Jane McAlevey
Jane McAlevey Head Shot
Born (1964-10-12) October 12, 1964
New York City, New York, U.S.
EducationState University of New York, Buffalo (BA)
Graduate Center, CUNY (MA, PhD)
Occupation(s)union, environmental and community organizer, scholar, author, political commentator
Years active1984–present
WebsiteOfficial website

Jane F. McAlevey (born October 12, 1964) is an American union organizer, author, and political commentator.[1][2][3] She is a Senior Policy Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, and a columnist at The Nation.

McAlevey contends that only workers have the power, through organization, to force significant change in the workplace and in society at large. Her model, what she calls whole-worker organizing, sees workers and community as a whole. The underlying theory of change requires a systematic, grassroots mass organization of workers.

McAlevey has written four books about organizing and the essential role of workers and trade unions in reversing income inequality and building a stronger democracy: Raising Expectations and Raising Hell (2012), No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (2016), A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy (2020), and with Abby Lawlor, Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations (2023).

Early life

McAlevey was the youngest of nine children.[4] Her father, John McAlevey, a World War II fighter pilot, lawyer, and progressive politician, was mayor of Sloatsburg, New York, then Supervisor of Ramapo, and member of the Rockland County Board of Supervisors.[5][6][7][8] As a baby, her parents took her to civil rights and anti-Vietnam War marches. When she was 5, her mother died of BRCA#1 breast cancer, and her father began taking her to work with him.[4][9] He advocated for open-space zoning and public housing, which led to her harassment in school: ''You'd go to school and get screamed at irrationally by the parents of other kids because 'your father is going to bring black people to Rockland County.' It was good to get taught principles early, to look in the face of fear a little bit and not look back," she recalls.[10] She began attending anti-nuclear protests on her own at age 13.[8] In high school, she organized a successful student walkout, protesting against sexist female gym uniform requirements.[11]

Education

In 1984, while attending the State University of New York at Buffalo, McAlevey was elected student body president. She went on to be elected president of the Student Association of the State University of New York (SASU), the 200,000-member statewide student union in New York’s public university system.[12][8] As president, she also assumed the sole student representative position as a voting member of the board of trustees of the State University of New York (SUNY).[13][8] There, she orchestrated a student occupation of the SUNY headquarters building, which eventually led to the SUNY trustees voting to divest the university system from entities doing business in South Africa. It was the largest act of divestiture by anyone in the USA at that time. She left university before completing her undergraduate degree.[14][15]

In 2010, at the urging of Frances Fox Piven, McAlevey returned to university to pursue a PhD. In 2015, she earned a doctorate in sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), under the supervision of Piven and advised by James Jasper and Dan Clawson. She then completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in the Labor & Worklife Program at Harvard Law School (2015-2017).[15][16]

Career

After traveling and working in Central America, McAlevey was moved to California to work out of David Brower’s Earth Island Institute on a project aimed at educating the environmental movement in the United States about the ecological consequences of U.S. military and economic policy in Central America. She was co-director of EPOCA, the Environmental Project on Central America.[17] After two years working on coalition building in the US and in the international environmental movement, she was recruited by John Gaventa to work at the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee, where she served as an educator and as Deputy Director.[18][15]

When the New Voices leadership came to power at the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) in 1996, McAlevey was recruited by senior AFL-CIO leaders to work for their organizing department and head up an experimental multi-union campaign in Stamford Connecticut.[19] From 1997 to 2001, she ran the Stamford Organizing Project, her first foray into union organizing, where she developed a model for what she calls "whole-worker" organizing, bringing together union members and community with the view that they were not two separate groups.[9]

From the AFL-CIO, McAlevey became the national Deputy Director for Strategic Campaigns of the Health Care Division of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), from 2002 to 2004. In 2004, she was appointed Executive Director and Chief Negotiator for SEIU Nevada, a state-based union that went on to success in achieving employer-paid family healthcare, preventing the rollback of public pensions, and using an approach to contract negotiations that gives workers the right to sit in on their workplace negotiations.[4]

In 2009, McAlevey was diagnosed with cancer and forced to take a break from her work to undergo treatment. While bedridden, she began writing a memoir of her years in labor organizing, which eventually became her first book, Raising Expectations and Raising Hell (Verso Books, 2012). After a year of treatment, she returned to university to pursue a PhD. Her doctoral dissertation became her second book, No Shortcuts - Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (Oxford University Press, 2016).[9]

Her studies completed, McAlevey returned to labor organizing, and continued to write, producing two more books, A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy (Ecco Press, 2020), and Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations, with Abby Lawlor (Oxford University Press, 2023).[20]

In 2019, McAlevey was named Senior Policy Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.[18][21] Also that year, she was named Strikes correspondent at The Nation; in 2023, she became a columnist for the magazine.[22][23] She currently alternates between organizing and writing.

Whole-worker organizing

McAlevey's whole-worker organizing model views workers and community as a whole: workers are part of the community, and community members engage in work. The underlying theory of change requires a systematic, grassroots mass organization of workers. Central to the process is the labor-intensive task of having one-on-one conversations with each of the constituents. Organizers main activity is listening, in order to identify people's most pressing issues, interjected with specific questions that lead to "framing the hard question": whether to endure the problems alone, or join in collective action.[9] A strike in the whole-worker model requires sustained action involving large numbers of workers to put the maximum possible pressure on management.[24]

Public debate

McAlevey is active in the public sphere, in the US and international media. She contends that only workers have the power, through organization, to force significant change in the workplace and in society at large.[25] She advocates for a complete restructuring of how a majority of labor unions today operate, including leadership development, bargaining approach, allocation of resources, and relationship to politics.[26]

Commenting on the current state of social movement organizations in general, McAlevey finds an overreliance on people who are already in agreement with a cause. She describes the three common approaches to change: advocacy, mobilization, and organization. Advocacy relies on experts, lawyers, and lobbyists, usually funded through donations, to promote a cause. Mobilization seeks to motivate like-minded people to act on their belief, through actions such as demonstrations or voting. Organization, the harder task, engages with whole populations, including those who have opposing opinions or have yet to form one, seeking to expand membership for future mobilization. According to McAlevey, the reliance on advocacy and mobilization by today's unions and social movement groups is “the main reason why modern movements have not replicated the kinds of gains achieved by earlier labor and civil rights movements.”[9]

Personal life

In 2009, McAlevey was diagnosed with early-stage ovarian cancer, and underwent a year of intensive treatment.[9]

Bibliography

Books

  • Raising Expectations and Raising Hell, My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement, ISBN 9781781683156, published by Verso in 2012.
  • No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, ISBN 9780190624712, published by Oxford University Press in 2016.
  • A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy, ISBN 9780062908599, published by Ecco Press in 2020.[27]
  • Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations , ISBN 9780197690499, by Jane McAlevey and Abby Lawlor, published by Oxford University Press in 2023.[28]

Refereed articles

  • "The Strike as the Ultimate Structure Test," Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy 2, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 122–135.
  • "The Crisis of New Labor and Alinsky’s Legacy: Revisiting the Role of the Organic Grassroots Leaders in Building Powerful Organizations and Movements," Politics & Society 43, no. 3 (September 2015): 415–441.
  • "It Takes a Community: Building Unions from the Outside In," New Labor Forum 12, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 23–32.

References

  1. ↑ Guttenplan, D.D. (February 7, 2017). "The Labor Movement Must Learn These Lessons From the Election". The Nation. Retrieved 7 January 2019.
  2. ↑ Brian Lehrer (June 25, 2018). "The Case for Unions". The Brian Lehrer Show. Retrieved 7 January 2019.
  3. ↑ Tattersall, Amanda; ChangeMakers; McAlevey, Jane (2021). "ChangeMaker Chat with Jane McAlevey: Winning Change Through Organising". Commons Social Change Library. Retrieved 2022-06-23.
  4. 1 2 3 Coolican, Patrick (Dec 10, 2006). "New face of labor has heart, drive". Las Vegas Sun. Retrieved Aug 30, 2023.
  5. ↑ Anderson, Scott B. (November 4, 1985). "Ramapo Offers Growth Lesson for South Florida". Sun Sentinel. Retrieved 4 January 2019.
  6. ↑ Hudson, Edward (Sep 1, 1985). "ROCKLAND TO ELECT FIRST COUNTY CHIEF". New York Times. Retrieved Aug 26, 2023.
  7. ↑ "Capt John F McAlevey". National Air and Space Museum. Retrieved Aug 26, 2023.
  8. 1 2 3 4 Egner, David (Sep 23, 1985). "UB Student Points to Sign Of Resurgence in Protests". The Buffalo News.
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Schirmer, Eleni (June 10, 2020). "Jane McAlevey's Vision for the Future of American Labor". The New Yorker. Retrieved Aug 25, 2023.
  10. ↑ Finn, Robin (November 9, 2000). "PUBLIC LIVES; In 15 Mug Shots, a Model of Disobedience". New York Times. Retrieved Aug 30, 2023.
  11. ↑ Jay, Paul (Nov 17, 2021). "Get Organized to Win! - Jane McAlevey pt 1/8". theAnalysis.news. 19:00. Retrieved Aug 25, 2023.
  12. ↑ Vellela, Tony (December 19, 1986). Student Activism in the '80s and '90s. South End Press. p. 194. ISBN 9780896083417. Retrieved 7 January 2019. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  13. ↑ "State U. Trustees Vote For Sports Scholarships". New York Times. May 29, 1986. Retrieved Aug 24, 2023.
  14. ↑ Charny, Benjamin (September 25, 1985). "SUNY Board to Trustees Votes to Divest South Africa Funds". Statesman. Retrieved 4 January 2019.
  15. 1 2 3 McAlevey, Jane. "About Jane McAlevey". JaneMcAlevey.com. Retrieved Aug 26, 2023. NOTE: Page includes readable photos of corroborating sources, such as newspaper articles.
  16. ↑ McAlevey, Jane F. (2015). No Shortcuts: A Case for Organizing (PhD). Graduate Center, CUNY. p. iii. OCLC 949906889. ProQuest 1689441854.
  17. ↑ Deborah McCarthy Auriffeille; Daniel Faber (1 September 2005). Foundations for Social Change: Critical Perspectives on Philanthropy and Popular Movements. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 183–185. ISBN 978-0-7425-8043-5. Retrieved 5 January 2019.
  18. 1 2 "The Labor Center Welcomes New Senior Policy Fellow Jane McAlevey!". Center for Labor Research and Education. November 4, 1985. Retrieved 26 July 2019.
  19. ↑ Steve Early (November 2013). Save Our Unions. NYU Press. p. 238. ISBN 978-1-58367-428-4. Retrieved 5 January 2019.
  20. ↑ Tavis Smiley. "Tavis Smiley Interviews Jane McAlevey about her new book Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations". KBLA (Podcast).
  21. ↑ "People". University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved Aug 25, 2023.
  22. ↑ Press Room (June 18, 2019). "New 'Nation' Editor D.D. Guttenplan Names Jeet Heer National-Affairs Correspondent and Jane McAlevey Strikes Correspondent". The Nation. Archived from the original on 10 July 2019. Retrieved 26 July 2019.
  23. ↑ "Jane McAlevey". The Nation. Retrieved Aug 24, 2023.
  24. ↑ Wills, Tom (December 21, 2021). "In Berlin, Overworked Hospital Staff Went on Strike for a Month — and Won". Retrieved 12 February 2022.
  25. ↑ Uetricht, Micah (May 7, 2023). "Jane McAlevey's Plan for How to Build a Fighting Labor Movement". Jacobin. Retrieved Sep 1, 2023.
  26. ↑ Gindin, Sam (Dec 8, 2016). "The Power of Deep Organizing". Jacobin. Retrieved Sep 1, 2023.
  27. ↑ Brown, Alleen (9 March 2020). "The Climate Movement Doesn't Know How to Talk With Union Members About Green Jobs". The Intercept. Retrieved 12 March 2020.
  28. ↑ "Jane F. McAlevey — Rules to Win by: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations - with Sara Nelson — at Conn Ave". Politics and Prose Bookstore. 21 March 2023. Retrieved 15 April 2023.
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