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tv   Economic Divide U.S. autoworker strike  PRESSTV  October 13, 2023 12:02am-12:30am IRST

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when it comes to the other workers strike in the us, there are many things the general public just doesn't know, this was about a broken promise and about sacrifice by the workers and the governments, but the workers got the cold end of the stick from the manufacturers, then the contagion where there are strikes of many different sectors now in the us, all of that is coming up first, let's take a look at some of the highlights that we'll be covering for you. first the us autoworker strike. it's a strike over pay, a strike over benefits. ceo pay at the big 3 has increased by 40%. that's one of the reasons why these autoworkers are angry. and of course they have every reason to be because overall another one of the highlights we'll be looking at are the us wages. now in terms of the increase there, the top 1%, 145%. the bottom 90%. and only 16%. that's a
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great recipe for inequality for a country. and finally, us strikes. these strikes are not just about the autoworkers. uh, there are in sectors like hospitality, dining and healthcare that are also experiencing a strikes, which puts into question the health of the us economy. the us is facing multiple strikes and industrial actions against the backdrop of an uncertain economic time. thousands of workers have gone a strike in different industries in recent months to demand higher pay and improved benefits and working conditions. the autoworkers are taking aim at ceos at ford, general motors and stalantis for received the 40% wage increase. workers also believe. they
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have more bargaining power due to a tight labor market, when it comes to the hollywood strike, the tentative deal was reached with studio bosses to end a strike that lasted nearly five months. riders began to strike on may 2nd asking for increased royalties, mandatory staffing of tv riding rooms and safecards to the jobs from the use of artificial intelligence. no matter how advanced ai is, they cannot replicate human emotions, they'll never be able to replicate human connection, and that's the reason why we have the passion for telling stories and why we make movies, so i'm hoping that everyone will come on board with us and stand against this, because there's nothing that can replace, technology can never replace true artistry. approval of labor unions is also its highest point since the year 1965, majority of the public 71 of americans see
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of unions as key in improving pay and working conditions. the number of workers involved in major work stoppages has hit the highest levels in decades. the number of workers went a strike grew by 50% in 2022, further more, between 1979 and 2022. the inflation adjusted annual wages of the top 1% of workers rose by 145%, while the average annual wages of the bottom 90% rose by only 16%. time to take a look at some of the online posts on this first up uh what was posted on x as it's called now it said the deal was uaw members take some short-term cuts for the long-term survival of ford gm and chrysler. that's the promise we made and that's the promise that was broken. all right that shows obviously uh how they were chipped uh out of uh what was supposed to be coming to them. next up. a
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website uh we refer to where it said more big strikes loom with thousands of healthcare and casino workers set to walk off the job. well guess what, when we had this entry, that already has happened. this entry said there is a feeling that the system is fundamentally unfair to the workforce that is doing all the hard work, went out to say what is driving the protest, the clining real wages, a tight lamur market and robust corporate profits only bolsters the case for for workers. uh, next, the website, where it talked about the largest healthcare strike in us history, the coalition of kaiser permanenta unions to accuse kaiser of negotiating in bad faith and committing unfair labor practices uh then a tweet on this on x: solidarity forever with the 7500 workers at kaisar permanente: when you win this fight, the entire working class will win as well. yeah, again the kaza permanenta took us by surprise because that's that's the largest uh of its kind in uh us uh
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hopefully we can uh maybe do a program on that well let's let me introduce our guests for our first q&a we have daryl mitchell joining us now daryl mitchell um is a retired autoworker, he worked at christler motors, he's a former union representative and he's an activist in the socialist movements for 50 years, rather long resume, former editor at southern advocate, he's a founding member of the league of revolutionary black workers of detroit and also former executive board member at detroit's coalition of black trade unionist. daryl mitchell, welcome to the program. all right, so uh, let's start off by asking you about this strike, so in one respects, it's... about the pay, we know that, but there are things that have really angered these uh strikers, for example, the coo compensation uh that these the big three automakers and their ceos are making, which has grown by the way 40% over the last four years and they're using that to press for their wage increases, are the workers
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justified to use that channel in order to get a pay increase for themselves? i think you posing an incorrectly the... the union has made it clear that one of his key demands is to end the two-tier system, they made this clear at every juncture, yes pay is important, yes it is important to contrast compensation of auto workers with compensations with ceo, there's nothing rational about paying ceos billions of dollars for a company being successful, but suppressing the wages of workers, that's my first point. "the second point is that to all the workers are fighting a battle for their existence, for instance, currently stalantis has roughly 58,000 employees in the us, that's chrystal. when i was hired in was 120,00 union members, over the next 10 years
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we are looking at the elimination of roughly 50 to 70% of the auto workforce by digital process and advanced robot." in my view this is last ditch fight of the autoworkers union well that's a great point that he makes there um which is something that's uh probably at the forefront of the auto sector overall when it become when it became automated feely let me introduce her she's a retired autoworker and member of the uaw local 22s welcome to economic divide um the general trend in the us uh based on wages is that uh we're looking a inflation adjusted annual uh increase the top 1% 145% uh the bottom 90% only 16% which is about a tenth as fast uh why is that happening why why is such unfairness and uh
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basically inequality as a result of this that uh these un uneven wage wages uh create yes i would say so and it's a combination of the corporations and the government laws that allow them to uh restructure uh on the backs of workers, right now for example, the uh companies are building new battery plants and the government has given them millions of dollars, probably about 100 million, $140 million dollars, but there are no guarantees in what is being given or loaned by the government to these factories and to the corporations of these factories to insist that there be adequate working conditions for the workforce there. so the restructuring
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that occurred in the 1979-81 period was sort of the beginning of the restructuring, but since then there have been probably three waves of... restructuring and workers are always expected to give back, when in fact we had nothing to do with the corporate decisions that were made, not only paying the corporate ceos huge salaries and benefits, but also uh buying uh buying back stock uh so that that would elevate uh what their their their uh company was worth. the mari uh experience is an experience that
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is opening mark opening up new era in west africa. during the attack we noticed our soldiers were no match, they were weaker, the isal fighters were stronger than us. whoever there to face them were killed on the spot. how many times has france killed us and looted from us, our gold, our uranium, everything that belongs to niger, france has got its hands on it, we do not accept this anymore, francis has brought us nothing good. inth section of the program, the us autoworkers strike, which is still ongoing. as of now, at least up to now, is reflective of not just payback time, but also of wall
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street greed. that's right, the manufacturers bailed out by us taxpayers money are not willing to give those very same tax payers the wages that they deserve. well, the ceos were raking in tens of millions of dollars in their salaries. all right, we're going to get into that, but this first section is all about what we're going to cover in this section, because there's a lot of them. the first uh thing we're going to cover is about the strikes themselves. uh what uh it has entailed, then we're going to talk about the progress that they have made or maybe lack of it based on uh what you're going to hear in a matter of minutes, then the number of workers that are involved and we're going to put that a comparative uh study for you. next up the the big three profits, big three being the auto manufacturers, okay? uh we have to find out how much money they are making. then we move to uh profits and uh losses. profits and losses based on uh when the strikes happened, how much the manufactured? made or lost, the wage growth, that's very important because of the comparison we're going to make to for
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example the ceos and we're going to take a look at the salaries that some of the ceos of these manufacturers are making, and finally car sales in the scope of how much the gross uh amount of sales these manufacturers have uh in their market, which is very important, so let's get going. all right, the first category that we have for you are the strikes themselves, so let's see what's going on here. here with the strike uh and entails walkouts so far gm and stalantis those two manufacturers you have five assembly plants that have gone a strike they're not operational and you have 38 parts depots also accumulatively speaking that are not functional uh this shows that this strike has the potential for it to actually expand okay next uh taking a look at the progress that's happening well it's pretty simple the union demand is 40%, that's the increase they want for their pay, but the carmakers are only willing to go up to 20%. the latest has
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indicated that this figure has gone down to 36%, but we're not sure because it's not confirmed. in canada, they gave up a whole lot more than that. let's move to the next category in terms of uh what we have here, the number of workers. this is important, in the year 2021, you had 36,600 that went a strike. look at the year 2023, 362,00 have gone a strike. now now if you're going to add the number of auto workers which combined, there's 150,000 auto workers all together for potential strikers, you can see that figure top there, the 362,00 is going to jump by quite a bit. next up, what do we have here? big three profits, need i say more at fort gm salantis, 92% the profits have increased, we took a range of 20 the years 2013 to 2022, 250 billion dollars, okay? so that shows the amount of money that they are making, that's quite a lot. all right, let's take a look now
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at the us wage growth, that is very important in terms of what we have for you, the top 1%, as you can see over here, look how much increase they've had on their wages, 145%, that's a lot when you compare it to the bottom 90% 90%, we just had 16% only for the wage growth, the years uh that we looked at 1979 through the year 2022. what do we have coming up next, co salaries? all right, that's the big one, that's one of the things that... is up for discussion in a major way, the big three ceo salaries, you have ford ceo jim farley 21 million per year, salanta ceo carlos tavares 25 million, and the one that comes in a number one mary bara 29 million, the gm ceo, all right, now this is what hurts for the workers, the cofits were made $1.7 millions off each worker, which came into the picture in terms of the way that these uh um ceos made their profits, in their salary but the time sharing that they did had with the profits, that's what it amount to. next up,
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what do we have? uh, car sales as a whole. how big a market is it? vehicles and parts, $1.53 trillion dollars for the year 2022. okay, tell me there's not a lot of money in car manufacturing. um, if there was to be an impact on that, the amount that it contributes to the us gdp is 3%. so that's why this uh car strike is such a... big deal still waiting see game uh to see if they're going to come up with any type of uh guess agreements on this. all right, guess it's time to get some analysis into the picture, don't you think? well maybe not, we have one more. go here, too many numbers for you, maybe gm profits quarterly, this is as of the latest, the latest quarter, $3.2 billion they made, okay, and they still want uh, won't uh negotiate, the auto losses, however, 3.95 billion, you're looking at over a month, a month and maybe a couple weeks now, that's how much money has been lost because of the
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strike, but that figure over there, that's a big figure there, i know, enough numbers, let's go to our guest. and see what they think about all of this. uh, let's bring back daryl mitchell, he's a retired autoworker, uh, he uh worked at chrysler motors and also a former union representative who rejoins us. darel mil, welcome back economic divide. uh, i'd like to find out from you, why it is that it's not just autoworkers that are striking, we're looking at other sectors that have uh joined now these strikes. it seems like the autoworkers kind of set it off, i think it's because of the large numbers that are involved and how major um piece of the economy the us in the us it plays um and this all points to stagnant wages and pay basically why has it spread to other sectors you think my view is that we going through a fundamental change in economy that is on the scale of the industrial revolution of the 18th century. we are going through a
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fundamental change in our society. that's probably equivalent to the discovery of five, i don't say that joking me, right now, i'm residing in uh, san jose california, san jose california is like the home of the new technology, in the last century, detroit and the auto industry was the home of technological innovation, my point is that we're going through a revolution in a tech. logical complex a scale that ushered in industrial capitalism, so we talking about the destruction of the workforce as it had existed for the last 150, 200 years, we going through a profound change in our society, and nothing can stop it or hur it. yeah, you know, he's got a point there, and i think he
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pointed out in the last time that we brought him on, where the automation that took place in the car industry, is which is one of the uh first to have gone that route pointing to the um artificial intelligence that it's going to be incorporated and we're seeing obviously that uh to be applied in many industries uh let's bring in our guests ian freely retired autoworker and member of uaw local 22c what she thinks diane feely um i'd like to ask you the question i asked our previous guest and that's about how we're seeing these strikes basically spread to other industies uh that we didn't expect. one the most recent ones being khaisa permanente which uh involves uh quite a number of employees, i think if you put it all together about 80,000 but hospitality, tech industries and even curier services. why is that happening? mean uh, you talk about only 3% inflation in the us as is reported, but yet people uh don't don't make enough money to pay their bills and to buy and basically to concern what's happening? well it's pretty
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widespread and the minimum wage is very very low, both the... federal minimum wage and in michigan it's slightly higher uh, the federal minimum wage is about $7.50, the uh wage in in uh michigan is a little higher at $10 an hour, but even $15 an hour is not an adequate wage, so one factor is the low wages of uh of many of the workers, the fact that uh inequality means that the profits are going uh much more towards the points that i raised before of ceos of uh outsourcing of um uh combining uh um so you have uh corporations that uh not only are active as in one
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industrial area but uh are conglomerate. according to polls, more than 40% of us voters would back joe biden in the 2020 presidential election, say they think that the economies is worse off than it was then, rising gas prices and high interest rates have contributed to greater economic uncertainty and has dampened consumer confidence, the conference boards consumer confidence and fell for second consecutive month, dropping to 103 in september, from an upwardly revised 108.7 the month before, the decline in consumer confidence was evidence across all age groups and notably among consumers with household incomes of $50,000 or more, the share of consumers surveyed,
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believe a recession is somewhat likely, or very likely, rose in september after dropping in august. consumer spending serves as a critical driver for us economic growth, the us censors bureau's most recent household pulse. survey for the two weeks ending september 4 showed that 80% of respondents were still somewhat or very concerned about future inflation. annual consumer inflation dropped to 4% in may and 3% in june of this year, but came in at 3.2% in july and climbed to 3.7% in august. i still worry very much uh that that we could have a hard landing, whether you probably not until next year, the hiking uh cycle that the fed's been going through, it takes 12 months to 18 months for it to really have an impact on. economy and same thing with the yield curve, the yield curve did invert to year ago and it usually takes about year for it really to have that kind of impact. hello and welcome to the
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quick take section, i'm matte aposan. when it comes to the us strikes, auto workers are not the only ones that are going a strike, there are workers from other sectors like dining. and hospitality, technology and health services. besides auto workers, hundreds of thousands of us workers have walked off their jobs this year in industries of all types. this includes hollywood screenwriters, starbucks, amazon workers and frontline workers like nurses, hotel staff and pilots. this day is very expensive, i love rom, i love my community, i love to be a part of this community, however the going rate of a one bedroom. is $2,200. the u.s. president joe biden, however, has a stated that the u.s. economy is doing well, more or less under the banner of bydynamics, that
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americans are just beginning to reap the rewards and have more confidence in the us economy. in one survey, it's indicated that 44% of voters said they're worse off financially under biden, the most for any president since ronald reagan in 1986. let's look at some economic factors that go against joe biden's claims, for many americans, job security is a big deal, and it should be since us businesses are not doing that well. us business bankrupties have reached a 13-year high, more than 450 corporations have claimed bankruptcy protection, surpassing annual totals for the past two years. the federal reserves interest rate hikes and economic uncertainty are cited as the reasons, meanwhile, poverty in the us has also seen a rise, especially in metropolitan cities like los angeles and new york city, which goes against us announcements of
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economy that is doing well. 2022 there was 12.4%, increase of 4.6 percentage points from 2021. more alarmingly, the child poverty rate more than doubled from 5.2% in 2021 to 12.4% in 2020. two, since we are looking at us poverty, let's look at food poverty and us's a snap program, short for supplemental nutrition assistance program, this is a government program that helps people who need assistance with food, and here is where the depth of america's weak economic conditions shows itself. 41.2 million people, that's 12.5% of the total us population have received monthly snap benefits in the 2022 fiscal year. and finally, on the note of government assistance, what things the us government spends its money on has been overlooked, which ironically should be the focus. first, we need to look at the us
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government income. the us makes around 6.3 trillion dollars in income, and believe it or not, spends half of that amount on entitlement programs like food assistance and benefits. that's the end of this episode's quick take, thank you for watching, don't forget to send us your comments and questions, i'm mattiapolis and i'll see you next week. greed has no bounds or limits, that is what has driven the ceos of these car manufacturers on the back of their workers and the money that they've made. the us president joe biden touted biteenomics that's so successful and that the economy is doing well for so many months in a row now, then why are there so many americans that are going a strike i'm sure they have better things to do with their time than to go a strike, but of course uh that's up to the us president to realize that that these people
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don't have enough money to get by with their everyday expenses. that does it for this edition of economic devide. thank you so much for being with us, we uh do enjoy making the program for you, but it's uh more successful for us to know how we are doing, if you give us feedback, contact information is uh behind me. from the team, it's good to buy until the next economic divide.
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few weeks ago we came to this facility to talk about radio pharmaceuticals and specifically gallium and luticium which have diagnostic and therapeutic properties, especially when it comes to cancer therapy, and the missing link now is iodine, so we have iodine solutions and capsules that is administered to patients with thyroid cancer or hyperthyroidism. stay tuned to see how these work to fight cancer in thyroid in this week's episode of euront.
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your headlines for this hour israel's savage strikes on the gaza strip claims the r or claim the lives of hundreds of palestinian children as death toll exceeds 1,500. hamas rejects west and claims that it violated human rights during his operation against israel saying it only target. military forces, the israeli military admits the regime's failure in responding to operation alaxa flood launched by the palestinian resistance fighters.