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

dimensions of our lives and those of our children.

I'm your host, Richard Wolfe.

Before jumping in today's very interesting program with my guest, Wilmer Leon, whom I'll introduce in the second half.

I want to remind you, Charlie Fabian is here.

Charlie.info-438 at gmail.com.

And again about my new book, Understanding Capitalism, available at Democracy

at Work.Info, along with all our other books. But the understanding capitalism is a way

of getting more depth in the stories that I develop and present to you on this

program. It's kind of a companion volume. I think you'll find it useful and interesting.

The topics we're going to discuss this morning in the first, are two topics. One short, one long. The short one

is about a strike in Philadelphia. A union election before a strike, but a strike is coming and you'll see why. And the second topic is

tariffs. Because President Trump insists on using tariffs more, more often on more adversaries.

We used to call them allies, but when you hit him with a tariff, they become an adversary,

and Mr. Trump is doing a great deal of that as fast as he can, days into his second term. So let's get to it. The Whole Foods chain that many of you know

about has of course stores in many parts of the United States including Philadelphia. At

one of the Whole Food stores in Philadelphia,

the workers petitioned for and signed the cards needed to arrange for an

election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board, in which all the eligible workers at that store

could vote yes, they do want a union or no, they do not.

This is the way many unions in many workplaces come into existence. This was established almost a century ago during

the 1930s. And the workers in this election have this election and 130s and 130 voted in favor of unionization, 100 against. So there was a very clear

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