Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the

economic dimensions of our lives. I'm your host, Richard Wolfe. Today's program will be talking about the strike

by United States railroad workers that's being developed as we speak. We're going to talk about

the Chipotle Corporation, closing those restaurants where workers are organizing and fighting for unions and beginning to talk

about strikes. Other issues as well. And then the second half, we'll have an interview with the

one and only, Noam Chomsky. So let me begin. Railroad workers last struck in the United States back in 1991.

So we're talking about 30 years during which there hasn't been a job action of the kind

we call a strike by this group of important workers.

And I want to talk about them, not only because they haven't

struck, but because these are better paid workers, at least as the wages go in the United States,

and they're becoming an important force striking and unionizing too. It's not just, important as that is, it's not just

the workers at Starbucks or Amazon that we've been hearing so much about. But it's all through

the labor movement, all through the different categories of work that workers are becoming more militant, demanding

better conditions, not tolerating what they might have tolerated for a long time.

Railroad workers are overwhelmingly male, many of them are former military, and relative

to other workers, they're pretty well paid.

The mean conductor, the average conductor salary, about $68,000.

The average engineer salary, $73,000.

With benefits and so on, it's a considerable pay package, but it isn't enough

for these workers, and there are very good reasons why. But before I tell you that, I want

to make sure everybody understands that if the last 30 years were a problem, the last five were extreme.

The period of leading up to the pandemic, the pandemic, the crash, the inflation, they put

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