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- [00:00]
Richard Wolff
Sam. Saint gonna change. Welcome friends, to edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the jobs, the incomes, the debts, the economic futures of our children, all those sorts of issues. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life and currently I teach at the New School University in New York City. This program is something that basically emerges from a project. The project is called Democracy at Work, and I want to begin today's program by urging you to take a look at the websites we maintain about this project. There you will find a complete archive of all these radio shows and a great deal of other material. You can sign up for a free newsletter. You can follow us by clicking on an icon both on Facebook and Twitter. See the events where I'm speaking around the country. It's really a repository of information for you, available 247 and without any charge whatsoever. Actually, we maintain two websites that do this. The first one is democracyatwork.info. that's all one word, democracyatwork.info and the second website is rdwolf with two Fs. Rdwolf.com Please make use of these websites. That's why we maintain them. Let me jump right in. We're going to have an interesting interview in the second half of this program with Professor Kathy Mulder, whom I will introduce a little later. But we're going to spend the first half, as we often do, on a series of recent events since last week that I believe merit your attention and your thought. I begin with the sad, the tragic travails of the island of Puerto Rico and the three and a half million people who live there and who have reached the end of a kind of economic disaster road that they should never have embarked upon, that was pushed on them in large part by the United States government and, and by the profit driven decisions of corporations to make use of tax advantages in Puerto Rico and low wages in Puerto Rico. Anyway, having done what most state governments around the United States have done, namely organize their economies to benefit corporations and borrow the public's money to do it, they ran out of options. In a way, the state of Illinois is the domestic mainland equivalent of what has happened in Puerto Rico. But Puerto Rico is a separate place, has a unique history in American society and in American history. So when it reached the end of the line, as announced by its governor this last summer, when it could no longer contemplate paying off the 72 to 75 billion dollars worth of, of accumulated debts and still provide basic services to the 3.5 million folks who live there and who already get lower incomes than anywhere else in the United States and suffer accordingly. They turned to the United States Congress, which they had to do to try to get some help, to try to get some relief. And the Congress has been wrestling with this question, but not in a successful way, and even more important, in a way that teaches us about what the priorities are of the United States government, what its dependence and subservience to big corporations makes them do in a way that few other things do. So that's what I want to bring to your attention. I'm reading now from the summary of the new bill proposed particularly by the Republican Party. But please note that the language indicates the basic agreement of both the Republican and the Democratic parties on what needs to be done in relationship to Puerto Rico's crisis. I'm now quoting from the summary offered by that bill. It's a summary of what's in the bill, quote, consistent with the views of Congress and the administration. By the way, they mean the Obama administration, consistent with the views of Congress and the administration that there will be no bailout of Puerto Rico and the full faith and credit of the United States is not pledged for the payment of debt obligations issued by Puerto Rico. Why did I read that to you? Because what they're saying, the Republicans and the Democrats, is they will not in principle consider a bailout of Puerto Rico. These are the same political parties and basically the same members of the House and the senate, who in 2009 agreed with virtually no discussion on a massive bailout of the biggest banks in the United States, of the aig, the largest insurance company in the world, and of General Motors, one of the largest automobile companies in the world. There was no problem in bailing them out, these huge private corporations. There was no hesitancy. And the full faith and credit of the United States was pledged on like there was no tomorrow. Without any hesitation. What was done for the biggest banks, the big insurance company, the big automobile company and others suddenly, as a matter of principle cannot be done for three and a half poor people in Puerto Rico, let alone the many millions of Americans trapped in, in states and cities that have done the same kind of economic development that Puerto Rico did. It's a sign of who gets the benefits. And let's make no mistake. The bailout of the big banks of aig, of General Motors was done with the money provided by the public in the United States, the very public who in principle will not be bailed out by the elected officials who bailed out Those large corporations. I can't think of a comment that I could come up with that is starker than that reality. Next update Inequality. The Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, whom you can follow on the Internet by looking@ips.org came out with a report recently on wealth in the United States. And while the results are not new and different from what we have heard before, they are nicely collected, stark. And I wanted to go over them with you as a prelude to talking with you about about the state of Wisconsin where two of the wealthiest Americans live and make their money in a way that once again reveals more about American capitalism than all the words I could string together to tell the story. Well, let's first see where does IPS get its numbers from? Well, it relies on Forbes magazine. Forbes magazine, a business magazine in this country for many years, keeps track of what it calls the Forbes 400, the 400 richest Americans by personal wealth. And they keep track of how the wealth of these 400 people compares to the wealth of the other 330 million million people who make up the population roughly of the United States today. Here's what they the 20 wealthiest people, the 20 individuals whose personal property makes them the richest 20 in America together own more wealth ready than the bottom half of the United States. That's right, the 20 wealthiest people have in together to total among them more wealth than 160 or more million Americans. You have to go back to ancient Egypt, to the pharaohs, when you have millions of people barely surviving slaves and so on, and a handful of people who build pyramids to themselves to get something like this. The fruit of 200 years of capitalism may be progress technologically, but it is the reverse of progress in terms of equality. Economically speaking, this is a system, modern capitalism, that can boast of taking us back to the ancient inequalities which we thought as a people, as a species, we had left behind. Now, the two examples. One is John Maynard, because it's important to put name and address on these wealthiest people who sit in this bizarre circumstance. John Menard, M E N A R D He is the richest person in the state of Wisconsin. His wealth, according to Forbes, $9.2 billion. If he invests that at 5%. And by the way, people this wealthy give their money usually to a hedge fund which delivers much better than 5% rate of return. But let's assume, to be modest, that he only gets 5% on his 9.2 billion. That works out ready. That works out to $460 million a year. He doesn't have to work for that. That's what he gets from the investments he makes. That works out to better. Well, better than $1 million a day, every day, seven days a week, whether he works that day or not. That's why John Maynard probably doesn't play the lottery. Why buy a ticket to get a million dollars when you're going to get it every day anyway? Wow. What have we produced? Well, it's more interesting because Mr. Maynard got in the papers recently when his company, which is a hardware and homewares chain of stores in Wisconsin and the upper Midwest, when it got into trouble because it had required all of its managers to sign an agreement. Here's what the agreement. If a manager's department was unionized by any union at any time for any reason, the manager's salary would be immediately reduced by 60%. Every manager hired by Menards had to sign as part of his or her personal employment agreement that Appendix J in their agreement. That gives an incentive to a manager to do all kinds of things to prevent something happening that the workers might want, that the workers might vote for, but that would cut his or her salary by 60%. That's how Mr. Maynard became wealthy, by preventing unions, by putting unspeakable pressure on managers to do everything imaginable. Wow. The wealth of the few at the expense of the union, the union rights, the job situations of everybody else. The second wealthiest man in Wisconsin, Herbert Kohler, K O H L E R Kohler, you might know, is the producer of toilets, among other bathroom fixtures. The toilet man has $7.4 billion. You may think going to the toilet is a nothing experience, but not for Mr. Kohler. He's become a billionaire by your doing. Well, I won't go there. Mr. Kohler is also in the news because of the activities of his company. On November 15th of this year, 2,300 United Auto Workers went out on strike at the Kohler factories in Wisconsin. Why? Because in 2010 they signed an agreement, because of the dire economic conditions of 2010, to help out the Kohler company by accepting a five year wage freeze. That means the workers of Kohler have not gotten any increase in their pay since 2009 and they wanted to catch up, at least to a significant degree, which with their new contract now. No, said Kohler, we're not going to do that. I could go into more, but the story is the same. The wealth of Mr. Kohler is predicated on squeezing and undermining the wealth of all the other people who make the Kohler industry what it is if that strikes you as unfair. Right on. You're getting it. That's the way capitalism works. And behind the glitzy numbers of the Forbes 400, these are the realities that should not ever escape your understanding of how that wealth is possible. My next story is about a bill that had been introduced into the Senate and a companion bill was introduced into the House of Representatives this very last week. And I want to alert you to it. And my thanks go to the alliance for Retired Americans in Washington, D.C. which sent out this alert. On the Senate side, this bill was introduced. And for those of you that are interested, it's bill number S to 2251 was introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and on the House of Representatives side last Wednesday. The bill There is called HR4144, introduced by Representative Tammy Duckworth, Democrat of Illinois. And here's what their bills propose. That Social Security recipients and Veterans get a 3.9% increase in their money that they get from the government in 2016. That it go up in 2016 by 3.9% more than they got in 2015. Why is this an interesting bill? Because a few weeks ago Social Security announced that by virtue of its calculations of what people need, there would be absolutely no increase in 2016 for Social Security recipients, even though the cost of many of the things that Social Security recipients rely on has gone up. This horrified Senator Warren and Congresswoman Duckworth. They did a little calculation which I want to report to you because it was creative on their part. They looked at the growth in income of the 350 top CEOs in the United States, the chief executive officers of the 350 largest American corporations. These are already people who get between 250 and 350 times what a typical Social Security recipient gets. So they are already much, much, much, much, much. Let me add one more much richer than Social Security representatives. And guess what? They found that the average increase between 2015 and what they're scheduled to get in 2016 of the 350 richest CEOs is, you guessed it, 3.9%. They concluded that if you freeze the income growth over the next year for Social Security representatives, recipients, excuse me, but you raise the already super rich incomes of the top 350 executives, you make the gap between rich and poor bigger, don't you? Well, the answer is yes, unless arithmetic has changed. So they had the modest proposal. If we're going to let the richest people get a 3.9% increase, on what conceivable basis would you deny that to the Social Security recipients who need it and the veterans who need it. So they've proposed to increase Social Security outlays and veterans outlays by the same 3.9%. Good for them. But as they themselves said to the press when asked about it, given who controls the Congress on both houses, do not hold your breath for the prospects of these two bills. Let me turn now to a question. It's actually the amalgam of a set of questions that you have all been sending to me through our websites, which by the way, is another way to to make use of our two websites, rdwolff, with two Fs.com and democracyatwork.info both of them provide you an easy way to communicate to us what you like and don't like about the program. Questions you'd like me to address, responses to whatever you see on our websites and also invitations for me to come speak in your area, local radio stations you can connect us to who might want to carry this program and so on. This question has to do with the gun controversy that keeps jumping into our consciousness because we live in the United States of America, where there are more gun violent assaults on people than in any other country on the face of this planet. And nobody's even close. What is it about the gun proliferation in the United States? Why is it that after the last both of the last explosive events, those in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and that one in San Bernardino, California, the sale of weapons and guns in large stores in America surged? What is going on? Well, I think there's an answer to that question I'd like to offer for your consideration and indeed to give you an example a few years ago, that's very similar to the answer I'm going to give in regard to guns. Guns in the United States, as you all know, are commodities. They are produced by corporations whose purpose is to make a profit off producing bullets, guns, and everything having to do with cleaning, maintaining, repairing, etc. The weapons, like all capitalist corporations, the gun producers, the weapon producers, the ammunition producers, are eager to find ways, through advertising, to get the people of the United States, and indeed in other countries too, to buy as many of the goods they sell as possible. Because that's how they maximize their profits, as all advertisers do. The advertisers working for the gun producers try to find ways to get people, wherever they are in their consciousness, in their ways of thinking, to imagine that they will be better off by buying whatever the client is who buys the advertising. How do you get people to buy guns, lots of them, to keep them in a closet or hanging on the back of their truck or wherever they store them. The answer is try to find a way to make them think that buying a gun is important, urgent, advantageous, a way to be safe, a way to be free. And they found it. They found it. They translate all of the problems and dangers of the United States, and they are many, into something you can try to persuade people they can protect themselves against by having guns in the closet. They latch onto the fear of people living in America. But because of the conditions here and the way people respond to them by accumulating weapons, that's a clever ploy. You know what that's like? That's like the manufacturers of soap bars of soap giving you an advertisement in which a 3/4 naked young lady standing in the shower, of course, because it's America behind frosted glass. So you don't see too clearly what it is that's being shown to you. And the words in the advertisement suggest if you buy the soap and use it properly, your sex life will improve dramatically and overnight. Well, we giggle when we see those advertisements because we mostly know what they're about. They're not about your sex life and they're not about your soap. They're really about trying to get you to buy and use something being produced by a profit making capitalist corporation which paid for the advertisement. And so it is with how we in the media and so on handle gun violence. It is carefully worked out to be a mechanism for getting you to buy more guns. Eight years ago, in fact, for the last 20 years, as Americans wages stopped going up. The banking industry did a version of this too. It said, you know, you want the American dream here, we'll lend you money because it's the only way you're going to get that dream. Your wages aren't going up anymore. And they used the anxiety of Americans who had promised the American dream to themselves, to their children as a way to sucker them into credit cards and student loans and car loans and mortgage loans and home equity loans. All of it the abuse of our psychology by advertisers to make profit for their clients. That's what's behind a lot of suffering and it certainly is behind the accumulation of guns. We've come to the end of the first half of this program. Not only do I want to thank you for staying with us and listening to us and hopefully through the websites, making use of what we do here, but we also want you to share what we do here. Take a portion of this program or all of this program there archived on our websites and share it with other people who might be interested in it. Builds the listenership and it makes you a partner with us of getting the message out. Finally, I want to ask you stay with us. We're going to have a very short interruption and then we're going to continue with what I think you will find a remarkable and exciting interview with the author of a new book you might want to take a look at as well. Stay with us. We'll be right back.
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Guest Speaker / Performer
No better version to me I could pretend to be tonight so deep in its will with the most familiar swine for reasons wretched and divine Sheep goes out of nowhere on the candle of the wild Laughing away through my feeble disguise Know what a version of me I would rather be tonight And Lord, she found me just in time Cause with my menu crisis all said and done I need to be youthfully felt Cause God, I never felt young.
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Richard Wolff
She'S.
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Guest Speaker / Performer
Gonna see me call me baby from her head to my head still on me Crazy soothy daily but yet she wouldn't care we'll steal Alexis be detectives right around picking up CL.
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Richard Wolff
Welcome back, friends, to the second half of Economic Update for today. The second half is devoted this time to an interview, and I want to introduce at the beginning the person that I will be interviewing and urge you to pay attention because this is one of the few experts now in the United States on going beyond capitalism through cooperative efforts by working people. And nothing, in my humble opinion, is more important for this country than moving more in that direction. My guest today is Dr. Kathy Mulder. She is an associate professor of economics at the John Jay College of the City University of New York. That's the public institution that educates how many people in New York City, I don't know, like hundreds of thousands of young people. It's probably one of the largest universities in the country, if not the largest. She received her doctorate in economics from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. She has written two books. The most recent one, released a matter of weeks ago, is called Transcending Capitalism Through Cooperative Processes and Practices. And that's the book she's talking about these days and that we're going to ask her about because we're so interested, as everyone who listens to this program knows, in precisely that how cooperative ways of owning and even more of operating enterprises is the wave of the future and a way out of the failures and decline that capitalism is now delivering to most people. Professor Mulder has an interesting history. She was a plumber for much of her life. No, no, sorry. Comes from a family of plumbers. But she herself was a communications worker. She also was the Broadway rep, the Broadway representative of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians in New York City, has been a labor educator and a labor activist at least since 1979, as well as being interested in the arts, which you're going to see when we talk about the London Symphony Orchestra, which, which is one of the cooperatively run enterprises that she examines in this book. So, Kathy, thank you so much for joining us. Professor Mulder has been a friend of mine for a long time, been on this program before, but now she has this new book and that's what we're going to talk about. So welcome.
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Dr. Kathy Mulder
Thank you very much.
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Richard Wolff
Let's begin.
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Dr. Kathy Mulder
Thanks for having me.
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Richard Wolff
You're very welcome. Let's begin by asking you about the title of your book. Transcending Capitalism is how it starts. Your title, what does that mean? What do you mean by it?
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Dr. Kathy Mulder
I don't like capitalism. I don't like the top down. I don't like Menards and Kohler's and the way they treat workers. And I get angry about those kind of things. So I believe in democracy and justice. I teach everything about democracy and justice. And the one place we don't have democracy and justice is in the workplace. We leave that at the door. So I've dedicated my life, most of it to, in one way or the other, to making sure that we are more democratic or at least we have more of a voice or we try to change things. And what this book is doing is we're looking at concrete case studies that have actually worked. One has failed, not because of their own problems, but because of external problems. But I just wanted to say that scale, everybody thinks, oh, a little cooperative scale is not an important factor in this. We can have a large institution and indeed, as you said, the Lendin Symphony Orchestra, which everybody should have on the top of their lips right now because they are the orchestra that puts out the music for Star wars. Okay. And as always, and they are the London, you know, that's what they do. So I found, you know, economics, everybody calls the dismal science. And especially when we're looking at all these problems that workers are having. Economics in this country is only good for those richest of the rich, those Kohler's and menards, owners and CEOs or whatever they are. You know, but you know, they, and we always, and even my colleagues are always it's dismal. It's a dismal science. It's called. And I wanted to write a happy book and Thus Colors, you know, it was happy and hopeful book that there are alternatives and they've been around. And I was sitting at a conference at one point or giving a talk on the Broadway musicians that I did previously in my first book. And somebody said, you need to look at the LSO, the London Symphony Orchestra. They've been around since 1904. They got ticked off. Four musicians got ticked off at their boss and said, we're out of here. You know, they came down with they were going to take away their income in ways that were egregious to them. And they said, screw it, we're out of here. And they left and started the London Symphony Orchestra. And they hire and fire all of their managers and whatever they need or even their conductors. They at one time fired Edgar Elgar, you know, of Pomp and Circumstance fame. Yeah. So I mean, you know, they're. They. So I. This book consists of four concrete case studies and then two other case studies. The Green Bay packers and the small Syracuse Credit Cooperative Credit Union, Federal Crop. Excuse me, Syracuse Federal Cooperative Credit Union in Syracuse, New York, that supports cooperatives and the like.
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Richard Wolff
Let me interrupt and.
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Dr. Kathy Mulder
Sure.
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Richard Wolff
Please make a point. The vast majority of capitalist enterprises that are formed go out of business so that an enterprise coming to an end, which happens among cooperative enterprises too, is not an argument, even though some have unscrupulously used it this way, but that there are some co ops that don't make it is not a sign of anything. In fact, the record of co op enterprises is less failure per number than of capitalist enterprises. And people shouldn't be dissuaded from their interest or their desire to learn about these things by imagining that their record of success and failure is some reason not to investigate them.
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Dr. Kathy Mulder
I don't know the exact numbers, but I would argue, you know, given anecdotal evidence, that cooperatives are more likely to succeed and stay successful except for external pressures and things that beyond their control that they are. They stay around longer because there's only one reason a capitalist venture is in business. Kohler is not in business to produce toilets. Kohler is in business to produce profits. That's it. They have the. But the London Symphony Orchestra, they're in business to produce music, something they love, something they embrace. It's their career, their avocation and, you know, the cultural norms and laws in the United States especially, you know, I'm going to come Back to the US with other firms, do not support cooperatives. And even our banking system do not support cooperative endeavors. But the American dream. I wanted to talk a little bit about that one is most people know that they're going to work for a capitalist. Right? They're going to go to work. But some want to own their own business. And rather than forming a cooperative with many people, they struggle and try to do it all by themselves and many fail. I think the statistics somewhere about 70% or the second thing can happen. Like the book is dedicated to my dad, you know, who owns a little plumbing company in Teaneck, New Jersey. And it's been in business and in its fourth generation since, for the last 80 years plus years. So it's successful. However, it's successful because these, my father, my grandfather, they all, they lived it, they worked it, they, they still no vacations when we were kids, no family time, no, you know, always working, always on their mind. My father is 80 years old this January and it's still on his mind. So, you know, it's just if there were other people that he could rely on that had just as much stake in it that he would not be in the position, it would have made life a little bit easier. Not that he doesn't have a great life. He does, but that's besides the point. So like I said, the London Symphony Orchestra is a cooperative in every sense of the word. However, there's no ownership there. Right. You don't have to own anything, but they run their own business. They do own some land that they have or they rent the pieces of the barbican. And they've also ensured their future. That's the difference with the London Symphony Orchestra. They're ensuring that they have audiences in the future by teaching young children at St. Luke's and other places about classical music and to come in and embrace them. And they are very much involved with the Gift Guild Hall School Correct. Of music. So they're the next generation of workers.
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Richard Wolff
Could I just draw you out? Because we're going to take, I want to take you through several examples that are in your book because I want the audience to get a feeling that there are varieties of worker co ops, that there are varieties and different degrees to which workers have taken over. So in the London Symphony, the musicians own and operate this business. It's theirs.
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Dr. Kathy Mulder
It's theirs.
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Richard Wolff
They make all the decisions. They hire and fire managers, conductors, everybody else. The workers are themselves in charge, Is that correct?
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Dr. Kathy Mulder
That is correct. They even hire their managers and financial planners and everything Else. Now, at first they used to do all that work themselves. I read all the archival business meetings. But it became a little onerous and they would rather focus their time on music rather than, you know, booking. In fact, that's one of the little unknown facts. They were booked on the Titanic. They changed their booking right before it.
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Richard Wolff
Yes, okay, so what's interesting also to me, if you have a comment on it, is I've been interested in classical music, for example, all my life. And I know had recordings of the London Symphony Orchestra. But here I am, an economist interested in these things. And until I read your book and talked to you about it, I didn't know that one of the major orchestras in the United. In the. I was about to say the United States. But one of the major orchestras in the world is a worker cooperative.
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Dr. Kathy Mulder
Not only them, but the other. There are five world class orchestras in England, four of which are cooperatives, the other three private.
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Richard Wolff
A total of seven.
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Dr. Kathy Mulder
No, there's five total. So there's the London Symphony Orchestra and then there's three others that are cooperatives. I did not investigate them in depth, so I'm not an expert on it to talk about. However, there is a fifth orchestra called the BBC Orchestra or the British Broadcasting Orchestra, which is publicly owned and is run as a capitalist firm. So that was another article I wrote.
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Richard Wolff
Very interesting. Okay, let me turn to another example in a completely different industry. Tell us the case. You call it the case of the Lusty Lady. Tell us what this is about briefly and how this is a cooperative and a little bit maybe why the women involved made that decision and how long it's been. Not just women. Not just women.
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Dr. Kathy Mulder
Even men too.
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Richard Wolff
Tell me the story.
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Dr. Kathy Mulder
In the 90s I became interested in Lusty lady because they, they did a film on collective bargaining and I teach a lot about labor unions. And so they were the first union eye. Well, they weren't the first. They were the first unionized sex workers to remain unionized. There was one in San Diego, but it fell apart right away. Anyway, so they were the unionized sex workers. Peep show, you know, the window went down and you see these workers in this little box of theirs in San Francisco and right on Kearney street, that's the area of this red light district, I guess, for lack of a better term. So what happened was with all the competition of Internet porn and other types of videos and things like that, profits started going down. So the owners decided to sell.
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Richard Wolff
And so the work, it was a capitalist enterprise.
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Dr. Kathy Mulder
It was a capitalist enterprise. And you can watch Live Nude Girls Unite talk about their unionization efforts and very interesting film. Great film.
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Richard Wolff
What's the title of the film?
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Dr. Kathy Mulder
Live Nude Girls Unite. Julia Query was the producer of it. Yes. And her mother was a famous. I don't know if she's still around, but she doctor here in New York City.
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Richard Wolff
Okay.
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Dr. Kathy Mulder
That tends to prostitutes. Yes. So very. You know, there's all this iron irony going on, but these women, mostly women and. But they had men and their staff members also wanted to buy.
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Richard Wolff
The business was going down.
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Dr. Kathy Mulder
Capitalist owners were selling, were selling, and they did not own the building. They only owned the business.
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Richard Wolff
Right.
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Dr. Kathy Mulder
Which is very common. So they paid rent to. So what happened was they couldn't get funding like most cooperatives. The only thing these workers had to sell was their ability to do work, whatever work that is. Okay. That's all most workers have to sell is their ability to do work. So they, they finally made a deal with the capitalists that they would buy it from them and they paid it off very quickly and they were doing fine.
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Richard Wolff
So basically it was financed by the capitalist enterprise that was selling to the workers.
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Dr. Kathy Mulder
Exactly. Because they couldn't get financing elsewhere because of the way the laws are and no collateral and this and that. But then the Walmart of the sex industry, I think it's called Deja vu, came in and bought up tons of property on this Kearney street, this whole area. And they are their competition. And they bought the building that they're in, so raised their rent to an astronomical amount that they couldn't reach. So what happened was they were still unionized by. They were part members of the SEIU Service Employee International Union. They were still unionized. And in their collective bargaining agreement, they put a successor clause in which I thought was very weak. Like, who's going to own it next? I thought, wow, that's weird. And that was because they were in the middle of selling. So I knew something was up when I was there. But these people were put out of business. And ironically, on Labor Day was their last day.
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Richard Wolff
So how long did the lusty ladies work as a worker cooperative? Oh, geez, a rough idea.
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Dr. Kathy Mulder
I want to say 10 years or over 10 years or whatever. I could be so wrong on that.
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Richard Wolff
But the reason I ask is I want to establish that even though like all kinds of business, some fail, they were able to function as a worker co op. They were able to work out their credit problems. Parenthetically, let me say to our audience that we now, we, democracy at work, who produce this program. We now have a relationship with a professional outfit of lawyers, accountants and so on. Who will help anyone who wants to set up a work?
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Dr. Kathy Mulder
Oh, they had a lot of help. They had help from the community, they had help from lawyers. They had help.
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Richard Wolff
But that's now organized and we can help anybody. Get in touch with us through the website. We'll do it. Let me move on to another example, one that got a lot of attention, but one I'd like to get some comment quickly so we don't want to run out of time. The New Era Windows factory in Chicago.
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Dr. Kathy Mulder
Right.
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Richard Wolff
Briefly tell us.
- [46:58]
Dr. Kathy Mulder
They're pretty well established and well known now because they're all over the Internet and they weren't when I started. Actually, I started because I thought it was a failure of their union, which is a very progressive union, the United Electrical Workers ue, and they're very progressive and they were. They all worked for what was called Republic Windows and Doors and on Goose Island. It's an industrial haven in the middle of Chicago. And they. Republic was sneaking out the equipment at night and the workers.
- [47:37]
Richard Wolff
Closing the business.
- [47:38]
Dr. Kathy Mulder
Closing the business at night, but sneaking out little pieces of equipment at, well, big pieces of equipment at times. And the workers actually, you know, stayed in their cars and watched this happen, a stakeout all night long, you know, and watched this going on. And they were worried about it. So they contacted the union. And so it turns out that Republican, excuse me, Republic did go out of. They, they closed and they had to. They did finally get their wages paid by bank of America, but not after all kinds of pickets and things that the UE did. The UE did stand behind them all the way. I just want to make that clear. However, the UE and their workers found another capitalist, serious material, serious materials who two years later went out on strike. And these guys are famous because they did sit down strikes and that the workers, the workers did sit down strike two, sit down strikes. And so Sirius, they even put the window, they had the windows in the Empire State Building. Some of those windows are from Sirius. And they ended up, they ended up saying, we're closing too. And the workers said, screw it, we're going to do it ourselves. And they. Oh, I'm sorry.
- [49:00]
Richard Wolff
They.
- [49:03]
Dr. Kathy Mulder
They were angry. They bought out again. They had financial constraints. But the great people of the working world, Brendan Martin and his group, Brandon Martin, I'm sorry, and his group came in and helped them out and he's part of that collective and they seem to be doing okay, as far as I know right now.
- [49:27]
Richard Wolff
And they're set up as a worker co op.
- [49:29]
Dr. Kathy Mulder
Yeah. Much smaller scale. And they, they had to do everything themselves. They learned how to do electricity, plumbing, everything themselves, but. And set up another, built another.
- [49:39]
Richard Wolff
So it's a successful. Right here in Chicago.
- [49:42]
Dr. Kathy Mulder
Right, Chicago. And it's successful. And they're getting help from Working World and they have this set up there.
- [49:48]
Richard Wolff
All right, let's move to the next example. Cuba. Cuba is a place which doesn't need a long discussion. But for those who are not familiar, some years ago a basic shift in the policy of economic development in Cuba was decided by the people and the government there that they were going to rely less on state enterprises, enterprises owned and operated by the government, the old model, you might say, of what socialism meant, and go in a new direction. And that is to reprivatize enterprises. Not state, but private. But the private enterprises would be worker co ops. They would not be individual capitalists hiring people. It would instead be the systematic development of cooperatives. And you went and studied one particular one. Tell us a little bit about how it's organized and how it works.
- [50:43]
Dr. Kathy Mulder
Okay. It's an urban farm right in Cuba. I did not expect to have a place, a case study from there. But indeed I did. And they are. There is state funding, but they are cooperative and they make. They start everything. It's an organic urban farm in Havana. And they do teaching, from teaching and lectures and tours to everything. And they make their own soil with the worms and everything. And right up to selling their products, which are cheaper, organic.
- [51:22]
Richard Wolff
How many workers are involved, if I may ask? You have a rough idea?
- [51:26]
Dr. Kathy Mulder
It's in the book.
- [51:27]
Richard Wolff
Okay.
- [51:27]
Dr. Kathy Mulder
I'm sorry. It's been a while since I've been to Cuba. Yeah. And the process of publishing takes a while. But it is the quintessential example of a worker self directed enterprise or not just a cooperative because they don't own the land. Land, you know, or they're not owners. They. But they make, they earn. Their wages are like twice as much or more than the state workers. The quality of the goods, their fruits and vegetables, their output are much better. And so.
- [52:02]
Richard Wolff
And they make the decisions collectively.
- [52:05]
Dr. Kathy Mulder
Collectively.
- [52:05]
Richard Wolff
All the business decisions.
- [52:07]
Dr. Kathy Mulder
All the business decisions. And they have bylaws. All these places have their own bylaws and ways of being democratic and make sure that they're democratic. One person, one vote.
- [52:19]
Richard Wolff
And from your investigation, did it work that way? Was it?
- [52:22]
Dr. Kathy Mulder
Oh, they're doing well.
- [52:23]
Richard Wolff
It's not just on paper, it's the reality.
- [52:25]
Dr. Kathy Mulder
Oh, they're doing well. Yes.
- [52:27]
Richard Wolff
And No, I mean, but they function democratically, collectively making their decisions. Because many of my listeners love the idea of worker co ops, but have a hard time wrapping their minds around the reality. You know, they're afraid to believe in it because it can't somehow be real. It's too good to imagine. So it's very important that you let us know that you went and you looked and you asked.
- [52:55]
Dr. Kathy Mulder
As a result, I have all their bylaws and. Yeah.
- [52:57]
Richard Wolff
And how they worked.
- [52:58]
Dr. Kathy Mulder
Yeah, yeah. London Symphony, all of them work. They're working. A lusty lady would have worked had it.
- [53:06]
Richard Wolff
Had it wasn't forced out.
- [53:08]
Dr. Kathy Mulder
It wasn't forced out by external forces, it'd still be there, you know, and I just want to put a little footnote with that lusty lady. These were. These women, most of them have PhDs or working on their PhDs or master's degrees or. It's just short, you know, they can work short time for a lot of money. So, you know, it was very, you know, interesting. Interesting place to be, you know, and.
- [53:34]
Richard Wolff
Not perhaps the stereotypic imagination of what a sex worker might be.
- [53:39]
Dr. Kathy Mulder
That's right. I just wanted to make that clear.
- [53:41]
Richard Wolff
Since we're coming to the end, I did not want to miss a chance to talk about something where the running of the business may not be cooperative, but the ownership is, which is a modest but nonetheless a step in that direction. Tell us briefly about what you discovered with the Green Bay Packers.
- [54:00]
Dr. Kathy Mulder
Well, the urban legend is that the town owns the Green Bay Packers. Well, Lambeau Field, the second largest venue for football venue in the country out of. You know, the only one that beats it is the brand new. I still call it Giant Stadium. I'm from here. The MetLife Stadium is the only one that's just a bit bigger. But Lambeau Field, which is the only one that's not named after capital's enterprise, it's named after its founder in Green Bay. Everybody thinks the town of Green Bay or the county of Brown county owns it. They do not. There's over a half a million shareholders that have no. They only have bragging rights. They don't get any dividends. They don't get anything but a piece of paper that they put on their wall.
- [54:53]
Richard Wolff
But they're a part owner of the Green Bay Packers.
- [54:57]
Dr. Kathy Mulder
Of the Green Bay Packers. That's all they get for it. And they get to come to the shareholders meeting that I was invited to a few years ago. There are over 5 million shares that are distributed. Nobody can own over 200,000 shares because they don't want anybody to have control. They are the Only out of 32 NFL teams, national football League teams that is a non profit, all of the, so they don't have that profit motive. So they, everything goes to a charitable, all their profits go to a charitable trust. Other than that, they're run just like every other NFL team. And I have to mention Mark Murphy, who is the CEO, was so generous with his time and nice to me when I went there. And he, he said they, he was treated just as when he does the collective bargaining and all that. He's treated just like any other owner. And they have, you know, and the way they stay in business, the small market stay in business is because they divide this, the TV revenues and Green Bay's still there. And if Green Bay ever folds or is sold, all the money goes back to the charitable trust. So somebody said they'll have the biggest or the best high school football field in the country.
- [56:18]
Richard Wolff
Kathy, thank you so much for this. And let me underscore for all of us listening, these are some of the creative ways that human beings have gone beyond capitalism. That's why the title Transcending Capitalism is perfect. This is a way. Some go further, some go not so far. That takes time. But the notion that workers can collectively own and operate their business is proven in these case studies. Take a look at the book. Thank you so much.
- [56:48]
Dr. Kathy Mulder
Thank you for having me.
- [56:49]
Richard Wolff
And for all of you, thank you very much for being with us. I want to thank truthout.org that remarkable independent source of news and analysis that has been a partner for Economic Update pretty much since the beginning. Sometimes I forget to mention them. I don't want to do that again. And I want to thank them, especially at this time of year when they're raising money for the very important work they do. This is Richard Wolff, Economic Update. I look forward to speaking with you again next week. But after a while, going to be my time. My time, babe. Thing going to change. Things going to change. Yes, it is, Sam. It.