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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 and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I have, as usual, a few short announcements. First, I will be giving our Every Other Month Global Capitalism Live presentation in person at Women Building Up Their building in Brooklyn, New York this Wednesday, November 12th. Registration for the event ends on Wednesday and you can sign up on our website at www.democracyatwork.infoglobalcap. i urge you to come. It's an interesting evening, as much for the questions and conversation as for my presentation. Secondly, if you haven't already, please check our Democracy at Work where you'll find all kinds of interesting information, more and more more diverse than ever there for your inspection. I have to remind you also about the fake videos that are circulating, many of them having me or a likeness of me saying things I never have said, never would say. It's a real problem for us. We are struggling with lawyers and Google and so on to deal with it. And we appreciate your letting us know. But if you want to be sure it's really us, then please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Go to our website. These are the ways to be sure you're getting the genuine article. Charlie Fabian remains available if you're interested in communicating your suggestions to us. Charlie.info438mail.com I want to also thank Charlie, who does a lot of the labor union related research that I present here on this program. He's a wonderful addition to to our project. And finally, the book Understanding Capitalism remains as a kind of indispensable companion to this program in terms of going into the points made here in much greater detail and you can obviously inspect it at your leisure. Okay, let's jump into today's economic updates. My attention in recent days was caught by a poll put out by Axios and the Generation Lab that they work with a poll of American college students. And here's what caught my eye that they reported and it got quite a bit of press, so I'm sure you can find it if you're looking for it. Axios Generation Lab 67% of college students randomly polled say that they hold a positive or neutral association with the word socialism. 67%. What about the word capitalism? What percentage of the students have a positive or neutral association with the word capitalism? 40% 67 for socialism 40 for capitalism would be a very lopsided score in football, but it's also a very lopsided score in the world of how young College students are understanding and reacting to the world they now live in. The poll also reported on negative students. Excuse me, views. How many students have negative views of socialism? Wow. 23%. 1/4. How many have negative or neutral views of capitalism? 53%. Something big is changing among young and particularly young educated Americans. I want to take some time out to talk to you about a strike. In fact, two strikes, both of them in Canada. The first one and the one that I really want to make sure you know about is the strike of 51,000. That's a lot of people. 51,000 schoolteachers in the province of Alberta, represented by the Alberta Teachers association, working at all grade levels. They began a strike on 6 October. And they explained that they had been trying for months to get a pay that would catch them up to the actual inflation that had happened in that part of Canada in recent years. But the authorities were not willing to do it to get improvement in the conditions of education, with particular emphasis on capping the size of a classroom, how many students each teacher would have to attend to. Many other provinces, British Columbia, Ontario, Manitoba, Nova Scotia and Quebec have laws on the books putting caps on class size, but Alberta doesn't. They went on strike. They got enormous support from other unions, from the community, from the students who went out of the schools, who marched out in support of the teachers. The conservative right wing government found an obscure clause in the constitution there, the notwithstanding clause, it's called, and used it to order the teachers. This is the government now ordering the teachers back into the classroom at the end of October, or which the teachers did, but with the student support and the public support and the union support, they are now having conversations about calling a general strike. Across the province of Alberta, labor conflict is heating up all over the capitalist world. It's a sign of stress and breakdown. It is emboldening extreme right wingers like Danielle Smith in Alberta to take extraordinary government enforcement rather than working things out with teachers as is normally what is done. The whole Canadian postal system, which is a largely private system, is likewise on strike and has been for a very long time. If I had more time, I'd go into it, but I was struck with the drama being played out in Alberta. But the whole postal system is likewise striking in Canada. It's another sign that the government there is unable or unwilling to tax rich people and big corporations so that the society can work decently for everybody. And if you don't do that, if you don't pay folks properly, if you don't give them Appropriate working conditions. You got to expect that the courageous among them will push back. That's what we're watching. And I want everyone to see it, to know about it and to deal with it in the different ways that are available to us. I want to turn next to a remarkable election, but one that you may not have heard about. Katherine Connolly was just recently elected the new President of Ireland. Now let me remind those of you who may not be up on your statistics, Ireland is that remarkable country that has sent so many of its citizens over the last several centuries all around the world. So there are people of Irish descent, many more that live outside Ireland than live now in it. The country of Ireland has over 5 million people in it. There's a little corner in the north of that island that is still part of England. It has about 1, a little over 1 million people in it. But there are many, many more million people who think of themselves as Irish or of Irish descent all over the world, and particularly here in the United States, they're all paying attention. They are all clearly aware that Katherine Connolly is a left wing socialist and always has been a young woman brought into Irish politics to fight for what was an issue many years ago when she was a young person, when the issue was rent, the impossibility of working class people to get an apartment near where they work, the housing shortage, the inadequacy of dealing with that fundamental human need. Remember food, clothing, shelter, shelter, housing. And so she made that her business. She was elected with the support, let me read it to you. The enthusiastic support of the 100% redress movement, the Communist Party of Ireland, the Green Party, the Labour Party, People Before Profit, and Sinn Fein, among others. She's the left and she's the President of Ireland. My last segment for today is not directly about economics, although it certainly touches is my reaction as an American citizen to something that we all need to speak out about. And I am very sad that more of us are not doing it. As I sit here, over 57, those are the numbers I've counted. Over 57 people in small boats on either side of Latin America have been killed by the American military. We were told by our President and our Secretary of Defense, unless he's now called the Secretary of War, which they seem to have changed the name. We were told that these are drug traffickers and the boats have been called narco boats. We, the American military that we all support, we all pay the taxes to fund and so on, killed these 57 plus people. They were not arrested, although we could, we have a navy there. They were provided with no lawyers. They were presented with no evidence for them to examine and to argue against. There was no jury, there was no judge, and there was nothing but a summary execution. The government was the arrested, the jury, the judge, and it short circuited the whole thing. It simply killed them. We'll never know what the truth was, what was in the boat. And you know, here in the United States, when people are arrested who have something to do with the drug business, which does happen fairly often, you know what? It's not a capital crime. We don't execute people for that. Not here. And they do have the right to a lawyer and a jury and a judge and the right to confront their accuser. What are we doing? Those boats were thousands of miles away from the United States. They represented no threat to us at all. That was imminent and required execution. What kind of a government does this? And what does it mean if it gets away with it? We've come to the end of the first half of today's show. Please stay with us. We're going to have two remarkable union organizers talking with us in the second half of today's program. 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, friends, and welcome back to the second half of today's Economic Update. I want to welcome to our microphones and our cameras Robert Ovitz and Kevin Van Meter. Robert Ovitz is a senior lecturer at a Bay Area university who teaches political science and graduate labor relations. Kevin is an author, instructor of labor education, and a union organizer. And I brought them to us because they have a lot of experience in these areas and we are finding which we are very happy about. More and more labor stories, strike stories, part of our programming and indeed at Some point. I'd love to go back and look at our 1215 year history now and see how much more labor material is now part of our regular programming. It tells you something about American history and not just American. Earlier this week I've been talking all over the place about the strike of the schoolteachers in Alberta, Canada, because that's a very important story as well. So let me begin. Let me begin with you, Robert. You talk a great bit about union organizing with a focus on what you call workers inquiry and class composition. Could you tell us a little bit about what you are doing and what those terms mean and why they are important?
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Well, Rick, you're right. We are seeing an upsurge in organizing. We're not even close to where we were 50 years ago with the number of new unionized workers, the number of strike related action, growth in union density. And what Kevin and I are working on is rediscovering and revitalizing a strategy that was originally developed by Karl Marx called the Workers Inquiry. In his last written article, he outlined how workers who are organizing can understand how capitalism is currently organized in the workplace. How is work organized, how is it imposed on workers? And then also understanding how workers relate to one another. How well organized are they? What did they learn from the last form of collective action? How were they defeated or how did they succeed? And then studying how they can develop new tactics, strategies and objectives from what they've learned. And that's basically what a Workers Inquiry is, is looking at that organization of both capital and workers.
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A
What about the class composition?
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B
That's what we call the class composition. How work is organized and imposed on us and how workers are organized or disorganized.
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A
Okay, let me turn to Kevin and tell me a little bit about the history of this kind of an approach. When has it been used? What have you experienced with it? To be blunt, what does it deliver as a way of going about this?
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C
Well, thank you, Rick. Let me address some of the history. As Robert just mentioned a second ago, it was Marx's last written piece, published piece, it appeared in 1880 in a French socialist journal and then actually in fact circulated around the world from there, where different workers organizations, socialist parties and others picked up the 101 questions of which he posed to workers themselves. What this questionnaire, Workers Inquiry in general seeks to accomplish is to understand production and the experience of work from workers own perspective. What are workers thinking of doing in the course of the workday? What kind of struggles are they engaged in? And certainly that's part of Marx's intent and is carried through that history. Then again, it appeared in a socialist publication here in the United States in its first English translation in 1938. The publication was called the New International. And it was in this publication that clr, James Raya du Escaba, Grace Lee Boggs and others, as part of the Johnson Forest Tendency, and then correspondents discovered that and in fact cited it and used it really for the first time in a pamphlet in 1947. Then the workers Inquiry circulates the globe. French, Italian, British, Canadian, and then back to the United states in the 1980s. And really since 1938, when this first appeared through to the 80s, you saw a really robust use of workers acquiring in the countries I just mentioned. Of course, recently we've seen more of a rejuvenation with a new project of the United Kingdom called Notes from Below. And as a direct result of their efforts there and across the planet, we're seeing a real interest and uptick in workers Inquiry. Now, what does it deliver? I think is a different question what in fact it's trying to do by understanding how workers think and work from their own perspective. In the course of the workday, the process of the inquiry itself seeks to get workers to think about those questions deeply. And then the circulation of that inquiry really attempts to get workers to who encounter that inquiry, to read it, to speak about it to their fellow workers. It develops their own class consciousness in the sense that it allows them to see themselves as part of a work process, a struggle and an experience of work, which of course, is our dominant life activity, and allows them to really feel part of a larger struggle and experience. It helps develop their consciousness in doing such. It helps circulate struggles and lessons of production. A pamphlet about auto workers in Linden, New Jersey in the 1940s can circulate to France and Italy, infect those factories with the same kind of processes, and then of course, be utilized for cafe, grocery and nonprofit workers today.
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A
Let me ask you a question that just occurs to me. Is there some family resemblance between this and. And what in the early women's movement was called consciousness raising?
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C
That's an excellent question there, Rick. In fact, there is. But I think we should take a step back even further than say, the 1930s, 1940s, when they started developing the United States with organizations like the Young People Socialist League, the worker education movement, which of course allowed Walter Reuther and his brother to engage in worker education that then they applied to the sit down strike and other labor struggles. There really was a Robust use of labor education to see workers develop their own natural and acquired powers, not just on how to organize or how the economy functioned, but in cultural, civic, political, philosophical questions. And that larger worker education movement, which was quite diverse, in fact, allowed workers to develop their consciousness, engage in practices we might want to call proto workers inquiry or class consciousness developing. And then, of course, there's a long, robust history of this kind of working class culture and activity in American history. And the feminist struggle, of course, drew on some of this for their own efforts as well.
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A
Robert, you're writing a book. Tell us about the book. I assume it builds on all of this.
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B
Yes. So I have written a book that's going to be coming out with Haymarket Press next year. And it essentially is what we call a workers inquiry from above of the nonprofit sector, particularly political advocacy nonprofits. And what I've done is applied the workers inquiry approach to understanding how the emergence of nonprofit advocacy groups has served as a way to channel and diffuse essentially, worker struggles. The foundation funding of these nonprofits has resulted in a massive growth of these nonprofits. At the same time that unions have been in decline, that worker organizing has really been in a downward spiral. And I see there's an interconnection between the two. Also at the same time, we've seen, and your show covers this quite thoroughly, a kind of outsourcing of what otherwise are public sector services from the state. And a lot of that has been outsourced to nonprofits, which have then relied on hiring mostly very young, mostly female, also high numbers of LGBTQ people to work very low wages, very long hours, doing very intensive work in the nonprofit sector. So what I've done is I've applied a workers inquirer approach to look at how nonprofit unionization, which has really taken off since the first couple of years of the pandemic, has resulted in an upsurge. One of the most exciting upsurges of workers that are self organizing and unionizing is in the nonprofit, both legal services sector and the political advocacy sector. These workers are trying to understand the consequences of how for profit management strategies have been applied, applied in the nonprofit sector, particularly. One example of that is the focus on quantified deliverables. And have really kind of mimicked a lot of the way that the corporate sector works. And so these workers have really started to approach and target that structure of their work in order to figure out new tactics and strategies and objectives. And I think one of the most exciting things, and it doesn't really get covered by the labor left if you will, media is that, for example, in New York City a lot of these legal services and advocacy nonprofits have really consolidated themselves into two main unions and are taking joint action across the entire city. And in the last few years there's been a number of essentially citywide strikes by these workers. So they've really tried to understand how the outsourcing of these public sector services, the joint funding, and for a lot of nonprofits, its foundations can inform how they organize to disrupt that control and exploitation of their labor.
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A
Kevin, is there an ongoing struggle that you can tell us about now that enlarges on what Robert just said?
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C
I can myself and two colleagues, Alexander Payne from the Blue Bottle Independent Union and economist Anastasia Wilson just conducted a workers inquiry and publishes a two part article that appears in Notes from below specifically on the CAFE sector. As we've seen in recent news sources, Labor Notes has covered this very well as other labor press have has. Starbucks workers are fighting for their first contract. This is true of the Blue Bottle Independent Union as well, who are fighting for their first contract with Nestle, who's actually in fact the parent company. In addition to the two I just mentioned, there are dozens of cafes and cafe chains around the United States that are organizing, demanding better wages, hours and working conditions. But arguably, even more importantly, they're fighting over shifts too few, too many when they're scheduled. One of the respondents to our workers inquiry talked about the need for open availability, that CAFE workers and service industry workers in general are expected to have open availability for their shifts. So it's not just fight over wages, hours and working conditions, but over shifts, in fact, and who scheduled them, how they're scheduled, when they're scheduled, how those schedules impact people's lives. Safety is a big issue, not just in producing coffee or roasting beans, but also encounters with the public respect for identity. We see, as Robert mentioned a few moments ago, with the nonprofit sector, a large swath of the leadership of the CAFE worker organizers across the United States are queer, trans gender, non binary and others who are fighting for not just the things I've mentioned, but also real dignity and respect for their identities in the workplace. Arguably, one of the things on their agenda is real workplace democracy, substantive, meaningful workplace democracy. And I'll just conclude on saying a recent Harvard shift study concluded that 97% of service industry workers in the United States self identify as working class. And in fact, that's where the class is moving. The class, the class is organizing. And one of the sectors certainly that Robert I and others want to call attention to and support the efforts of those in Starbucks, Workers United in Blue Bottle, Independent Union, and of course, other efforts.
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A
We've run out of time, which is often a problem for us. Tell us and tell the audience, if you want more information about all of this, what's the best place for an interested person, maybe someone thinking about organizing at their workplace? Where should they turn?
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B
Well, I would encourage folks to attend the Labor Notes conference that happens every two years. The next one will be in Chicago in June. You'll find workers from many different sectors, also from around the world who are there to connect to pick up new organizing skills and build this movement.
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C
And for those interested in Workers Inquiry and related topics, I'd suggest taking a look at Long Haul Magazine, a newly launched publication here in the United States that focuses on these issues, in addition to Notes from below@notesfrombelow.org, which is the UK outfit I mentioned earlier and we published our cafe workers inquiry in.
- [31:45]
A
Thank you both for a very, very important part of contributing to the upsurge of labor. I'm sure we'll be coming back to you as that develops and we do our best to help it develop at this end. Thank you both for your time and for the work that you do. And to my audience, I say, as I always do, I look forward to speaking with you again next week.