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Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic.
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Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. Jobs, debts, incomes, those of our children and those facing us. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. I want to begin today's updates by talking about something as old as the human race. I'm talking about the problem of maternal death rates, women who die in childbirth, something that has been a concern for the human community, for the life of our species. The reason I bring it up today is a statistic that caught my attention. The maternal death rate in the United States is four to six times larger than that in Europe. That's the number of mothers who die in childbirth as a percentage of the total population. So it takes into account the different sizes of the different countries. This is an extraordinary and deeply depressing statistic. So I looked further, tried to find out what are the causes, as far as science knows, for maternal death, dying in childbirth, given all the advances science and medicine have made in this area. And there are three basic causes. One, poor health of the population in general, number two, poor heart care, health in particular because it's a tremendous strain on the heart giving birth. And number three, poor pregnancy care. So it turns out that the United States has four to six times the rate of maternal death in pregnancy, excuse me, in birth, because it has poor general health, poor heart health and poor pregnancy care. What an extraordinary comment. And what a way to contrast the claims of Mr. Trump and the GOP that we have a great economy. Think about it. I want to talk next about inequality. Everyone knows who pays attention that the level of inequality, both of income and wealth in the United States is off the chart, so extreme that it's almost a daily affront to the majority of people. And so I wanted to bring your attention to some comments about it and some facts about it that may not have come to your attention before. And I want to remind you of the work of the French economist Thomas Piketty that we've talked about before, whose famous book published in 2014 called Capital in the 21st Century, is a documentary study of how capitalism, throughout its history and wherever it has settled as the dominant economy, has increased the inequality of wealth and income. It's only when people upset by this inequality have risen up and demanded changes that you've had a temporary because always turned out to be temporary, a temporary reversal of the inequality, or at least a slowing down of the growth of inequality. But as soon as that temporary revolt from below is over, the inequality resumes because it's built into to capitalism. That was Mr. Piketty's discovery, his 600 page book, is the demonstration and proof of this argument. So I want to begin with a recent statement, February 4, to be precise, made by Pope Francis in a speech in the Vatican. I can't do better than quote the words of the Pope, so let me do that right now. We must be conscious of all being responsible. If extreme poverty exists amid riches which are also extreme, it is because we have allowed a gap to grow, to become the largest in history. Pope Francis, February 4th of this year. I found this remarkable and it stood in contrast to something else I also found remarkable. It turns out that the recent Valentine's Day holiday that many of us celebrate was also the occasion for a hotel in New York City, the Peninsula Hotel, to also offer a special deal for the Valentine's Day holiday. I'm going to read it to you and then give you the price that the Peninsula Hotel charged with for this service. The ultimate Valentine's Day Manhattan experience. How about a night under the stars in a rooftop dome? New York's Peninsula Hotel has just the ticket, with packages that start at $48,000 for the evening. Included in this Valentine's Day special, a champagne toast from a dedicated personal butler and a private dinner, complete with Petrosian caviar. If you wondered how the other side lives now, you know, these are signs of extreme inequality, of just the sort of that Pope Francis was talking about. It goes together with another thing Mr. Pope Francis said he offered a critique of the destruction of the Amazon rainforest as part of the consequences of inequality in the world. He criticized the destruction of that vast natural preserve. In response, the President of Brazil, Bolsonaro, attacked the Pope. Here's what he the Pope may be Argentinian, but God is Brazilian. I couldn't make this stuff up, so that's why I'm reading to you. This was at the same time that the former President of Brazil, who did not despoil the Amazon, Lula by name, was, was getting an audience with the Pope in the Vatican. And then there's the last example for today of extreme wealth. The richest man on this planet, Jeffrey Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, decided recently that he was going to commit $10 billion for him, you know, a weekend's chump change to the climate change. To fight climate change. He said he will decide who gets it for what, when, and of course, unless he changes his mind. We live in a society in which the hundreds of thousands of people who make Amazon what it is and produce the wealth that Mr. Bezos disposes of it have no say in what is done with the wealth of their labor helped to produce. Instead, we allow one man to decide what to do with the wealth produced by hundreds of thousands of people, you know, like a king or an emperor, which we may have thought we got rid of hundreds of years ago. But they show up again dressed as corporate CEOs. My next update has to do with the arrival of the MeToo movement, which started in the entertainment industry, went on to high tech, and has now reached the banking industry. And two events in particular I wanted to bring to your attention. The first concerns the Wells Fargo bank. They have a long standing procedure which they've now stopped. The procedure was to subject internal complaints, like complaints about sexual harassment to mandatory arbitration, so that people who work for the Wells Fargo bank had to submit to mandatory arbitration, which typically ended with a non disclosure agreement signed by the person who made the complaint. So that the rest of us, the larger world, the public, never learned about these incidents of sexual and other kinds of harassment. Wells Fargo, under pressure from particularly women in the MeToo movement, has decided to no longer impose mandatory arbitration. And then there was the case brought against the Pittsburgh PNC bank, one of the larger banks in the United States, by a former employee, Damara Scott. She won a judgment by a jury of $2.4 million. Her basic story was that she was sexually harassed by a wealthy client of the bank. Her case contended, and the jury found for her that the bank knew that this person was given to these kinds of sexual harassment, knew that it had happened, took her complaint after it happened, and did exactly nothing about it. When banks directly or indirectly accept or require or tolerate sexual harassment, the bank is acting effectively like a pimp acts. And it is interesting that finally something is being done to deal with this situation. The lawyer for Ms. Scott says that more female bankers have come forward with their parallel stories. MeToo arrives in the banking world. The next update has to do with President Macron in France, increasingly known in his own country as President Trump Lite, as he looks so much like it recently. Macron, who basically gets exposed in a scandalous way every week or two with something new, was exposed this time by meeting with the president of the BlackRock Money managing firm, the biggest money manager in the world based in the United States, whose president, Larry Fink, sits on top of a firm that manages, get ready, $7 trillion worth of other people's money. He was meeting with President Macron because President Macron has been facing a general strike of the French people for trying to change the pension system there. Guess what, Mr. Finks Blackrock manages the pension funds of people all around the world, including governments and corporations. So he is looking with great eagerness on the reform which might bring his management all kinds of clients. Here's some things to think about. France today has one of the lowest poverty rates among its elderly anywhere in the world, much, much lower than the poverty rate of elderly in the United States. That's one of the reasons the French people are fighting to keep their pension system, since it's responsible. The French also don't like to invest in stocks. Only 5% of the people's assets in France are invested in stocks. By comparison, here in the United States, 34% is invested in stocks. So here we have the cute luncheon between the pension manager and the President caught drooling over what money they might make by the reform of the French system. My last update has to do with a sad story many of you remember or know about. Newsweek magazine used to be one of the most important sources of weekly news in the United States. The great competitor of Time magazine. The other one was was founded in 1933 as a competitor to Time magazine, was bought in 1961 by the Washington Post and then later sold in 1991. At its peak, it had 3.3 million subscribers. The last time I could get statistics, 2015, it was 100,000. A virtual collapse. And then in January of 2018, the police raided the headquarters of Newsweek in Lower Manhattan, discovering a money laundering corrupt activity that involved what District attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. Called criminals illegally moving millions of dollars. The IBT corpor, a fictitious company called Karen Smith, David Jang, a South Korean minister, church minister, and Olivet University, a small Bible college that Zhang founded in Southern California. As I said, you can't make this stuff up. We've come to the end of the first half of today's program. Please remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and and Instagram. You can go to democracyatwork.info to learn more about other Democracy at Work shows, our Union Co op store for gift items and our books Understanding Socialism and Understanding Marxism. And lastly, a special thanks to our wonderful Patreon community whose support is an invaluable part of making this show possible. We will be right back.
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A
Welcome back friends, to the second half of today's Economic Update. Before I introduce my guest today, Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg, who's known to me as Trudy as she is to her friends, I wanted to respond to your requests to know where I might be speaking next around the country. On the 18th of March, I'll be speaking at the Raritan Valley Community College. And on the 8th of April, I'll be speaking at the Abigail Adams Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And from time to time, I'll let you know about other places in case you're able and interested to meet me at those events. Trudy Goldberg is chair and co founder.
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Of the National Jobs for All Network.
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A very important organization active for many years, targeting as its goal full employment, a topic that needs a lot more attention than it usually gets, which is one reason for today's program. She was for many years a professor at Adelphi University in the School of.
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Social Work and Social Policy, which she directed.
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And she is also a lifelong activist around this issue and related issues. Her latest book, co authored with Sheila Collins, is about the New Deal, something becoming more and more interesting to Americans. And so this book is one I.
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Would recommend to you.
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It's called When Government Has Learning from the Successes and Failures of the New Deal, was published in 2014. Her latest article, appearing in Dollars and Cents in 2018, was called Trying Again for Full Employment.
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Welcome, Trudy. Thank you very much for coming.
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Oh, thank you for having me.
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All right, let me jump right in and ask you to give our viewers and listeners a sense of what this national coalition is for, why it was founded and what you're trying to achieve.
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Well, we think that full employment now called a job guarantee. We said jobs for all because we thought that really said what it means is really so fundamental to economic equity and justice. It's Franklin Roosevelt called it the first and most fundamental of economic rights and one that would make all the others easier to achieve, such as adequate housing, health care, education.
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And you mean by this the guarantee that if you're an adult, able bodied human being in this society, a job is an obligation of the society to, to offer to you.
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I think it was Martin Luther King who said it's part of the creed of the society. And if people don't have it, how can you practice the work ethic if you don't have a job? You know, it sounds easy to have full employment. It sounds like it's very in sync with the American ethic, you know, the work ethic. But it's not so easy to get because it really takes away a fundamental way in which the workforce is disciplined, the right to fire. And you could still fire, but that person would find another job. And that's what's so wonderful about this, about the possibility of having a job guarantee. The way we're looking at it now, too, is that we. The way in which we would achieve it is by using the experience of the New Deal and creating work so that the people who get jobs are not only helped, but the whole society has helped because it can help to make the environment more sustainable. It can provide services, it can improve the infrastructure. You know, there were many really mass unemployment very recently in the Great Recession. And many of those people were kept on unemployment insurance for a long, long time in idleness when they could have been improving our infrastructure, when they could have been helping to create sustainability, help to build housing, all of the needs that have gone unmet. So that in these programs and the programs that we are proposing for full employment, there's a great benefit to society, not just to the workers.
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Let me ask you a question or two about this. It's always seemed to me in the jobs I've held in my life that the employer is almost in the position of terrorizing the employee. That the fear that your job could be suddenly taken away from you, that your income source would suddenly dry up, is a very powerful weapon. Even if it's never used. The mere threat that it could be used is probably more often at play than the act itself. You would be taking away, to use your words, a way to discipline working people who are the vast majority. If you took away from the minority the authority to lose a job, to lose your income. And yet doesn't democracy, decency, morality mean that we ought not to have a society that allows a minority to have such power over a majority?
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Of course you could fire, but the point is that somebody would find another job that doesn't take away from the right to have the kind of workforce that they want to have. I hadn't thought of it that way, but I think that it's important to.
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Say precisely because we don't guarantee a job. It means when you're fired, you're in deep, deep trouble. Deep trouble. To say you can fire a person because that person doesn't fit in a work procedure for any one of a thousand reasons is a separate matter from whether or not a job is to be guaranteed to every person so that they're productive and contribute to the society that has helped make them be what they are. Tell me a little bit about the history. Is it true or untrue that the United States has demonstrated a commitment to really full employment?
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No, not really. I mean, it happened during World War II.
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Is that the only time in the.
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Last century as we would define it. It was really almost 1% unemployment. Really. They worried about who would pick the apples off the trees. But actually we did all of that because there were so many people who had been told were unemployable. Employability is always a matter of the availability of work. And here were the women that had been kept. You probably saw that movie about the women who were kept out of the workforce during the Depression. They all went to work. The older people went to work. People became employable because there was full employment. After the war there were attempts to achieve it. And basically it was at first, it was never a guarantee. It was an effort to achieve maximum employment, but never guaranteed. There were two times when there were really strenuous efforts to achieve it and important senators were involved. I think the only way it will ever be achieved is if three things at least happen. One, there's a president who is committed to it and who is very adept and adroit at getting what he wants. Truman was actually President Truman. Right after the war when there was an effort, a strenuous effort to achieve full employment. People didn't want to go back to the horror of the Depression. They feared demobilization and they thought this was the right time to achieve full employment. Truman was for it, but you know, he had many other things to do. He was new at the job and he wasn't terribly good about really going about it. And then ultimately the Congress changed some and the feared high unemployment didn't occur either because of the pent up demand for goods and people had savings as a result of the war. So we got something like maximum employment. And one of the Republicans in Congress said, don't worry, it's not full employment. And it wasn't. It was Taft, it was.
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And the fear, the fear of so called maximum or full employment seems to go back to your discipline. In other words, if there's lots of jobs, if the unemployed is small, then your ability to discipline your workers is reduced because they know that can get another job if you fire them.
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You need a reserve army of the unemployed, as they used to say.
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Right. But that means that capitalism as a system seems to require having in this country big enough in this country to have millions of people necessarily sitting idle.
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I'm glad you mentioned that because one of the things I think that really thwarts us in our work is the idea that this is very small number of people who are unemployed and they're probably not very good or able to work or something like that. And if you want to really Push a social problem, you have to really have magnitude. You have to say it affects a lot of people and it's severe in its consequences. And actually both are true. And since unemployment statistics change every month, I want to, you'll excuse me if I go to a note, but actually this, so called, this 3.6% unemployment, which is so very low as official unemployment, is really just the tip of the iceberg, to use a very original expression. But it means that 5.9 million people are officially unemployed. Now, 6 million people is not nothing at all, but that's really low unemployment and low official unemployment. And that means that these are people who are working at all during a week, that they're actually interviewed as part of a large survey that the Department of Labor conducts. And it doesn't matter how long they're employed or whatever, but just so they're employed during the week or maybe working in a family business a certain number of hours. But actually, and so that's the 3.6% unemployment, but it doesn't count a number twice that size actually, because you take people who are part time for economic reasons, that means that they'd like to work full time, but. But they can't get a job. Now there are some people who are involuntarily part time unemployed. And actually they're probably not so voluntary anyway because they might actually lack childcare or they might lack transportation. But anyway, another 4.2 million people added to that 5.9 are these people who are part time for economic reasons, part time unemployed, which means not only that.
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They don't have the job they want.
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They don't have the income, but they.
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Don'T have the income that pinches their family's resources.
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Absolutely. And then There are another 4.9 million people who are job wanters. They're not actively looking in order to be unemployed. I forgot to say this. You have to say I've actively looked for work. These are people who would like a job if it came along, but they're not actively looking. And it could be that they are also discouraged, but that's another 4.9 million. So instead of 5.9 million, this 3.6%, you've got 15 million people. And I might say too that if you take even the official unemployment numbers, they're not equally distributed among the population. Whites are 3.1% unemployed, blacks 6.0, usually about twice as much, gap is narrowed a little bit. And if you take teenagers, young people who are starting their working life, you've got something like 12% and black teenagers 22%. And then of course, you've got. We also look at job vacancy rates. We've got 2.3 people looking for every available job who want jobs. I'm sorry. And then of course, we have this whole thing of the number of people who work year round full time for less than the four person poverty standard. And that's actually only about $25,000 a year. So we really need full employment to fill this gap.
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Trudy, I wish we had more time.
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But we don't, even though the topic demands it. And I hope you will come back.
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And I'd like to, I'd like to talk more about what we're doing and about the legislation for a job guarantee.
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To all of you, I want to thank you. I can imagine you share my frustration that we don't have more time to go into this topic. It is so urgent to change the whole way this society works around the meaningfulness of work and the guarantee. Imagine the society we could have if people didn't have the terror of the lost job and the lost income.
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And we had that.
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And we're going to explore that in the future. We really are. With Trudy and others, I want to thank you all again, especially the Patreon community, for your support. And I look forward to talking with you again next week.
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Sa.