Portside

"March for Dignity", Schools, science education, Obama and the King

Just watching staid Angela Merkel and stout Sigmar Gabriel trying to straddle the crevice - figuratively speaking - was quite a sight, no easy matter for the chancellor or the vice-chancellor, who is also head of the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

Colombian autoworkers take fight to the U.S.

Yet the skills story just keeps showing up in supposedly informed discussion. Again, I think that this is because it sounds like the kind of thing serious people should say.

"We have a choice, and we will choose between the world economy of today—with slow growth, high unemployment and obscene levels of inequality—and the world of tomorrow, of broadly shared prosperity. We will choose between a world of wealth for the 1%, with poverty for the rest of us, and a world in which all of us who work hard can enjoy the fruits of our labor."

Going back, you said that there were 80 unions at the Labor Party's founding that represented roughly half a million workers. It seems like you were trying to make this a party that was - concretely and substantively, not just symbolically or rhetorically - composed of and led by actual leaders, organizers, and rank-and-file members of the labor movement. Can you speak about that kind of model, and how it's different from other existing parties?