Protected: Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations
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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 third book, A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing and the Fight for Democracy, was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2020.
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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 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.