Jane McAlevey, 1964-2024

Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell) was the book that got me active in the labor movement. I have always felt sort of awkward to say this; most organizing trainings encourage participants to come up with some wild, personal story of triumph, but McAlevey’s writing and thinking had a great impact on me, and I am sure many others will say the same. Of all of Jane McAlevey’s gifts, being able to dramatize any story about a contract campaign or union election into a swashbuckling, life-or-death battle was always the most incredible to me. Take this 11-minute video she made about getting an on-the-fence worker to join a contract action team at a Philadelphia hospital. Anyone worth their salt as an organizer has a story about something like this, but when McAlevey tells it, the narrative becomes the biggest, most audacious, and impactful thing to have ever happened in Pennsylvania. Her narrative talents have galvanized many, inspiring both new and seasoned union activists to commit themselves to labor struggles.

McAlevey spent much of her life on the road helping to support various campaigns. She was the closest twenty-first century equivalent to the traveling organizers of the IWW or CIO times, and McAlevey focused most of her energy on the workers in the “modern economy” of healthcare and education. For newer organizers raised in the age of strike-heavy, impactful campaigns like Starbucks Workers United or the UAW Stand Up Strike, it may be hard to understand how critical her arguments were when Raising Expectations came out in 2012. McAlevey had just left SEIU after a decade of organizing in various roles. At the time, SEIU was criticized as a union that often cut workers out of organizing. Her second book, No Shortcuts, makes this criticism more explicit, framing her organizing against the titular “shortcuts” of photo-ops and secret neutrality deals of Stern-era SEIU.

McAlevey’s belief in worker power and agency is shown most in her three big tactics: power-structure analysis, open bargaining, and whole worker organizing. Each of these tactics requires long-term relationships and deep conversations with workers as well as a belief that worker agency and knowledge are crucial. Her open bargaining style is by far my favorite of her tactics. It turns the usually deeply bureaucratic and boring process of bargaining completely on its head and makes it into a process completely run by the workers themselves. In her 2021 case study on open bargaining for the UC Berkeley Labor Center, she summarizes the tactic succinctly: “when workers are trusted to seriously engage in their own negotiations, they can achieve the commonly unthinkable: they can win against the odds. Whether you are a worker in Germany or Alabama, the only way you win a decent life is by building enough power to create a crisis for the employers.”

Despite the enormous influence of McAlevey’s work there have been many critiques of her method including some published by Tempest. In my own reading, I found that McAlevey was sometimes overly dismissive of the structural barriers in the union bureaucracy, which prevent some of the organizing she specialized in and advocated for. Nevertheless, these criticisms do not overshadow the important contributions she made to labor campaigns nor do they diminish the positive influence she had on a generation of labor organizers. As a missionary of worker power, Jane McAlevey was second to none. I will miss her greatly.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”