Cut out of black and white photo of Jane McAlevey who is holding a microphone and turning to the right. Text reads 'Learn from Jane McAlevey'.

Jane McAlevey: Organizer Extraordinaire

Jane McAlevey, organiser, trainer and author, passed away on 7 July 2024. You can learn powerful lessons from her through the concepts, articles, books, videos and podcasts gathered here.

Introduction

In distilling a variety of lessons concerning how workers and others can take power to effect real change, veteran labour organizer and author Jane McAlevey has reinvigorated unionists around the world in recent decades. Her work has encouraged a closer and more effective focus on strategy, mapping and organizing from the grassroots up. This guide to her work includes a biography, key takeaways, and a plethora of links to books, articles, videos, podcasts, workshops and more.

Solidarity among human beings can happen spontaneously, as in a flood or fire, or by design, through organizing. – Jane McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age.

Who was Jane McAlevey?

“Jane McAlevey is an organizer. More recently, with a later-in-life PhD, she added author and scholar, writing three books on organizing, with a forthcoming new book in early 2023 on how to democratize union negotiations and build significantly more worker power by practicing transparent, big, and open negotiations. Her first book, Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell), was named the “most valuable book of 2012” by The Nation magazine. Her second book, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (2016), has been used as the basis of study groups with thousands of unionists. Her third book, A Collective Bargain, Unions, Organizing and the Fight for Democracy (2020), focuses on the links between the attack on workplace and civil democracy, and how the tactics of the right-wing can be overcome.

From 1984-2009, most of McAlevey’s time was spent organizing campaigns large and small, in a variety of arenas, but always organizing the multiracial working class to win on issues that matter. From 2010-2015, she earned a Ph.D., followed by a two-year Post Doc at the Harvard University Law School. She is the Strikes Correspondent for the Nation magazine. She is currently a Senior Policy Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley’s Institute for Labor & Employment Relations, where she teaches trade union and community-based organizations the core fundamentals of organizing, and now negotiating to win. She also designed and leads an international organizing training program in conjunction with the Rosa Luxemburg foundation in Germany that since the pandemic, has trained over 25,000 trade unionists worldwide in twelve languages. Her focus is teaching people how to win and win big, despite the challenges.” (Source: Jane McAlevey Short Bio)

Jane McAlevey passed away on 7 July 2024. Read The New York Times obituary.

Jane McAlevey lived with cancer since 2021 and on April 14 2024 she announced:

“I have stopped all work to turn to home-based hospice for the remainder of my time… from here out I will be focused on spending time with loved ones, while cheering on every worker in every fight against what has become a rapacious, vicious new gilded age elite, whose predatory nature is nothing less than despicable, not to mention criminal… I am so grateful to so many thousands—tens of thousands—of people and so privileged to have worked with simply extraordinary organizers that I am at a loss for the words to thank you all properly.” (Source: Jane McAlevey Latest News)

Thank you Jane McAlevey for your great contributions to collective action and social justice, empowering many struggles for years to come.

What are Jane’s Key Takeaways?

While steeped in extensive research McAlevey’s work offers practical, applicable lessons for campaigners. Although primarily based on the situation and legal framework of the United States many of these can be used and adapted in other contexts. Her key insights include:

  • the need to build effective unions
  • the importance of winning
  • mapping the structure of power
  • finding organic leaders
  • performing structure tests
  • understanding the difference between organising, mobilising and advocacy

The Need to Build Effective Unions

While McAlevey shares many critiques of the way in which many unions currently operate she also emphasizes the continuing need for a strong, democratic labour movement to raise expectations, improve safety, attain better wages and working conditions, and generally ensure working people have a say. To achieve this requires building unions that are owned by engaged members who are organised in such a way that they have the power to play a central role in workplace life and beyond.

There’s a pretty long list of why unions are a pain in the ass. And yet we still have no choice but to build good unions, because there isn’t any way to actually win democracy under capitalism unless there’s industrial workforce democracy. – Jane McAlevey, Source

The Importance of Winning

Moral and philosophical appeals will only ever draw in so many people. Getting a significant majority of the workplace to the point where they are ready to make the sacrifices and undertake the risks required to force employers to cede deep and lasting change requires convincing all involved that they can genuinely win. This requires face to face conversations and often undertaking smaller but escalating actions to build confidence and measure strength via “structure tests” (see below). Campaigns that deliver genuine improvements and power for workers in one part of the economy can then serve as examples and models for those elsewhere.

In the organizing approach, specific injustices and outrage are the immediate motivation, but the primary goal is to transfer power from the elite to the majority, from the 1 percent to the 99 percent. – Jane McAlevey, Source

Winning. Actually f*cking winning really matters to the workers in every campaign I have ever been part of. And I mean winning a life changing contract, not just a vote. Workers need governing power and that requires super majorities. – Jane McAlevey, Source

Mapping the Structure of Power

If workers are going to achieve wins then they need a strategy to do so. A successful one involves selecting measurable goals and the steps, structures and numbers needed to achieve them. As part of an overall organizing approach (see below) McAlevey argues that a detailed power structure analysis is vital to crafting a winning strategy. In terms of management and employers, organisers and members need to know who and what they are up against, and where weaknesses and potential pressure points lie. They also need to identify where and what workers’ existing strengths and weaknesses are, what kind of networks and structures already exist, and what is holding them back from action. Mapping also needs to be regularly updated to gauge the progress and strength of union strategy.

What is almost never attempted is… a parallel careful, methodical, systematic, detailed analysis of power structures among the ordinary people who are or could be brought into the fight. – Jane McAlevey, Source

The more people understand how power works, the more capable they are of actually overcoming the kind of obstacles that are thrown in their face along the way. Source

Finding Organic Leaders

A key part of the mapping process and a major step in building an effective workplace structure is identifying “organic leaders”, that is the people within the workplace who already influence their fellow workers. Convincing them that is worthwhile and then empowering them to lead workplace action and recruit others takes advantage of and transforms existing structures. Central to winning over these workers, and others, is having unionists engage in conversations with people outside of existing “self-selected” groups of active members.

[Organic leaders are] almost never the workers who most want to talk with us. More often than not, [they’re] the workers who don’t want to talk to us and remain in the background. They have a sense of their value and won’t easily step forward, not unless and until there’s a credible reason. That’s part of the character that makes them organic leaders. – Jane McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, Source

Organising is fundamentally about having hard conversations with people and not running away from hard issues. – Jane McAlevey, Source

Performing Structure Tests

McAlevey advocates undertaking “structure tests” in order to gauge the strength of the union and what kind of action members are ready for, as well as to identify who amongst the workforce still needs to be won over. These often involve seeing whether members and supporters will undertake lower risk actions, such as signing petitions or brief stoppages. MacAlevey argues that a “super majority” of all in the workplace is required for success. This requires engaging with fellow workers in a sustained way over time, which when combined with activities performed as tests builds an effective union structure within the workplace.

Individual campaigns matter in themselves, but they are primarily a mechanism for bringing new people into the change process and keeping them involved… Ordinary people help make the power analysis, design the strategy, and achieve the outcome. They are essential and they know it. Source

Understanding the Difference between Organising, Mobilizing and Advocacy

As outlined in the table below MacAlevey differentiates between advocacy, mobilisation, and organisation as means of creating change. Based on her definitions she argues strongly for an organising approach that strategically wins over and builds up the number of active members and leaders at the base of a union, organisation or campaign rather than mobilises and activates those already sympathetic to the cause.

Source: Table 1.1, Options for Change, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age

Books

No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age

Book cover for 'No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, Jane F. McAlevey'.

About Book

  • “Argues that meaningful change can only happen with organizing that puts ordinary people at the center of their own struggle: there are no shortcuts to lasting social change
  • McAlevey brings an informed, real-world perspective to the topic as a longtime organizer and scholar
  • Provides a clear analysis of power for movements and unions that often don’t understand their own sources of power or how to use it effectively
  • Features case studies from a broad array of labor unions and social movements, including the Chicago Teachers Union, which is gearing up for a showdown with the Governor of Illinois
  • The high profile Supreme Court case, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, on public-sector unions will keep issues of organizing, unions, and equality on the public agenda for the foreseeable future.”  – Source: Publisher, Oxford University Press

Book excerpts

Book Reviews

Access Book

The 1 percent have a vast armory of material resources and political special forces, but the 99 percent have an army. – Jane McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, Source

Learning/Training Resources

Other Languages

Media about Book

Rules To Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations

About Book

“Rules To Win By is a book for workers, unionists, tenant organizers, racial justice and climate campaigners, academics, policymakers and everyone who wants a more fair and democratic society. Drawing insights from recent hard-won union negotiation campaigns, organizer, negotiator, author, and scholar Jane McAlevey and Abby Lawlor, an organizer and labor lawyer, look to the workers leading some of the toughest fights today to provide a masterclass in participatory social change.

The book features six case studies from the last five years: Boston hotel workers, educators in New Jersey, nurses in rural Massachusetts and Philadelphia, reporters from the Los Angeles Times and Law360, and hospital workers in Germany fighting for their patients and their own lives in the pandemic. In each of the cases, workers used the collective bargaining process to achieve transformative contracts through deep organizing and member-driven strategy. All of the cases featured in Rules to Win By also underscore that workers need not—and cannot—wait for the PRO Act or other labor law reforms to successfully overcome employer union busting and win union recognition and life-changing collective bargaining agreements.

Rules to Win By offers practical tools and resources for any campaign. Unlike so many books on negotiations, it encourages readers to think beyond the shortcuts of verbal tricks and short-term tactics and to harness the power of ordinary people to win the public good. At a time when the right to strike is under attack around the world, and with a decision pending in the Supreme Court case Glacier Northwest v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters that could significantly increase the risks of striking for unions in the United States, these campaigns illustrate how fundamental the strike—and the strike threat—is to an effective system of collective bargaining.” – Source: Jane McAlevey’s website.

Access Book

Book Excerpts

Media about Book

A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy

About Book

“A rousing and electrifying call to arms, A Collective Bargain shows us why we must strengthen and defend the only force capable of fighting back against social injustice and the alarming right-wing shift in our politics: a strong, democratic union movement.

For decades, intractable social and economic problems have been eating away at the social and political fabric of the United States. There is a single, obvious weapon whose effectiveness has been proven repeatedly throughout US history: unions.

In A Collective Bargain, longtime labor, environmental, and political organizer Jane McAlevey makes the case that unions are the only institution capable of fighting back against today’s super-rich corporate class. Since the 1930s, when unions briefly flourished under New Deal protections, corporations have waged a stealthy and ruthless war against the labor movement. And every decrease in the numbers and power of organized labor has enabled an increase in inequality and injustice.

Today, McAlevey shows, unions are making a comeback. Want to reverse the nation’s mounting wealth gap? Put an end to sexual harassment in the workplace? End racial disparities on the job? Negotiate climate justice? Bring back unions.

Alongside McAlevey, we travel from Pennsylvania hospitals, where we’re thrust into a herculean fight in which nurses are building a new kind of patient-centered unionism; to Silicon Valley, where tech workers, fed up with the illusory promise of a better world, have turned to old-fashioned collective action; and inside the most promising anti-austerity rebellion in years, the one being waged by America’s teachers.” – Source

Strikes are uniquely powerful under the capitalist system because employers need one thing, and one thing only, from workers: show up and make the employer money. When it comes to forcing the top executives to rethink their pay, benefits, or other policies, there’s no form of regulation more powerful than a serious strike.

The strikes that work the best and win the most are the ones in which at least 90 percent of all the workers walk out, having first forged unity among themselves and with their broader community. To gain the trust and support of those whose lives may be affected, smart unions work diligently to erase the line separating the workplace from society. – Jane McAlevey, Source

Book Excerpts

Strikes, and good union campaigns to win big on issues, are the best political education because they unite all kinds of different people, encouraging and enabling people to get beyond the self-segregation and prejudices people hold about one another (and that antisocial media reinforce). – Jane McAlevey, Source

Media about the Book

Nothing can rebuild a progressive, ground-up electoral base like a strike-ready union. The Koch brothers know this. The Democrats don’t. The choice is clear: build good unions, undo Taft–Hartley, and enable robust collective bargaining and strikes—which will force an end to austerity as it did in Los Angeles. Otherwise, democracy ends.

We don’t need to innovate. From now until the 2020 election day and beyond, we must put the pedal to the metal on the kind of supermajority strikes that began in West Virginia in 2018. Good unions point us in the direction we need to go and produce the solidarity and unity desperately needed to win. We can fight, and we can win. – Jane McAlevey, Source

Access Book

To win big, we have to follow the methods of spending very little time engaging with people who already agree, and devote most of our time to the harder work of helping people who do not agree come to understand who is really to blame for the pain in their lives. – Jane McAlevey, Source

Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement

About Book

A veteran labor organizer whose tactics have earned her admiration and condemnation McAlevey pulls no punches. She says of the current moment: The only crisis, the only fiscal cliff in this country that anybody, especially the labor movement, should be talking about is the fiscal cliff that Wall Street forced every American worker to walk off in 2008. And by the way, if you’re poor, you’ve been hanging on that cliff forever. On a branch. That’s the spirit that infuses this memoir/manifesto, which calls for putting the movement back into the labor movement. McAlevey argues that unions must make connections to communities and social justice campaigns if they’re going to renew themselves and transform the economy. After the 2012 election, she said, With our breathing room that we have now, we have to totally reframe the crisis. McAlevey’s prescription is right: raise expectations, and then raise some hell. Source

Book Reviews

Media about the Book

Access Book

Training, Videos, Podcasts and Tools

Organizing for Power O4P: Online Training Program

Organizing for Power (O4P) was an online training program for organizers worldwide created in 2019 as a joint collaboration between the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and US-based organizer Jane McAlevey. It trained more than 35,000 people from 1,400+ organizations in over 110 countries. The program’s curriculum taught its participants how to build disciplined majorities capable of winning measurable victories through well-planned campaigns. Here are some videos from the Program.

This is the pilot episode of What Winning Looks Like, a new show from Organizing for Power that focuses on strategic choices in campaigns and the methods that lead to victory. In conversation with the workers and organizers who led them, we get to the heart of what makes a successful organizing drive run.

The Fight of Our Lives with Jane McAlevey

An exclusive interview with Jane McAlevey hosted by Organizing for Power.

Learning from our Struggles: Winning Conflicts

What tools does our side need to initiate and succeed in workplace conflict?

How to Achieve 100% Strike

This interview covers how best to organise in a workplace to build power. Consequently, this is of interest for someone who wants quick suggestions about how best they approaching strike organizing.

Jane McAlevey and Ethan Earle Following Up

In this 52 minute video, our lead trainer Jane McAlevey takes on a number of questions asked by you, the community of graduates of our networking and training program.  This video also marks the first time that Jane and O4P coordinator Ethan Earle meet in real life (fully vaccinated and at a healthy distance), so there’s a bit of O4P history to add to Jane’s excellent responses to your equally excellent questions!

Democracy Now Interviews, April 2024

Watch the videos and read the transcripts from these interviews late in Jane McAlevey’s life.

Labor Organizer Jane McAlevey on UAW’s Astounding Victory in VW Tennessee & Her Fight Against Cancer

How Workers Win: Labor Organizer Jane McAlevey on Her Life & Strategies to Beat the Power Structure

Strike School

Strike School was part the Organising for Power training program. It was designed to upskill activists by teaching them strategic approaches to resistance. Here are some articles about it.

Get Organized to Win: Eight part series with Jane McAlevey 

One of the world’s leading “organizers’ organizer” Jane McAlevey has trained thousands of activists in building more militant unions and winning electoral organizing; she sees the fight for effective unions as critical to winning transformative climate policy. Jane tells her story to Paul Jay on Reality Asserts Itself. Transcripts can be found at theAnalysys.news

  • 1. Get Organized to Win!
  • 2. Respecting the Genius of Ordinary People
  • 3. Organizing for Power
  • 4. Hard Bargaining in Las Vegas Hospitals
  • 5. Mobilizing is Not Organizing
  • 6. To Win We Need Strong Militant Unions
  • 7. Power Analysis and Whole-Worker Charting
  • 8. The Power of the Strike

Organizing Conversations

ChangeMaker Chat with Jane McAlevey: Winning Change Through Organising

Jane McAlevey is a fierce advocate for winning social change through organising. Her organising method, grounded in decades of experience, mentorship and the battles of many movements across US history, is that workers and people need to lead their own change. She specialises in teaching how you can support people to do this. For unionists, her work is well known – and this episode is a joyous journey into how she came to this approach, and how that approach works. For others in the climate movement or racial justice movements – this is a useful introduction to what Jane means by organising, how it is different to mobilising and some of its crucial features.

Case Studies

In addition to the sample case studies below many more can be found in Jane McAlevey’s publications.

Explore Further