
Jane McAlevey
Senior Policy Fellow
Jane McAlevey !Presente! Forever Present!
July 8, 2024
With overwhelming sadness, we share news of the passing of Labor Center Senior Policy Fellow Jane McAlevey, who died Sunday, July 7, at her cabin in Muir Beach after a long struggle with cancer. She will be deeply missed by all who knew and worked with her. It was almost impossible to meet Jane and not be inspired by her unwavering commitment to justice and her passion for mentoring workers to develop their own power. Jane’s contributions and insights have deepened and enriched our work at the Labor Center over the past five years.
Jane joined the Labor Center in June 2019, to focus on building capacity, civic engagement, and leadership development among California’s public school K-12 educator unions. Less than one year into her appointment, COVID hit. Jane, along with the rest of the Labor Center’s Leadership Development team, radically shifted gears to continue the urgent work of building the capacity of members and staff of labor organizations representing essential workers–including and beyond the education sector–to organize and win, doing so in a strictly virtual environment.
Because of Jane’s renown in the national and international labor community, there was widespread interest in learning the organizing skills and methods she had sharpened over decades to build high-participation unions. Having already piloted a successful global organizing program virtually, Jane was able to share those skills with our Leadership Development team and expand our reach exponentially. The results have contributed to the rise in big bargaining negotiations, successful organizing and contract campaigns around the country, and a renewed rigor in the U.S. labor movement.
It has been a great source of pride and joy to hear stories from union leaders about how Labor Center training programs developed by Jane were changing the way they work, building worker leadership and participation, and leading to real wins. We are grateful for the opportunity we have had to work with and learn from her.
Though also a trainer, mentor, and scholar, Jane was first and foremost an organizer. She honed and popularized a systematic organizing method whose impact will be felt in the labor movement for many years to come. She wrote four books on her theories, methods, and experiences –Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell), No Shortcuts, Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, A Collective Bargain, Unions, Organizing and the Fight for Democracy, and, most recently Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations. These titles established a blueprint for building worker power and creating lasting change.
Jane received her PhD from the City University of New York Graduate Center where she studied with political scientist and sociologist Frances Fox Piven. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Labor and Worklife program at Harvard.
Jane faced terminal cancer with the same tenacity that she brought to organizing, mentoring, scholarship, and writing. In her own words on the syndicated program Democracy Now!, “…the work is going to go on .. one soldier is going to go down in the fight, and there’s a ton more soldiers being produced every day, in all of these campaigns, in all of the training programs. And I do think that they’re going to win, ultimately, because people have had it with capitalism in 2024.”
We will celebrate Jane’s life and legacy soon. For now, and always, the best tribute will be to continue her work strengthening the labor movement and mentoring grassroots leaders in the skills they need to win. Our colleague Katie Miles, who worked closely with Jane, reminds in her tribute in The Nation, “…Jane taught me that good organizing breaks open our world. When we build unshakeable unity and solidarity, we see ourselves and each other differently, capable of courage and power we could have never imagined before.”
Jane McAlevey ¡Presente! Forever present!
To learn more about Jane’s work at the Labor Center, please visit her staff bio page.