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Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, incomes, those we face and those our children are having to think about more and more with each passing week. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and I hope that that has prepared me well to go over the events of each week as we do on this program. So let me jump right into the economic updates for this week. I want to talk about the state of Maine. I don't talk about it that often, but it deserves an analysis because of some courageous and innovative things that are going on there in the realm of economics. And I'm indebted to my friends@inequality.org for having gathered this material. And if you're interested in more details, that's where you should go. Maine is becoming a very interesting place. On the one hand, it has arguably the most right wing governor in the state in the whole country. On the other hand, it is doing things that are very progressive, and its legislature and its people are in the forefront of such things. In 2016, for example, voters approved ballot proposals to raise the state's minimum wage, to raise taxes on the wealthy, to fund education, and to legalize marijuana. Kind of interesting that the state of Maine would do that, but that wouldn't have been enough for me to bring it to your attention. I wanted to make it clear that these progressive steps are the result of systematic, organized political work being done by the Maine People's Alliance. They are the ones who deserve the credit for raising these issues, for educating the main population about them, reaching all over the state, explaining what's going on. And they've just launched another campaign which I find extraordinarily interesting as a way for committed, interested people in a state to really make a difference. Here's what they're going to do. They are going to put another landmark issue on the 2018 ballot. They call it universal home care for the disabled and the elderly. Maine, out of the 50 states, has the highest median age. In other words, it has a disproportionately large number of elderly and probably also disabled citizens. Caring for this aging population is expensive, the median annual cost median being 50% above and 50% below. The median annual cost for home care is over $50,000 per year. And that's about on a par with Maine's median income for an entire household. How in the world, if a household depends on 50 grand a year, are they ever going to pay to take care of an elderly, mother or father, et cetera, when it costs the total amount. And what's worse is that Medicare does not cover the costs of in home care, and the Medicaid reimbursement rates are so poor that employers are unwilling or unable to find workers who will do the work for the low level of reimbursement offered by Medicare. So the problem is, how are you going to care for the elderly? Which is, after all, one of the ways you measure how well an economic system serves the people who live in it. If you're able to take care of the elderly who've given a lifetime of work and service, and the disabled, the Maine People's alliance proposes to do the if the vote passes, it will raise $132 million to take care of a proper maintenance for the elderly and the disabled. How would they raise the $132 million? A payroll tax of 1.9% levied only on annual salaries and wages above $127,000 per year, and a 3.7% tax on investment income, again only if it is more than $127,000 a year. In other words, these are taxes very small but targeted at the rich. Why the $127,000? The answer is itself an important story. That's the maximum that you earn now upon which Social Security is withheld from your check. Social Security system works by taking a certain percentage from you, matched by your employer, but only up to the first 127,000. Which means if you're very wealthy and you earn above that, all of the money you earn above that, which can add up to millions, has no Social Security tax taken from it. So it struck the people in Maine as reasonable, since those who earn a lot escape much of their income from the taxes of Social Security. And therefore it also follows that the very wealthy are not affected by sales taxes the way low and middle income people are. Because if you're very rich and have a big income, the sales taxes you pay are a small percentage compared to what they would be if you're not rich. So taking all this into account, they've decided to tax those who are most able to pay the same principle that governs the income tax, the federal income tax in the United States. And given the success they've had in the past, it will be very interesting to see whether this program of taxing only the richest to provide something that the whole of society will benefit from, namely care for the elderly and the disabled. Will it succeed in the state of Maine? My next update is really Very simple and very brief. It's to let you know, and which may come as a surprise that the United States Senate, and in particular the United States Senate Finance Committee, just issued in the middle of October a report on estate tax abuses. What do I mean? I mean the way wealthy people in the United States, and we're talking about poor 0.0001%, how they escape the estate tax, which only they are required to pay, since we've exempted 11 or 12 million of everybody's estate from any federal estate tax already. And the Trump administration proposes to eliminate the rest, which is eliminating a significant tax on, on the wealthiest people in the country. Well, it turns out those people have already been evading the tax for years by using special loopholes, all kinds of tax rulings. And I've told you that in the past. But what I found remarkable was that the US Senate Finance Committee issued a report dated October 12, which documents in detail all of the evasion schemes that have gotten wealthy, the wealthiest in America out of paying their estate tax. Here's the name of the document if you're interested in looking for it. And the way to find it is to go to www.finance.senate.gov financenate. GOV. You'll get you right to it. Here's the name of the report. The title estate tax schemes. Here's the How America's most fortunate hide their wealth flout tax laws and grow the wealth gap. That's right, a document issued by the U.S. senate Finance Committee showing the anger of those senators because the evasion of taxes by the richest really is very gross. I want to turn next to an update on a story we've covered before, but it continues to amaze. This has to do with Flint, Michigan. You know, the problem of Flint in the aftermath of the crash of 2008 in a city that was already the largest bankruptcy in American history. Detroit, the neighboring city of Flint, Michigan, to save money, diverted from using the Detroit river as its water source to the Flint River. That water was polluted by very old lead pipes. It was drunk by all kinds of adults and children in Flint, disproportionate, part of them being African American, causing brain damage, illnesses of all kinds. A horrible story. You know that story? I am not going to repeat it. What's new is it turns out that here we are years after this crisis blew up and Flint continues to suffer from polluted water. Large numbers of its citizens have to have bottled water brought in or tank water brought in. It's a very serious problem. Two hours Away from Flint by car is a little town called Evart. E V A r t Evart, Michigan. 1500 people. A really little place. But in that place, something extraordinary is going on. The Nestle Corporation, one of the largest food conglomerates in the world that produces all kinds of things around the world. It pays $200 a year to pump water out of the ground under E vart, Michigan out of an aquifer there. It bottles the water. It sells the water throughout the Midwest, including to people in Flint, Michigan. Flint has high water bills, dangerous water. But at the same time that the people of Flint have suffered for years without adequate access to clean water, which the UN calls a human right. A private profit corporation, two hours away pumps all the clean water. It wants to make profit by bottling it and selling it to everybody else. Something is terribly wrong with this picture I've just painted for you, isn't it? Profit gets the water and the people get the pollution. A system that works like this has lost its right to continue. This story was carried the first news of it that came to me in the British newspaper the Guardian. Isn't it interesting that the Guardian would capture this particular update of the Flint water disaster? Before I turn to my next update, let me remind you that we maintain two websites which are there for your use. For you to partner with us in the spreading the word of what you learn on this program. What insights we are able to share with you. Use these websites, please. That's why we update them every day with new materials as a way to partner with us and share the information. The first website is rdwolff with two f's. Com and the second one is democracy at work. That's all one word, democracyatwork.info Both websites allow you to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and YouTube. Both of those websites allow you to communicate with us what you like and don't like. Make use of them. That's why they're there and they're available 247 and no charge. For those of you listening to the program who might also want to see it as a television program, please know that you can go to patreon.com P A T R E O-N patreon.com economicupdate and then the program will be available to you in a fully televised video format. There is a term being used in Europe to cope with the problems the Europeans have had since the crash of 2008. It has become widespread now across the world among researchers and scholars and activists trying to come up with a term that captures the economic crises in which so many people have been mired since 2008. And the term is social exclusion. What does that mean? Basically, it means that your income is so low that you can't really participate in a regular life with the food, the clothing, the shelter, the transportation, the education, the health care that you need. If you're going to be included in the community's life, you are, in a sense, being pushed to the margins of this society. So you are suffering social exclusion. And there are complicated measurements that are made to get at that. I thought you'd be interested in how a number of European countries fare. When you look through the lens of social exclusion, perhaps the most dramatic statistic was the 35 and a half percent of the entire population of Greece lived in social exclusion last year, 2016. That's over a third. By comparison, in 2008, the last year before the full impact of the capitalist crash hit, the percentage of social exclusion in Greece was 28%. So they've gone from 28 to 35. That's not a recovery, friends. That's a society who is excluding ever more people. Across the entire 10 years since that crisis hit, the average across all of the EU, the European Union was 23.4%. It's bad enough, but that was roughly the same as 2008. So across Europe as a whole, it hasn't gotten any better, but it hasn't gotten any worse. But not for Greece. If you want the technical definition of social inclusion, you can get it from Eurostat. That's the agency that keeps the basic economic statistics for all of Europe. A person living in poverty or social exclusion is measured as earning less than 60% of the average national income. That is when people are unable to procure basic consumer goods or to fulfill basic financial obligations. The two worst countries in Europe where social Exclusion is at 40.4 and 38.8% that is even worse than Greece were Bulgaria and Romania. Finally, at the other end, here are the three countries that had the lowest percentage of social exclusion. Number one in Europe, the Czech Republic. That part of the former Czechoslovakia, 13.3% excluded the smallest percentage of of its population. That might surprise you. The next two countries that didn't exclude very many, but not quite as good as a Czech Republic were Finland and Denmark. That will be less of a surprise. It would be interesting if we had serious social exclusion data for the United States, and I'm working on that. The next economic update has to do with two health programs in the United States. That are a little bit below the radar these days because of so much attention devoted to the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare and the Trump and Republican Party's effort to overthrow all of that. While everybody was debating and looking at that, two existing health care programs in the United States were set to expire on 30 September 2017. And and expire they did. And unless the Congress now run by the GOP together with Mr. Trump, unless they move to reinstate these programs, they will stop. So let me tell you about the two of them since very little publicity was given. The first is the CHIP program, C H I P, which stands for Children's Health Health Insurance Program. Okay. It ensures, if my data are correct, something on the order of several millions. I'm just checking here to get it to you. I don't have it in front of me. Sorry. But there are several million children that have been helped. I think it was 8 or 9 million children across the United States helped by this program. By letting it run out, you are of course depriving the these children and their families of the financial support needed to get health insurance. The other one is the federally qualified health centers. This one really struck me. And here I have the data in front of me. 9,500 locations, that's health clinics and health centers around the United States, particularly in rural areas, are qualified to get help from the federal government to serve 27 million people. These are people who live often far from hospitals or develop medical care centers. And they have been helped for years by the federal government, as was the children's health. Both of these programs expired on 30 September. In many states, there are reserves being used to keep them going, but without federal help, that will stop in a month or so at the end of this year. The Kaiser Family foundation is very concerned, believes that this is a major blow to the health care of many Americans. And if you look at where these health care centers are located and where the children are that are helped, there's an interesting irony. A disproportionate number of these beneficiaries who are now deprived live in states that voted for Donald Trump for president. The Bloomberg News Service carried the next economic update. It points out, and of course, this is hardly hot news. But then again, it's important. When the Bloomberg Service, which is the major provider of economic news to the business community in the United States and in many other parts of the world, when they write this, then it's kind of recognized. And here's their point. A story on the 20th of September. If you put together the impact of automation with the impact of outsourcing of jobs, that is moving jobs out of the United States, the impact of those two things together, replacing jobs with machines and replacing jobs in the United States by having those jobs move to another part of the world. The end result is that fewer people are working and that they're earning less than they used to. And the way economists measure that, it's called labor's share. The share of the total income in our country that working people get. People who work nine to five, five days a week earning a wage. Labor share versus the profit share, or sometimes it's called capital share. Labor share, the capital share, the employee's share, the employer's share. Well, for years now, the labor share has, has been going down. The number of people in the laboring part of the society keeps going up, but the share of total income laboring people get goes down. You know what that means if there's more and more of us sharing less and less? It means that the average economic situation of Americans is being pinched, lowered, reduced, squeezed, whatever word you like. And Bloomberg wants the business community to know about it. And the reason is not far to search for with this kind of tearing a society apart into those who have and those who don't. Those whose profit share is rising, giving them good times versus those whose situation is being squeezed so they suffer shrinking incomes or maybe social exclusion. As we just finished talking about, the gap between these two is filled with bitterness, resentment, envy, anger, recrimination, you know, and it becomes fertile soil to try to convince upset people to that this or that group is the bad guy making this happen. The people who are different from you, the people who are immigrants just like your ancestors were, those are the people you can now turn on to blame. But the reality is it's got nothing to do with immigrants or with African Americans or with any other of the convenient scapegoats of which we have had so many. It has to do with an economic system. And even Bloomberg understands. It's the profit driven decision to replace a worker with a machine or the profit driven decision to move a job out of the United States and give it to someone at a fraction of the wage in China or India or Brazil. It's a system driven by profit. The famous bottom line that dictates what happens. That is at the core of the inequality tearing the society apart. And Bloomberg lets its people know because even Bloomberg is scared of where this division in this society is going, how far it will be allowed to go and what the social consequences will be. And are there alternatives? Of course there are. A society that wanted to would not allow automation to happen in such a way that the worker suffers and the employer gets the benefit. Why not? Because there is no reason to do that in the first place. And secondly, the inequality that follows is a good reason not to do it. And to remind you, as we have done on this program, how could you manage this? The answer is so easy it's a little awkward to have to repeat it. When a machine can make half the number of workers produce the same output compared to what before took all of the workers we know what happens. The capitalist who buys the more efficient machine fires half the workers because the remaining half with the new machine can produce as much as all of them produced before. Everything else is the same. But our employer has a wonderful situation. He has half the wage bill he used to have. The money that he used to give to half the workers. The ones he fired he can now keep for himself. And that shows up as much higher profits. What's the alternative? Simple. You don't fire half the workers. You put all the workers on. Halftime gets you exactly the same result. The capitalist can continue paying them all earning whatever profit he earned before. The technical change means that everybody who works there has half time labor for the same wage. It's more leisure for every worker. If the benefit were more leisure for every worker, the majority would get the benefit. We have a system that fires half the workers and keeps it all in profit for the top. That's why we have a splitting society. And if we don't deal with that situation, it will continue. We've come to the end of the first half of Economic Update after a short interlude. We will be right back. Stay with us. I think you'll find the material on the second half interesting. Welcome friends, to the second half of this edition of Economic Update. In this second half we're going to devote ourselves to two important topics that need the kind of analysis you have asked me to provide and that are generally important to the future of this country and indeed of many parts of the world. The first topic is migration, the movement of people across national boundaries, usually in response to either serious factors that are pushing or serious factors that are pulling them, or both. And the second topic has to do with the relationship between the labor movement, trade unions on the one hand and worker co ops on the other. This new emerging organization of work. What do these two working class movements have to do with each other? So let's Start with migration. People moving, often over long distances. This has happened throughout human history. There's nothing new or exceptional about it. Let me just give you a few examples. Every city in the history of the world was formed by people migrating off the countryside and coming together and deciding to live in a very small space so that we could distinguish urban from rural. The city is the product of migration. 80% of Americans today live in cities. And that's because over time, their ancestors, their parents, moved from a countryside, from a rural area to the city. If you admire the city, which 80% of Americans seem to do, if you want to live there, you. You want to live in. The product of migration number two. More than most countries in the world, the United States is itself the product of migration. Because the original Europeans who came to the Western Hemisphere, who came to what we now call the United States, were genocidal in relationship to the native people here. They quickly discovered that if you either destroy or marginalize or restrict to reservations a native population, you can't develop a modern economy because you may have good climate, you may have good rivers, you may have wonderful oceans, you may have lovely harbors, but you don't have workers. And without workers, no economy works. That was quickly figured out by the Europeans who came here. They may have gotten rid of the Native Americans, but now they had a labor problem. And we have had a labor problem in this country ever since. And the way we've solved the labor problem, the way we brought working men and women to the United States, was by successive waves of immigration. Some of it was, quote, unquote, voluntary. That is, the individual made a choice. A good part of it, the African American part, was not voluntary, was violently forced on people from the African continent who came here as slaves. But either way, we're talking about migrations. And those created the American success story from the 1800s to about 1970. So this country is the product of migration, as many have shown. Why do people migrate? The answer is partly push, partly pull. That is, something about the situation they're in makes them want to leave. And something about the place they went to make made them choose to go there. In the United States. The stories that went back to Europe from the earliest ones who came was that you could make a living here. And that the living you could make here was better than what you could anticipate back in Europe that you came from. Obviously, there didn't have to be that kind of situation with African people because they were not making a personal choice. It was imposed on them. But that's always been the story of migration. If you look at the European migrations today, the people coming from the Middle east and Africa moving into Europe, they're coming in part because the conditions where they lived in the Middle east and Africa were becoming intolerable. And when they decided to leave, they looked around to where their best chance would be and as to where they would go. So they left troubled areas and went to where they thought they could get a job, get a home, raise a family. You know, the classic human desires. And migration has been a way to accommodate people who are in distress, who are in difficulty. Economic, political, cultural, military, you name it. So what's the problem? If the history of the world is bound up with migration, why does migration become a big contentious issue the way it is in Europe for so many countries right now, the way it is in the United States for so many citizens in so many states, particularly those bordering Mexico? Why is it such a big issue for this president? And so on. And here you have to do, really the economics more than anything else. Immigrants go where they think they can get a job. It's the number one consideration in deciding where to go. Once you've made the decision to that you're going to leave the country where you were born, where you grew up, where your family resides, where your community supports you. You make that momentous decision very difficult to leave all of that and go to a place you don't know. You may not know the language, you may not know the customs. This is a very risky proposition. You have to be desperate, usually. How is it decided? Well, it's a question. Are there going to be jobs? And here's where things get dicey. The economies to which migrants go are the economies that offer them work. But the question is, what kind of work? And the second question is, how much is paid for the work that migrants are welcomed to take? And whether you look at Scandinavia or Western Europe or Eastern Europe or parts of Asia or the United States or Canada, it really doesn't matter, because the story is always the same. The employer class in all those places sees in migrants an opportunity. What do I mean in plain English? A chance to get someone to work under conditions that nobody else would accept, for wages that local people wouldn't accept. The migrant is brought in to do the work at the wages that the local people have rejected, have struggled to overcome. But it means that the entrance of the migrant is, of course, immediately contested. Why? Because the employer will be ready, willing, and able to fire the person he's paying $20 an hour to. To substitute an immigrant whom he can pay $15 an hour to, or anything like that. For the immigrant leaving his or her own country, usually under desperate situations, they are willing to accept poor working conditions, poor wages, poor job security, few benefits. It's better than what they had, or at least it's less awful. And this would be bad enough. But of course it sets up a tension. The native American who has been displaced from his or her job been told that the job they may have expected isn't going to be there for them because an immigrant offers to do it for less. That person is now plunged into a morass, a problem, a difficulty. Now there's two ways to go and every migrant faces. You can get angry at a system that exploits the need of a fellow human being, the immigrant, to take advantage of that need by a bad job at low pay. You can be angry that the system works like this. You can be angry at the social divisions between immigrants and native working people that this situation creates. That makes you a critic of a system, of how a capitalist system handles migration. I would hope you understand that. But for many people that's too difficult, too abstract, too scary. It's easier, perhaps more socially approved in their environment to blame the immigrant, to get angry at the person who comes. Even though your own ancestors came in very similar ways and suffered very similar abuses in how they were welcomed. A decent society, a decent society would welcome immigrants. Decide how many you can absorb and decide that by making sure that no native worker is displaced, no drop in wages is imposed on on the immigrant. That immigrant has suffered a lot already, uprooted from their native environment. Don't hammer home their suffering by a bad job at low wages, where their neighbors that they're moving in amongst will hate them for having lost their jobs. Don't do that. There's no excuse for it, there's no moral excuse for it, there's no ethical excuse for may be the way capitalism works, but it produces social conflict, social anger, bitterness, resentment, and the horrific things that have been said in public ways in this country for years now. If you can't handle the immigrants, don't let them come. If you want to enrich your society with new and different waves of people the way we were enriched for the last hundred and fifty years, then do it in a decent way that does not set newcomers against those they are now joining and recognizes the obligation to handle human beings treating them in a different way. The second issue is the relationship between unions and worker co ops and this is extremely important. Since the union movement could, I underscore, could become a major assist and a major support for the development of a worker co op movement in the United States. Let's begin by reminding ourselves what unions are there to do. Labor unions have been for at least two centuries a mechanism used by workers in all countries to improve their situation, to get higher wages and to get better working conditions. How do they do that? By representing all of the workers together, the union, the coming together of workers, because it's clear that they can bargain more successfully with the employer if they do it as one unified group rather than as an individual, each one bargaining with the employer. When that happens, the employer can play one individual off against another. And if they are all in a union, that is not available as a tactic to the employer. That's why workers like unions and that's why employers don't. So unions enhance the position of working people. They can put pressure, they can bargain, they can negotiate, and in the end, they can also strike in order to get improved wages and working conditions. The history of the United States is identical to the history of all other capitalist countries in being the history of successive waves of efforts by labor unions to improve the wages and working conditions in their countries. One of the reasons the United States has relatively high wages and relatively good working conditions is precisely in part the result of what struggles unions undertook. A worker co op is something completely different. A worker co op is not about bargaining with the employer. And the reason is very obvious. In a worker co op, the workers are also the employers. It's not a different group of people. The workers are not going to bargain with themselves. The whole point of a worker co op is to go one better than the unions. In other words, where the union bargains to get a benefit from the employer, the union has to contend with this unalterable fact. Even if you get an improvement by bargaining with an employer, that employer has a vested interest in undoing that improvement as soon as he can. His profits are greater the more flexibility he has about when you work and how you work and with what machines you work. He makes more profit if he can save on his wage. Bill. That's what they learn in business school. That's what it's all about. So the union has a double it not only has to struggle to gain good working conditions, good wages, but its struggle isn't over. When it's gained them, it never can stop because the employer has a continuing incentive to undo what he once was forced to Give. In the 1930s and 40s, American unions won absolutely stunning advances for working Social Security, a minimum wage, unemployment compensation, public jobs when private jobs were insufficient. But after the war, over the last 40, 50 years, many of the gains unions won have been eroded by or taken away altogether. A perfect illustration that unions have this double problem. They have to get the improvement and then they have to safeguard the improvement. Here again, the worker co op is quite different. You're not going to have to worry about keeping the improvements you get because there is no employer organized against you. There is no employer ready and willing and able to take it away because you are the employer. In a sense, the ultimate achievement of a union is to have a worker co op to convert the enterprise they live in from the adversarial. We, the workers against the employer, get a gain or lose again, etc. Etc. Instead of that, the workers become their own employers and thereby secure the wages and working conditions they fought so hard to get. So the natural alliance would be between the labor unions, who get the best possible deal with within the capitalist system, and a worker co op, which is the next step for a union, the better way to guarantee what a union can achieve. They could be allies. They should be allies. It is the logical next point. Co ops should welcome unions. Why? Because they are, in a sense, the struggling institutions that will convince and persuade and educate workers as to why a worker co op is a better way to work than in a conventional capitalist adversarial system. The union, in a sense, is a training ground, an experience school, if you like, in which workers learn why, exactly, a worker co op would be a better way to be engaged and employed. And speaking of an alliance or coalition between unions and worker co ops, let's do a little history to drive the point home. A century ago, there was an alliance between worker co ops and unions. They often did things together and supported one another. So there's plenty of precedent. But I want to talk about the history of the 1930s. The 1930s were the best period for American labor unions. They grew in a way they never have before or since. Millions of people joined unions who had never been in a union before, whose parents had never been in a union before. And how did that happen? Well, they had an ally. The unions did. The allies were socialist and communist parties that were Strong in the 1930s and into the 40s in the United States. And those political parties went around the country with their political candidates, with their literature, with their newspapers, arguing why a union was a good place for a working person to. To get some benefits, to get some job security. To take care of his or her family. And that alliance Unions on the one hand, they were called the CIO in those days, and socialists and communists on the other, produced a dynamite labor movement, the most successful in the history of the United States. Today. There could be a parallel alliance, this time between the unions and the movement for worker co ops. Once again, such an alliance could have powerful effects. Suppose the unions had an ally in the worker co op movement that went around the country saying we are the movement that wants to create a democratic workplace, that wants to transform workplaces from top down, hierarchical, undemocratic institutions, which is what they are in a capitalist system, to democratically run and operated worker co ops. And one way we know we can build a worker co op sector of this economy is if more people are in labor unions and are experiencing all the struggles necessary to get good wages and working conditions to, in and from a union and from the employer who confronts that union. Those workers will learn practically daily why having a worker co op enterprise would be the better way for them to go. In other words, we want to build the unions because by doing so we build the constituents. For a worker co op transformation of the economy. There's a solid, logical, grounded alliance, one that can help the unions reverse their 50 year decline. Help the unions to recapture the larger social mission that was so obvious in the 1930s and worked so well to bring people moved by that mission to see joining the union as a step in the direction. What about now? Telling people attracted by the images and the possibilities of worker co ops that unions are a training ground, an experiential school to teach working people how and why a worker co op is the logical end of of the whole process. Let's learn from the history of a successful alliance between labor and other social groups in the 1930s to do a comparable a parallel alliance between a social movement that for worker co ops and a union movement that desperately needs more allies than it now has because it has suffered from that absence of allies for a long time. True, a union changes its function once a worker co op is established. Will workers need a union if in the end they're discussing with a board of directors comprised of themselves? Will you need a union to negotiate with yourself? I don't know. I think it will be up for the workers to decide in worker co ops what kinds of organizations within the co op would make sense, would help it run better. They may well decide that unions have a place. They'll be a different place, it'll be a different institution because it's working inside a different system. But no one need to fear any of that, because the whole reality of union struggles really has always been not only to get good wages and working conditions, but to keep them. What kind of an achievement is it if you get it in year one, lose it in year two, and have to spend all of year three rerunning the same struggle that you did in year one to get the gains? And that has been the history of the labor movement everywhere. Very hard to hold on. And there's a reason for that. The employer has every reason to undo what you got. Final illustration. The Europeans, the Western Europeans, especially their trade unions, kept their alliances going with the socialist and communist parties in their countries. And I'm speaking here of France and Germany and so on, Italy. And so they have been able to hold on better than we did here in the United States to the social welfare, to the benefits and job conditions they got. They have a National Health service, they have five, six week paid vacations, they have subsidized education. But they are in the process of discovering that that's no guarantee. Mrs. Merkel in Germany, Mr. Macron in France and the governments elsewhere in Europe are trying very hard, you guessed it, to take away the very achievements because the business interests want them to, because the capitalists push them to. And that's where the money for most of the political parties comes from. And so workers are discovering again that within capitalism, nothing is secure in the way of wages and working conditions. And that lesson translates very quickly into a recognition of how much better off you'd be if you substituted worker co ops that you yourself owned and ran for, bargaining with people who have every incentive to take away what you won. We've come to the end of the second half of Economic Update for today. I want to remind you that the goal of everything we do is, is to partner with you in getting these analyses, these understandings out to a larger population. We now work on the radio and the television. We need you, where you live, where you work, where you play, to share these insights. We've had that partnership with truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis for, for years. It works well with them, it works well with you. Partner with us as we move forward to ever larger audiences and ever larger social impact. I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Sa.