The Labor Center Welcomes New Senior Policy Fellow Jane McAlevey!

The UC Berkeley Labor Center is thrilled to announce the appointment of Jane McAlevey as a Senior Policy Fellow. McAlevey will join the Labor Center for two years, starting June 26, 2019, focusing on leadership development, civic engagement, and capacity building, with a focus on California’s public education community.

In her nearly four decades as a practitioner, and more recently a scholar, McAlevey’s work has always centered on how ordinary Americans can build the power required to effectively challenge income inequality. This work is more urgent today than ever. As an organizer for over thirty years, McAlevey has facilitated break-through successes that rely on the deep integration of community and workplace struggles for justice. The focus of McAlevey’s campaigns, and now her academic research, has always been on power and power structures, and the intersection of power, people, and strategy.

More About Jane:

Jane McAlevey has spent most of her life as organizer and negotiator. She’s fourth generation union, raised in an activist-union household. She spent the first half of her organizing life working in the community organizing and environmental justice movements and the second half in the union movement. She has led power structure analyses and strategic planning trainings for a wide range of union and community organizations and has had extensive involvement in globalization and global environmental issues. She worked at the Highlander Research and Education Center as an educator (and as Deputy Director) in her early 20’s.

More recently, Jane has added “author and scholar” to her bio. McAlevey earned a PhD in June, 2015, from the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, studying with Frances Fox Piven. In September, 2015, she began a Post Doc at the Harvard Law School with the Labor & Worklife Program.

Her third book, A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing and the Fight for Democracy, will be published January 1, 2020, by Ecco/HarperCollins.