Mylan Pharmaceuticals, a huge pharmaceutical company that got into trouble in recent weeks for having jacked up the prices of an anti allergy injecting pen that particularly used in schools across America, having raised the price many, many times over recent years in order to earn millions and millions and millions of dollars. That's not the scandal I want to report on. I already did, and it's in the press. What I want to do is to offer a solution and to use history as my example of what the solution might be, have there been other industries in the history of capitalism, particularly in the United States, that have behaved so badly, gouged their prices, gouged their customers so badly that the mass of people have said it's intolerable the way they might now say about drug pricing? Because my LAN is only the latest in a whole series. And by the way, I should mention that Heather Bresh and Mylan didn't just outrageously raise prices, they also engaged in those kinds of inversions. They're called tax hustles, in which you move your headquarters over to Ireland or another European country to get out of paying the taxes you would otherwise have had to pay to Uncle Sam. They did that at my land too. Just like Pfizer and others that we've reported on. Well, the answer historically is yes. And the two famous examples are utilities like electric and gas and water companies on the one hand, and insurance companies on the other. These have often been companies that have raised their prices so outrageously, both to the consuming public and to other capitalist businesses who, after all, have to buy electricity and water and gas and who also have to pay for their insurance for their businesses. So what we did in America is we created commissions. Every one of the 50 states has a utility commission and an insurance commission. And here's what they do. They require the private companies to come before them to show them what their actual costs are. And then the insurance commission or the utility commission says, okay, you can charge a price that brings you a reasonable rate of return, oh, 5% or 8% or whatever the commission decides. And that's all. You can't raise your prices above that, a commission to at least reduce the amount of, well, let's be polite, money making and profit making that the utility companies and the insurance companies used to get away with before the commissions at least limited what they did. Simple. Yes, we need utilities, yes, we need insurance. And yes, we need pharmaceuticals, drugs and medicines. But after stories that we've been hearing now for months, for years, isn't it time we had a serious discussion about a drug commission? And indeed, commissions responsible to elected officials should be governing all the prices we pay. But after the history of gouging that we've now seen with utilities, insurances and drugs, the drugs might be the next place to go. I want to talk to you about airlines as my next update. And here I'm grateful to the October issue of Consumer Reports magazine that did a bang up job on airlines. And here's what I want to talk about back in 1980. Let me get my dates right. 1980, we had 24 airlines here in the United States competing for our business when we flew someplace. By 2016, thanks to the Reagan administration and many administrations since then, Republican and Democrat, we have seen our deregulated airline industry go from 24 carriers competing to only four. That's right, four airlines now do 80% of the business in the airlines. And I'll mention them so we all know who we're talking. United, Delta, American and Southwest. And if you're interested in all the different countries that were swallowed up by these four giants, go to Consumer Reports in October. There's an excellent article there will give you all the statistics you need. The justification for deregulating airlines from the way they had been handled before the 1980s compared to after was that there would be more competition and the consumer would benefit. That was the promise. But that was not what was delivered today, 2016. What have we all seen? One of the things the airlines began doing in their deregulated states was charging us for things they had never charged us. Which seat you get in which part of the airline. And I don't just mean first class, business class, I mean all the rest of it. Charging us for baggage handling, charging us for whether we can get earlier on the airplane than other people charging us for meals. You get the picture. Those of you who fly know this all too well. Then they put more and more seats in each airplane so that the effect of being in a sardine can is not lost on anybody who flies, at least in economy class, which is the vast majority of those of us flying. In other words, we have seen not the improvement of services, but the deterioration of the entire flying experience. And here's the best part. The prices have gone up. That's right. Not down, up. And the collusion among the airlines, in the sense that the prices are terribly close to one another, has now prompted calls for, and if I can believe the news reports, the beginning of investigation by the government into the question whether the four remaining airline giants are indeed colluding somehow in setting prices as well as all the rest of it. What's the lesson here? The lesson here is that capitalism as a system, having been around now for two to 300 years, has a kind of repetitive history that we ought to pay some attention to. So we don't just keep repeating it. Here's how it There are competitive firms in an industry, but competition is a struggle, and some win and some lose. And the way capitalism works is the Firm that wins eats what remains of the firms that lose. The firms that go out of business shed workers, shed equipment, and guess who hires those workers and who buys the used equipment. The winner in the competitive struggle. So guess what happens in capitalist competition? Many become few, relatively small become large enterprises, as the winners absorb the losers. Exactly what happened with the airlines? And pretty soon, when there are only a few left, they enter into one or another kind of grand gentleman's agreement, shall we say, understanding, collusion, a lot of words for this. And then they begin to take advantage of the fact that there's such a few of them. And we begin to see quality go down and price go up. And then we call in the government and say, wait a minute, this is outrageous. And the government takes 5, 10, 15 years during which these now no longer competitive big shots make a ton of money, as the airlines have been doing. And then the government comes in and says something has to be done, and maybe it will be done, and then they'll start evading it and we'll have a demand for deregulation and the whole silly game will be played again at the public's expense. Airlines are a perfect example of, of what happens when the lessons of capitalism's functioning aren't learned and used to make the kind of basic changes that would stop this repetitive rip off of the mass of people. The next economic update I want to talk to you about has to do with a growing number of people that have begun to react to the critique of capitalism that has been emerging for more and more writers, thinkers, public speakers, athletic stars, you name it. People who are more and more able and willing to say that the problem isn't this or that company, or this or that industry, or this or that government regulation. This is a system that is producing all of these symptoms, if you like. It's a little bit like a doctor saying, folks, we've got to face the fact that your arm ache and your elbow ache and your shoulder ache, they're all parts of a problem in your system. And we can't keep dealing with each symptom. We have to deal with the system that is producing the symptoms. And people are understanding the economics of that, that capitalism is a problem, that capitalism is no longer serving the needs of the vast majority of people. It's an engine for ever greater inequality. It serves the rich first, and the rest of us may be a little later, not so much. The defense of capitalism, therefore, is becoming more urgent for the people who don't like the system to be questioned, who got used in the past 50 years to no questions being asked about capitalism, this system being treated as though it were the bestest possible world, and therefore anybody who questioned it was either uneducated or somehow devious. So the defenders are beginning to come forward. And one of the most persuasive of them, a person I know from my own history as an economist, because she's an economics professor like me, is Deirdre McCloskey, who teaches economics at the University of Illinois in Chicago. And she makes a point that others are making. And so I wanted to respond, or if you like, refute their argument, here's their basic argument. If you look at the big picture of world capitalism over the last 30 years, then she argues, poor people have become less poor than they once were across capitalism's history. And that ought to be celebrated. And that, in a sense, trumps all other arguments. And particularly if you look at places like India and China, the people there, particularly in the last 30, 40 years, if you look at the average income per person statistics, gross domestic product, gross domestic product per person, those kinds of numbers, they are less poor than they used to be. My response to that is, let's take a closer look. Are they less poor on the average? Yes, let's give Professor McCloskey that. But let's do a little context that Professor McCloskey isn't so willing to confront. First, places like China and India, and I could add many others, were devastated by capitalism in its early India, by Britain, China, by a whole host of Western European countries, then also by the Japanese later on. These colonial masters, in the case of India and many other countries, and sort of semicolonial China as a whole never became a colony, but parts of China were seized and controlled by a whole bunch of other countries. Some of you may know the famous Boxer Rebellion early in the 20th century, when the Chinese tried to get out from under without success in that case. So looking at the growth of these countries requires you to take a step back and remember that one of the reasons they were as poor as they were in the 19th and 20th century was because of the savaging of their economies by their colonial masters, who wanted to take the wealth of those countries but did not want to develop them, certainly not as competitors to what was happening in Western Europe, North America and Japan. Number two, that ought to be real. Economic development for the mass of people barely began until these countries were really independent, in the case of India, for example, until they threw out the British, which was the achievement of Mahatma Gandhi in the 1930s. And 40s, and in the case of China, it was when they cut off the controls exercised by Western European colonial powers and the Japanese as well. And that was the achievement of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party. And in the aftermath of their independence in India and their communist revolution in China in the late 1940s, these societies saw a rapid transformation of the economic foundations of their society by Nehru and Gandhi and his followers, who were all socialists in India, and by Mao and his followers, who were all communists in China. So that the interesting development of what happens after that also owes a good bit to what was done by, by then. Third considerations in China, in India, in Brazil, the kind of development capitalism is bringing to them raises the average that Deirdre McCloskey is so interested in the average income, but it doesn't make that society at all more equal. In fact, the opposite. The average masks the fact that a tiny number of people at the top, as a percentage of their societies, have become very wealthy indeed. That's why the average has gone up, because the development they've had, precisely because it is a capitalistically organized development, particularly in the last 20, 30, 40 years, has put most of the wealth at the very top of those societies. That's why tens of millions of people in India went on strike a few days ago in the largest strike probably in human history, which I'll have more to say about in the second half of the program. But Deirdre McCloskey ought to be fair and say inequality has grown in China and India alongside the average growing up. And that certainly changes the picture. And finally, one of the key causes of why wages and incomes have risen on average, far from everybody, because the mass of poor there are unspeakably poor, particularly in places like India and Brazil, little less unequal in China. But it's important to remember that that happened in part because capitalists left Western Europe, North America and Japan over the last 30 and 40 years, moving production first of manufacturers, then of services to places like India, China and Brazil. Which is why we all know made in China is the label we see on virtually everything we buy. That's because capitalists made more money by shifting from higher paid workers to, in the United States, in Canada, in Western Europe, in Japan, to much lower paid workers. That was great for their profits, but it has left in its wake devastated populations of working people in Western Europe, North America and Japan. The capitalist system, in other words, boosted the welfare and the standard of living to some degree, very unequally in the Third World, as we used to call it, but did so at a devastating price to the working classes in the countries they abandoned, Western Europe, North America and Japan. That's nothing for a capitalist system to be proud of. And by the way, we are seeing the anger, whether it's in Brexit or the support for Mr. Trump or the movements Occupy Wall Street, Bernie for president, you name it. The signs of anger, resentment, bitterness and loss of working class populations in the devastated abandoned parts. Capitalism managed very badly, very unequally, very unjustly. Yes, it raised the average in India and China. But to look at that and abstract from all the things I pointed out to is an argument designed to recoup something from the history of capitalism other than an exposure of the unnecessary and unjust way it has developed, if that's even the right word, the modern world economy. My next update is actually more of an announcement. I want to read to you a quotation. It was sent to me by a listener and I'm very grateful that she did so and it struck her, and therefore it strikes me as well as somehow a fitting way to end that little discussion we just had about, about what capitalism did or didn't achieve, what it is or isn't responsible for, et cetera. I want to read to you a statement written by arguably the greatest scientist of the last century, a man by the name of Albert Einstein, in 1949 at the beginning of a journal, an independent socialist journal here in New York City called the Monthly Review, which he supported. He offered them and they published in their inaugural issue an essay by Albert Einstein called why Socialism? For some of you who may not know this, Albert Einstein was a socialist. And I want to read to you what he says about capitalism, a system. This is a quote, direct quote from his essay. This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career. Career. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely, through the establishment of a socialist economy accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. Albert Einstein, a scientist. Albert Einstein, professor at Princeton University in New Jersey, and Albert Einstein, a socialist critic of capitalism, whose comments are as pertinent today as they were half a century ago when he wrote them. Finally for today, an alert for next week when I will have as my guest Professor Peter Raines, whose new book is called Cooperatives Confront Challenging the Neoliberal Economy. I Think it'll be extra worthwhile for you to listen in. We've come to the end of the first half of this program. Let me remind you, please to stay with us. We will have a short break, and then we will be back. And then our focus in the second half today will be Labor Day and the issues, problems and struggles of labor in the global capitalist system right now. Stay with us. We'll be right back.
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Downtown we let it go sunset high in our bodies low blood rush in a hazy glow My hands, your bones loose up we break the scene one step deep as you fall to me High clap we skip a beat count 1, 2, 3 and don't you stop the music getting to it won't you dance with me? Find a place of lose it, you can do it won't you dance with me? Hold your feet and feel it in the space between. You gotta kill yourself a moment let your body be we gotta lose it, we gotta lose it.
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Welcome back to the second half of Economic Update. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. And today in this second half, we want to deal with labor. It's Labor Day that's just passed. It's Labor Day that, as I pointed out in the first half, has been ignored by major parts of the American media establishment. And it's labor that deserves our attention anyway, just as the important topic it always has been. And I want, as always, to preface my remarks by reminding you that we maintain 2rdwolf with 2f's.com and democracyatwork.info these two websites enable you to communicate with us, to follow us, to share what we do with other people. They have a complete archive of every weekly radio program we've ever done. They have ways for you to follow us on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. They're full of materials and mechanisms that we update and add to every day 24. 7. It's available to you, no charge whatsoever, for anything that we put up there for your use. So please make use of it. Share what we are doing on this program with others. That's part of why we do this program. And your sharing it with others is a way for it to become that much more effective. And I also want to remind you all that I travel from time to time around the United States. If you're interested in having me come to where you are, please get in touch with us through either of those websites is the best way to do it. And likewise, we're always looking for new radio stations that might, or television stations for that matter, that might be willing to carry this program. For those that are not aware of it, we are NOW carried on 71 radio stations across the United States and two television stations, one in Manhattan, New York City, and one in the Bay Area in California. Okay, let's turn to labor and Labor Day. Let's begin by noting some facts about labor today that you may not have known about, but that are important to understand because of their social implications and are the kinds of stories that ought to have gotten a great deal more attention, especially on Labor Day, than they did. The first has to do with what has happened to public school teachers, teachers in the kindergarten through 12th grade system here in the United States. Recent research by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington you can find@epi.org as well as a very nice story on the 1st of September in the Bloomberg Service News service talks about what has happened to public school teachers. And I'm just going to mention a couple of the key statistics because of what they suggest about labor in the United States. First, the research shows that teachers who have a bachelor's or a master's degree, as most teachers are required to have, earn 78% of what other workers in America earn who have the same educational level. In other words, if you go to college and if you go to a master's program. Beyond that, if you choose to go into teaching, you will get a quarter, roughly a quarter less pay than if you go into other fields with the same qualifications. And it varies a great deal among states. And because I want you to get a picture of this with me, I'm going to mention the five states that pay their K through 12 teachers the most in the sense that whatever your qualifications, you get nearly as much as a teacher as you do if you go into other fields. No one quite matches it. The lovely state of Wyoming comes closest, paying its K through 12 teachers almost 100% of what people with the same qualifications get in other fields. The other four top states are Rhode Island, Alaska, Montana, and New York. What are the five worst states? That is, they pay their teachers much, much less even with the same qualifications as they do to other people who take those qualifications into other fields in order of awfulness in terms of what they pay their teachers? Virginia, New Mexico, North Carolina, Colorado, and the worst, Arizona. Now, why do I talk about this? First, I want you to see a pattern. Back in 1980, people with qualifications who taught, chose to become teachers, earned only 8.5% less than what they earned in other fields. Now it's 17% on average, which is twice the differential teachers are being discriminated against in terms of their pay. And as if that weren't bad enough, over the last eight years, since the capitalist crisis that we're in hit us over the last eight years, that's roughly 2008 to 2016, the number of teachers educational jobs held in K through 12 schools in America has dropped by 243,000 fewer educational jobs. But what has happened to the number of students attending school? It's gone up by 1.2 million. That's right. We have over a million more students in our schools, serviced, taught, helped by a quarter of a million fewer teachers. No wonder that the productivity of the American worker is shrinking, is having a rate of growth much lower than it used to be. We're not investing in education. And think about it with me as an economist for a moment. Almost every economist I've ever met has said to me at one point or another, the future of the United States economic system in the world will depend more than on anything else, on the quality and the quantity of our labor force. Well, the quality of our labor force is shaped above all in the schools we put our children through K through 12. And then whatever higher education they pursue, if we cut back spending on that, we are in an economic sense shooting ourselves in the foot. We're deciding to react to the problems of capitalism, the crisis, the depression, the recession, the limp and lame recovery that bypasses so many. We're reacting to all that problem of capitalism by shortchanging our school system. And that's self destructive and self defeating. And one ought to ask why? The next fact, two professors, pretty well known. One is named Lawrence Katz, he's at Harvard. And the other one is named Alan Kruger, he's at Princeton, did a paper that they published back in March of this year in which they tried to figure out how many more workers are no longer enjoying a secure job with clearly defined tasks and hours so that they can build a stable life around it versus how many people are more and more stuck in what they call alternative work arrangements, irregular contracts, what other countries call precarious labor. Work that's done under a contract that may or may not be renewed either from month to month or week to week, or even from some cases from hour to hour. And their basic discovery is that over the last decade there's been a 50 to 60% increase from 10% of the labor force 10 years ago to almost 16% of the labor force is in irregular precarious labor. That's labor that often has little or no Benefits attached to it. That's labor that is harder for unions to organize. That's labor that is at the beck and call of their employer. Terribly afraid of raising any questions for fear that the job will go to someone else. Jobs are becoming more secure as well as all the other problems besetting the labor movement. And finally, what about that labor movement, organized labor, the unions? Let's talk a little bit about them, since a great deal of nonsense is spoken about them. Forty, fifty years ago, the percentage of the American working class that was organized into a union, and by that I mean that had an organization that bargained with the employer and developed with that employer a contract that had to be signed by the union on the one hand and the employer on the other, mandating for a period typically of three years, what the wages would be, what the working conditions would be, what the rights of the employer would be, what the rights of the workers would be, and so on. The number of workers, the percentage of our labor force in America that was covered by a trade union negotiated collective bargaining agreement was about 30%. Today it's about 11%. That is a staggering decline in the proportion of our labor force that is represented by a union that has a union bargaining for it, defending it, negotiating with the employer on the worker's behalf, and so on. It's even worse when you look at the labor movement and divided into the public employees who work for city states and the federal government on the one hand, and private sector employees. The private sector is the larger part of our economy. How does union membership look there? Well, it turns out that in the private sector, union membership has been all but extinguished less. Get ready for this, folks, because if you're not familiar with this statistic, it may shock you. Less than 7% of private employees, people who work for a private company of one kind or another, less than 7% of them are in a union or represented by a union. Over 93% of the sector in which most Americans work, over 93% of those workers have no union, are not governed by a contract or protected by one. They are without a union. Wow. In the public, it's a much higher percentage in the 20, 25%. Something in that area, public employees are still more unionized than private, but they are declining also for a whole variety of reasons, particularly in the last eight or nine years. So unions in this country are very small as a percentage of the workforce, by the way, this is called in economics, union density. The percentage of workers that are in a union. Union density is very low in The United States, as I say, about 11%. And in our system, only if a union is there can it enter into a collective bargaining. And it can only do that for the union members and the people who work in the workplace, even if they aren't members of that union, they're covered, but nobody else is. And there, the United States is quite different from the rest of the world. In most of the rest of the developed world, membership in a union is one thing, density is one thing, but being covered by a collective bargaining agreement is something else. Let me give you the starkest example. In France, only 8% of the workforce is a member of the union. So less than here in the United States. But in fact, unions are infinitely more powerful in France than in the United States. Why? Because Even though only 8% of workers are members, when the unions enter into a bargaining agreement with employers, it covers all the employers. So, for example, what's called collective bargaining coverage, how much of what the union negotiates and bargains with the employer, how much of that covers what percentage of workers? In France, It's a stunning 98%. That's right, 98% of workers are covered by the agreements negotiated by unions. In Italy, it's 80%. In Germany, it's almost 60%. And so on. In the United States, 11%. In other words, membership can vary. But when you get to the power, does what the union fights for really serve the mass of workers? Then the answer is in other countries, yes. In the United States, no. I want to turn next not to union facts and labor facts, but to labor and union struggles. Because the struggle between labor and management, between capital and labor, between employer and employee, never stops. And the reason it never stops is because their interests are in fundamental ways opposed. And so of course, they enter into conflict. If you were seriously interested in the conflict that never goes away, you'd have to face what the clash of interests is. But folks who don't want to look at capitalism as a system that produces people with clashing interests and therefore labor struggles, avoid that topic. We won't. So let's begin. I'm going to begin with something I mentioned before. Tens of millions of people, the unions claimed 150 million. Even if it isn't, it is clearly, if not one of, if not the largest labor strike in the history of the world, it's certainly one of them. It happened on September 2, 2016 in the country of India. Tens of millions of public sector workers went out on a day long strike. The strike was called after talks with Finance Minister Arun Jaitley broke down. Union leaders had rejected his offer. And folks, really pay attention here because you'll understand a great deal of world economics with simply the next basic statistic. The union leaders had rejected the Finance Minister's offer to raise the minimum wage for unskilled workers from $96 a month to $136 a month. That's right. You heard those numbers right. The government is only willing to pay people a minimum wage of $136 a month. That's right. It's about $25 a week for full time labor. And even when you make all the adjustments for what the cost of living is in India compared to what it is here, if you think $25 is below what a human being ought to live on for a week, then you've understood what the strike is about. Average standard of living of India gone up. Yeah. But the condition of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, public and private, is awful. Capitalism there is awful. And the working class knows it, feels it and is struggling. Next example. Here in New York City, Long Island University, a private university, has campuses out on Long island and another campus in Brooklyn. It took an extraordinary step on September 6, 2016, something, I don't know, a university has done and shows you that the battles are heating up in the labor versus employers struggle. Here's what happened. On the Tuesday 6th September, Long Island University locked out its professors. This is not a strike, it's called a lockout. And it literally means. And this is what happened there on the Brooklyn campus where there are hundreds of professors. The doors were locked. The professors were not allowed to come into the classroom to teach the courses starting Wednesday the 7th that they were scheduled to teach. They were not allowed to go to their offices where, by the way, personal as well as professional property that they own is located, which is part of their job. The university said it would run classes, which it apparently has been doing the last few days with administrative personnel. Let's be real clear, these are people without the qualifications, without the professional degrees required for an accredited university to function. So this is an extraordinary step. You locked out the teachers. Make it real clear here. The students are being denied the educators they have paid to be taught by, by a decision of the management and the owners of that university to lock out their professors. Why? Because they've been negotiating for months and there's a disagreement about what pay increases the professors want. Mostly the folks in Brooklyn want to have their wages and working conditions improved to be on a par with what that university Already pays the professors out in Long Island, a few miles away, not, you might imagine, an extraordinary request. They haven't come to an agreement with. But rather than bargaining at the expiration of their existing contract, which was 31 August, instead of continuing to bargain, the management has locked them out. Last step. To show you how sharp and how bitter labor struggles are becoming. These professors were told, not only are you locked out of your classroom, not only are you locked out of your office, not only will you not be paid for these days that we don't allow you to do your job, but we have canceled your health insurance. That's right. If you get sick today, tomorrow, the next day, you're not covered anymore. These are bitter decisions. Bitter decisions. They will not be forgotten and they will have their consequences that we will all live through. Let me turn now to a couple of labor issues. People ask me all the time, what are the biggest problems that workers face in a capitalist system? And that's a very good question, and it's hard to answer. But here goes my effort. There are two mammoth irrationalities of capitalism that confront workers all the time. The first is unemployment, and the second one is exploitation. Let me explain. Unemployment is a terrible anxiety for millions and millions of workers. Even if you're not unemployed, the fear that you might become so because what you produce no longer has a market. People don't want it anymore. Or because your boss doesn't like you, or because somebody else is willing to do the job more cheaply. Or the company may move to another part of the world where they can get away with environmental destruction that they would have to pay for a year. Whatever the reasons, you never know. You're not part of the decision making apparatus. You don't know how secure your job is. You could be unemployed. You. And if you become unemployed, your sense of yourself as a functioning person in this society is badly damaged. Your relationships with your spouse, your children, your family, your neighbors. We know from countless studies, unemployed people have more problems with alcohol, they have more problems with drugs. They have more problems with physical and mental health. For obvious reasons, it takes a terrible toll on society and it's irrational. Here's When a person loses his or her job, what that means is they stop being a productive member of society. They no longer are able to use their brains and their muscles to produce goods and services. That's what unemployment means. But those people continue to consume goods and services. They don't stop eating, they don't stop wearing clothes, they don't stop turning on the heat. In their apartment. They continue to consume, but they don't produce for the system as a whole. That's crazy. We need all the production that we can get to take care of our people. We ought to have a mechanism which we would have that guarantees immediately if you lose your job for any one of the thousand reasons that can happen, here's an agency that, number one, will continue to pay you and will train you if needed, help you move if needed, to the places where jobs are needed. They're always needed. And if there isn't a private employer, then let the government figure out what needs to be done. Do the subways in New York need to be cleaned? Are you kidding? Do daycare centers need to be built and staffed so working parents have a place to put their children? You betcha. Are the elderly becoming more and more part of our population? Do they have needs? You bet. The government had lots of work to do. We can all make lists if anyone's short on good things to be done. Keeping people working is a way of making our society better. Only capitalism doesn't get it wants to have that threat over the workers because then they're pliant. Then they don't complain about their job conditions, Then they don't look so hard at the wages they're getting, because after all, it's better than unemployment. We have unemployment because it suits capitalism, not because we need it. And the second one is exploitation. And here it's real simple. In most capitalist enterprises, a tiny group of people at the top make all the decisions. You're told what to do, where to do it, where to sit, what to work with. Here's the tool, here's what you do. And at the end of the day, go home. We don't want to see you until tomorrow when you do it all again. All the interesting decisions. Designing the work, deciding what to produce, deciding what technology to use, deciding what to do with the profits your labor has produced. All of those key parts of life you're excluded from on the job, you're exploited because you are excluded. And that has an impact on your psychology, your sense of yourself, your sense of what you're entitled to, your sense of being a citizen at the workplace, which of course extends then to your role as a citizen in the larger community. It hurts having the fruits of your labor taken from you and having no say over how they're used. Organizing production in a capitalist way exploits workers because it excludes them from important parts of a full, complete, integrated life. This used to be called the problem of alienation of people feeling disconnected from themselves as full human beings because on the job they have so little power, they have so little influence. They are required to be so passive. They're required to be so reactive. It's a constriction of the human experience that capitalism puts every worker through. The world would be a radically different place if we got rid of unemployment and we got rid of exploitation. It would be a way of honoring our working people to take those scourges away from them. It is something that a Labor Day worth the name would long ago have inscribed on its banner, no more unemployment and no more exploitation. It's the way I would like to honor Labor Day, at least on this program. Before we close for the end of today's program, let me again remind please partner with us, take parts of this program, share them with other people. You can do it directly. You can do it through our websites, rdwolf with two Fs and democracyatwork.info that's all one word. Democracyatwork.info. thanks for being with me. I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Sam, It.