And the 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 Wolf. I begin as usual reminding you that Charlie Favian is awaiting

your suggestions for which we are grateful and which we use in building our programs.

And once again, Charlie.

info 438.gmail.com is the way to communicate your ideas, suggestions, criticisms to us.

I also want to remind you of the three books that we have produced over the last several years. Understanding Marxism, then

understanding socialism, and just released understanding capitalism. You can

find out more about each of these books at our website, Democracy

at work. Info slash books, where they are all available.

And finally I want to note, as you'll see,

that this program is partly in honor of Labor Day,

which happens early in September of every year, and there's an opportunity

for us to give recognition to the process of work, to the organization of work, and to the organization of labor unions to represent

workers that doesn't get the attention it deserves most of the time the rest of the year.

So I'm going to start with a strike that began on the Sunday before Labor Day

and may be continuing depending on where you are.

It has to do with hotel workers, the people who check you in, check you out, clean the room, clean the facilities, make

it an experience you look for and remember rather than other sense of horror. These are very hard-working people. They are not well paid in general by the standards we hold up.

And they work at something that makes the rest of us comfortable.

And before I jump into the strike,

10,000 of them have just launched

...