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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 of our children now and those confronting our children in the years ahead. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I've been a professor of economics all my adult life, and I currently teach at the New School University in New York City. Before jumping into the updates for this week, I wanted to make a couple of announcements. I had hoped to bring Dr. Harriet Frad on today's program for part two of the interview that we had part one last week, but her schedule had to change. So she will not be with us this week, but she will be here for part two of the interview with on the impacts of the economic crisis on people's personal lives and psychology and how other countries are coping with that and what we might do in the United States. That will be next week, not this week. I also wanted to alert those of you in the Syracuse, Ithaca, New York area that I will be coming there from the 8th to the 10th of April, and I hope that you visit our websites to get the details of of where I will be speaking. If you would like to join us, meet me. Allow me to meet you. And so on. The website, of course, is democracyatwork.info. that's all one word, democracyatwork.info and our companion website, rdwolff with two Fs. Com 4-8-10 Syracuse, Ithaca, NY. I also want to thank my generous hosts last week when I visited the Cincinnati, Ohio area and the Lexington, Kentucky area, giving a variety of talks there. It was a wonderful experience. It gave me a feeling for Kentucky, which I hadn't visited before, and it's an ongoing testimony to something I also want to ask you about, which is, if you're interested, if you're a trade union, a community organization, a local radio station that broadcast this program, a university, a college, and you'd like to have me come and talk and meet with you directly, please don't hesitate to use those websites once again, rdwolff with two Fs.com or democracyatwork.info to contact us to help arrange such visits, which I enjoy and which gives us a chance to talk about these kinds of issues and in greater detail. Okay, let's turn to the economic updates for today. I should mention again that these are designed to respond to the comments, questions and criticisms that you send to us through those websites which have the ability for you to send us emails we can't answer each and every one much as we wish to. There simply are too many. It's a testimony to the over 52 stations around America that now carry our radio program every week and to your interest, both of which we are proud and excited about. But it means we simply cannot answer them all. Please be patient with us. Please understand, we read them all. It's just we don't have the time and the personnel to respond to each and every one. One of you asked a question about wages in China, so I did some research in order to answer your question. And the difference between China and the United States, for example, and this would apply to Western Europe as well and to other parts of the world, is actually quite stunning. Let me give you the basic data, and if you're interested, there was a very important story on the Bloomberg News website on March 29 and literally another one, and in the economist magazine dated March 15th of this year. Of course, between 1997 and 2007, basically, real wages in China, what you can afford to buy with what you actually get for your week of work, tripled. Yeah, you heard me correctly, it tripled over the last nine and a half years, probably doubled again. In other words, in the last 15 years, last 20 years, real wages of workers in China have gone up at a pace many, many times faster than in the United States. In this last year, 2015, wages rose roughly 7% in China and less than 1% in the United States, real wages. So we're not talking anything close. Working class in China has an improving standard of living that Americans cannot even fantasize enjoying. And that's been going on for quite a while. Keep it in mind when you try to understand the upset with the society and the economy in this country and the very different reaction of Chinese workers in theirs. Next update. This has to do with something that is now becoming very, very serious. It's always a serious problem. And what am I talking about? Deaths from the overdose of drug use. The center for Disease Controls, the American government agency that monitors all of this kind of thing, as well as other private labs and universities, are all saying the same we now have an epidemic of drug use. Well, to be accurate, we've always had, or at least for many, many years, an epidemic of drug use. But it is now spiraling out of control in terms of numbers and in terms of what public part of the population is being affected. Up until the last 10 years, the bulk of the population being affected was African American, Hispanic American, poor white. But now the new surge and I'm going to give you the numbers in a moment is particularly hitting white people, rural people, people in small cities and towns across the United States. So now here's the staggering number in 2004. That's a little over 10 years ago. Most of the United States was suffering a rate of 10 lethal overdoses per 100,000 people in 2014. And there's an interesting map you can get on the April 4th edition of Time magazine and also at the Time magazine website, you can get an interesting map of the United States to see exactly where your region fits in this story. But in 2014, most of the United States had jumped to more like 20, doubling the number of lethal overdoses per 100,000Americans. And since, of course, over that time, the number of Americans also increased, we're talking about a genuine epidemic even larger than the epidemic that affected those other communities earlier. President Obama's budget, announced this year in part responded by setting aside $1 billion for heroin and opioid, opioid, opoid, excuse me, abuse. And that's nice, but it's a drop in the bucket of what needs to be done to cope with this. I have only one thing to add, that these deaths and by the way, the also associated spread of illnesses like hepatitis C from drug use and abuse, it's hard not to see this growth as intimately associated with another big event in the period between 2004 and 2015. And that event, of course, is the great crash of 2008 and the limping, lame recovery since then that has bypassed most Americans. Job prospects are poor, income is pinched. The security and benefits that go with jobs have been cut drastically. People's prospects for the kinds of lives they had hoped for versus the kinds of lives that are staring them in the face in terms of jobs and income will not surprisingly, lead people to look for an escape, a way to have at least a good time for a little bit before heading back into a very bad job and income situation. In other words, among the many uncounted costs of a capitalist system that has periodic crashes like the one in 2008, and the kind of slow, painful recovery that bypasses so many for so many years, among those uncounted costs, lethal overdoses, hepatitis C, communities across America devastated as these kinds of epidemics sweep through their high schools, sweep through people of all ages, it's a major crisis, and it is something a discussion of economics has to acknowledge. I want to turn next to my ongoing observation about what it means that a country basically still as rich as the United States is capable of treating its own citizens in ways that are literally beyond comprehension. And I speak again of Puerto Rico, an island territory owned and operated by the United States as part of itself. Three million citizens living there just went through another crisis. As I've told you, their politicians over many years working closely with banks and other lenders in metropolitan mainland United States, racked up an enormously profitable for them, level of Puerto Rico debt. That is, the politicians borrow, the lenders lend, they all go out to a very expensive restaurant to celebrate the interest that has to be paid and the payback of the loan that, of course, comes out of the pockets of the mass of people in Puerto Rico, in the taxes they pay used to pay off those loans, in the rates they pay for their electric services and the other Puerto Rican borrowers. And now they've reached the point where these kinds of deals, odious they're called, in other countries, have racked up a level of debt that Puerto Rico cannot pay, as the leading politicians, the very ones who cut the deals, are now saying, can't be done. Or another way of being a bit more honest. The only way we can pay back all that we have arranged to borrow all that the banks in New York and elsewhere arranged so nicely with fat fees along the way to lend us, the only way we can do that is if we literally rip off the 3 million citizens of Puerto Rico. And how are they doing that? Well, they've already done it. 11.5% sales tax, higher than anywhere is in the rest of the United States. Cutbacks of public services from the University of Puerto Rico on down to local provision of basic services. And now they say they can't go on without literally risking the lives and health and security of their people if they're going to pay back these odious loans. So they tried something recently. They tried to go and tax the largest single employer in Puerto Rico, which is the Walmart Corporation. That's right. The largest employer in Puerto Rico is one of the corporations that pays the lowest wages of any corporations in the United States, or for that matter, in much of the developed world. Again, a sign of Puerto Rico's poverty. They tried to tax Walmart. Walmart went into court and this last week, a federal judge said Walmart didn't have to pay. And the reasoning was so stunning, I have to tell you about it. The judge reasoned, as there is a procedure in Puerto Rico, as there is in most parts of the United States, for a state to tax a corporation the way Puerto Rico proposed to do with Walmart, and if the corporation doesn't feel it's fair, then it has the right to appeal. And there's a procedure for appealing and getting a decision when the tax can either not be required to be paid or some compromise, a lower tax rate is agreed to. The judge said, however, that there's a risk of Puerto Rico defaulting or going into bankruptcy over the period of time that the appeal from Walmart was would be going through the process. So it might not be possible for Walmart to collect a refund because it might have been Puerto Rico's obligation to go into bankruptcy. So because it might not get a refund of the sort it wanted, because it might have to stand in line with Puerto Rico's other creditors if a settlement out of bankruptcy was reached. Therefore, the judge concluded, because of those possibilities, which are already realities for other creditors of Puerto Rico, Walmart wouldn't have to pay anything at all. Therefore, the state of Puerto Rico is unable to tax what is its richest corporation, its largest employer, because of what might happen in a future time. An extraordinary tying of the hands of the Puerto Rican government, meaning we're inching closer to a catastrophic imposition of suffering on the poorest part of America to handle the odious debts worked out by irresponsible politicians in cahoots with profit driven lenders. A story repeated around the world. Puerto Rico, as I suggested, is the Greece of the United States. Next update and one that I really have to talk to you about because once again, this happens so often that it merits an ongoing kind of analysis. Here's how this one works. Yale University once again in the news. What is it this time that Yale University is doing? Well, it's fighting. It is at Yale University. It's fighting, as we noted a couple of weeks ago, it's fighting the efforts of the mayor of New Haven, showing unusual courage, and the legislature and the governor who are being appealed to by New Haven to allow that city to put a tax, a property based tax, on Yale University, one kind or another. Now, why would the city of New Haven want to tax Yale? Well, let's see. Yale is the richest citizen of New Haven by far. It's the second or third richest university probably on this planet, certainly in the United States. And New Haven is among the 10 poorest cities, over 100,000 in the United States. So New Haven, Connecticut is a place where the extremes of wealth and poverty now common in the United States are standing facing each other literally toe to toe. But Yale is not only the richest citizen New Haven, it is also the largest landowner and the largest employer, again, by far. What does this mean? It means that New Haven, a very poor city, is delivering free services to the richest university or the second richest after Harvard, in this country. That's right. The city of New Haven delivers free services. Why do I say that? Because Yale doesn't have to pay taxes on its educational property, which is 95% or more of the property it owns 200 buildings alone in New Haven it owns. The city of New Haven cleans the air for those buildings. The city of New Haven maintains the streets that move around among those buildings, streets used by the trucks that provide services, traffic those buildings, whether they are dormitories for students or laboratories for scientists or classroom buildings. The city of New Haven maintains the health and welfare of all the people in New haven, including the 17,000 members of the Yale community. The city of New Haven educates, at the public's expense, the young people that go on to work at Yale and give Yale the benefits of the education that the city pays for. Yale gets all these benefits, but it doesn't pay for them. It doesn't have to pay taxes. And you know what that means? It means that the rest of New Haven has to pay for the public services delivered to Yale that Yale, through its tax exemption, doesn't have to pay. You know what this is? This is Robin Hood in reverse. Poor people. Remember, New Haven is among the 10 poorest large cities in America. Poor people have to pay more taxes to pay for the services delivered free to Yale. Yale has an endowment, more than $25 billion of wealth, not to count its buildings and their contents. And it gets free services thanks to the taxes levied on small businesses in New Haven and poor citizens. Wow. Finally, despite the enormous power Yale wields in New Havenand by the way, this story is repeated with other private schools all around the country. Finally, because of the enormous pressure on a poor city like New Haven, it has decided it wants to get a modest, small amount of taxes out of Yale. And of course, as Yale has done for the 300 years of its existence, it is refusing, it is fighting, it is denouncing this as can you believe it? Quote, unquote, unfair. Enter the governor of Florida, Rick Scott. Here's a contribution a governor of Florida doesn't often make. He invites Yale. This was on March 29th, 28th and 29th. He invites Yale to consider moving south to avoid taxes. Here he is, a government official, when he finally sees that some backbone, not a lot, but some, is growing in the mayor and governor of Connecticut to even broach the question of getting some more taxes out of Yale. His contribution, in solidarity with his fellow politicians, is to see an opportunity to maybe snatch a valuable asset from Connecticut and move it to Florida. For those of you interested, don't worry, never going to happen. Yale has 200 buildings in the New Haven and Connecticut areas. Moving them would cost them way, way more in disruption, in cash, than anything the city of New Haven or the state of Connecticut can hope to get, if they indeed get anything. But it is a sad saga of how American capitalism works to allow and to enable the wealthiest of our citizens to rip off the middle and the poor, using the government to play that role. And that when finally there's a little bit of modest pushback, we have another agency of the government wishing and willing to enter this story, Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, in order to save the richest corporation from, from even the most modest contribution to paying for the services it now gets for free. Let me turn to another economic update in the time remaining in this first half hour of the program. This one has to do with the minimum wage controversy swirling around the United States. The spotlight falls on the state of California these days. It has made a commitment to raise the minimum wage basically to $15 an hour in stages, ending up in 20, 22, six years from now. And as this time approaches, and as the steps up are coming due, a very odd debate reignites. The debate goes like on the one hand, led above all by restaurants, the businesses that don't want to pay workers anything like $15 an hour or 12 or 10, who want to keep it as close to the national minimum wage, $7.25 an hour, can you believe it as possible? They are full of stories, planted in the media, advertised, circulated as rumors everywhere they can, that somehow this raising of the minimum wage is bad. And what they like to tell you most about is that there will be some employers somewhere who will actually close down fireworkers rather than pay them an extra two or three dollars per hour. On the other hand, there are those who tell you, oh, no, no, no, no, don't worry about that, that won't happen because the extra minimum wage that many workers will get will lead them to buy more things and that will make sure that workers don't lose their jobs. I find this kind of debate somewhere between absurd and ridiculous. We all know what the real issue is, don't we? Employers don't want to pay higher wages and workers want to get them. That's the way this system works. Employers usually have the upper hand. And so they can prevent or slow wage increases in all the ways we all know that they use. And raising the minimum wage is just another occasion for this discussion. The reality is nobody knows how all of this plays out. First of all, when you raise the minimum wage, obviously you put more money in the pockets of those whose wages were at the minimum that is now being raised. They will buy more goods and services. That will allow other businesses to hire more people and or raise their prices because people have a greater ability to pay. How all that plays out over the next several years, nobody knows how that works. No one can predict the future economically any more than they can in any other way. But that's only the tip of the iceberg. When you raise the minimum wage, you're actually raising the wages of lots of other workers. Those whose wage is set at 10% more than the minimum or twice the minimum. A lot of employers do that. When the minimum goes up, it'll raise those people's wages. And we will have to figure in how all of that works. But we're not done. When wages go up at the minimum and above the minimum, people's tax payments to the local and state and national governments go up. As their income goes up, so do the income taxes they owe. That will give cities and states more money to do a variety of things for us. How do we know that all of those results will end up making us worse off, losing some people their job? We don't. But let's give the restaurant and other opponents of rising wages their due. Suppose workers lose their jobs, if that's what you're really concerned about. And of course these companies are not really. But if it were, then have a jobs program, a government jobs program for all the unemployed, those who've been unemployed for a while, and those who might lose their job because we raised the minimum wage. That's what happened in the 1930s when the minimum wage was first established. We had a government jobs program, so we didn't have to worry about anybody being hurt by helping the mass of people who will be benefited by raising a minimum wage. If you care about the people who might lose their jobs, there's an easy way to solve the problem. Thank you so much for staying with me in this half hour. We will be back after a very short break. We will have some major pieces of analysis to do. I think you will find them interesting. They have to do with jobs moving out of the country. They have to do with worker co ops, something we talk about a lot. So stay with me we will be right back. That I stole from five on the cares in the bubbles when I get older Climbing up on the back porch fence Just to see the dogs running with the wing and a question in my shivering voices singing through a crack I better go it alone. I better go it alone. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of this week's edition of Economic Update. I want to thank the many of you who written to us about last week's interview with Dr. Harriet Fraad. We had planned originally to have the second half of that interview on today's program, but scheduling conflicts have required us to move it to next week. So we will have the second half of this analysis of the interaction between the economic crisis we're living through and the personal and psychological implications and crises provoked by that next week with Dr. Fraad, and I ask you to join us at that time. I also want to alert again the good people of Syracuse and Ithaca, New York, that I will be up there next week. And if you'd like to come to one of the various talks I'm giving, please consider yourself invited. The details can be found at our websites democracyatwork.info that's all one word. Democracyatwork.info and rdwolff with 2f's.com I want to begin my discussion of major issues today, once again responding to questions several of you have sent in by talking about an idea that is often abused. The idea is the if we want to have workers better off, well, then we should do more in the way of educating them. It's a kind of idea that somehow conveys the dangerous notion that the unemployment suffered by many, the inadequate wages and salaries suffered by many, can be, ought to be, should be blamed on their not having enough education, as if the fault of a low wage lies with the wage earner and not either with the wage payer, the employer, or with an economic system that seems to be incapable of providing meaningful, appropriately reimbursed work for adult citizens who want an opportunity to work. So I was interested in a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute in Washington dated March 30 by Robert Scott and David Cooper. And it's what they call an economic snapshot. And they presented a simple statistic that I want to make sure you all think about Two thirds of the people in the labor force in the United States do not have a college degree. Let me do that again. The overwhelming majority of workers in the United States don't have a college degree. Many of them don't even have a high school degree, or they have that and they didn't go to college, or they went to college and they didn't finish, etc. So if we're going to talk about doing something for the majority of the working class of the United States, giving them heated advice about getting an education is really not the relevant issue, is it? I'm not even going to talk about the fact that in our society, the only way to get such an education for most of the two thirds of the labor force we're talking about would require them to to load up with debt to pay for the absurdly high cost of education, particularly higher education in the United States. I won't talk about that, even though, of course that's a relevant issue. They can't do it is the bottom line. It's too expensive. And the debts which they already have preclude them from loading up on more debt or else they will come out of their education with a burden that nobody should be asked to carry. The problem, in fact, which this number proves, is that if you want to help the American working class, you've got to provide higher wages and better working conditions separate from the question of education. It's just not available. And there's a kind of cruelty in proposing something which isn't relevant for a huge number of people. The facilities aren't even there, and the cost of trying to go in that direction is prohibitive. So it's not an appropriate response to give some bland advice about getting more education. Two thirds of the workers in the American labor force do not have a college degree, and that number is not likely to change very much very soon. Which means if we don't do something for people other than giving them lame advice about education, then we're condemning the majority of our working force, and therefore the majority of our population, to a continued situation of unemployment and unsatisfactory wages and working conditions. Another story that leads me to offer a piece of analysis. Two stories this last week came to my attention. One from the state of Massachusetts that I want to talk to you about, and one from the state of Indiana. In Massachusetts, it's a company that makes a particular fabric called Polartech. It goes into all kinds of sports equipment and sports clothing. The company Polartech has a factory in Lawrence, Massachusetts, which it is proposing to close and to move the production instead to Mexico, where it can get the work done while paying much lower wages. The union there, unite here by name, is fighting because it represents those workers fighting this process and it's going to the other Companies and the wholesalers and the investors that are relevant to the Polartech company and trying to put public pressure on them in the hopes that they will persuade Polartech not to leave the Massachusetts for Mexico. The people that follow this don't give them much chance, but the union is doing the best it can to try to slow the departure, make the departure affect fewer workers. They're begging for a little less of a bad outcome. Second example, the Carrier Corporation in Indiana. It has two facilities, one in Indianapolis and the other one in Huntington, Indiana. Altogether 2,100 jobs. That will be a big blow to both Indianapolis and even more so to Huntington. And they too want to move production to Mexico, a cheap place, or at least cheaper than the United States in terms of the wages the company can get away with paying. And in this case we're not seeing so much union activity. But it is the mayor of Indianapolis and Huntington, the mayors and the governor of Indiana who are promising in the face of this disaster, for them to offer workers education, yes, the very thing we just talked about and job retraining and maybe some help to cope with the disaster imposed on those workers. On their husbands and wives, on their children, on their neighborhood, on their community, on their state, with a few softening benefits. Wow. What do I have to say about this? Well, there is something humiliating, isn't there? Something pathetic in this begging that the workers affected by these decisions are engaged in, that their unions are engaged in and that politicians they vote into office are engaged in. It strikes me that this kind of support really qualifies for the label way too little and way too late. What these working people and their communities need are jobs. Jobs that are protected. Jobs they can hold onto, not a few dribs and drabs of help as they go through the disaster imposed on them by the profit driven decisions of the Polartech company in Massachusetts and the Carrier Corporation, a subdivision of United Technologies in Indiana. And I don't want to leave it at that. I want to tell you what the option is. If the governor really wants to do something, if the mayor wants to do something, if the union leaders want to do something, I have a suggestion. Why not have the union and the politicians get together and lay down the law to the corporations? Here's how that would work. The law in question is the law of eminent domain, the right to that a city or a state has to require the sale of property, in this case carrier factories and Polar Tech factories in Indiana and in Lawrence, Massachusetts, require those facilities to be sold at their market value to the city or the state? The city and the state would then borrow the money to buy these enterprises because they're threatening both the city and the state by proposing to leave. And the city and the state can sit down with the company and say we're using the law of eminent domain because we intend to turn these facilities over to the workers in them, to convert them into worker co ops. And we as leading politicians and we as unions will be cooperating to make these successful worker co ops. They will continue production, they will therefore continue to pay themselves wages, they will continue to pay taxes to the state and local governments. We will save the jobs and the families and the neighborhoods and, and the states well being in this way which the law of eminent domain was intended to achieve. Not only that, the union and the politicians will help this worker co op advertise all across America to the customers of Polar Tech, to the customers of the carrier corporation which makes air conditioners and ventilation equipment, will say to the customers, you have a choice. You can buy from the new factories in Mexico, from the company that abandoned Indiana and Massachusetts, the company that abandoned the workers, the families, the communities, or you can buy from those of us who have been producing what you've been buying all along, who are at work in Indiana and Massachusetts. That's your choice. American company everywhere. That's an alternative way for politicians and unions together to offset the terrible economic consequences when corporations decide to get up and to leave because they make more profit that way. It's an alternative strategy and it's one that I would suggest is long overdue for being brought into the public discussion. Since I have not the slightest doubt that if the union leaders and the politicians were to offer to the population a vote, a choice, would you like us to respond to the departure threatened by these large employers by retraining the workers, by some education, by some handouts in the difficult times ahead for them? Or would you like to keep the factory humming? The jobs there, the incomes secure, the tax revenues continue to be paid. I know which way the people would vote, so do you. And maybe that's why we don't pursue these alternatives. But we certainly should be debating them. And if I can help that happen by talking about it this way on this program, well then that's what I'm going to do. And that's indeed what I am doing. Let me turn next to a topic that I want to talk about, worker co ops, since they come out of today's program as a logical place to look for solutions to the kinds of problems we're talking about in the case I just finished, we can make a general statement. It ought to be the policies of unions across America and at least of progressive public officials to say to companies that threatened to leave, hey, wait a minute. Over the lifetime in which you grew as a company, you never hesitated to come to the workers and ask, or to the union, if they had one, and ask for concessions, ask for assistance, work a little longer, work a little harder to incorporate this new technology. Don't complain if the air isn't so good for a while. We're working on it. All kinds of help. And you never hesitated to come to the politicians. You need a little tax break here. You need a little subsidy over there. You'd like the curriculum in the schools to be changed so that young people get a kind of training that will save you, the employer, the cost of that training. You'd like to have the public schools pick it up, wouldn't you? And you would like the roads to be maintained a little better here near your factory than is done elsewhere in the community, because your truck traffic leaves quite a debris in the road, and you want the city to pick up the cost of that. You've come and you've gotten most of what you asked for. That's a debt you have, and you don't have to pay it. We're willing to take care of you, but you then owe us in the event you propose to leave. So that when you come to us and say, oh, we're closing the factory, we're going to Mexico or to China or to Brazil, because we can get away with paying a lot less there. Well, we then would like you to pay the debt you owe you, pay back all that we gave you because we gave it to you on the premise that you would stay here. Had we understood you were to be leaving, it would have been a different conversation. You might have been asked to pay for what you want the city to do, because the city can't count on your loyalty to stay here. Wow. Now, the companies, if they were confronted with this, would have to rethink whether it pays them to move now, that they're going to have a big new bill to pay as part of moving. But I want to take it much further. Maybe a day will come, maybe it's coming soon, when unions and politicians will sit across the table from a company that's announcing it's planning to leave by saying, to the surprise of the company officials, have a nice trip as you leave. But we're telling you we're going to use eminent domain to take over this workplace, this office, this store, this factory, and we're going to keep it humming. We're going to convert it into a worker co op. And we, the union and the politicians are going to be helping the workers here to run this business on their own to compete with you where you're going. We're not going to allow you to destroy what this community has come to depend on. And we don't need to. A worker co op is a good, viable investment for this community to make, not just in the workers immediately affected, but in the whole larger society. It's a good direction. A worker co op is better than a capitalist enterprise, and here's why. Worker co ops together, democratically, all the workers decide on crucial things. And the decisions they make are different from the decisions made by capitalist corporations. How do we know that? Because we have studied the existing worker co ops in the United States and around the world. One of the first things you learn is that worker co ops distribute wages and salaries to their members much less unequally than capitalist enterprises. Do worker co ops never give a tiny handful of managers wildly expensive pay packages while everybody else has to scurry around desperate to find the money to get their kids a college education? No. Whether it's the big Mondragon cooperatives in Spain or the smaller cooperatives scattered across the United States, they systematically pay their members much less unequally than do capitalist corporations. Here's another example. In a co op, if they decide the workers there that they need and want managers, they hire the managers. And if they don't like how the managers manage, they fire them. Let me repeat that to you. In a co op, the workers hire the managers. In a capitalist enterprise, the. It's the other way around, isn't it? The managers hire and fire the workers. In a worker co op, you are called upon as a co op member not just to do your particular task, your particular job. Your job description has two parts. The part where you're an employee and the part where where you are an employer. Because that's what a worker co op is. It's a way of organizing businesses so that the board of directors, the people who run the business, are the workers themselves. Every worker is both an employee and his own or her own employer. And so you're going to be called upon to use parts of your brain, parts of your skill, your enthusiasm, your creativity to design and run an enterprise. You're not just a drone. You're not just someone who comes to work and is told what to do, how to do it, where to do it, who's told at the end of the day, thank you for producing all that stuff. Now go home. You have nothing to do with what is done, with the labor, the creativity you've poured into, into the goods or services you've helped to produce. No, no, no. In a worker co op, you don't just help produce the stuff you make together with other workers, the decisions about where it's sold, what it's used for, what the profits from the company are used for. You're part of running a business and that's going to change you as a human being. It's going to develop your skills, your aptitudes, your knowledge. You're going to become a fuller, richer human being. Work is not going to be something you look upon as an ugly, boring, uninteresting burden, something you have to do just to earn the money you need to be able to buy your means of survival. No, no, no. That's the way a job is understood in capitalism for most employees. The whole point of worker co ops is to change your work life, to make those 40 hours a week, the best hours of the day, five out of seven days a week into a creative, learning, exciting period of your time. Something you look forward to. We don't want a tiny minority of people lucky enough to find a job they actually like to do. We want to convert all jobs into having major components that you look forward to, that you like to, that you have freedom and power to shape to meet your needs. A worker co op gives you that chance. A worker co op enables workers to radically alter their lives, not just in terms of hiring the manager, not just in terms of a less unequal pay scale. Important as those things are, it also is a change in who you are, what kind of life you live, how you feel about other people and about yourself. Worker co ops, in short, are not only an alternative to the top down, hierarchical and fundamentally unequal and undemocratic organization typical of capitalist enterprises. Worker co ops, in my opinion, are the future. They're where people are going to go, as they already are, as the capitalist system is more and more incapable of providing the kind of life most people want, the kind of wages they want, the kind of workday experience they want, the kind of future they seek for their children. This is a system that can't deliver anymore. And more and more people are recognizing it what those people want. And I can see that in the speeches I give as I travel across the United States. What more and more people want is not so much another argument about how and why capitalism lets them down. Their daily lives are lessons in that. What they want to know is what do we do? Where do we go now? What's an alternative we can believe in and construct? And my argument is that transforming the workplace, democratizing it, making it a place run by and for working people, together with the communities affected by any enterprise, the communities that provide services to every enterprise, the communities where the workers live. The interaction between a democratic workplace and a democratic community offers a way forward out of the failures, the accumulating failures of a capitalist system. That's why we talk about worker co ops. Not that they're warm and, and cuddly. They are, at least relative to a capitalist business. But that's not the point. The point is they are the way out. They are the way forward. Will they have to be coordinated with one another? Of course they will. Just like capitalist enterprises had to figure out their way of coordinating with one another, usually called the market, worker co ops will have to find their way to coordinate with one another. Some of that may be using markets, some of that may be using planning. Learning from the experience of the socialist countries who celebrated planning, how to do planning of a different kind. Because in the future, I envision the planning will be done with control from below. The planning will coordinate enterprises that are themselves democratically owned and operated by the workers, together with the local communities. That was something that the socialist experiments of the 20th century never quite achieved. That's where we're going. Thank you so much for spending this hour with us. This is Richard Wolff for Economic Update. And I look forward to talking with you again next week when we will have that interview with Dr. Harriet Fraad. Part two. My time, my time baby they ain't gonna change Change, change, change, change, change change Things on the change yes, it is, It.