Unions & Worker Organizations
Workshops & Leadership Schools
Collective bargaining
Union organizing
Research on union avoidance firms
Power structure analysis and strategy
Mission-driven sectors of the economy (health care and education)
Jane McAlevey has spent most of her life as an 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. She earned a Ph.D. in 2015 from the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, studying with Frances Fox Piven, after which she was a postdoc at Harvard Law School with the Labor & Worklife Program.
Her fourth and most recent book, Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations, is available from Oxford University Press.
Drawing insights from recent hard-won union negotiation campaigns, Jane McAlevey and Abby Lawlor look to the workers leading some of the toughest fights today to provide a masterclass in participatory social change.
A report by Jane McAlevey and Abby Lawlor, illustrates best practices for building the power to win in today’s challenging union climate and features a series of case studies in collective bargaining during the four years under Trump. They cover four key employment sectors: teachers, nurses, hotel workers, and journalists. In each case, workers used high transparency and high participation approaches in contract campaigns to build worker power. Each victory points a path to raising workers’ expectations of what is possible to win at the negotiations table today.
The Los Angeles teachers’ union was profoundly influenced by Jane McAlevey, writes former president Alex Caputo-Pearl. If the loving and assertive push was her trademark, then thinking audaciously big was its complement.
“She was always kind of ahead of the curve of what was coming,” said Labor Center director of Leadership Development Program and coworker of McAlevely, Danielle Mahones. “This needs to continue to be taught, and she wanted to be connected to an institution that can do that.”
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?
Jane McAlevey reflects on her life’s work in organizing and recent wins for labor, and what she sees as crucial for workers to do if they want to continue the positive streak for unions.
Democracy Now! speaks with the great labor organizer and writer Jane McAlevey about the historic victory for Volkswagen employees at a Chattanooga, Tennessee and about her terminal cancer diagnosis and why she’s “going to fight until the last dying minute, because that’s what American workers deserve.”
The recent upsurge in organizing is worth celebrating, but workers can’t afford to rest.
The same Supreme Court that revoked Roe v. Wade is engaged in a long-term effort to outlaw strikes: according to Jane McAlevey, building up mobilizational capacity for unions now is about preparing US workers for a future of illegal strikes.
On the sidelines of PSI Congress, we caught up with Jane to discuss her perspectives on organising – and winning!
Hour-long interview with Jane McAlevey.
