Marketplace for Monday, September 24, 2007

Segments From This Episode

• UAW workers strike General Motors

  by Alisa Roth

  At General Motors this morning 73,000 UAW members walked off the job and onto the picket lines in the first nationwide strike against an American car maker since 1976. Until the walkout, negotiations had appeared positive. Alisa Roth reports on where things got off track.

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• Union is set for a long standoff

  by Kai Ryssdal

  The UAW is about as set as it can be for a walkout, with about $800 million in its strike fund — enough to give every striker $200 a day and medical benefits for two months. Kai Ryssdal talked with Doug Rademacher, president of UAW local 602 in Lansing, Mich.

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• Wal-Mart looks for more green

  by Sam Eaton

  Wal Mart says it will begin asking its suppliers to voluntarily measure and report their climate-warming carbon emissions. How much impact will it have? Sam Eaton reports.

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• Less farming, less poverty?

  by Marketplace Staff

  About a third of the world's workers are in farming. But in the prosperity of Europe and the United States, less than 2 percent of all workers till the soil. Commentator and business historian John Steele Gordon says getting more people off the land would be progress.

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• Leaving coal mining behind

  by Kyle James

  Coal mines and steel factories in Germany's Ruhr Valley once drove the country's recovery from World War II. But modern economic realities are changing a way of life. Kyle James reports.

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• Eavesdropping, the next business model

  by Jill Barshay

  A company is offering a new Internet phone service free to users. Interested? Here's the catch: You have to let the company listen in on your calls so it can show you advertising related to your conversation. Jill Barshay reports.

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• ‘Buy 1, Give 1’ laptop campaign boots up

  by Steve Tripoli

  Remember the group that want to provide a $100 laptop computer to kids in poor countries? It hit a snag, in part, because it couldn't deliver the machine at that price. Today, it rebooted its business plan. Steve Tripoli reports.

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• Battle heats up over Southwest water

  by Stacey Vanek Smith

  

  It was a long dry summer across the Southwest United States. And climate experts say it's only going to get worse — which has made one already scarce commodity all the more precious. Stacey Vanek-Smith reports on the competition for water between cities and the countryside.

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