Jane McAlevey

Jane F. McAlevey (October 12, 1964 – July 7, 2024) was an American union organizer, author, and political commentator. She was 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 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.

McAlevey wrote 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 Born in Manhattan, She began attending anti-nuclear protests on her own at age 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. 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). 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).

Career After leaving university, McAlevey traveled through Central America, spending time in Nicaragua working to support the revolution led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front. She then 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 US military and economic policy in Central America. She served as co-director of EPOCA, the Environmental Project on Central America. After working on coalition building in the US and in the international environmental movement for two years, 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. 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. 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.

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.

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”.

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. Also that year, she was named Strikes correspondent at The Nation; in 2023, she became a columnist for the magazine. She alternated between organizing and writing.

Whole-worker organizing 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."

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. 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.

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."

Personal life In 2009, McAlevey was diagnosed with early-stage ovarian cancer and underwent a year of intensive treatment. 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."

McAlevey died from multiple myeloma on July 7, 2024, at the age of 59, at her cabin in Muir Beach, California.

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."