Jane’s words will continue to guide me forward. Class struggle is not easy. It is, however, urgent and ongoing.

Mercedes put on an “A-level boss fight.” Which was only to be expected. So how can the union win next time?

The recent upsurge in organizing is worth celebrating, but workers can’t afford to rest.

Researchers at UC Berkeley’s Labor Center and UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research estimate that by year’s end the number of working-age Californians without health coverage will have declined to roughly 2.5 million people.

With so much riding on the outcome, it’s time for labor and its supporters—from the White House to the grass roots—to play for keeps.

But while both are worth celebrating, there are still no shortcuts to the hard organizing work needed to win life-changing contracts.

I want to celebrate the real wins we know about and focus our collective attention on some vexing questions about how workers can—and must—win when key windows of opportunity and leverage open up.

Upcoming negotiations by these two unions could swing the 2024 election—and help rebuild democracy.

The court’s ruling could have been much worse—and soon will be. Workers and unions need to be prepared.

The coming months might well make 2023 the year that workers in legacy unions showed how to challenge the likes of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Reed Hastings—and win.

In 2017, Kentucky became the most recent “right-to-work” state in the US. Which makes the recent victory by the Amalgamated Transit Union all the more significant.

In the initial unionization election, workers learn to overcome adversity, but it’s in the campaign for the first contract that they learn to build governing power.

McAlevey will continue filing from the front lines of the labor movement, covering workers’ rights, unions, and labor organizing, and offering insights from over thirty years as an organizer, contract negotiator, and strategist winning hard fights in and outside the USA in her new column, “Framing the Choice.”

A union member’s view of the biggest strike in the country.

Two Canadian unions show why the supermajority strike is the key to worker power.

As with the moment last year dubbed “Striketober,” promises of massive labor action by national unions didn’t live up to the hoopla, with the few real wins coming out of bold moves taken by rank-and-file workers.

In the first installment of our new The Nation Explains video series, Jane McAlevey explains the core principles that can help workers win better contracts, faster.

In The Nation, longtime organizer and scholar Jane McAlevey wrote a postmortem on the campaign. She noted that organizers did not have an accurate count of how many people worked at the site and were more concerned with giving employees a digital platform for expressing their discontent with Amazon than with building grassroots support for a union.

But now the real fight begins. Under byzantine US labor law, winning the union election is only step one. At present, the ALU is not even legally certified by the National Labor Relations Board. Without a legally certified union, the employer does not have to commence negotiations. On April 8, Amazon filed objections. This is the standard union buster’s playbook: to delay and outlast the workers, to prevent certification and the ability to get to contract negotiations.

Today’s vote marks an important victory over corporate power and arrogance—and a crucial step in the fight to unionize the company.

In April of last year, the UC Berkeley Labor Center and UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research released a report estimating that 3.2 million Californians would remain without health coverage in 2022.

What should national unions have been doing? Mobilizing members to take the only action—strikes—that could have given them real power in the legislative fights that have ended badly for workers

A new report from Berkeley is a rare piece of good news for American labor—and a bracing reminder of what real organizing looks like.

Jane McAlevey argues that the biggest factor in the vote was the laws that give tremendous advantages to the corporate side—but the union itself made a series of tactical and strategic errors.

It’s bad news, but it doesn’t mean workers in future Amazon campaigns won’t or can’t win. They can. The results were not surprising, however, for reasons that have more to do with the approach used in the campaign itself than any other factor.