Avec son programme O4P (Organize for Power) Jane McAlevey encourage et soutient les inistiatives syndicales dans le monde entier.
October 17, 2023 by Eleni Schirmer - The renowned organizer and theorist has a terminal-cancer diagnosis. But she has long been fighting the clock.
This past January, Jane McAlevey spent a week in Connecticut leading an organizing blitz. In union parlance, a blitz is a quick, concentrated organizing effort, designed to engage as many workers as possible in a short period of time. The campaign’s goals were ambitious—to bring some twenty-five thousand home health-care workers into a fight not just against their bosses but against the broader social and economic problems weighing on them, including issues such as a lack of affordable housing, insufficient public transportation, and the need for debt relief. For seven days, McAlevey and about two hundred other organizers went door to door, talking to thousands of people—mostly Black and brown women employed by nursing homes, group homes, and home health-care companies. McAlevey and her team told them, “This is a new program to bring power all of you have, but often aren’t aware of, to the table.”
For McAlevey, one of the nation’s preëminent labor organizers and strategists, the project presented a chance to revisit a strategy that she had advanced twenty-some years ago in Stamford, Connecticut, known as the “whole worker” method. In the nineties, a lack of affordable housing in Stamford—located in one of the wealthiest counties in the country—overshadowed nearly every other issue on workers’ minds. This was not a problem that could be solved by unions alone, but unions, if strategically harnessed, had the horsepower to fight it. McAlevey began organizing workers in four different sectors—janitors, cabdrivers, city clerks, and nursing-home aides—and determined that they could exert influence through the city’s churches. (“Note to labor,” McAlevey wrote about this campaign, years later. “Workers relate more to their faith than to their job, and fear God more than they fear the boss.”) Soon the city’s most powerful preachers were hosting bargaining sessions in church basements. By the time the campaign finished, more than four thousand workers had their first union and new contracts to boot. Their efforts also saved multiple public-housing projects from demolition, won fifteen million dollars for the units’ improvements, and secured new ordinances that mandated affordable-housing levels going forward.
In the intervening decades, McAlevey has become not just an expert organizer but a social scientist of organizing’s methodology. She has written four books that have become touchstones for a new generation of labor leaders. Rather than instructing organizers to run as hard as they can in whatever direction they happen to be facing, McAlevey emphasizes strategy. She advises organizers to first conduct what she calls a power-structure analysis, which asks who has the power to change an issue (not always the most obvious targets) and what power workers have to influence those actors. She then leads workers through a series of escalating actions, from attending a meeting to wearing buttons to work to joining walkouts: she calls these “structure tests.” During the past decade, Amazon warehouse workers and Los Angeles teachers have drawn on McAlevey’s approach. (McAlevey informally advised the New Yorker Union during negotiations for its first contract, which was signed in 2021.) If at any point during this past hot labor summer, or the decade leading up to it, you encountered a group of workers strutting on a picket line or jubilantly making demands well beyond the scope of their own wages, chances are that many of them had been reading McAlevey.
When McAlevey went back to Connecticut this past winter, she hoped that the campaign would form the basis for a book about the whole-worker methodology. The project is significant for two reasons. First, it’s her most ambitious research effort to date, involving not only tens of thousands of health-care workers but also their churches, tenants’ unions, and neighborhood councils. Unions generally limit their organizing sphere to the workplace, leaving broader social issues to political campaigns. But this approach cedes what McAlevey calls the third front of power: workers’ relationships to their communities. Without this degree of coördination, workers were unlikely to achieve anything close to their goals, which include winning a twenty-five-dollar-an-hour minimum wage and affordable health insurance.
More fundamentally, the project is likely to be McAlevey’s last. In September, 2021, she was diagnosed with a high-risk variety of multiple myeloma. Since her diagnosis, each treatment option that her medical team has offered her has failed, faster than expected. Days prior to leading the blitz this January, McAlevey was hospitalized to receive an emergency treatment; she was thought to be living her last days. She persuaded doctors to release her—she had a blitz to lead, and the clock was running out.
For McAlevey, relentlessness is a way of life. She talks fast, swears often, is blunt to the point of brashness, laughs easily. She has little tolerance for mediocrity, particularly on the left. Trade-union leadership, she once remarked, “choose every day . . . to lose.” When I was preparing to visit her in New York, on a cloudy April weekend, McAlevey sent me an agenda for my stay: on Saturday, we had drinks with an organizer, dinner at seven, and then all serious conversation wrapped up by tipoff. It was the Warriors vs. the Kings, Game One of the playoffs. McAlevey, who has lived part time in the Bay Area for the past twenty years, is a diehard Golden State fan.
When I arrived at McAlevey’s place, a rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan, she welcomed me warmly, in jeans, heeled sandals, and a Warriors jersey. For most of her recent public events, she had taken to wearing a wig, concealing the effects of chemotherapy, but at home she goes without. When I visited, a layer of fine, downy hair was just beginning to grow back.
I sat at the table while she bustled around, making salad and thawing a jar of homemade pesto for pasta. When I had first approached her about writing this piece, she’d told me that she didn’t want her cancer diagnosis to appear in the story. This was understandable but not possible: among other things, doing so would require me to strip a thread from McAlevey’s life. When Jane was about three years old, her mother, Hazel McAlevey, who was very ill with breast cancer, was taken to live elsewhere, in order to prevent Jane from witnessing her mother’s decline. At age forty-four, Hazel died. Jane was five.
The family lived in Sloatsburg, forty miles outside New York City. There, Jane’s father, John McAlevey, became a politician, winning office first as the mayor and then as a supervisor in the county. Jane spent most of her early years grubby and unsupervised, trailing her older siblings everywhere. She became dearly attached to her older sister Catherine, who became the family’s caretaker as a young adolescent. As her reward for doing all the cooking, cleaning, tending, minding of the house, and minding of the children, Catherine was granted the largest bedroom, replete with a stereo, a television, and a prime location next to the bathroom. “I would do anything to get into that room,” Jane recalled. Though the younger siblings envied Catherine’s belongings, she was the heart of the family. “We always said she was the most loved McAlevey,” Jane recalled, “because she was everyone’s sister, mother. She played every role.”
Raising seven kids on the wages of one public servant was difficult. When Jane was around ten, her father nearly went bankrupt, an experience that Jane only later understood as an embarrassment. Around this time, he remarried. At odds with her stepmother, Jane left home at age sixteen. As her stepbrother explained, “Jane was always at the bottom of something awful growing up. Her mother was taken off to die. Our father had no clue how to take care of family. And Jane was always at the bottom of the pile.”
For a time, McAlevey stayed with her older sister Bri, who was living in a radical co-op in Manhattan, before enrolling at SUNY Buffalo, where she waited tables to pay for her schooling. When Governor Mario Cuomo proposed tuition hikes, she got swept up in campus organizing. As she told me, “I literally could not afford more than two hundred dollars a semester.” In her first semester at SUNY, Jane and others packed bus after bus with enraged students to register their complaints in Albany. Cuomo dropped his proposed increase. SUNY students claimed the victory.
Shortly thereafter, McAlevey ran a successful campaign for president of the student body at SUNY Buffalo, as part of a slate whose platform was no tuition increases, no rent increases, no military-defense programs on campus, and no athletic fees. McAlevey effectively began working full time as the president of the Student Association of State University of New York. Divestment from apartheid South Africa had been a priority for SUNY student organizers for more than a decade, but Janice Fine, a former S.A.S.U. student organizer who is now a labor-studies professor at Rutgers, told me that their efforts had been poorly focussed. McAlevey changed that, shifting the target from the SUNY chancellor, Clifton R. Wharton, Jr., to Governor Cuomo. As Fine explained, “We went from targeting somebody who was an appointed official to someone who was elected, someone much more vulnerable to national perception.” In 1985, the board of trustees voted to divest $11.5 million in stock from companies who did business in apartheid South Africa.
McAlevey got her first job in the labor movement running the Stamford, Connecticut, campaign. Afterward, she was hired by the Service Employees International Union (S.E.I.U.) to organize hospital workers in Las Vegas. McAlevey wrote in a memoir, “The union had no discernible power in any field. The workers were weak as hell in terms of anything that had to do with organizing or mobilizing. And I’d been sent there to clean the place up in general, and specifically to organize new hospital workers into the union.”
Inspired by union tactics from the thirties, McAlevey began running open bargaining sessions, in which hundreds of workers sat head to head with the boss. “The idea is to demonstrate to the boss and to the workers themselves that the workers are standing together and the union is in charge,” McAlevey wrote, years later. Rather than having negotiators present demands, she identified workers who were passionate about each issue, and could speak directly to the employer about patient-nurse ratios, schedules, or wages. Fredo Serrano, a local nurse, told me, “Jane could figure out people. She knew what we needed. She knew where the influence had to be. She knew who the leaders were.”
During one session, workers found themselves facing off against a notoriously hostile management negotiator, who was also a vigorous gum chewer. The more irritated he became, the louder he would chomp, scornfully blowing bubbles. “It became an outward sign of his contempt for the workers and for Jane,” Kristin Warner, a fellow-organizer, recalled. During a break, a worker wondered how the negotiator would respond if everyone started chewing gum. Jane and the staff organizers jumped at the idea and ran out to get supplies. The next time the negotiations hit an impasse, two hundred health-care workers in the bargaining room carefully unwrapped their gum and chewed it—one loud, smacking wall.
But McAlevey’s vision of a worker-led, militant union put her at odds with the national union’s leaders, who hoped that the union would strike a deal with hospital corporate leadership. In the fall of 2006, when Vegas hospital workers were on the verge of a strike, the S.E.I.U.’s national legal leader called McAlevey. “It was a most unusual phone call,” McAlevey told me. The legal leader warned McAlevey that the national union had just renegotiated a national labor-peace accord; strikes were now off the table. If the locals disobeyed the national’s directives, they could run the risk of being placed under trusteeship, removing much of their hard-earned democratic character. (The S.E.I.U. declined to comment.)
McAlevey told all of the worker leaders to come to her house for an emergency meeting. When they arrived, McAlevey explained the choice: they could follow national orders and call off their strike vote, or they could go forward with their plan and risk having their union doors padlocked by the national leadership. The group agreed to proceed with the strike vote. “Those workers didn’t give a shit. We were doing this,” McAlevey said. When the team notified the national legal staff the next morning, McAlevey knew that it would be only a matter of time until she would have to leave the S.E.I.U.
Within weeks, Jane received another life-changing phone call: her sister Catherine had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. Jane got on the next flight to New York, where Catherine lived. “We spent forty-eight hours hugging and crying, and then making a plan, with me committing to regularly come home to visit,” McAlevey said. Like Jane, Catherine had long blond hair. “I told Catherine’s partner that when the first sign of hair falling out happened, to call me, and I’d be there,” McAlevey recalled. Weeks later, McAlevey was sitting with her sister at a wig store in New York, holding her hand while her sister’s head got shaved, clumps of hair falling to the floor. “Catherine was crying so hysterically, they had to keep stopping with the razor,” McAlevey told me. “I just remember thinking to myself, Act like you’re going to get through this.”
Her sister’s diagnosis confirmed a deep foreboding. As McAlevey put it, “I always believed I was going to die in my early forties from breast cancer, just like my mother.” In early 2008, roughly a year into treatments, Catherine learned that she carried a BRCA1 gene mutation that is associated with increased risks of aggressive cancer. Catherine’s results prompted Jane to get tested. She was positive. Preventive surgeries revealed that she had early-stage ovarian cancer. As McAlevey wrote some years later, “The fuse was lit and burning early in my 40s. Just like my mother. Just like my sister.”
Jane McAlevey standing outside on a balcony wearing jeans and a pink top
Organizing is not an art of telling people what to do, McAlevey explains, but of listening for what they cannot abide.
During the next year, McAlevey recovered from multiple surgeries related to her ovarian cancer and the BRCA1 gene. Stuck at home, she began writing. The resulting book, her memoir, “Raising Expectations,” reads like a shotgun spray, a fusillade of labor-organizing battle stories. Some of Jane’s mentors, including the sociologist Frances Fox Piven, wanted something more measured. Piven nudged her toward graduate school to work through her insights. So, just weeks shy of forty-five, McAlevey enrolled in a sociology doctoral program at CUNY Graduate Center.
McAlevey spent her second summer of graduate school in the Adirondacks, on a writing retreat at the Blue Mountain Center, to finish revisions of “Raising Expectations.” One Friday in August, Catherine and her partner were planning to pick up McAlevey to spend the weekend in Saratoga Springs. But, the day before, Harriet Barlow, a mentor of Jane’s and the director of the Blue Mountain Center, approached Jane to let her know that her sister’s partner was on the phone. She told Jane that Catherine’s cancer was back. “I walked out of the office, and I remember looking at Harriet and saying, ‘My sister’s going to die,’ ” McAlevey recalled. The following spring, Catherine passed away.
McAlevey, who had taken time away from graduate school to care for Catherine, returned to CUNY to finish her degree. Shortly after she graduated, her dissertation was published as a book, “No Shortcuts,” dedicated to Catherine. “No Shortcuts” describes three common pathways to create change: advocating, mobilizing, and organizing. Advocacy relies on lawyers, consultants, and lobbyists to secure one-time wins, often via backroom deals. Mobilizing draws in activists to participate in rallies or protests. McAlevey distinguishes both of these activities from organizing, which she defines as something stronger and more abiding. For McAlevey, organizing means that “ordinary people help make the power analysis, design the strategy, and achieve the outcome.” The book outlines the key elements of McAlevey’s method, from conducting a power-structure analysis and stress tests to identifying leaders in the rank and file. But it also offers a radical theory of power. Organizing is not an art of telling people what to do, McAlevey explains, but of listening for what they cannot abide. “Anger is there before you are,” the opening page of “No Shortcuts” declares. “Channel it, don’t defuse it.”
Almost instantly, “No Shortcuts” became an underground bible of organizing. In the summer of 2017, a West Virginia history teacher named Jay O’Neal started a labor-themed reading group with some colleagues. “We were, like, the teaching conditions suck in West Virginia,” he told me. “How can we get our unions moving and doing something?” McAlevey’s distinctions between advocacy, mobilizing, and organizing gave the group language for their frustration, and her emphasis on power structures helped them decide to target the state legislature. “It’s like when you’re growing up and you hear, like, a love song, and you’re, like, Oh, that’s exactly how I’ve been feeling,” O’Neal explained. Within months, O’Neal and his colleagues led a statewide walkout that set off the #RedForEd teachers’ strikes. In 2017, the leaders of Los Angeles’s teachers’ union had a chapter-by-chapter discussion of “No Shortcuts” that guided the buildup to the union’s successful strike in 2019.
McAlevey’s influence spread to other progressive struggles. Naomi Klein, the leading climate activist and writer, told me that McAlevey’s focus on winning helped the movement to reframe the climate crisis as a power struggle. “We’re not losing because people don’t know there’s a problem,” Klein told me. “We’re losing because there are vested interests who may not be large in number, but they are mighty in their political and economic power.” McAlevey’s work, she went on, asked, “Where’s your war room? Where’s your power map? Have you stress-tested?” I recently found myself talking to a McGill professor from Nigeria who studies African diasporic social movements. “Oh, Jane!” she exclaimed, when I told her about this piece. “My Nigerian comrades have trained with her.”
Some union organizers similarly concerned with building worker power have wondered if McAlevey’s path from union complacency to union militancy breezes over a critical component: union democracy. Mike Parker—a veteran labor organizer, educator, and author, who died last year—once observed that workers often must win the fight for the union presidency before they can win the fight with the boss. But such struggles get little airtime in McAlevey’s work. “It’s as if she hopes that current leaders will see the light and ‘empower’ their members from above,” Parker wrote. Others have taken this argument further, charging McAlevey with an overreliance on professional staff at the expense of a radically empowered rank-and-file. McAlevey throws up her hands at this critique. “The idea that you’re just gonna beat Amazon when you’ve never run a campaign in your life is, like, seriously? Gimme a fucking break,” she told me.
After Amazon workers in Alabama failed to unionize, in the spring of 2021, McAlevey published a column in The Nation about the campaign’s weak points. “When there are more outside supporters and staff being quoted and featured in a campaign than there are workers from the facility, that’s a clear sign that defeat is looming,” she wrote. The piece drew heated criticism. Some saw it as punching down. Union leadership blamed high employee turnover for their failures. McAlevey, however, stood by her assessment. “When you do something that’s stupid, I’m gonna call it out,” she told me. “I will not take a word of that article back.”
What some may perceive as arrogance is perhaps better understood as impatience. McAlevey has no time to waste. In fact, none of us do. She just perceives this scarcity more acutely than most. In recent months, she said, she has been working harder than ever: “I feel great and I feel horrible. I feel frenetic.”
In March of 2022, after five months of intensive chemotherapy, McAlevey received a stem-cell transplant. For three months, she sealed herself in her apartment, recovering, but also revising a new book, which had just received peer reviews. Published this spring, “Rules to Win By,” which she co-authored with Abby Lawlor, is part theory and part nuts and bolts; its focus is McAlevey’s strategy of using big, open bargaining sessions to secure winning contracts.
When autumn arrived, McAlevey, who is a senior policy fellow at the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley, joined thousands of her U.C. co-workers on strike. One day, on the picket line, she collapsed—probably the result of a long bike ride the day before, she thought. She went to the hospital, where a panel of blood work revealed that the stem-cell transplant had failed; a treatment that typically results in five to seven years of remission had lasted her less than a year. McAlevey was put on high-dose chemotherapy and underwent radiation treatments on her hip and jaw.
By Christmas, it became clear that the treatment plan wasn’t working. The most promising treatment for multiple myeloma was a course of cellular immunotherapy, but McAlevey’s doctors believed that her condition wasn’t stable enough to make her a promising candidate. “It wasn’t worth it to any doctors to get me in their clinical trials,” McAlevey told me. Uncharacteristically, she paused. “That was pretty intense.”
Shortly after the New Year, a group of McAlevey’s closest friends met at her home in California to help arrange her affairs. Together, they packed up nearly fifty boxes of McAlevey’s favorite belongings—clothing, pottery, art work, jewelry, books—which would be sent to close friends and family upon her death. The next week, she flew to New York to begin an intensive treatment regimen at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. If this treatment did not take, she would be heading to hospice. Friends and family from around the world lined up next to her hospital bed, crying, telling her they loved her. “I called it death tourism,” McAlevey told me. She was grateful for it.
When the treatment ended, with no hitches, McAlevey began negotiating her release. The blitz in Connecticut was to start at the end of the month. “I mean, I hadn’t reacted badly to any of their tests or treatments,” she told me. “I just wanted them to let me the hell out of here. And my doctor was, like, We’re not getting you out of here to go do some crazy thing with a bunch of people, and I said, ‘Yeah, actually, you are.’ ” McAlevey, the expert negotiator, won.
By this past spring, Jane had defied doctors’ predictions: she was not dead. This piece of good news coincided with another—“Rules to Win By” was about to launch. On March 25th, McAlevey’s friends held a party to toast her accomplishments, including still being alive and completing a book.
The party was at the People’s Forum, a political-education and event space in midtown Manhattan. In the morning, fifty or so guests joined a live discussion of McAlevey’s legacy for the podcast “The Dig.” McAlevey, who was wearing jeans, puffy purple shoes, and a sleeveless, peach blouse, took the stage, along with her interviewer, the Jacobin editor Micah Uetricht. Uetricht lobbed slow, arching questions at McAlevey that allowed her to reflect on her life’s work. Organizing is a craft. Everyone can do it, but it depends on concrete methods and skills. “Every day, for organizers, there’s a strategic choice, the possibility of choosing a way to win. I write books to call people out and say, ‘Let’s try to win today,’ ” McAlevey explained.
When the session ended, I looked around the room. A few rows from me, an older, mustached man wearing a flannel shirt caught my eye. I recognized him as Marshall Ganz, a famed labor organizer with Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers campaign, who is widely credited with developing the grassroots model for Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential run. Speaking softly, almost musically, he told me, “Jane and I, we belong to the same church. We fundamentally believe that people have power—not as props, not as resources, but as people with agency.” We were among the last guests still in the room when he pulled out his phone and began reading me a Mary Oliver poem that, he said, reminds him of McAlevey. “I look upon time as no more than an idea,” Ganz read. “Each body a lion of courage, and something / precious to the earth.”
By evening, the rows of folding chairs had been cleared out to make a dance floor, bottles of wine and champagne had replaced the coffee carafes, and hot trays of catered Lebanese food lined the back walls. McAlevey had changed out of her jeans and wore a sweeping red dress and heels, with her head bare. The crowd milled around, sipping champagne, until the party’s m.c.s, two comedians, announced the first activity: Icebreaker Jane Bingo. Everyone received a bingo grid with squares containing phrases like “Too intimidated by Jane to hit on her”; “Have a selfie with Bernie Sanders”; “Are also dying.”
In a toast, Janice Fine, Jane’s longtime friend and comrade, reported that McAlevey had fired her from the party-planning committee. “I was making things too emotional,” she chuckled. Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land, a friend of Jane’s from graduate school at CUNY and a criminal-justice professor at the University of Winnipeg, teased, “Well, Jane, if you had known your life was going to be cut short, do you think you would have come to Winnipeg three times? Joke’s on you.” Dobchuk-Land told of a time when Jane took a very pregnant Bronwyn on a vigorous walk to the top of Winnipeg’s “Garbage Hill,” precipitating Bronwyn’s labor. While Bronwyn was in the hospital, Jane cleaned her house, stocked her fridge, and did her laundry. She was the first friend to hold Bronwyn’s daughter. “And I believe she planned it that way,” Dobchuk-Land said. “To know Jane is to be organized by her.”
