Democratic Renewal and the Green Job Guarantee

The following remarks were delivered as the keynote at the joint Global Forum for Social and Solidarity Economy (GSEF) and International Centre of Research and Information on the Public, Social and Cooperative Economy (CIRIEC) conferences in Bordeaux, France, on October 29, 2025. We are living through a moment of deep division across our politics, economies, and environment, a division that stems from a deliberate forgetting--a self-induced amnesia, if you will. For decades, political parties have treated the working family as a slogan rather than the foundation of a healthy society. This amnesia was aided and abetted by mainstream economic theory that treated the economy as a financial machine, not a social ecosystem. The abandonment of family wellbeing, and working people in particular, created a void now being filled by authoritarians. I would like to propose a project of democratic renewal capable of mending our social fabric while addressing the defining challenge of our age: the climate crisis. This project begins with a simple, radical, and fundamentally democratic idea: guaranteeing the right to a decent, living-wage job to everyone who seeks one.