Labor Unions and Political Power
Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Democracy at Work
4.8 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 3 December 2024
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week’s episode of Economic Update, Professor Wolff devotes this week's episode to Labor Unions and Political parties. We explain why US & Western capitalism today provoke labor and unions into more and more social and political action. The latest examples are the recent Canadian Postal Workers strike and the Barnes and Noble bookstore workers rally in New York City. The Professor discusses the history of the standard practice of employers filing complaints with the National Labor Relations Board to dispute the results of elections that form unions.
Finally a major discussion on politics and the intersection of labor. What will be unions' relationship to political parties? Will we see general strikes and mass popular mobilizations? Only time will tell.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic |
| 0:26.6 | dimensions of our lives and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolfe. |
| 0:32.7 | I want to remind you, as always, that Charlie Fabian is available to take any suggestions, ideas, |
| 0:39.8 | programmatic notions you have that we can think about and consider for future programs. |
| 0:46.2 | You can always reach him at Charlie.Info-438 at gmail.com. Charlie. Dot info at 438 at gmail.com. |
| 0:54.5 | Charlie. |
| 0:55.2 | .info at 438 at gmail.com. |
| 1:01.2 | And as always, I want to remind you that our new book, Understanding Capitalism, is a kind of companion |
| 1:08.4 | to these programs. |
| 1:10.2 | It is an assemblage of the theories, the ideas, |
| 1:15.7 | the problems, the mythology, everything that sustains and organizes the capitalist system we live in. |
| 1:23.9 | And it's a way of understanding it to use it to follow what we do on this program, |
| 1:30.7 | and vice versa, to use what we do on this program as a nice way to give examples for what you |
| 1:38.9 | will find in the book. It's available at our website, Democracy at Work.info. |
| 1:45.0 | Okay. |
| 1:46.0 | Let me begin today, which is a program devoted to labor unions and political parties. |
| 1:55.0 | A relationship between them that is at a crisis point now and a changing point and something that I want |
| 2:03.9 | to go over because you'll be reading about it and watching it unfold over the next couple |
| 2:11.1 | of years, perhaps with considerable drama. |
| 2:15.4 | What am I talking about? |
| 2:16.9 | I'm talking about the fact that the labor movement |
| 2:20.7 | has awoken over the last two or three years. It has mobilized millions of people, and it is |
... |
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