The pandemic temporarily paused the trend toward more strikes, but workers’ anger continued to rise as they dealt with the dangerous work environments and staffing problems that the pandemic caused. “I think all of this is boiling over now,” McAlevey told me.

What can you do to neutralize the impact of disinformation? Optimizing relational organizing skills involves structured organizing conversations. Steps of a structured organizing conversation to counter disinformation are adapted from Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in a Gilded Age.

Central to McAlevey’s organising model is the idea that workplace unionism must be based in high worker participation, with strong member democracy.

That’s why labor consultant and author Jane McAlevey recommends that unions today follow the example of Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) organizers. In the post-war era, she reports, they better appreciated the fact that former service members had “strategic value” in strike-related PR campaigns, not to mention “experience with discipline, military formation, and overcoming fear and adversity,” all very useful on militant picket-lines.

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.

“Workers aren’t waking up to change the world; they’re waking up to get a good contract,” said Jane McAlevey. “And you need to help them win it—soon—or they’re going to walk away.”

It is to management’s advantage to have the bargaining process narrow; by contrast, as organizer and negotiator Jane McAlevey and others have stressed, workers benefit from having the process open to their participation.

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.”

Jane McAlevey wants us to have a better understanding of Womack’s concept of power and how to wield it effectively. “From an organizer’s viewpoint, the question is, are the workers capable of creating a crisis big enough that it forces the employers to make concessions?”

McAlevey said including a broad spectrum of workers at the bargaining table through tools like Zoom has been successful for unions and is common without any legal pushback. She said unions can benefit from having rank-and-file members informed of the talks, even though unions should as a rule have only negotiators speak during bargaining sessions.