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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. I'm your host, Richard Wolff, and the theme for today for today's program is why working people are upset in the United States. And there are a number of ways to get at that. I want to start by reminding people that upset takes a time. It builds. It often builds slowly. And the longer it builds, and often the slower it takes to build up, the bigger the crisis when it hits teachers. Public school teachers have been really badly treated in the United States for decades. In many parts of the country, poor wages, virtually no wage increase, deteriorating support, deteriorating conditions, larger class sizes, more students to take care of. And finally, they've had it. They got angry enough, determined enough. And starting last year in West Virginia, public school teachers began the fight back. And it has only grown since then. And my purpose in mentioning it is to welcome the public school teachers of Oakland who are doing an enormous service by bringing into a large city that badly needs it a movement to do something for the future generation. The children going to school in public school. Today, our hats are off to the public school teachers striking Oakland and making a difference. I want to turn next to a hidden hurt being suffered by working people, and that has to do with the pension crisis in the United States. Working people in general have two kinds of pensions. One, Social Security provided by the government. The other one, private employer pension systems. Those are systems where money is taken out of your salary or your wage every week. If you're lucky enough to have such a program, sometimes it's matched more or less by your employer and put aside so that you have something for your older age. And let's remember, it's not just honoring people who have given a lifetime of work to our society that a pension serves. It's also the children of those people. Because if there isn't a pension for the older ones, they really have nowhere else to turn but but to their children. So it becomes then an economic concern for the entire family, not just the older folks, everybody who's connected to them. Here's the raw fact that we have to analyze. And here I'm helped by Professor Teresa Gilarducci, a professor at the New School University in New York City, where I also teach. She's done wonderful work on the pension crisis of the United States, and I'm relying on her work. In 2000, at the beginning of this century, over 50% of American workers had some kind of coverage. It's called pension coverage. That is, they had some sort of private employer pension that they could rely on when they retire. As of 2016, the latest data that Professor Gilarducci had access to, it was down to slightly over 35%. That is an enormous drop, a drop roughly of a third of the people covered lost their coverage. Let me give you some of the statistics she's developed that dramatize all of this. People who near retirement are facing the following Poverty rates for people in America double when they get to retirement because of this falling retirement pension crisis in America. You don't hear it, you don't see it, but it is going on underneath. I'm gonna come back to that in a minute. Here's another In New York City, it is very hard to save money. It's very expensive. Half of coupled older households, that's households of older people with at least one nearing retirement have less than $60,000 in total assets they can rely on when they retire. You can't possibly live in New York City in retirement on $60,000 spread over however many years you're going to live. Here's an even more amazing Half of single older workers and single older workers is a growing category have less than $5,000 saved. In other words, pensions are the difference between poverty and a decent life for millions of our fellow citizens. Here's what I want to we have an example of something similar in our crazy political system. Politicians are afraid to tax corporations and the rich because then they won't donate money to their candidates candidacies in their campaigns and give money instead to their enemies, pushing them out of office so they dare not tax corporations and the rich. And they've been shifting the burden of taxes onto the mass of people as a result. And it's gotten so bad that the mass of people now will not tolerate more taxes. So they have to come up with a way of handling this situation. And here's what they do. In cities and states across the country, they quote unquote defer maintenance. Here's what that they don't keep up the sewer systems, they don't keep up the bridge systems. They don't keep up the road systems. They avoid spending money so they don't have to tax either the rich who they're afraid of and the mass of people who they're afraid of in a different way. The rich won't give them money and the mass of people won't give them votes. And the combination means what? We're not taking care of our infrastructure. So we are having our roads and bridges and harbors falling apart and our sewers and our water mains and all the rest of it, as you know. Well, you're doing that now to old people. You're doing that by taking away pensions, which is going to come back and blow up in your face, just like our falling infrastructure is hobbling our economy and hobbling life for so many. It is an irrational way for a capitalist system to cope with its problems, and we're living in it. My next update has to do with a bank in France. It's the UBS Bank, a very large bank in the world that was forced by the French government to pay a fine of over $5 billion. And here's what the fine was levied for helping wealthy French people evade their taxes. Let me say that you punish the bank for systematically soliciting wealthy customers, corporations and individuals to facilitate, hiding or otherwise manipulating their assets to evade taxes. This is done in every capitalist country. It is certainly done in the United States. The French know about it. They've been doing it for a long time. But they at least occasionally go and punish some of the folks facilitating. It would be interesting if the United States and other countries suffering from the same problem did even a portion of what the French have done. The next update is about black olives. What do I mean? The Trump administration has ordered a tariff, 25.5% on black olives from Spain because they were, quote, unquote, dumping them at a low price on the market and another 27% on top of that because the Spanish government provided certain subsidies to olive growers. The United States subsidizes all kinds of agricultural activities in this country. Sugar, corn, wheat, soyou name it. So doing this subsidy is in no way an unusual act, but it was a good excuse. It was wonderful for the black olive companies in California. They're the ones who complained that they couldn't compete with those Spanish black olives. So Mr. Trump, to help them, and who knows, maybe get some political support in a state where he doesn't have much, he went to work. It's devastating for the Spanish black olive producers and for the businesses that depend on it. The Europeans are outraged. They claim this is purely helping your own businesses at the expense of the world. That's what the World Trade Organization, the wto, was organized to prevent. Now, sure, everybody does a little bit of rigging the market, but the whole purpose of the World Trade Organization was not to eliminate it. Nobody believes you can do that, but to keep it within bounds. The idea being, if we don't do that, we're all going to be Competing to help our own at the expense of everybody else. And when the dust settles, everybody's hurt. It's like that old an eye for an eye makes everybody blind. It's not a real good system. Well, what's going to happen? The World Trade Organization is going to have to make a decision. But that's hard to do because the judges on the World Trade Organization require nominations from the United states states, which Mr. Trump isn't doing. This is looking to the rest of the world, not, of course, to Americans who don't get much word about this. This is looking like a ploy. This is looking like the United States throwing away all the world trade arrangements that we've had for decades to avoid all going blind economically. And why would the United States under Mr. Trump be doing it? Because working according to the rules of the system that was developed to cope with this craziness is not helping the United States enough. The United States is going to go it alone. The United States is in trouble. Otherwise you wouldn't do this. That's the lesson here. It's not about Spain, it's not about black olives. It's really about the United States, desperate in its economic difficulties, trying to re rig the world system to its own advantage. It's too little and it's too late. And the rest of the world is not sitting by and waiting for this to happen. Relations between the United States and Europe are at a very low ebb and going down. My last update that we'll have time for has to do with a wonderful annual product called the State of Working America Wages. This is for 2018, produced by the EPI in Washington, D.C. the Economic Policy Institute. They study wages and what's happening to them. And one of their conclusions was so startling to me that I wanted to share it with you. Over the last 18 years, that is the 18 years of this century, we're now living in the 21st. Wages for people who've had some college, didn't finish college, but had a little went up. Absolutely not at all. That is, if you adjust the wages people with some college got for the prices they had to pay their real wage. That's what we call that went nowhere. They're not earning one bit more in 2018 in terms of what they can afford than they earned in the year 2000. The best off were those who've had graduate, that is, they not only got a BA degree, but got some graduate training. And their wages only went up 0.6%, barely over half a percent a year. That's very little. When you count in statistical errors, when you count in the changing lives we lead, that's stagnant wages. And everybody else, people with no high school education, people with high school but no college, fell somewhere in between 0 and 0.6. That is an awful record of the last 20 years roughly of wages in America. They're stagnant. And over the same period, the productivity of all those workers went up. Let's be real clear what that means. The productivity measures how much the worker provides to his or her employer and the wage represents how much the employer gives you for working. If what the employer gave you is stagnant, hasn't gone anywhere in 18 years, which is what we just said, but the productivity has gone up 1, 2, 3% depending on where you work. What you're doing is giving more and more to the employer and getting nothing extra for yourself. All of the increased productivity, the hard work you do, the education you bring, the technical skill you've learned, all of that makes him the employer wealthier and does for you squat, nothing. That's a system that isn't working for the mass of working people. And that's what we document all on this program. We've come to the end of the first half of Economic Update. I want to remind you, please, of the importance of subscribing to our YouTube channel, YouTube Economic Update. It's a big service to us. It takes an instant of your time and no money at all. We also want you to make use of our websites, rdwolff with two F's com and Democracy at Work. That's all one word, Democracy at Work. You can reach us through those websites. You can follow us there by a click of your mouse on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. And of course, toward the end of each of these, I want to thank our Patreon community for their support and their encouragement. You are very important to us. Thank you. We will be right back. Welcome back friends, to the second half of Economic Update. Well, I couldn't be more happy today to have someone who's going to talk with us about the labor movement here in the United States and even more to talk about reviving it, renewing it, making it be perhaps again what it once was and what so many look to have it be again. My guest is Larry Williams Jr. He is the President Emeritus and a founder of the Progressive Workers Union. It is a Washington D.C. based union for non profit employees that recently signed a landmark contract with the Sierra Club. As you know, America's largest environmental organization. Larry Williams experiences in US Organized labor movement led him to be a co founder of Unionbase.org, a new and secure social networking and educational platform for a new generation of union workers and union leaders. Larry, thank you very much for joining us.