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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nA packed room listens to Jane McAlevey speak in conversation with Anthony Thigpenn, not pictured, during Book Talk: “Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations” by Jane McAlevey at UFCW 770 Union Hall in Los Angeles Thursday, July 13, 2023. Allen J. Schaben \/ Los Angeles Times via Getty Images<\/p>\n\n\n\n This story originally appeared in Jacobin<\/a> on July 08, 2024. It is shared here with permission.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n In order to remain independent, we rely on donations from people like you who care about our work. If you value The Real News as a platform for movement-building journalism, please support us today!<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Before I ever met Jane McAlevey, I received a package from her in the mail. In addition to a copy of Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement<\/em>, her first book (written with Bob Ostertag), it contained instant coffee and a few other items that one could imagine packing into a rucksack while on the move.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019d just reviewed<\/a> A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, the Fight for Democracy<\/em>, her then latest book. My piece opened with an anecdote about Hosea Hudson, a legendary labor organizer and black Alabama communist in the 1930s, a time when being either of those things put one\u2019s life at risk. Of his rap to new recruits, Hudson said, \u201cWe had [to] tell people \u2014 when you join, it\u2019s just like the army, but it\u2019s not the army of the bosses, it\u2019s the army of the working class.\u201d I likened Jane to a drill instructor, the book an army manual. If there were any doubt as to whether the comparison was apt, Jane\u2019s care package confirmed it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We are always in a class war, but sometimes it felt like Jane was one of the few people who acted like it. Urgent, direct, no bullshit: that was Jane, the master organizer and negotiator and communicator and strategist. And she was like this with everyone in her orbit: once you were in, you were to be cared for, looked after, and, fundamentally, organized<\/em> by her \u2014 toward the end of keeping up your strength to not only wage class struggles, but to win (one of her favorite words). Her father was a World War II fighter pilot and progressive politician; the apple didn\u2019t fall far from the tree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Join thousands of others who rely on our journalism to navigate complex issues, uncover hidden truths, and challenge the status quo with our free newsletter, delivered straight to your inbox three times a week<\/strong>:SIGN UP<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jane devoted her life to union organizing, and then to writing about it. But the writing was organizing too, a means of multiplying herself, allowing the lessons to reach into countless nooks and crannies across the economy and globe. Bay Area factory workers, striking teachers from West Virginia to Los Angeles, Starbucks baristas, and Amazon warehouse workers have all mentioned her work to me as an inspiration. It wouldn\u2019t be an exaggeration to say that many workers treat Jane\u2019s writing like a kind of Bible, but that would imply a reverence that the substance itself refutes. As Jane argued again and again, workers already have the power to change the world, and the organizer\u2019s role is to show them that: to listen, to identify what they cannot stand, and to teach them the skills to channel their power effectively in order to wrest control from the bosses \u2014 to fight and win.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the Gilded Age<\/em>, her 2016 book, has played a role in a dizzying number of organizing drives and strikes across the country. It began as her late-in-life sociology PhD dissertation at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center (advised by social movements scholar Frances Fox Piven, whose own career-long emphasis on the importance of \u201cordinary people\u201d plays a major role in McAlevey\u2019s book). Each chapter is a case study: \u201cThe Power to Win Is in the Community, Not the Boardroom,\u201d \u201cNursing Home Unions: Class Snuggle vs. Class Struggle,\u201d \u201cChicago Teachers: Building a Resilient Union,\u201d \u201cSmithfield Foods: A Huge Success You\u2019ve Hardly Heard About,\u201d and \u201cMake the Road New York.\u201d The conclusion\u2019s title is classic Jane: \u201cPretend Power vs. Actual Power.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Assessing the reasons for the wins and losses in each case, Jane hammers on the distinction between mobilizing (getting people out for a one-off rally or action) and advocacy (which dispenses with ordinary people entirely) versus the deep organizing that was her everything, the process by which power is transferred \u201cfrom the elite to the majority.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In her view, the Left and progressives\u2019 decades-long decline is partially explained by a shift away from deep organizing in favor of shallow mobilizing and advocacy. The book also takes the reader through power-structure analysis, a tool Jane used time and again in building campaigns that homed in on the enemy\u2019s weak points in order to win.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No Shortcuts<\/em> also lays out a clear emphasis on organic leaders rather than activists \u2014 a distinction of critical importance for budding organizers, many of whom fall into the latter category. In a workplace, you shouldn\u2019t focus on the people who already agree with you, but rather those who are trusted and respected by their coworkers. It\u2019s the organizer\u2019s job to bring them (and their networks) into a campaign, to teach them the skills they need to win, then to test the strength of the majority being assembled again and again (what Jane termed \u201cstructure tests<\/a>\u201d). This is how one builds a supermajority at an employer, a battle-ready army that can withstand the boss\u2019s inevitable attacks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As she writes,<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which key individual worker can sway exactly whom else \u2014 by name \u2014 and why? How strong is the support he or she has among exactly how many coworkers, and how do the organizers know this to be true? The ability to correctly answer these and many other related questions \u2014 Who does each worker know outside work? Why? How? How well? How can the worker reach and influence them? \u2014 will be the lifeblood of successful strikes in the new millennium.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The same criterion applies beyond the workplace. It\u2019s the leaders in your community, your neighborhood, your religious or social organization, the ones who have earned the respect of those around them, who are your target if you hope to build a mass base for your cause that has staying power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n McAlevey didn\u2019t invent these principles, but she popularized them among broad swathes of the labor movement and the Left, in large part through No Shortcuts<\/em>. Ever since its publication, characterizing a strategy as a \u201cshortcut\u201d is about as damning a condemnation within the labor movement as you can make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Raising Expectations<\/em>, Jane\u2019s first book, is a memoir, but no less instructive for it. The title is Jane\u2019s phrase for what she believed organizing is about at its core. To organize is to make a worker demand more<\/p>\n\n\n\n about what people should expect from their jobs; the quality of life they should aspire to; how they ought to be treated when they are old; and what they should be able to offer their children. About what they have a right to expect from their employer, their government, their community, and their unions. Expectations about what they themselves are capable of, about the power they could exercise if they worked together, and what they might use that collective power to accomplish. Ultimately, expectations about where they will find meaning in their lives, and the kinds of relationships they can build with those around them.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Jane called this expansive vision \u201cwhole-worker organizing,\u201d an approach that draws on a worker\u2019s entire self, rather than bracketing their lives outside and beyond the workplace. A worker\u2019s relationships inside the workplace are the foundation for organizing: the means by which they can move others to action, the trust needed for workers to take on the risks that come with acting collectively, the faith and confidence such action requires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Jane saw their ties off the job as both another resource and a place they could organize in turn upon gaining workplace-organizing skills. Not only could a worker enlist their religious institution, their community organization, or their social clubs to strengthen a campaign, but a good organizer could expand the expectations a worker brings to the other areas of their lives. When unions failed to engage workers in their entirety, she was unrelenting<\/a> in her criticism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She rejected the dichotomy of workplace and union versus community and community organization, arguing instead for \u201cbringing community organizing techniques right into the shop floor while moving labor organizing out into the community.\u201d Everything was a feedback loop with Jane: power begets power, wins beget wins, community begets community; multiplication not division, a sense of self-interest that continually broadens. You start with your on-the-job interest and, if the organizer does her job right, you end with the entire community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Raising Expectations<\/em> is about how workers can organize and win, but it\u2019s also a record of the sexism that pervades the labor movement. (Jane: \u201cIf I discussed every instance when [sexism] had a negative impact on the work I was trying to do, there would be no room to talk about anything else.\u201d) In this respect, too, Jane was a pioneer: there are lots of female union leaders today, but the culture remains hostile to women, and especially ones like Jane who don\u2019t put up with such disrespect. As she told me when we first met, gin and tonic in hand: \u201cDon\u2019t worry about all the bullshit you\u2019ll get from men in the movement. Fuck \u2019em.\u201d It felt like I was being inducted into a secret sisterhood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Indeed, the labor movement\u2019s shortcomings almost led Jane to give up on it. A lifelong environmentalist (her later decades were split between a rent-controlled apartment in New York and a leafy, spartan outpost in the Bay Area, and she was prone to going off the grid to ride horses), college-aged Jane saw the labor movement opposing \u201cevery environmental principle I believed in.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n At SUNY-Buffalo, she joined the student association, becoming its president. It was there that she first gained organizing skills. After a foray around Central America, including work on a construction brigade in Nicaragua at the height of the Contra War, she devoted herself to environmental work \u2014 though her time in Central America added further marks against unions. It was the 1980s, and the AFL-CIO was implicated in backing death squads in Latin America via the American Institute for Free Labor Development, its international arm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As she wrote of that period, \u201cThe unionists I was working with, who were already deeply engaged in a battle with a capitalist class of the most brutal and violent nature, now also had to deal with killer thugs funded by the unions of my country.\u201d It made an impression on Jane, planting the seeds of a lifelong devotion to making the labor movement, that pain in the ass that is our only hope, better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jane\u2019s time in the environmental justice movement connected her with the storied Highlander Research and Education Center, which played a central role in the civil rights movement, hosting and training everyone from Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King Jr to John Lewis and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) throughout the 1950s. By the time Jane was in her twenties, she was working at the center to develop its globalization program, traveling the globe to fight toxins that don\u2019t respect borders. She referred to Highlander as a \u201ccreative hothouse,\u201d with her subsequent work in unions traceable to the hours she spent browsing the center\u2019s archives of educational materials from its era as the training and education arm of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As she told my colleague Micah Uetricht in a long interview<\/a> last year,<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was set up in the library [of Highlander], because there was no office space for me. I was in my mid-twenties. I started to go into the archives, and that was the first time I saw organizing manuals from the CIO and realized, \u201cOh my God, it\u2019s always<\/em> been the labor movement in the civil rights movement. These have always been inseparable movements.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n She was recruited into the AFL-CIO in the late \u201990s, heading up the experimental Stamford Organizing Project, which focused on cab drivers, city clerks, janitors, and nursing home aides, exerting influence through Stamford\u2019s churches \u2014 \u201cNote to labor: workers relate more to their faith than to their job, and fear God more than they fear the boss,\u201d Jane wrote of the campaign \u2014 and organizing workers around a range of issues beyond the workplace, including affordable housing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After Stamford, Jane became the national deputy director for strategic campaigns in the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) health care division. In 2004, she was appointed SEIU Nevada\u2019s executive director and chief negotiator, where she began leading open-bargaining sessions in which hundreds of workers would attend negotiations, seeing the boss\u2019s tactics for themselves and getting a hands-on training in negotiations in the process. Her unwillingness<\/a> to abide by what she characterized as undemocratic orders from higher up in the union hierarchy put her at odds with SEIU leadership, but it took a 2008 ovarian cancer diagnosis to put a pause on her organizing activities. She used the time off to write Raising Expectations<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the pandemic created one crisis after another for the working class, Jane designed an international organizing training program in conjunction with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, an almost industrial-scale workshop to train groups of workers around the globe. At the time of her death, she had trained some twenty-five thousand people through the program, a remarkable legacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No matter what her schedule, Jane somehow always found time for workers. When the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) sought help following their unlikely victory at JFK8 in Staten Island, Jane squeezed in intensive trainings with founding members. When the New Yorker<\/em>, a shop in my union local, was organizing toward a strike, I received an email informing me that Jane McAlevey would be leading a training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her PhD from CUNY led to a postdoc from Harvard Law School, then a position as a senior policy fellow in her beloved Bay Area, at the University of California at Berkeley\u2019s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. There she continued to teach unions and community organizations the fundamentals of organizing and winning (and seemed to never miss a Golden State Warriors game; if Jane had ever held a time-management training, I\u2019d have been the first to register).<\/p>\n\n\n\n She kept writing through all of it, offering a real-time first draft of the history of working-class struggle in the United States. She had a column with Jacobin<\/em><\/a> and was the Nation<\/em>\u2019s \u201cstrikes correspondent\u201d (an enviable title). Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations,<\/em> a book on democratizing<\/a> union negotiations, written with Abby Lawlor, was published last year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her final piece before announcing that she would be pausing her work as she entered hospice care is titled \u201cEnjoy Labor\u2019s Tailwinds \u2014 but Don\u2019t Forget to Keep Rowing!\u201d It concludes: \u201cGiven the odds against workers, all victories are worth celebrating, but we can\u2019t afford to rest until we\u2019ve seen those wins codified in a union contract \u2014 enforced by an organization that keeps going toe-to-toe with the bosses, the union busters, and the political elites. Nothing else will do it.\u201d War footing, always.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I loved this about Jane, as did countless other people, as evidenced by the flood of testimonies on social media from workers around the world as to how her work changed their lives. To be committed, a soldier in struggle, is worth honoring, yet it was her singular personality \u2014 a loud, polarizing, unmistakable individuality and pride \u2014 that really set her apart. Jane devoted her life to collective action, but she never forgot that collectives are composed of people, and every person is a world unto themselves. She modeled that: living off the grid in the Bay Area, disappearing to ride horses in Mexico, taking pride in her accomplishments, extending herself beyond all conceivable measures to mentor so many of us. Leave the world better than it was when you arrived and leave many more organizers in your place when you go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThey thought I would be dead a few weeks ago,\u201d Jane said<\/a> on Democracy Now!<\/em> in late April, shortly after announcing that she had entered home hospice care, having exhausted treatment and clinical trial drugs for the multiple myeloma cancer she had been battling since 2021. Ever with her eye on the prize, she was on the show to talk about the United Auto Workers\u2019 earth-shattering<\/a> win at Volkswagen\u2019s auto plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. \u201cI\u2019m out again. I\u2019m riding my bike. I\u2019m on your show. And I\u2019m going to fight until the last dying minute, because that\u2019s what American workers deserve.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s an ethos in the labor movement to never say \u201cthank you,\u201d as it implies one did something\u00a0for<\/em>\u00a0you, rather than the truth, that we speak up and take risks and act for ourselves. So I won\u2019t say that. Instead, I\u2019ll leave it with what Jane herself\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0in finally, reluctantly, announcing that she had found one fight that she could not win: \u201cI have loved being in this world with you.\u201d We loved it, too, Jane, and we\u2019ll fight like hell to make it every bit as good as you knew it could be.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Alex N. Press is a staff writer at Jacobin. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Vox, the Nation, and n+1, among other places.More by Alex N. Press<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" No one believed in and embodied the labor movement\u2019s transformative power more than organizer, strategist, and writer Jane McAlevey. BY\u00a0ALEX N. PRESS JULY 9, 2024 (therealnews.com) A packed room listens to Jane McAlevey speak in conversation with Anthony Thigpenn, not pictured, during Book Talk: “Rules to Win By: Power and… Continue reading ![\"Jacobin](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/therealnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/jacobin-logo.jpg?resize=629%2C169&ssl=1\"){kind=logo}
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WIN, WIN, WIN, WIN, WIN<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The writing was organizing too, a means of multiplying herself, allowing the lessons to reach into countless nooks and crannies across the economy and globe.<\/q><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
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ALWAYS WAR FOOTING<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Jane devoted her life to collective action, but she never forgot that collectives are composed of people, and every person is a world unto themselves.<\/q><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
\u201cTHEY THOUGHT I WOULD BE DEAD A FEW WEEKS AGO\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
ALEX N. PRESS<\/a><\/h2>\n\n\n\n