McAlevey contended that only workers have the power, through organization, to force significant change in the workplace and in society at large. Her model, what she called whole-worker organizing, sees workers and the community they live in as a whole. The underlying theory of change requires a systematic, grassroots mass organization of workers.
Born in Manhattan,[4][5] McAlevey was the youngest of nine children.[6] Her father, John McAlevey, a World War IIfighter pilot, lawyer, and progressive politician, was mayor of Sloatsburg, New York, then Supervisor of Ramapo, and member of the Rockland County Board of Supervisors.[7][8][9][10] 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.[6][11] 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.[12] She began attending anti-nuclear protests on her own at age 13.[10] In high school, she organized a successful student walkout, protesting against sexist female gym uniform requirements.[13]
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.[14][10] 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).[15][10] There, she orchestrated a student occupation of the SUNY headquarters building to protest the university's investments in South Africa. McAlevey was one of the "SUNY 6" organizers arrested for trespass; she and two others accepted 15-day sentences and went to prison rather than agree to refrain from protesting during a probationary period. Four days after their release and announcement of further protests, the SUNY trustees voted to divest the university system from entities doing business in South Africa; it was the largest single act of divestiture in the United States at that time.[16][17]
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.[23] From 1997 to 2001, she ran the Stamford Organizing Project, an unusual experimental approach built around a multi-union partnership – a rarity – and extensive community involvement.[24] It was her first foray into union organizing, where she developed a model for what she called "whole-worker" organizing, bringing together union members and community with the view that they were not two separate groups.[11]
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.[6]
Scholarly work and consulting
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), named by Nation magazine as the “most valuable book of 2012”.[20] After a year of treatment, she returned to university to pursue a PhD. Her doctoral dissertation became her second book, No Shortcuts (Oxford University Press, 2016).[11]
Her studies completed, McAlevey returned to labor organizing, and continued to write, producing two more books, A Collective Bargain (Ecco Press, 2020), and Rules to Win By with Abby Lawlor (Oxford University Press, 2023).[25]
McAlevey, an engaging speaker, reached global audiences when, starting in 2019, she led an intensive six-week online course, Organizing for Power (O4P), at the Berlin-based Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, a democratic socialist policy nonprofit. Over four years, over 40 thousand people in over 100 countries logged onto the workshops, which were translated into 19 languages.[4][20]
McAlevey's whole-worker organizing model views workers and the community they live in as a whole: workers are part of the community, and community members engage in work. She explained, “What almost no union does is actually organize their members as members in their own communities to build community power. I teach workers to take over their unions and change them."[4] The underlying theory of change requires a systematic, grassroots mass organization of workers.
Central to her approach is the labor-intensive task of having one-on-one conversations with each constituent. Organizers' main activity is listening, in order to identify people's most pressing issues, with interjected specific questions that frame "the hard question," asking the individual to choose between enduring the problems alone or joining in collective action.[11] A strike in this whole-worker model requires sustained action by an overwhelming majority of workers to put maximum pressure on management.[4][30]
Public debate
McAlevey was active in the public sphere, in American and international media. She contended that only workers have the power, through organization, to force significant change in the workplace and in society at large.[31] She advocated for a complete restructuring of how a majority of labor unions today operate, including their approaches to leadership development, bargaining, allocation of resources, and relationship to politics.[32][33]
Commenting on the current state of social movement organizations in general, McAlevey found 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, which McAlevey calls "shallow organizing", seeks to motivate like-minded people to act on their belief through actions such as demonstrations or voting. Organization, the hardest 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."[11][34]
Personal life
In 2009, McAlevey was diagnosed with early-stage ovarian cancer and underwent a year of intensive treatment.[11]
On April 14, 2024, McAlevey announced on her website that she had entered home hospice care the week before, a result of a multiple myeloma cancer diagnosed in the fall of 2021.[35] On April 23, during an interview on Democracy Now! discussing the United Auto Workers unionization win at the Volkswagen plant in Tennessee, McAlevey stated that she had exhausted conventional treatment and clinical trial drugs: "They thought I would be dead a few weeks ago. I'm out again. I'm riding my bike. I'm on your show. And I'm going to fight until the last dying minute, because that's what American workers deserve."[36]
McAlevey died from multiple myeloma on July 7, 2024, at the age of 59, at her cabin in Muir Beach, California.[5]
Writing in The Nation after McAlevey's death, journalist, academic and organizer Eleni Schirmer described "Jane’s hallmark style: big, bulging goals and a basketball-like execution plan—the precision of a thousand tiny repetitions; inviting people to touch their power, then watching them grab it for their own; the grinning, sweaty devotion to the team; the rapture of winning."[37]
Bibliography
Books
Raising Expectations and Raising Hell, My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement, ISBN9781781683156, published by Verso in 2012.
"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.
^Brian Lehrer (June 25, 2018). "The Case for Unions". The Brian Lehrer Show. Archived from the original on January 25, 2019. Retrieved January 7, 2019.
^ abcdMcAlevey, Jane. "About Jane McAlevey". JaneMcAlevey.com. Archived from the original on August 26, 2023. Retrieved August 26, 2023. NOTE: Page includes photos of corroborating sources, such as newspaper articles.
^McAlevey, Jane F. (2015). No Shortcuts: A Case for Organizing (PhD). Graduate Center, CUNY. p. iii. OCLC949906889. ProQuest1689441854.
^"Jane McAlevey". UC Berkeley Labor Center. Archived from the original on July 5, 2024. Retrieved July 8, 2024.
^Earle 2024 "Jane’s core theory of labor organizing, as it developed through her campaign experiences, was that American trade unions had moved away from the kind of organizing developed in the first half of the twentieth century in favor of what she called “shallow organizing.” The same approach is more commonly known as “mobilizing”: essentially getting people to turn out to large demonstrations without any plan for what to do beyond the demonstration."
^"Latest News". Jane McAlevey. April 14, 2024. Archived from the original on April 16, 2024. Retrieved April 15, 2024.
