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Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I have a couple of announcements on really big events, particularly one that I want to bring to your attention before we jump in to today's substantive program. On the 9th of October, we are sponsoring, and by we I mean the Left Forum, Democracy at Work, and the Economics Department of the John Jay College of the City University of New York. The event is called It's Time for a Big Beautiful Basic Change in Our Society. It brings together four speakers with distinguished histories that I think you'll want to hear what they have to say at this critical time. Cornel West, Chris Hedges, Laura Flanders and myself. We want this to be what we know, given our history. It can be for us, for the organizations, for the institution, and for all of you. So please, if you're interested, make a point. Go to our website democracyatwork.info and click on the banner you'll find there which has all the information you'll need. If you would like to participate in this event addresses a panel discussion. It's more important than anything else we could think of right now to help motivate and direct the national conversation. I I also want to remind you one more time of an upcoming book release for the book from the Flag to the Fascism American style, published by OR Books. The launch will happen in New York City, September 24, 6pm Francis Kite Club, East Village, 40 Avenue C. You must RSVP for this event. You can do all of that again, go to our website democracyatwork.info and click on the banner to do all of these things for either of these two events. And finally, you can also visit our website and sign up for our weekly newsletter that will provide you with details on both these events as well as other upcoming events or which we are busily organizing. I think you'll find it interesting, informative and worthwhile. And by the way, this includes our annual back to school discount on several of our books that is running through the end of this month. Thank you. Okay, today we're going to be talking about Vermont public employees who have done something new, I believe for the first time in American history. What the Tesla board is doing with Elon Musk. What is happening with the Trump administration entering into cozy new relationships with the biggest high tech corporations in America. Something that should concern every person. And finally, we'll be interviewing Joe Berry and Helena Werthen, two people who have spent decades organizing what they call contingent labor in the higher education, college and university professors whose fundamental employment situation is captured by the word precarious. They've come a long way, what we used to call adjuncts. And it's important for everyone in America to understand it. And that's what we'll be focused on in the second half of today's show when Joe and Helena will join us. Okay, here's what happened in Vermont that I want everyone to know about. The public employees, many of them organized in the American Federation of State, county and municipal Employee Unit 93, working together with the Vermont AFL CIO, has introduced and gotten into a collective bargaining agreement for the next five years to give to the workers the right to heed a call. What does that mean? And what is the call if the call comes to defend democracy by means of a general strike? This provision of the contract allows the workers to take time off without loss of pay to engage in public action to defend democracy. The workers of South Burlington, Vermont, the second largest city in that state, joined eight other AFSCME units across the state to get this clause in their contract. Multi day regional actions without loss of pay these workers can participate in if it's to defend democracy. And you know what, President, this is the result of right now, I don't think this has happened anywhere else. If I'm wrong, please let me know from everywhere and anywhere. I would like to document the existence of such clauses in union contracts. And I certainly want to congratulate the AFSCME union, the AFL CIO in Vermont, for the courage to do this. A first in American labor. That tells you a lot about what's on the mind of working people in today's America, doesn't it? And when unions are told you should be right up front in the national issues, well, these workers in these unions are doing exactly that. I turn next to an action recently by the board of directors of the Tesla Corporation, a major company producing mostly electric vehicles, as you all, I assume, know. No, they offered the CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk, a new pay package over the next 10 years. A pay package worth $1 trillion. Now, to my knowledge, no CEO of any American corporation has ever been offered anything remotely like that gargantuan amount of money. It's kind of odd that the person who is already the highest paid CEO in the United States, or certainly at least the wealthiest one, Mr. Musk, the same person currently estimated to have, depending on who you pay attention to, somewhere between 300 and $450 billion of personal wealth in other Words. The way capitalism as a system works is to give a board of directors the incentive to give the largest amount of money imaginable to the person who's already the richest person on the planet. It makes the old joke that capitalism is a system that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer sound like a poor joke. Didn't quite capture the reality, which is funnier than. If that's your sense of humor, than the joke. A trillion dollars could transform the lives of all Americans, but certainly could go light years towards solving our poverty problems, our central city problems, with our housing. A trillion dollars. My goodness. Every one of you watching or listening to this program could take a pencil on a piece of paper and write down 10 things this country or any country needs that could be helped, gotten in whole or part, by a trillion dollars. Or to say the same thing another way. You all know 10 things more important to do with trillion dollars than to make the already richest person on earth even richer. You know, the word that ought to come into your mind. This is obscene. Poverty has been rising in the United States in recent years. What are we doing with trillion dollars? Making the rich man even richer and that man to boot. Wow. Imagine a different economic system, not a capitalism, not one that works to have its institutions like corporations take steps like Tesla to make the richest people even richer. It really, it boggles the mind not just that this happens, but that we live in a society that reads the headline which says it and doesn't know anything other than to do to turn the page and see what the baseball scores are today. I want to talk to you about a recent set of phenomena that point in a particular direction. Europe fined Google for violating its laws and then reduced the fine down to just two or three or four billion dollars instead of the much higher amount of original. That's the power of Google. The lawyers it can hire, the politicians it can donate to. Wow. Google will earn 205 billion on its ad revenue. The fines it's paying are 2, 3, 4, 5 billion. Tiny percentage won't make a difference. Bump in the road for Google. Then I noticed that Mr. Trump had used our tax money to take a 10% position in the intel corporations, one of the high tech giants in Silicon Valley, California. 10%. With another 5% the government may choose to buy shares. That means that there's a kind of merger beginning between the highest levels of our government and and the highest levels of our corporate oligarchs. They are becoming the same people. If workers strike at intel, does that mean they're striking the United States government, which will be the most important owner of intel stock. Will Mr. Trump be tempted to call in the National Guard? Will ICE be given a new job, not just go after immigrants, go after anybody who's threatening the government's share of the big corporations? What was Mr. Trump doing when he cut a deal with Nvidia and AMD to catch 15% fee for the government from the chips or chip making machines that those companies sell to China? They got a license to sell to China in exchange for giving the government 15% of of whatever sales in China they achieve. There's a name for the merging of the top levels of corporate private corporations and the top levels of a particular political government. In Germany, that's what Hitler did and it was called Nazism. In Italy, that's what Mr. Mussolini did and it was called fascism. It breaks down the fence that was supposed to exist between politics and economics. The government is becoming the employer. Republicans are leading the charge they used to be against things like this and for us, the people. The merger of the big corporations and the big government make the people oppressing us stronger and more unified. And that ought to worry you, as it should every working man, woman and child in this country. We've come to the end of the first half of today's show. Stay with me when we talk to Joe and Helena about the organization and the work of the contingent faculty who teach most of our students in most of our universities today. Before we jump into the second half of today's show, I wanted to thank you for your very generous response to our fundraising efforts this year and in particular in the last couple of months. And in part responding to that, we are extending the availability of our limited edition linen covered hardcover version of Understanding Capitalism, the book I wrote and that we have been making available now for quite a while. If you are interested, I will be signing copies of that hardcover and they will be available to you as they have been over the last few weeks. Just simply send an email to us@infodemocracyatwork.info and put in the subject line limited edition. We will send you all the information you need to order and receive your copy signed copy of Understanding Capitalism in its hardback. And thank you again for your kind attention to the fundraising dimension of what we do. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic update. I am very glad and pleased and indeed I'm honored to bring to our microphones and our cameras two people who've been working on a struggle together much of the time that is one many of you know about, but that we need to learn more about as it is undergoing, like so many other things, big changes. They are Joe Berry and Helena Worthen. Joe has been involved in higher education labor movement since the 1980s in many roles and he's the author of a book back in 2005 called Reclaiming the Ivory, Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education, then working with Helena. The two of them together produced a book released in 2021 called Power Despite Strategies for the contingent faculty movement in higher Education, Joe taught history and labor studies at many institutions. Now retired, he is still involved with an important organization, Higher Education Labor United States, and his own local union, American Federation of Teachers 2121 at City College of San Francisco. Helena Worthen is a writer, novelist, teacher and union activist. In addition to the co authored book I just mentioned, she wrote earlier a book called what did you learn at work? The Forbidden Lessons of Labor Education. These are people who have tried to work in the field of organizing, people whose jobs are precarious, a word that has come to mean much in many fields but has for a long time been a serious issue in public higher education. So that's what we're going to talk about. Let me begin by asking whichever one of you would like to give us quickly a brief definition. What are contingent faculty? Who are they? Where do they exist? How important is this group in the higher education of the United States?