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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. We have a few announcements. I promise they will be very brief. First of all, I want to remind you that the lecture, the presentation on Global Capitalism that Democracy at Work presents every other month will be taking place on November 12, Wednesday evening, November 12, at the Women Building up organization in Brooklyn, New York. If you'd like to sign up and join us, which I hope you will, please go to our website, www.democracyatwork.infoglobalcapglobalcap and all the information you'll need is right there. Secondly, if you haven't yet checked out our stuff substack, please go there. We are putting items on there all the time. It's a place of really interesting work that I think you will find more than worth your while to check out. Democracyatwork.substack.com of course, there's our book, Understanding Capitalism, the kind of companion book that goes into detail in what we do on this show. And there's Charlie, our volunteer, to take your comments and suggestions for the program. Once again, charlie.info438mail.com and finally, a reminder, sadly, that there are people making fake videos of me of this program and of what we do in Democracy at Work. Only items containing the Democracy at Work logo. Can you be sure that that's actually our work? We cannot control what other people are doing with AI. There are faces that are half mine and half somebody else's. There is dialogue that's not mine, but coming out of what looks like my mouth and so on. All kinds of people are having this problem. It's not just ours, but we have to inform you so that you are at least alert. Okay, let's jump right into today's Economic Update. The financial press, in case you don't look at it, is full these days of scary stories about an impending recession. Some people think we're going to have it now before this year is out. Others think it'll hit us sometime in 20, 20, 26. Why is this happening and what can we draw in the way of understanding from it? Well, first of all, economic downturns are a feature of capitalism. It is arguably among the most unstable economic systems the human race has ever instituted for itself. On average, every four to seven years, there's a crash. Some of them are short and shallow. Others of them are long and deep. The Great depression of the 1930s lasted over 11 years that's a long one. And at its height, one quarter of the labor force was unemployed. That's deep. That was an awful one. The one in 2008 and 09, more recently terrible, called the Great Recession because it was so terrible. And then we had the so called COVID 19 crash of 2020 in which half half the workers of this country were out of work for at least a week or more and some are still out of work. So it is an extraordinary system. And of course, since the Last one was 2020 and since we are now at the end of 2025, it is in fact normal and natural for people who follow capitalism to be predicting and awaiting and shivering about how we might have another one. And it also helps us explain that remarkable Friday, October 10, when the stock market crashed by 800 points in a matter of minutes. Why? Because everybody's so nervous about when the next downturn happens that the minute you get a bit of bad news these days, loads of people start selling their shares, down goes the market. We're on the edge. In short, well, what determines whether we have a recession or a depression? Well, the answer is very easy. It's mostly when suddenly demand cuts back. People don't buy the way they did. Companies don't hire or order inputs the way they did. So suddenly all the people who had jobs producing the inputs that companies order or producing the goods and services that the public wants, if the public isn't buying, if the industries are not buying, the people who make those things lose their jobs. And when they lose their jobs, they can't buy. And the spiral, like a snowball going down a hill, gets bigger and bigger. And we go from a downturn to a recession to a depression, depending on how big the downturn 20 turns out to be. But if you look a little more closely, you notice something. It's really the top 5 or 10% of our people who make the difference. Here's how I businesses in this country are concentrated. The U.S. census tells us 3% of people are employers. That means the other 97% of us aren't. It's the employers who decide whether to hire more workers or not. It's the employers who decide whether to buy a fleet of trucks for their business and grow the business that way or not. So it's a tiny group of people who decide what the business community makes as investments. But it also turns out that the top 10% of our people in America right now do 50% of the consumer buying. That's right. If you've noticed that Rich people buy a lot and the rest of us don't welcome. It's the same people, it's the same small part of the population that are the employers who are the rich people who do most of the consuming. And if rich people think the economy is not in good shape, if they're not going to hire more workers in their business or buy more inputs to grow their business, they're likely to hold back on spending as a consumer because they see the economy going down and this is not the time to get another mansion or buy another yacht. In other words, the recession or the depression depends mostly on the top 10% of our people. Capitalism is a system that the majority are held hostage, economically speaking, by the minority. And that is something you ought to think about because here's just one implication of this fact. If we distributed income more equally in this country, 10% of the people's feelings about consumption wouldn't hold us hostage in terms of our jobs. Because as we know, people in the middle and people at the bottom spend money pretty much as quickly as they get it. They're not in a position to hold back because they have so much spending enough for their daily, but not making the big purchases. If income were distributed more equally, we would have less instability. And likewise, if the decisions about a business growing or not, hiring more workers or not were made by the whole group of people involved in the workplace democratically, not by a tiny group of employers at the top, you'd likewise see less of the holding back, more of an understanding that we need the businesses to be active so the economy as a whole is in good shape. The democratization of the enterprise is a way to reduce instability. That's a fact of capitalism we should never forget. My second update has to do with a decision made by the largest single bank in the United States, JPMorgan Chase, the leader of that bank, announced a week or two ago that his bank was committing $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years to, and I'm going to quote now, remedy U.S. problems in national security and self reliance. Well, that's an interesting admission that the private capitalist economy of the United States over the last 10 years at least didn't adequately address national security and self reliance. But you never heard this bank president or any other major leader admit to that during the 10 years that things weren't happening that could have and should have very few. And those were mostly politicians tooting their own horn. No. Here's the head of a bank admitting that he's going to spend more money on national security and self reliance. You know what that translates into. We are not interested in the world anymore. We're turning inward. That's what it's about. The head of the biggest bank is echoing the President of the United States, who is in fact isolating the United States by his tariff wars, by his trade wars, by his slamming every other country every other day. He is making it harder and harder for people and companies around the world to do business in the United States. That's why we're on the edge of a recession. It's one more reason. It is remarkable that Mr. Dimon, the head of the First Republic, sorry, of the JPMorgan Chase bank, is having to make up in the next 10 years by being an economic nationalist for what he was before, which was an internationalist. It's part of what's happening to the American economy. And in turn, it's part of what we've been talking about on this the end of the American empire. We are not what we were. We are a declining part of the world economy. And instead of trying to work out our relationship with the rest of the world, we're turning inward. We're pushing them away. And that only isolates us, not them. And we're watching and living through that process. The last segment I have time for today is about the weekend of October 10th to 12th. Just a little while ago, 12 people were killed violently in the United States that weekend and 40 were wounded by mass shootings in the US that's defined as killing four or more people, not including the shooter. It brought to 340 the number of mass shootings in the United States this year alone, 20, 25. And we've got a good part of a year left to go. You know, this is not that different from the killings of civilians in the Ukraine war. We're not a country at war with somebody else. One in 15Americans have experienced one or another of these mass shootings, either in a physical or psychological way that has hurt them and that they carry the scars of that with them. And why, we all ask why? Why is the United States so violent a place? And here's an answer. To think we watch ice jumping on people hurting people. Immigrants, but not just immigrants. All the people they mistake for immigrants. A lot of violence. We watch our government killing people in boats a thousand miles away. People who are now talking about as being fishermen. But our president thinks they might have carried drugs. By the way, carrying drugs inside the United States is not a capital crime. You don't get killed for that. But we're killing people far away. We don't even know who they are. They're near Venezuela now. We've just attacked Peru, and our president says he's against the violence in Ukraine, but apparently not against the violence in Gaza. What is strange is that we have a tendency to solve the national problems violently, and yet we seem puzzled why inside. Violence is so often how people express their difficulties and their hostilities, their problems. The decline of the empire shows up that way, too. Stay with us. We've come to the end of the first half. I think you'll be really interested in the interviews with two union organizers when we come right back. 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@infoocracyatwork.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 proud and glad to bring to our microphones and cameras Alex Pine and Anastasia Wilson. Alex is an organizer with the Blue Bottle Independent Union, working to organize baristas and the employees of the Blue Bottle chain of coffee shops. And we'll hear all about that in a moment. Anastasia Wilson is an assistant professor of economics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and a member of the Solidarity Research Center. So first of all, Alex and Anastasia, thank you very much for joining us and giving us a moment of your time.
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B
Let me thank you for having us on.
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A
Oh, you're more than welcome. Let me begin by reminding everyone that it was just over a century ago that the United States had the greatest surge of unionization in its history. We never had anything like it before. We've never had anything like it since. In a very short time, the 1930s, tens of millions of Americans joined unions. These were people who had never been in a union before, whose parents had never been in a union before, most of them. And so they were making a statement that the greatest crash of American capitalism would also be the moment of the greatest unionization in the country's history, which it was. One of the great questions these last few years has been whether, after many decades of decline from that height, we may be on the cusp of, or may already be in a new beginning, a resurgence of the labor movement in this country. And nowhere has that been more of a thought entering people's minds than in the behavior of fast food restaurants, of retail establishments, of Amazon warehouses, and of coffee shops. So it seemed to us to be a really good idea to find two people involved in that process trying to unionize coffee shops, bring them on here and let them tell us what they're doing and why they're doing it, what their hopes are and how it's going. So let me begin with you, Alex. Tell us a little bit about what's going on at the Blue Bottle coffee shops, and then we'll go back and forth to hear about Workers inquiry and other methods that you're using. Hi.
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B
Yeah, thank you for having us on. Bluebottle, for those who don't know, is a specialty coffee chain that is owned by Nestle. If you're thinking, is that the Nestle? Yes, it is. It's the one that everybody regards as evil. They were acquired by Nestle in 2017 for an estimated $700 million. And we've successfully unionized nine of those locations. Six of them are in the Greater Boston area, and three of them are in the East Bay area. We've been fighting for a first contract for a livable wage for the past year. And the company has continuously delayed and stalled getting to an agreement on a first contract.
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A
Wow. Okay. So you have union. You have organized at nine locations, but you're still fighting for the first contract.
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B
Correct.
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A
Okay, now you have mentioned to us, and we're very interested, maybe I'll turn to Anastasia on this one. What is this Workers inquiry that you are engaged in? What is that? How is it? Why are you using it? Give us an insight as to what seems to be a central part of your organizing.
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C
Sure. So I can share a little bit about how this project started. Myself and Kevin Van Meter, who's a labor educator and organizer, along with Alex, came together to form our group that we're kind of informally calling Workers Inquiry Work. And you can put that URL into your browser and it'll bring you to a bunch of links from the stuff that we've been working on. But we're working in the tradition of what sort of marks laid out, which was this 101 question, 101 question survey about sort of what, what it's like to go to work, what it's like to experience work. The imposition of work under capital. So we partnered with Blue Bottle Indie Union to launch a workers inquiry about CAFE work in the, in the CAFE sector, which started as a survey that we distributed through our networks of fellow workers as well as some one on one interviews that Kevin and I did with folks to learn more about what happens on the job. And from our point of view, collecting this information and then distributing it both through media and zines and through conversations with each other is a really important way to sort of circulate struggles to, to understand how to do this work. Right. How to form an independent union and what parts of that organizing process look like. Yeah. I don't know if Alex, you want to add a little bit more to that.
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B
Yeah. Within the organizing process, surveying our co workers and getting their first person narratives or experiences of what work is actually like for them has been really instrumental in informing our approach to organizing and also in having different stories that we can reflect back to our co workers to let them know that their experiences are organized in a particular way. Because the coffee chain is organized in a particular way. It's a method of creating, I guess, a feedback loop both to know what our coworkers thinking. So that way we can organize for the things that matter to them and also to help them gain a kind of consciousness about their own experiences.
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A
Yes. And it would seem to me, just as an observer, that it creates that intersection that you want between you, the organizer and they the organizee. If I could say it, that there's a really close back and forth between you. You know, it's been a problem, as we all know, with union movement historically, that like many bureaucratic institutions, gaps can develop between what the leadership does and what everybody on the ground floor in a sense needs and wants. And working to prevent that at the beginning is probably the best way to prevent it from growing later on. Tell me a little bit about. Are you spreading this? I noticed in one of the communications that you are working also with grocery worker unions. Is there something, can you tell us about that a little bit?
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C
Sure. So we published recently the results of this inquiry with our comrades, Notes From Below, who are out of the UK and you can check out their amazing set of publications on notesfrombelow.org Notes from below publishes many, many worker inquiries from the UK and from Europe. And so we published this one, this US Based one with them. But additionally, we are excited to continue to kind of launch this process into other organizing efforts that are kind of interested in learning the method, experimenting with the method, and kind of growing this body of work. And so we have recently decided that we would launch a grocery worker inquiry. I don't know if, Alex, you want to expand on that and talk a little bit about, like, some of the places that are doing good organizing work in the grocery sector.
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Yeah. For anybody that's unfamiliar, there's a lot of organizing in the grocery sector right now. I am very. I look to like the Trader Joe's United or New Season's labor union as inspirations for my own organizing personally.
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A
Tell me, is there a response that you can tell us about or how do the workers respond when you do these inquiries? What is the meaning of that? Can you tell in the workers you draw into the process?
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B
Generally speaking, people are very interested to read other people's experiences or if. One of my favorite responses we ever got was somebody talking about how if they could change, you know, how their cafe runs, then they would change the placement of the fridges. And it sounds kind of silly to anybody that doesn't work in a cafe, but I can tell you that, like, the placement of drains or, you know, the kinds of syrups that we have on offer are things that, even though they're not necessarily related to wages, people care about just as much. And it's exciting to folks whenever they encounter other baristas, other people with the same job, that have deeply held convictions and thoughts about how the work should be organized. The other thing is that we tried to make it a kind of collective experience. So usually making zines which include people's responses to these things is another part of the organizing, because people love arts and crafts.
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A
Yeah, I was trying to draw you out about there's an honoring of the worker and the workplace that our culture does. Never do. That you're doing by making an inquiry, you're telling these people their story, their concern about the placement of the refrigerator has a value to you. This is a very important message, and for successful unionizing, I would think it is almost magic. So I was wanting to get your reaction to that.
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B
Yeah, I think so. And in conversations with my coworkers, I've kind of seen that be drawn out over time. And that's the beauty of it, to me, is that it's supposed to be a continuous process. And then also it's a great way to help address questions or concerns about how unionizing or how we can actually take action to address more serious concerns at work by not sweating the small stuff.
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C
Yeah. I'll add a bit to this to say that I think one of the sort of aspects of this process of workers inquiry that makes it effective is that we're saying everybody is an expert on their experience at work and their experience with what sort of capital does. Does to us. Right. At the same time, in the responses that we got to our inquiry, we see a lot of discussion about the role of camaraderie at work. Right. Sort of a recognization both of everybody's own expertise. They know how to place the fridges better. Right. Even though management doesn't. But also the value of sort of camaraderie with the folks that you're working with. Not everyone, because management will create those divisions. Right. But with sort of the camaraderie that folks have when they're for example, counter planning on the shop floor going through this process of inquiry, realizing like, damn, we could do a better job at placing those fridges. And that creates this sort of social relations that can sort of lead to some very exciting conversations, not just about unionization, but sort of like beyond that realm.
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A
Well, we've run out of time, unfortunately anyway. But your comment, let me make a little comment also. I think it is enormously important. I'm very glad we brought you now more than I was when we first discussed it here. And I'll tell you why. What you're describing is not only a way of drawing these people into the unionization effort, as you show as an organizer, your honoring of their experience, their reflections, but in that little moment of we can do the refrigeration placement better, you have the kernel of something which on this program we emphasize all the time that these enterprises could be and would be and should be better organized if the workers ran them themselves. And that thought is already present in what you're doing. And for that this is a very important program. I wish we had more time. My guess is we'll come back to you in a few months to check in on how the organizing is going. But for the moment, congratulations on having organized the nine. And I hope this video helps bring the other side to the table to get your contract.
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B
Thank you.
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A
And to all my audience as usual, thank you for listening and I will look forward to speaking with you again next week.