Unions and Strikes are the People's Power
Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff
Democracy at Work
4.8 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 20 September 2023
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
NOTE TO SUBSCRIBERS: Despite the multiple setbacks we have experienced over the last several months in our efforts to continue producing and releasing Economic Update here on YouTube, we are very excited to announce the return of Economic Update to YouTube as of today. Over the next few days/weeks we will be releasing episodes of EU we were unable to share with our community of subscribers throughout the summer.
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The d@w Team
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[ S13 E 28]
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This week's show brings updates on unionization of Stanford University grad student workers, UPS's 350,000 workers vote and prepare for strike, 2.5 million public employees in Germany strike and win big wage gains, LA sees biggest hotel workers strike in 50 years, win big wage gains at LA's biggest hotel. Major discussion of markets' failures using 2 examples: (1) FDR replacing markets with government rationing in World War 2, and (2) using the market to distribute housing causes gentrification and homelessness. Short concluding discussion of the reform vs revolution debate.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic |
| 0:16.3 | dimensions of our lives and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolfe. I want to begin today |
| 0:23.4 | by reminding you, as some of you have now taken to heart, that we welcome communications |
| 0:29.4 | from you about stories you think are important and that deserve the kinds of analysis |
| 0:35.2 | we do on this program. I want to give you again the name of |
| 0:40.3 | my friend Charlie Fabian, who is handling this process. And he has a website where you can |
| 0:46.9 | communicate and he will respond to you if you have suggestions, ideas, materials, references, |
| 0:53.5 | and so on. Here is his email. Charlie, spelled |
| 0:59.1 | C-H-A-R-L-I-E, Charlie. Info-338 at gmail.com. Once again, Charlie dot info 438 at gmail.com. Once again, Charlie.Info-438 at gmail.com. The first half of today's program |
| 1:17.9 | is going to be devoted to unions and striking, because that's going on in this country in ways |
| 1:24.1 | that it has not for a long time, and it doesn't get the attention of the mass media |
| 1:29.5 | anywhere near related to its real importance in American life and history. |
| 1:35.9 | And in the second half, we'll have something to say about the old debate between reform |
| 1:41.5 | and revolution, and also the examples in American history when either the |
| 1:47.0 | market was set aside as an institution we don't want, or the market wasn't set aside, |
| 1:53.3 | leaving us with consequences of the market that we don't want either. These are important |
| 1:59.3 | topics to bring awareness to in this moment of our history. |
| 2:04.9 | So let's begin with the unions and the strikes. I'm going to begin with a remarkable story. |
| 2:13.3 | Graduate student workers, two or three thousand of them, are a feature of many universities. |
| 2:21.3 | They get away with giving work to their graduate students. |
| 2:25.9 | Instead of giving them grants so they have the time to study, they give them a job. |
| 2:32.0 | This is clever because the students need the money, in part because the university doesn't give them a job. This is clever because the students need the money, in part because |
... |
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