Jane McAlevey puts the “movement” in “labor movement”. She worked for unions for a decade, including four years in a “right to work” state (aka “right to work for less”) helping hospital workers win victories for themselves and their patients in an era characterized by concessions to the bosses. McAlevey’s memoir/gonzo case study anthology Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell) (Verso) was reissued in paperback just over a year ago this past May, and she participated in a panel a couple of weeks ago at the annual Left Forum conference where she outlined a recent paper for the Socialist Register and announced the working title of her next book — No Shortcuts.
If you are not familiar with McAlevey’s work, over the last few years she has become one of the Left’s most incisive commentators on labor and grassroots struggles. By pursuing a PhD and publishing her memoir, McAlevey has translated her credibility and experiences as a field organizer into respect as a scholar and strategist from both academia and popular Left media outlets (Behind The News on Pacifica radio, GritTV with Laura Flanders, The Real News, In These Times, The Nation). Listening to or reading McAlevey is exciting because she talks about the Left “building power” and “winning” in ways that are ambitious but not at all sentimental or sounding like bravado. McAlevey talks fast, thinks sharp and is relentless in her mission to stop the Left from repeating the same mistakes of the last 35 years.
In her tour de force Left Forum presentation, McAlevey kicked off by talking about how she (and, ideally, every organizer) starts each day by “thinking about ways to create a crisis for capital.” The kind of crises that sitdown strikers and others were able to create in the 1930s that made the 1% of that time concede substantial power and compensation to millions of workers. The fundamental project of our time, according to her, is recreating working class identity and solidarity.
Why? If working people (and those who cannot find work) don’t perceive themselves as a group with distinct interests counterpoised to the owners and bosses then it is much more difficult to see economic and job site injustices as the product of a system that affects everyone — and not simply the product of one’s own mistakes, a few bad bosses or a few bad companies. If we don’t see the broader system of injustice then it is more difficult to move toward methods of struggling together and supporting each other, the practice we call solidarity.
So how do we accomplish this? Standing on a tree stump shouting “Workers of the World Unite!” seems outdated and unable to penetrate the propaganda we are saturated with. For McAlevey, the opportunity comes from working with people on the concrete issues that directly impact them, in the form of “whole worker organizing” — that is, organizing that recognizes a person seeks justice on issues both inside and outside of the workplace. But, we need to structure our fights for the concrete in a specific way. When planning and fighting a campaign, whether it is for a raise in wages or affordable housing, we must ask:
- Is the strategy we are pursuing expanding our base of organic worker/community leaders? An “organic leader” is someone who is naturally looked to as a respected person in a group, be it a workplace, neighborhood or other form of community. These are the ones that people turned to for help or advice before your campaign ever started. They are not necessarily the people who automatically agree with your campaign! Which is why they must be identified and recruited.
- Is it deepening working class solidarity?
- Is this strategy bridging the divides the bosses create? (Sexism, racism, elitism etc.)
- Is it helping the working class see the power structures that oppress workers rather than seeing problems as one-offs or the result of a bad boss?
Broadly speaking, the way to answer “yes” to these questions is through structuring campaigns and organizations around radical, popular education to transform consciousness and democratic, deep member participation to foster member leadership and ownership of the struggle. In her talk, McAlevey broke those principles down in a more granular way:
- Struggle together: abolish as many internal divisions as possible (e.g. different jobs on a worksite, treatment of different genders, those getting gouged by their health insurance vs. those without any coverage). Everyone’s issues matter.
- Forge a common vision for how the campaign will win: talk to the members about the goal of building power. Talk about how that power requires mass participation.
- Organizers must talk to the members and members must talk to each other: they have information and stories no organizer could imagine and they must understand each other’s needs.
- Semantics are central: How we talk about a campaign shapes how we think about it, and how we think about it determines what long-term lessons will be taken from it.
It’s important to note that when McAlevey talks about organizers, she refers to both paid and unpaid (staff and non-staff members) who are committed to building power, thinking about the next steps of a campaign, anticipating the bosses’ next moves and facilitating the members’ decisions about how to win. Also, while McAlevey speaks mostly about workplace organizing because that is a strategic priority for her and a formative part of her background, this applies to any grassroots struggle for the 99%.
For a deeper understanding of these organizing concepts, and how McAlevey contrasts them with the mobilizing tactics that have defined most progressive struggles since the 1970s, her talk the Parkland Center in Canada is a fantastic resource:
What makes Jane McAlevey someone who should be on the radar of everyone who cares about fighting for the 99% is her ability to connect day-to-day organizing to a vision of building the actual power we need to win the world we want. Creating working class solidarity and identity, expanding our base of organic leaders, bridging divides created by the 1% and helping workers see the systems that create injustice are all achievable through daily organizing practices that prioritize radical member education and participation. And by achieving those aims we can build real power. Raising Expectations presents her experiences as inspiring and educational case studies that will benefit any organizer, especially those that have not had the benefit of deep-pocket union training. Her next book aims to explain organizing in a more systematic way, and if we really listen and commit to what needs to be done then we’ll have a fighting chance for real victories in the short and long term.
