← Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Higher Education Labor United (HELU) Rises
00:33:39
On this week’s episode of Economic Update, Professor Wolff delivers updates on the Vermont Public Employers who got the contractual right to act with pay to "defend democracy," Tesla’s board offers Musk a $1 trillion CEO pay package, Trump and top...
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- [00:20]
A
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?
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B
Well, this is the majority of faculty in the United States. Probably 75% of all people who are doing the work of faculty in higher education are hired on a contingent basis, which means that they don't have any assurance from one semester to the next whether they're going to get a job and when they are actually doing the job, which means teaching of some sort, they can be tossed out of that job for whatever reason. Some contingents have union contracts that bring a certain degree of protection, but most of them don't. And yet they do a good job. They are as for the most part, exactly as qualified as the tender stream faculty. And they are excellent teachers. And they are important not only because of their number and the impact of their working conditions on the whole experience of higher education in the US but also because their existence, their presence in institutions of higher education has over the last 30 years undercut the power of faculty in higher education and made higher education more vulnerable to the kinds of things we're seeing the Trump administration bringing down.
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A
Yes, let me interject. I've been an academic all my life. I've been a professor in half a dozen universities and I can personally attest to what you're saying. When I first started teaching many years ago, contingent faculty were a small part of what the department, in my case of economics had. And over the time, over the last 40 years, they became first an important group, then the majority, and now the overwhelming majority of the actual interaction with students, teaching, grading, meeting with the students. It's all done by graduate students and others that are in a very vulnerable, precarious situation. So let me turn since we started with you, Helena, Joe, tell me a little bit about unions. Have unions been something that the contingent faculty joined? Have they become important? What's the relationship between what Helena just summarized and the union movement?
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C
Well, as far as faculty especially are concerned, we are the people unions were invented for. Many faculty have legal protections of tenure, whether or not they have unions. And historically that was the majority. But now both in the public and private sector, but now with the majority of faculty being contingent, we're the people unions were invented for higher education in general and faculty and grad student and researcher. Unionism in general is one of the most organized places in the US labor force, about 20 to 25% depending on how you slice it, which is high for the United States. Very high. We are probably the most organized group of contingent workers in in the United States. But still you're looking at 20, 25%. And many of our contracts do not mitigate our contingency that much. They vary tremendously. Some of them are us alone, some of us are in bargaining units by ourselves and some of us are in combined bargaining units, we with full time tenure track faculty or other kinds of groupings. But unions have helped, but not enough. That's the one line answer to your question. Very few have contracts that allow us to move across the line into secure tenure track positions. Very few contracts. Some have gotten us benefits, some have gotten us some degree of job security. But the answer is unions have helped, but not nearly enough. And still only 20 to 25% of us are covered by them.
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A
I want to ask both of you.
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C
If you add one other thing I forgot, multiple unions represent us largely. Many non traditional unions in education other than the traditional American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association, American association of University Professors, many other unions have represented both graduate employees and contingent faculty, largely because the traditional academic unions were not interested or turned us away when grouped people came to them. And that's an important piece of history and helps explain the diversity of unions in higher education generally.
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A
There's a perception in the United States, to which I would like both of you to briefly respond, and that is that somehow education is no longer important, valuable. They watch the. The government efficiency drive. If you take all that seriously, savaging the Education Department at the federal level, they're wondering whether somehow education itself is under attack or under some kind of shrinkage in its importance. How do you view all of these events, including this attempt to suggest that our education system would be better off if there were no federal government interested in supporting it, developing it, improving it in the way that the Education Department was set up to do?
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B
Well, I think that's a sign of how important education actually is and how scary it is if people can get access to the. Can get access to the resources and the habits of thinking and the habits of asking questions that education supports. They would not be. I mean, I may be being naive, but I think that if people were educated, they would not be voting for people like Donald Trump, and they would be getting organized to deal with climate change, and they would be supporting collective activity that would produce good results for everybody. To me, the attack on education is a sign of how threatening education is.
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A
Yeah. If you take a look at who is championing cutting down education, it sure does look like it comes from. From the right wing, overwhelmingly.
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B
I want to turn this from the top, too.
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A
Absolutely. I want to ask Helena, and then you too, Joe, when you say that precarity is a central feature and that even when they had unions, there are limits to how much they could reduce the kind of precarity built into higher education. It seems to me then the danger is those people will be afraid to be critical or to teach critical thinking in any of its dimensions, because any step outside of a narrow range of acceptable, you know, vanilla, they will be at the risk of losing their job or losing their situation. That the precarity, besides being a tremendous burden on the precarious faculty member, is dangerous for the quality of the teaching, dangerous for the education people are getting, and dangerous for the society as a whole in terms of the fear it instills in being critical, in being open minded, in being different from whatever the dominant perspective is. Do you have something to tell us about that dimension of the situation?
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B
So you're talking about how precarity weakens somebody's courage because they lose their job, they're going to lose the health insurance, they're going to be out on the street and they love their job, so they're going to lose something that's part of their identity. How that changes the quality of what they are able to do. We, if that's what you're talking about, we see this all over the place. It's. I mean, take a look at what has happened in Florida under DeSantis. We have people in higher education, Labor United, which we may talk about later, who report things going on in the higher education in Florida under DeSantis attacks, which have given students the permission to videotape a teacher in a class and send in a complaint based on that video, saying that it made them uncomfortable or that because it was teaching history in a way that made them feel bad in a way. Traditional precarity is something that we were familiar with 10, 15 years ago, but what's going on right now is that everybody is precarious. And the impact on academic freedom is being felt up and down the faculty in higher education, not just among contingents.
- [30:17]
A
All right. We're running out of time, which is our unfortunate problem. Joe, let me ask you, if you might comment. Building on what Helena has just said, you raised a question off camera about why people who are not themselves precarious faculty ought to care about what happens. In a way, Helena has given us a part of that answer because it changes the whole public conversation around a whole row of issues. But could you address just that question? Because I want my audience to hear you.
- [30:54]
C
Well, higher education is now what high school education was at the turn of the 20th century. The majority of the population that gets a high school degree gets some higher education. Most families now have somebody who has been to higher education or works in the higher education system, if not as a teacher, they're the mate. Higher education is a major employer in every single metropolitan area, the number one in the Boston metro area. And so it's not a niche. That's one thing why people should care what happens here, because it's not a niche. It's a huge number of people. Secondly, because it is important in constructing the discourse in the society as a whole, you know, and it also shapes the relationship between what people know and the work they have to do. The job training aspect, education is not an absolute. It's always been a terrain over which people fought over what should be in it, both K12 and higher ed. And in terms of higher ed, should it just be job training for the 99% and critical liberal education for those who are going to rule us and are educated at the Ivy Leagues and their equivalents? And that's the direction. That latter is the direction things are going right now. And higher education, Labor United is based on the idea that there's a different future possible, neither an austerity neoliberal future nor the Trumpist neo fascist future that is being projected. But there is a future that's possible for higher ed that serves the working class majority of the country and also is not oppressive and is liberating to the people who work in it. Everybody from the people sweeping the floors and doing the landscaping and feeding people to the computer people to the student services people to the people actually teaching and researching.
- [33:06]
A
I really do wish we had more time. We don't. We have run out of our allotted moment. I just want to say that many of us are very proud that there are people like you that are fighting that fight, making those arguments and spreading that word. So congratulations to you and thank you for being part of our program here today. And to my audience, I say as I always do, I look forward to speaking with you again next week.