Jane
McAlevey

Senior Policy Fellow

janemcalevey@berkeley.edu

Program Areas

Unions & Worker Organizations

Workshops & Leadership Schools

Area of Expertise

Collective bargaining
Union organizing
Research on union avoidance firms
Power structure analysis and strategy
Mission-driven sectors of the economy (health care and education)

About Jane

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.

    Jane McAleveyand Abby Lawlor

    Turning the Tables: Participation and Power in Negotiations

    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.