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Sam saint gonna change one welcome friends to another edition of economic update a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives our jobs our incomes our debts those looming down the road and those confronting our children as they stare at an economy that must give them sleepless nights 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 before jumping into today's program which i think you will find exceptionally interesting i wanted to mention that we are now available in video form in other words you may be listening to this program but others may prefer or even you may prefer to watch it as a television program as a video program and so i want to tell you because we're proud of it that we are now available in that format and i want to give you the two websites where you can go and see us that way if you wish the first is patreon dot com patreon is spelled p a t r e o n patreon dot com economic update that's economic update as one word that website will give you the video version of this program and of course the other place to go is the inimitable youtube where you can likewise find this program in video form if you are interested as well as always i need to remind you that we have two websites that we also maintain directly where we add material that extends and expands on what we do on this program that provide you with ways to communicate your pleasures and displeasures with this program to us provide you ways to follow us on facebook twitter instagram and so on and finally allow you to partner with us in terms of helping us find new radio or television stations that might be interested in the program and to perhaps arrange for a visit where i can come out and meet some of you which i enjoy doing a great deal these two websites are democracy at work that's all one word democracyatwork dot in fo i n f o and finally the other website is rdwolff with two f's com okay let's jump into our economic updates for today and i starting with the state of oklahoma why well oklahoma is a leader if that's the term you can describe for something you wouldn't want to be a leader of it's a leader in destroying there's really no nice way to say this it's public schools let me give you an idea of the dimensions of this there's been no increase i'll start with the statistics that i find the most amazing oklahoma has not raised teachers salaries since two thousand eight okay that's nearly a decade in which prices rose every year but the salaries of those teachers did not oklahoma ranks forty ninth in the nation we have fifty states let's remember forty ninth in the average salary of its teachers teachers are leaving the state in droves for better paying jobs across the state line and the number of positions filled by what are called and you gotta love this term is emergency certified teachers emergency dash certified teachers these are people who have no education training they are now thirty five times as high in their use in oklahoma schools as they were as recently as twenty eleven but i'm just beginning to tell you why what years of republican domination of the governors and the state legislature and what has happened in the rest of the united states what it has done to the public schools of oklahoma they now lead the country in the number of schools that have gone from a five day school week to a four day school week over twenty percent of the school public schools in oklahoma are now on a four day a week schedule why are they doing this the answer is very clear and there's no one hiding it they don't have any money and they can save money this way and when i inquired how exactly do you save money since you're paying the teacher the same the teachers get paid the same we learned that since two thousand eight the teachers are paid the same well you don't have to heat the building on friday you don't have to feed the children at least that portion of the children that qualify for food assistance and so you can save money by keeping the kids out of the school building that that seems to be the biggest saving so let's take a look at that if you have teachers that are increasingly unqualified if you have a shorter length of the work week what is happening to the kids what is happening to their education and what is happening to their families well let's see the poorer you are the more you rely for your children's meals on breakfast and lunch at school if you go from five to four days that's one more day that your kids don't get breakfast or lunch at school it's also four days when they are required to stay longer than the regular number of hours and that puts an extra strain if you are poor with both members adults in the household working what are you going to do with your children on friday there isn't daycare and even if there were you can't afford it to try to deal with this oklahoma offers daycare at least in some of these schools where they've cut it to four days and they charge thirty dollars a day for the kids to come to school and do nothing whereas before they came to school and did their schoolwork so it costs parents more to have the kid in school on friday it's just they don't get any teaching done you got to scratch your head in stunned disbelief that this is called public education anymore when i looked into it further i discovered that one of the great benefits that the folks in oklahoma describe to me was that it's easier to recruit teachers which you can understand is difficult for oklahoma if you rank forty ninth out of fifty as being the second lowest paying state in the union for public school teachers we can get teachers now because we offer them a very low salary but only four days a week that they have to be in school and so they can have presumably other jobs to make up for the low salary something that will have them focused elsewhere low on energy depleted who knows in oklahoma elementary class sizes now hover between twenty six and twenty seven try to have a first grade class with one teacher and twenty six or twenty seven it's far higher than the twenty student limit set in a nineteen ninety oklahoma state law which apparently is simply ignored in twenty sixteen schools started charging to participate in sports and extracurricular activities let me say that your child wants to learn a musical instrument and play in the school band your child wants to be on a sports team you have to pay extra as a citizen and why did all this happen because oklahoma believes like many states with republican governments that their number one priority is to cut taxes and if you cut taxes you see you're supposed to believe everything gets better the the economy zooms jobs appear out of nowhere and everybody's better off but if you talk to the students and the parents and the teachers you will find a huge number of them understand that they're the fall guys they're the victims of this policy and now let me weigh in as an economist by the way before i do let me give credit where it's due the story of oklahoma schools can be found in the washington post dated may twenty seventh in a really fine detailed article by emma brown washington post may twenty seventh here's the economics the united states is now part of a world economy we're more integrated into the world economy than we ever have been as a nation throughout our history that means we depend for our future economic future on how well this economy functions and that in turn depends more than on anything else on the quality and the quantity of our labor force the people who have to do the work and the single most important institution in developing the skills and training and productivity of our workers is our public education system that's what educates the vast majority of our students all the way through college and university since most college and university students attend public institutions to cut back on the number of teachers on the quality of the teachers on the number of days in school on the number of programs available to students that those are all ways to undermine our economic future and all that is in the name of cutting taxes mostly on business and wealthy folks yes they become richer yes the gap between rich and poor gets worse but in terms of a strategy for economic development it's the worst imaginable failure and the victims first and foremost children remarkable the next economic update i want to talk to you about was amazing to me to discover here again let me give you the source some of you are interested in pursuing it if you go to a place called market watch that's all one word marketwatch dot com it's a very good source of economic analysis that i make use of from time to time and this is a story dated march may twenty eighth excuse me may twenty eighth twenty seventeen by quentin fautrell the personal finance editor he writes a story that i found astonishing maybe you all know about it but if not maybe i can astonish you too here's the blunt the average us employee who receives a paid vacation as part of his or her job only takes half of it per year this was the result of a survey of two thousand two hundred workers by the career website glassdoor all one word glassdoor and this website glassdoor has been doing these surveys for a few years now and the number hovers around fifty percent fifty percent of american workers don't take the paid vacation days they have coming to them that are part of their job wow let's look into this a little bit the united states is very unusual in advanced industrial countries in not having laws that mandate that require paid vacations to give you an idea the united states leaves the question of a paid vacation up to the private sector mostly companies have no obligation to keep a person hired they can fire at will it's called and that has to be kept in mind as we go through this story only if you if the worker can prove discrimination or if there's a written contract about the job or if there's a contract with a trade union that covers the job only then are workers protected but in most cases workers keep their jobs if and only if the employer wishes them to keep the job why is this important because this country again doesn't require paid vacations at all there's no law that mandates or requires an employer in the european union in those many countries that have combined in the european union workers are legally guaranteed twenty paid vacation days per year twenty days folks that's four weeks twenty workdays monday to friday four weeks so let me say it again but because i suspect many of you have never heard this or have not pondered what it means you must as an employer whether there's a union or not whether there's a written contract or not you must give every employee a minimum of twenty paid vacation days in some european countries in some it's twenty five or even thirty paid vacation days americans have no such thing they're not even close and it's the law in europe not here and americans therefore depend mostly on the employer and whatever generosity that employer may or may not have in regard to paid vacations so glassdoor and other researchers have begun to ask the american worker given that you have fewer paid vacation days than other workers why in the world do you not take half of them and by the way a good portion of that paid vacation day that isn't taken is forever lost sometimes you can roll it over into the next year sometimes you can take compensation of some kind but in many many cases you just lose it gone forever and the answer is to my mind sad sadder than i can convey because the answer based on a number of questionnaires and interestingly the questionnaires were developed by the us travel association and you can see why because the more workers don't take their paid vacation the less travel to a motel or travel to a resort and a travel association is unhappy that workers are not taking their paid vacation because that's their income from workers becoming at least for a week or two tourists here's this sadness i'll break down the survey that was done by glassdoor thirty four percent of respondents to the questionnaire say they don't take all their vacation days because they fear getting behind on their work thirty percent believe no one else at the company can do the work while they're away twenty two percent simply answer the that they are completely dedicated to their company it's fear it's fear that if you are away from your company even for your paid vacation days you will somehow jeopardize your job and since american employers are free to fire in a way that people in other countries are not this fear is rational this fear makes sense but of course if the employer agreed to pay you for say a week that you didn't take that you went to work you don't get paid any extra you would have gotten paid for that week whether you were working or not you choose to work you're giving your employer hundreds and depending on how productive you are thousands of dollars worth of labor for no extra pay at all it's a gift you're making your employer more profitable and here's the saddest questionnaire result of eighty percent of employees asked said that if they felt fully supported and encouraged by their boss they would take more time americans don't take half their paid vacation no one has done the research that i know of to ask what portion of the profits earned by american corporations are attributable to the fact that their employees don't take off paid vacation time it's extraordinary it means that the level of exploitation of american workers is is higher than we already knew it was because of this anxiety because of the labor reforms that make it possible for an employer to fire you at will that makes workers so anxious they don't even take the paid vacation that is really part of their pay package the last short item we'll have time for is again a comment on the so called free market this fantasy utopia that has never existed doesn't exist now but is something that conservative folks seem to want to believe is there or to want to believe we're on the way there or we're moving there it's sad it's sad such fantasies govern people's consciousness well how does that become important right now in recent years the united states government has recognized as have governments around the world that there are very severe costs to having an energy situation where we rely on oil coal and things which when you burn them have horrible consequences for for our health for our climate and so forth and that therefore it's important to look for new and different sources of energy that will not have these bad effects no rocket science here and two of the most important have emerged solar energy from the sun using the sun's rays and wind power using the natural movement of air to generate electricity many of you have seen the huge windmills that are now appearing across the countryside around the world in order to get those new forms of energy up to speed the government has provided various kinds of subsidies tax breaks and so on throughout the history of the united states when things were necessary in the minds of the people who run the country they would give tax breaks and subsidies that's how our railroads got built that's how our canals got built that's how ouri mean you name it that's how it was done our computers were invented at universities subsidized by the united states government to carry out this research in those days it was in order to fight world war two but it had all kinds of secondary consequences so supporting what is important in a society with tax breaks and subsidies in is as old as the united states and it's been done for solar and wind this however not so surprisingly has made the oil companies and the coal companies upset and because they are very big and very rich they know how to translate their political upset into political and economic cash so they go to work on political parties and politicians and people running for office and promise them big bucks if they will come up with an argument any argument we'll do as long as it flies to stop the subsidies and to stop the tax breaks for solar and wind so that we will go back to being reliant on coal and oil the koch brothers and many others whose fortunes depend on oil or coal or both are of course leading the charge and now they have two champions one is donald trump and the other one is rick perry who used to be the governor of texas where he hobnobbed with oil companies for obvious reasons and and who's now the energy czar and he's now being worked on by the oil and coal companies to take away the subsidies and the tax breaks for solar and wind so that we can go back to what they make money on and not help take the country in a new energy direction the outcome will be whatever the political strength of these two sides are the companies that want to make their future money on solar and wind one way or another will fight and buy politicians and the coal and oil companies and we all we the public the mass the democratic majority we will have to live with the health or not health that results from however this fight shapes up the market for energy in this country is this a free market the answer is you must be kidding this market is anything but free it is the playground of massive amounts of bribery the crude kind the more sophisticated kind full of arguments that expensive economists like me have to invent to justify what these two money making groups fighting over we will live with the consequences of what these tiny groups of wealthy capitalists what they do not a way to run a society wouldn't you say okay we've come to the end of the first half of this program i want to thank you for being here with me i want to remind you to make use of those democracyatwork dot in fo and rdwolfwith two f's com if you're interested in the video version again patreon dot com economicupdate or youtube will provide you with the visuals that go with what we do but most important partner with us work with us share what you do share what we do it's a way to change things for the better stay with us we'll be right back i.