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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives, jobs, incomes, debts, those coming down the road, those confronting our children, as well as those we have to deal with every day. 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 realities of what's happening in our economy with you. So let's jump right in for today. A remarkable piece of research has been done by the United States federal government for some years now. The Bureau of Labor Statistics and other government agencies carefully survey the labor market in order to provide us with some idea of where jobs are going to be coming over the next five and 10 years and where jobs are going to be disappearing. It's a useful thing for schools, for individuals to know, because it will affect the decisions we make about what we study, where we live, what skills we develop and so on. So I was really taken with the reports on these studies carried in the New York Times on 24 October, because it was really a bombshell, what they had to tell us. Here's what they said. Over the next decade, next 10 years, overwhelmingly the two job categories that will grow many times more than then, all other kinds of jobs combined are the following, and I'll give you their home health aides and personal care aides. What is that? Those are people who help ill folks and folks who are aged or have other needs for personal care. Here's what's important to understand about these jobs. They are among the lowest paid jobs in our economy. So what this is telling us is that if you look at the job picture, what's going to shrink in general? There are some exceptions, but in general are better paying jobs. And what's going to explode are personal service, low paid jobs, jobs with minimal benefits, jobs that are highly insecure, and jobs that are irregular. That is, you often don't know from week to week which hours you are working. What this means, and there's no pretty way to say this, is that the United States is changing its economic structure. This follows from the growing gap between a very small part of our population, 5 to 10% who have enormous wealth, and the vast rest of the population who don't. And what is happening is that as jobs shrink, and I'll have more to say about that in a minute, more and more people are going to earn a living by providing personal services to those 5% who have the money to pay for all those personal services. The personal Shopper, the dog walker, the aides to help your elderly relatives, if of course you can afford it, all of that. Now, why are the better jobs disappearing? That has to do with automation, capitalists making more profit by replacing people with machines and even more with job exports, moving the productive work, making the things we use. In other parts of the world, particularly China, India, Brazil and places like that, the good jobs, the better jobs that we used to have doing that are now being transformed into not so well paid jobs but in other countries. That's why the good jobs we had are shrinking and the explosive jobs in the future will be low paid, poor working conditions, personal service. In this way, the American economy is going back to what it was in the 19th century. A highly concentrated mass of wealthy people at the top with armies of personal servants. In those days, you didn't go to a store and get somebody who's a hired worker to do your personal service. You brought them into your home, your butler, your chauffeur, your nanny, all of that. That's where we're going. And we ought to be thinking about whether we want that kind of society. It is nothing short of a reconfiguration of the American economy to serve the 5% at the top. Last week also saw the United States Senate take a remarkable step. It basically voted to overturn a rule that had been passed earlier by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And when I explain this to you, I sure hope you're shaking your head because if you understand what I'm saying, that's at least what you ought to do. Here we go. In the wake of the biggest banks in America over the last seven or eight years, having literally violated either the legal or the ethical norms of proper banking across the board, having been caught laundering money, having been caught overcharging us for bounced checks, for mortgage help, all the rest of it having faked interest rates to make more money, even though we all have to pay based on those interest rates, having you name it, they abused the law. They need regulation. But the United States Senate overruled the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. On what? On a rule governing banks. The Protection Bureau had issued a rule saying that banks cannot use what are called arbitration clauses. In other words, in your dealings with a bank, if you have a dispute with the bank, what the bank wants to be able to do is require that the dispute go to arbitration, where you can hire, at your expense, your lawyers to make your case, and the big bank at their expense can hire their lawyers to fight you. Why do the banks want that because they win. They have big, deep pockets. They hire the bank of lawyers. You can't do that, especially with the risk that you'll pay all that money and lose your case, too. This. This is going to dissuade people. So the Financial Control Board passed a rule allowing consumers with a complaint if they can locate others who've suffered a similar problem, they can engage legally in something called a class action. That's when large numbers of people aggrieved over the same issue can share the cost with lawyers of bringing a case against the banks that have abused them. It's a way to give individuals something like the same clout in a trial proceeding that the banks have. The banks didn't like it. The banks went to work with the Republicans who controlled the Congress and with Mr. Trump, and they got the Senate last week to overrule the efforts of the Financial Control Board. In other words, they undid the little bit of regulation of the banks that came out of the disastrous performance of those banks since 2008. It's extraordinary that a sector as badly behaved as the banks that have had to pay billions in fines for their bad behavior had the clout with the folks in Washington to not be regulated even to the little bit that was possible since 2008. My next update has to do both with the United States and the United Kingdom. And it comes initially from the Harvard College magazine. Being myself a graduate of that place, I get that magazine and I read it from time to time. It's not a very good magazine, but it comes for free. And so I read it occasionally. And here was a good story. The article in there says with some statistics that if you compare private colleges and universities in America to public colleges and universities and further compare both of them to what are called the historically black colleges and universities in America, here's what you discover. The amount of spending per student is the highest in the private schools, is considerably lower in the public schools, and is at the bottom with the historically black colleges and universities. And as the article points out, what this does is to confirm inequalities from generation to generation. Those who have the money to send their kids to the elite schools to prepare them from nursery school on. To do that, those wealthy people get their kids and into the elite schools, and those who are less wealthy get them into the public universities where the tuitions are more bearable. You see the story. It's a way of reinforcing the divisions in this society, making sure they go from one generation to the next. Then the article veers into crazy places. When the explanation comes, why is this happening? The author cites market forces. This has the same solid weight as if he had said magic or the moon or tea leaves or something like that. Because the obvious response to being told that market forces did it is to ask why the market forces work that way. In other words, you haven't explained anything when you say market forces. And my suspicion is they don't want to say the word that needs to be said. Capitalism. There, I've said it. It's a system in which the distribution of wealth goes to a very small number of people, those tiny boards of directors at the top of every big corporation who decide how to distribute the profits, not to all the people who help produce them, but rather to the shareholders and the top executives and the board of directors who run the business, a tiny minority. And they become very wealthy and they want their kids to go to the right schools. So they make sure that happens. This is an old story, and you ought to understand that if you allow corporations to work that way, a tiny group of people make all the decisions, take the wealth basically for themselves, you're going to see the rest of society reflect all of that. And that's why the private schools spend a lot more per student than the public colleges and universities, and both of them more than than the historically black colleges and universities. No one should be surprised at how these different communities do because the system is set up like this. You might even say it's rigged. But this is not an American problem. My attention was caught in the Guardian, a British newspaper that I often use. October 19, 2017. There is a story in which a former Minister of Education, David Lammy, L A M M Y, who's currently a member of Parliament for Tottenham, used the Freedom of Information act to discover that 82% of the admissions into Oxford University and 81% of the admissions into Cambridge University, those are the top schools in Great Britain. They're sort of like Harvard and Yale or something, something here in the United States. In any case, those huge percentages went to the students from the top two socioeconomic groups. That's up from 79% five years ago. In other words, England, like the United States, gives the richest people the special access to the institutions which keep them the richest people, thereby keeping it going generation after generation. Oxford stood out because it admitted no black students. There are black British people in large numbers all over England. Oxford and Cambridge had an unbelievably low acceptance. So not only were the low ends of the income scale excluded, so were racial and ethnic minorities. The United States is not alone in this kind of behavior, but it needs to be called out, don't you think? The next piece of information is extraordinary, and I want to bring it to you in its full flesh. And first I want to thank the researcher who made this available. Her name is Julianne Holt Lunstad. She is a professor of psychology at Brigham Young University in Utah, and she has done a number of studies in which she looks at hundreds of other studies to try to figure out answers to the following Are the American people lonelier than other people? And is loneliness a factor in people's illness rates and early death rates? I won't bother you with the details. You can find it in a number of places. She has given testimony in the United States Senate. An article with her results is forthcoming in the journal American Psychologist, and you can look her up. Holt Lunstadt is her name. Here's what she the effect of isolation, loneliness and living alone has an effect on the risk of dying younger than other people. And that risk is greater than the risk of dying younger, well known that flows from obesity. In other words, loneliness is a serious problem in this society. It is an epidemic. It follows from the number of people who no longer work together with others in a collective workplace, who work on their own in an isolated way, who are part of the gig economy or the sharing economy. Nice words put on a reality that Professor Holt Lunstadt is is here to undo. So we understand is very serious. We know it from the taking of psychological drugging to help you get over your loneliness, or at least to try. We know it from the number of people who need care for, depression and so on. In January in England, this was recognized by when the Parliament in England set up a commission to tackle loneliness, it was inspired by the murder of Joe Cox, a member of Parliament that you may recall last year having been shot by somebody who turned out to be suffering from severe loneliness. As our capitalist system moves more and more into robotics and other ways to replace groups of jobs with groups of machines and more and more individually lonely, isolated workers, this problem, which we ignore at our peril, will in fact get worse. Before going on with the other updates for this week, let me remind you that we maintain two websites that are available for your use, which is why we maintain them rdwolf with two Fs.com and democracyatwork.info that's all one word, democracyatwork.info. those websites contain lots of material about what we do on this program. They allow you to communicate with us what you like and don't like, what you would like us to cover. And we read them and build these programs around them. They also allow you, with a click of a mouse to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and if you are interested, those of you that are listeners in seeing this program as a television program, please consider going to patreon.com p a t r e o n patreon.com economicupdate and there you can see the program as a television program. If you're not already doing that, let me return then to the updates. I want to call out the graduate students at the University of Chicago. They had an election very recently in which they voted to unionize. And the vote was overwhelming. Better than 2 to 1. 1,103 graduate students voted yes, and under 500 voted no. That's a very resounding victory. They are one of a dozen schools to host graduate student unions. Now, as the graduate students try, by unionizing, to be less exploited by their universities than they traditionally have been. And indeed, as I was also back in the day when I was a graduate student, as usual, the universities came up with the same old irrelevant argument against the students, an argument that failed, clearly in the University of Chicago. Here's the argument. Unions are not needed here. We don't want a third party. That's the key idea. A third party. The union to interfere in the relationships between the university students and administrators on the one hand. Excuse me, the university faculty and administrators on the one hand, and the students on the other. This notion of the union as an outsider, a third party, messing up the wonderful relations between Mrs. Two key points. One, the students are obviously getting the short end of the stick on this cozy relationship, which is why they're looking for a union. So telling them they don't need one when they obviously have gone to great lengths to produce one is bizarre. But here's the better argument. There already is a third party in every major university. It's called the board of trustees or the board of directors. At Yale, it was called the. The Yale Corporation. You know who's on these boards? Businessmen and women. Not faculty, not administrators and not students. Guess what? A third party with enormous power to run the universities the way they see fit. What is this argument? We can't have a third party. You already do. And that's the problem. Congratulations to the students in Chicago. And I'm not alone in congratulating them. Let me tell you the congratulations they got from a graduate of the University of Chicago. Some years ago, a man by the name of Bernie Sanders. Here's what he Having a union ends the arrangement where the employer makes all the decisions unilaterally and it institutes a legal process where a union can represent the students and get a fairer, more adequate relationship. And he added, quote, I respect the critical work you, the union, do every day and I wish you the very best in your efforts to create a democratic workplace where your voice can really be heard. Interesting. A sign of change doesn't get enough attention, but deserves all it gets. I want to also turn quickly to something that came across from Brazil and it's horrifying, frankly, and I want to bring it to you. The conservative mayor of Sao Paulo, one of the biggest cities in Brazil, together with the local Catholic Cardinal Scherer by name, have hit upon a plan to provide food for the massive number of poor people in Brazil. It's a chemically combined food that, that uses as its core. Ready? Here we go. Close to the sell date. Items of food that are pulled back from supermarket shelves because they're close to the sell date. That's the date after which it's too dangerous to eat, that food companies that give this will get a tax write off and poor people will be given food, clothes close to the sale date mushed together into pellets. When rich people become so rich that the mass of people are worried about food, it is not at all unusual for those at the top unwilling to part with their fair share of taxes, unwilling to share the wealth of their society with their fellow citizens, come up with plans like this to give nearly rotten food. Because let's be clear what we're talking about and tell people, poor people, you're doing them a favor. That the mayor, a conservative, thinks of this is bad, that a religious leader endorses it. Well, I'll leave that to your judgment as to how to understand that. For the last economic update that we will have time for today, I want to talk to you about a new study having to do with the costs, the economic costs and the human costs of pollution. And here I'm making use of a study reported on in US News and World Report on 19 October, for those of you who'd like to pursue it. The study was led by Philip Landrigan. He is the dean of global health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. He's the lead scientist and medical professional who wrote this report. And here's what they environmental pollution by which they filthy air contaminated Water is killing more people on our planet every year than all the wars and all the violence, more than the smoking, hunger or natural disasters, more than aids, tuberculosis and malaria combined. What are the numbers we're talking about? Estimate of this report, 9 million people dying prematurely every year at a cost of $4.6 trillion and more than you can make sense of. The single worst country in the world for this is India, where two and a half million people died prematurely from the effects of pollution that were separated out from all the other things that could have killed them. In order to focus on this, and as Dr. Landragan says, it is interesting that pollution having these devastating effects has not gotten the kind of attention that AIDS or that climate change and other problems have gotten. And he wanted to rectify all of that. In the top 10 countries alongside of India are also included China, the United States and Russia. In other words, this is a catastrophe that affects underdeveloped so called countries and developed countries. It has to do with a disinterest in checking whether industries, because that's where most of this pollution comes from, industries that dump chemicals into the air or the water that pollute those crucial parts of our lives. We don't monitor what those industries do in, in the way of pollution adequately. In many countries, they don't monitor them at all. And even where they do, it's been recent and it is spotty. And governments, for example, like those of Mr. Trump and the Republicans in the United States and conservatives in most part of the world, are reluctant, slow and spotty in making sure that when you calculate whether a company is serving the community or not, you include not just whether it's profitable, but what it is doing to the environment. A company that's profitable but killing children in its environment is a company that ought to be questioned, investigated, and probably stopped because the net negative impact it has on the society in which it functions is greater than the profit it makes for a relatively few people, after all, and even more important than the jobs it creates. Pollution is a serious economic problem in the world and it needs our attention. Our thanks then to Dr. Landrigan and his colleagues for bringing this to our attention. Well, we've come to the end of the first half of economic Update for for today. It's been my pleasure to assemble these insights, to present them to you and to urge you, as we always do, to partner with us, to find ways of sharing what may have come across, I hope, in this program with other people. Because if you talk about these things with others, you extend the reach and the effectiveness of what we are trying to do. It's a way of partnering with, that we invite, that we welcome, that we encourage. It's a way for us and you to work together, which is what this project is all about. Stay with us. We will be right back after a short interlude. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update as we are beginning the month of November. As always, we will have as our guest Dr. Harriet Fraad, who will discuss with me a variety of issues that deal with the intersection between economics and psychology. Dr. Fraad is a practicing mental health counselor in New York City. Her practice includes hypnotherapy and she also writes a great deal in various publications for the blog on democracyatwork.in fox and for her own website, harrietfraud.com and the fraud is spelled F R A A D. It is really my pleasure to welcome Dr. Frad to economic Update. Thank you very much.
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Glad to be here.
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Okay. We're going to talk today, as we arranged, about the economics and the psychology of sex work. Of sex work, which we mean the providing of sexual pleasures, sexual services, by one person to another. And I want to start off because this is a controversial topic, to say the least, by asking you how you think about this widespread phenomena that has existed, as everyone tells us, for thousands of years, in which members of both sexes, but it's particularly women, make a decision, sometimes forced on them, sometimes not to sell sexual services basically to make a living. A lot of energy, time and intensity have been spent over the years to raise this as a moral issue. Is it ethical? Is it religiously allowable? Is it morally right or wrong for this to happen? How do you as a psychologist react to this topic, let's call it?
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Well, as a mental health worker, I react to the hypocrisy that this morality represents in a society in which young people without education and help from their families have very few ways of making a living and prostitution is one of the few ways that are available. So I wouldn't want to discuss morality outside of that social context. And this is certainly an apt time to be discussing it as the seats of power, seats being two meanings at the same time, whether they are the government, with ex President George Bush reaching around and grabbing people's behinds at 94 years old from his wheelchair or or the Sacramento legislature, the Albany legislature, or the restaurant business or Hollywood and Weinstein's ilk or anywhere else. The rampant sex abuse from the keepers of morality or the church, I should point out, is revealed as women Empowered by the realization that we don't have to tolerate this to get ahead, are speaking up and speaking out. And so it is time to talk about the hypocrisy around prostitution and the ostensible morality of outlawing sex work and considering it a moral, personal sin in a context in which economics has such a powerful force on young people.
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Let me draw you out a bit more on this. I've always been struck by. By the moral condemnation of selling sexual services and how it has gone together with the selling of sexual services. It doesn't seem to have made a great deal of difference. It's sort of the protesting too much, the noisy condemnation which is often revealed to come from the same people who are patronizing the very market for these services themselves constantly. We even seem to be a society that enjoys exposing this hypocrisy. Tell me. And continuing it and continuing it. It strikes me, how do you understand this combination of denouncing it, condemning it, and keeping it forever going at the same time?
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B
Well, it's classic hypocrisy. The state in the United States that has the biggest porn use and there are a lot of competitors in porn use, is Utah, the Mormon state. Practically a theocratic state, because the more you repress sexuality, the more people are ashamed of their needs, the more they.
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Go underground to satisfy them.
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To satisfy them, and the more ashamed they are of those needs. Which is why the life expectancy of an American prostitute is 34 years old. Because people are so guilty about their needs. Men are often unhappy with their needs, period. But their need for sex that they kill the prostitute after using her. So that we have a troubled hypocritical morality. But really where I want to go is a different basis for morality. I want to look at not the morality of sex work, because sex work is everywhere. Whether it's people showing their all sexy and young in their bathing suits, drinking Coca Cola or Peroni beer or whatever, or women drooping themselves over a car to sell it. It's everywhere. And porno is everywhere. But what there is, is there's several different ways to do sex work. Some are grossly immoral and some are not. And these are economic ways of doing sex work.
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A
So we're going to explore then less this question of the morality of selling or not selling, but knowing that it has not stopped the selling indeed goes together with it. What you're saying is you want to change the focus to look at how the sex work industry is organized, how it works, and look at what the moral questions are about that. But before we do that, that's fine. I want to ask you or challenge you a little bit. Your comments are about women that are driven by need. The implication being poor people. And it includes men, since we know that that also happens.
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Needy people.
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Needy people.
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People who need money.
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Right. But it turns out these are not to be understood as the poor. You yourself, on earlier programs have talked about this phenomena of the sugar babies.
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B
Absolutely.
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A
Could you remind us and tell us, is that also a kind of selling of sexual services?
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Yes, but what it. I would like to hold that question until a little later when we talk about the different kinds of sex work. Because the first one I want to talk about is an economic system called slavery. People all over the world apply for jobs, young women particularly, and are supposedly found jobs. And then they come for the job and they're sexually enslaved. And that is a very immoral thing to do. Because their work, the proceeds of their work, the conditions of their lives. The conditions of their work are controlled by somebody else who usually makes money off of them or just uses them for their personal pleasure. But they have no say in their lives. They have no say over their income.
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I think the word that you're looking for that may help here in economics is exploitation. In other words, the slave, whether it's for prostitution or any other business, is a person who produces a product or a service that is sold for money. And the money that's drawn in, earned, if you like, is much larger than whatever is given to that person for his or her own maintenance. The difference between what is sold and the revenue gotten and what is given to the person who does the work is the profit or the surplus. And the slave master takes that for himself.
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B
That's right. But so does a lot of the businessman. So I want to keep them separate. Because slavery can also be accomplished for personal use. Women can be captured as they have been in various news stories and used where they have no control over anything. Not only their sexual services, but any other things in their lives. And then.
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A
So you're saying, and that is super.
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Exploitation in a classic sense of. If we ask who is producing a service, who gets the benefit of the service, who gets. If there are money involved, the money of the service, who gets to distribute it, that service? Those are crucial questions. And I am saying the slavery class process in which women and some men are used is the most immoral because it is the most exploitative. And then the second most.
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And you're saying that there's a portion of the sex work industry that is organized in this slavery way.
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B
Absolutely. The brothels all over New York and any other big sex city and any football team are often peopled by sex slaves.
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Okay.
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And then so it's not just a phenomenon from overseas, although some of the people are from overseas. You also then have what I would call a feudal way of organizing things because love and fidelity are part of it. But the distribution of the sexual labor is in the hands of the feudal lord. Now, it could be a husband in a traditional marriage. We have to remember that it wasn't till 2005 that marital rape was forbidden in every state in the union. So it's recent that women have sexuality doesn't belong to their husbands to be used as at will. It's also the pimp who gets a prostitute to love him and puts her on the corner and takes the proceeds. And just as in feudalism, the feudal serf swore love and faithfulness to his lord. Lord, and the lord did the same. The conditions of enforcing it were all in the hands of the feudal lord, and they used to be in the hands of the husband, where battery was allowed. You could beat up your wife, you could rape your wife. The feminist movement, working very hard, changed the laws on those things. But in the traditional marriage of US history, before 2005, women's sexuality belonged to their marriage partners. And. And also, of course, pimps took over their prostitute girlfriends, end quote. Sexuality enforced by them.
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A
And there again, I think it would be fair to say that if the sexual services were sold by the pimp or whoever was in that relationship with the woman, in this case, in the most cases, then what that was sold for was much more than what was given or paid or distributed to the worker. To the worker. And there's the exploitation that the worker produces, more revenue value, if you like, than what they themselves get. And that difference is taken by the master in the slave relationship and the lord in the feudal personal relationship as it is structured.
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B
And that is where my morality is that you don't rip people off.
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A
So it's a different matter from the morality of whether it's moral to sell or not sell. You're really focusing on the morality of how it's organized, this very process of producing sexual services.
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B
Because the other morality is hypocritical to even raise as an issue in a society in which young people have so few alternatives, particularly uneducated young people. There are ways that are not exploitative.
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A
But before we get to those, is there a capitalist way of organizing sexual services?
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B
Very important.
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A
That is not Slavery, that it's not feudal, but is literally like a capitalist business with an employer, an employee, and all of that.
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B
In the glorious state of Nevada, it's even a legal business. But there are businesses all over that are not legal, in which an owner in Nevada, a board of directors, where the board of directors decides how much is going to be charged, how much is going to be paid to the sex workers, and how much is going to be invested in upkeep and creating novelties at the brothel. There are also smaller individual brothels where the brothel owner decides just those questions, how much to pay.
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A
That's a wage like any other worker.
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B
That's a wage in which profit is made because people are not given what they're worth, which is the basis of most wages, in fact, all capitalist wages. You have to make more than you actually give to somebody, or else you're not a good capitalist. Even though you might be a nice person, you're not a good capitalist. So that too is immoral and exploitative.
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A
And we have basically all three of these coexisting. We have examples, say, in the United States, but in other countries too, we have the selling of sexual services, the production of those services done in a slave form, in a feudal form, and in a capitalist form. And they can coexist in the same community?
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B
Absolutely.
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A
Okay. Are there ways so you condemn that for the exploitation of that worker in that activity? If it's organized as a slave or a feudal or a capitalist, Are there ways that sexual services are produced that are not exploitative? And tell us about those.
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B
Yes, that's what I wanted to proceed to. But I think the capitalist is, of course, very important, since we live in a capitalist country. But there's a very interesting form which is expanding, and that is what I would call the independent form, where a woman or a man, him or herself decides to open a business to be a sex worker and decide what to charge, how much to keep, how much to invest, and so on.
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In other words, self employed.
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B
Self employed people making all those decisions themselves, which I do not see as immoral. A huge new development in sex work, which is a development that is not restricted to poor people at all, is the sugar industry.
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The sugar.
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It's called the sugar industry.
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A
Oh, just the sugar industry. Okay.
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And where sugar babies, young, attractive women, the majority of whom are in graduate school or college with their outrageous tuitions. These are young people who don't have the money for tuition or whose parents don't have it and who don't want to take loans that Will create debt servitude for on average 20 years. Find a Within the sugar websites, they find a sugar daddy for whom they provide all sorts of services, sexual services often, but also accompanying this man to events where he can show that he has a young, attractive, smart lady on his arm, showing him around the city, being there with him, sort of a girlfriend experience, plus or minus. But they negotiate the terms as equals.
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A
And they have a contract.
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B
And they have a contract. However, as soon as they make the contract, the contract is not mentioned for the sake of the sugar daddy's delusion that this is a voluntary relationship that doesn't involve purchase of somebody else's time and sexual energy and emotional energy. The main site is called Sugar Baby University so that our listeners can get on that site and see what it's about where people meet one another and work out the terms. That is growing. NYU in our city of New York, very expensive private university, has an enormous number of sugar babies. And the state has not come down on that. It's another sexual term I didn't mean. But the state has not repressed that development. So that is probably a majority form that is well organized, the sugar industry. Then there is another form which is.
- [45:21]
A
A form that's also not exploitative, a.
- [45:24]
B
Completely non exploitative form, and that is a sex workers co. Op. They are all over the world, the United States, I don't know of one at the moment. There have been some and then they also disappeared and dissolved.
- [45:43]
A
How does this work?
- [45:45]
B
Well, I want to show how it works by talking about the biggest sex workers co op in the world, which is the USHA cooperative, which exists. Its primary location is in Calcutta.
- [46:03]
A
In India.
- [46:03]
B
In India, but it also has branches all over Asia now and it has at least 20,000 members. They all decide what their locations, decide.
- [46:17]
A
What they will charge, but they decide this as a collective.
- [46:20]
B
As a collective location.
- [46:23]
A
So one, one person, one vote making the decision.
- [46:25]
B
That's right. All those members decide what they will produce, what to charge and how to distribute their income. Some share, they have to buy shares into the co op the way they do in any co op. But because of this, sex work in Calcutta has been transformed. They have their own bank, so they're no longer subject to loan sharks who practically own them because of the. The interest on their loans. They produce loans, they produce other banking services. And now for the first time there, well, since 1995 when it started, they have not only the bank, but they have loans to enable them to educate their children, to enable them to buy homes to enable them to buy businesses. And they are a legitimate business force. Whereas before an ordinary bank, in all their hypocrisy, wouldn't loan to a sex worker and they relied on loan sharks. And these co ops have grown in spite of the loan sharks hiring people to beat them up. When they joined, they've kept it up and now they have their own security force. They produce their own sanitary napkins, they sell wholesale their own forms of birth control, they have their own health clinic, they have their own social spaces where women can hang out and discuss their work or anything else they want to. They have savings plans so that people can retire and get a pension, which are unheard of without a sex workers co op. It shows the collective power and the morality of connection and celebration of workers who entered this by overwhelmingly, involuntarily. Some felt because of the rampant sexual harassment at their work, they might as well be sex workers and be paid well than be constantly assaulted on the job where they weren't paid well. Indian women, by the way, are coming out en masse against that, against sexual harassment.
- [48:40]
A
I'm struck because you're. Your focus today is on the morality, or lack of it, in how the sex work is organized and not, as we discussed at the beginning, on the morality of the fact that it's sold for money or not sold for money. This kind of thinking could be applied then to everything. Of course it could. Not just sex services, but the production of any goods and services. It's a separate matter whether you like or don't like that it's sold for money for a hamburger or sewing a shirt or building a software versus asking the question, are there moral dimensions to how it's organized? So it seems to me we've been talking about a controversial commodity. But your logic, your. Your passion applies equally to the production of any good or service across the board. Across the board.
- [49:40]
B
Because exploitation is the immorality that I'm addressing. Not one kind of work or another kind of work. And that's very, very important because religion has made sexuality outside of their sanctified marriage, the sin and created a lot of guilt and upset. For example, in the islands of the South Pacific, there was no rape till the missionaries got there and made people ashamed and sex a tense, shameful activity. I am not discussing whether sex itself is moral or immoral. I think it's immoral to coerce people to the point where they have no options when they're young and they don't have an education. That is the morality I'm looking at now, and I'm looking at it across the board and applying it to the sex trade, because sex work has been particularly religiously, morally condemned and it is condemned in India, although in Calcutta the 20,000 sex workers at the USHA cooperative have turned that around and are businesswomen now.
- [51:03]
A
So in a sense, to go back to the very beginning of our conversation, there's a double hypocrisy about all this. There's first, the hypocrisy of denouncing the selling of sexual services by people who seem to need to denounce it, although not ever to really get together to prevent it or to stop it. So it continues. There's the hypocrisy of not facing that and asking why and being self critical about your own contribution to that. But the second hypocrisy is involved in talking only about the sale as though it was the moral question and never talking about how the work itself is organized, what that means to the people involved. And you've shown quite clearly that there are just as important urgent moral and ethical questions about how that's done as there are about the act of selling it. And it's hypocritical to think morality applies only to whether we buy or sell it and not to how we organize the doing of it.
- [52:06]
B
Exactly. Because what I'm talking about is also psychological. The self respect of someone, the sense of control over her or his life, which is produced by independent and particularly cooperative sex work, is a world away from the shame and condemnation of people pushed into sex work because they desperately need funds, either because they don't want to be indebted for the rest of their lives like sugar babies at universities, which are the the lion's share, or whether they are independent entrepreneurs because they need the money, often because they have a child and there is no support for children. So it is gross hypocrisy to condemn someone for making an adjustment and a decision to be a sex worker on the basis of their economic need to support a child, to have a home, to have an education, to not be indebted for life.
- [53:13]
A
But it also seems to me a remarkable psychological difference.
- [53:19]
B
Absolutely.
- [53:19]
A
How the job situation affects you is going to be shaped by how it's organized. If you are a slave, if you are a serf, if you are an employee who is being exploited by somebody else working under the control and direction of somebody else, that the impact on you psychologically is very different from if you're your own boss, if you're part of a collective where you're equal to everybody else in making the decisions. These are radically different. I'm reminded of my own experience as a college teacher when I learned over the years that the most important thing my students wanted in their own future was to be my own boss was more important to them than the salary and many other things. You could see the hunger for something coming out of an American capitalist situation. But you're saying it's really more general.
- [54:14]
B
I'm saying that the whole culture in America that says be yourself, do your own thing, in other words, feel empowered is sapped by having someone else make the decision of what to give you while they're ripping you off, and that that sense of self is expanded and emboldened when you are part of a collective or you're an individual setting the terms of your own labor.
- [54:43]
A
I have to say the usual, which is we've run out of time. And we will come back and visit these questions with you at the beginning of next month when we see you early in December.
- [54:54]
B
Good.
- [54:55]
A
Thank you very much for being with us. Thank you. And I want to thank all of you for joining us. I hope you have found this as interesting as I did. And I want to remind you to be a partner with us and to thank truthout.org, that remarkable independent source of news and analysis that has been our partner for years and provides us the model for asking you to share what you've seen, share what you've learned with as many folks as you can. Use our websites to that end, partner with us. I look forward, as always, to speaking with you again next week.