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The Nation

“The Great Resignation” Is a Great Exaggeration

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.

Commentary by Jane McAlevey in The Nation

The Amazon Labor Union’s Historic Victory Was the First Step

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.

Commentary by Jane McAlevey in The Nation

How Workers Can Win 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

The Nation

Organizing at Amazon: What Went Wrong?

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.

The Nation

Can American Labor Survive Prop 22?

Prop 22 exempts the gig companies from AB5, and instead creates a “third category” of independent contractors with a few perks. Drivers will now receive limited health benefits, but only for those who log enough hours, and an hourly pay “guarantee” that a UC Berkeley Labor Center study found to be worth $5.64.

Commentary by Jane McAlevey in The Nation

We Really Need to Tax the Rich

This group of capable organizers, rooted in structure-based organizations in the workplace and in the community, composed of many groups whose leaders and members are overwhelmingly women and people of color, is now attempting the unthinkable: challenging Proposition 13, passed by California voters more than four decades ago.

The Nation

One Hospital System’s Response to Covid-19? Union-Busting.

“The right wing, the corporate elite understand how strategic nurses are to the labor movement,” said Jane McAlevey, a union organizer, The Nation’s strikes correspondent, and author of A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy. “Hospital administrators try to come off as doing something good, but really they’re just taking public money and hiring union-busting thugs.”