Jane F. McAlevey, a dedicated labor organizer and scholar who taught tens of thousands of workers around the world strategies for leading and shaping unions, died Sunday at her mountain cabin in Muir Beach, Calif. She was 59.
Her brother-in-law, Mitchell Rothbart, said the cause was multiple myeloma. She had previously had surgery for breast cancer. Her primary residence was in Manhattan.
Ms McAleavey dedicated her life to empowering the working class, and she believed that worker-led trade unions – led from below rather than from above – were the most effective driving force. To combat economic inequality.
Through her writing, including what The Nation magazine dubbed “Strike Correspondent,” as well as frequent media interviews and podcasts, McAlevey has become a vocal critic of what she sees as complacency, incompetence and corporate collusion among much of America's union leadership.
“Most unions don’t actually organize their members as part of the community and build community power,” she said in an interview for this obituary last November. “I teach workers to take over their unions and change them.”
After leading successful campaigns for the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union from 1997 to 2008, McAlevey turned to consulting, coaching unions across the country on how to revitalize their rank-and-file memberships, attract new members and counter aggressive anti-union tactics from employers.
She has also worked with immigrant rights organisations, tenant groups and climate activists, and travelled overseas to advise hospital unions in Germany, communications workers in Ireland and trade union organisers in Canada, Australia and the UK.
A captivating speaker with a sense of humor, McArevy expanded his global influence in 2019 when he hosted a free, intensive, six-week online course, “Organizing for Power,” at the Berlin-based democratic socialist nonprofit Rosa Luxembourg Foundation. Over four years, 36,000 people from 130 countries have attended the workshops, which have been simultaneously translated into 12 languages, including Arabic, Hindi, Portuguese and Russian.
She also attracted about 4,500 participants over four years to workshops at the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center, where she was a senior policy fellow. The United Food and Commercial Workers Local 770, a major labor union in Southern California, is sending 100 members and staff to workshops in 2022 to prepare for negotiations with grocery chains, said Cathy Finn, the union's president.
As a result, the union opened up staff-led negotiations to the rank and file. Finn said this transparency led to “huge numbers of union members voting to strike,” and that high turnout forced concessions from the company and averted a last-minute strike. “We're seeing more and more unions using her tactics,” he said.
Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education and research at Cornell University, said McAlevey's books and classes were based on long-established organizing methods, but she added that “Jane's charisma and teaching methods inspired people around the world, especially young people, to use rank-and-file labor power to organize.”
Jane Frances McAlevey was born in Manhattan on October 12, 1964, the youngest of seven children. Her mother, Hazel (Hansen) McAlevey, died of breast cancer when Jane was five years old. Her father, John F. McAlevey, was a local politician in Rockland County, New York.
McAlevey grew up in the suburb of Sloatsburg, New York, where his father was mayor, and accompanied him to election campaigns, civil rights marches and anti-Vietnam War protests.
“I got the fighter pilot genes from my dad,” McAlevey said of his father, who flew bombers over Germany during World War II.
As a student at the University at Buffalo, New York, Ms. McAlevey participated in protests against tuition hikes, was elected student body president and later led the student association at the state university system's 64 campuses.
In April 1985, Ms. McAlevey hid chains and padlocks under her dress and helped hundreds of students occupy a SUNY building as the board of trustees resisted divestment from companies operating in South Africa. She served 10 days in jail for trespass.
After graduating from college, she spent a year in Central America, teaching people to read and write and rebuilding homes in a war zone in Nicaragua. Returning to the US, she worked for several non-profit organisations, including the Highlander Research and Education Centre in Tennessee, helping poor communities combat pollution from chemical plants.
After a decade in environmental justice activism, McAlevey joined the AFL-CIO where he led groundbreaking multi-union campaigns. In Stamford, Connecticut, a corporate hub with few union members at the time, they organized nursing home workers, taxi drivers, janitors and city hall employees.
McAlevey discovered that workers were unhappy not just with wages and benefits, but also with the lack of affordable housing in Stamford. He expanded the union's campaign to push for housing security, an approach he calls “whole-of-worker organizing.”
McAlevey said unionizing is “more than just something that happens when you punch in your hours.”
“But it's not just that,” she said. “Are there good schools for your kids to go to? Are there clean, safe parks? Is there affordable housing? Is there transportation?”
Over the course of four years, the Stamford Organizing Project formed unions and won contracts for more than 4,000 workers, and partnered with community organizations to stop the demolition of public housing.
After joining the Service Employees International Union in 2002, McCalleavy campaigned to organize nurses and other hospital workers in Nevada, a so-called right-to-work state where workers cannot be required to join a union. That also means unionized workers don't have to pay dues, weakening their influence. McCalleavy is credited with reviving a dwindling local chapter and leading a strike that won a contract for higher wages and improved benefits.
But her four-year tenure in Nevada was turbulent: She earned the nickname “Hurricane Jane,” some local union officials resisted her efforts, and her biggest battle was with the SEIU's national leadership, which at the time had made private deals with hospital chains to limit strikes in some areas, including Nevada, in exchange for allowing unions to organize in others.
McAlevey left SEIU in 2008. The following year, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had preventive surgery to remove her ovaries, uterus and breasts. During her recovery, she wrote a memoir, “Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): A Decade of Fighting for Labor.” (2012), Written with journalist Bob Ostertag, the book offers an unusual candor that not only exposes the tactics workers used to fight the Nevada hospital chain, but also the internal union power struggles that stymied their success.
Her story led to a new career: She was invited to pursue her doctorate at the City University of New York, and she compiled her dissertation into a new book, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (2016), which analyzes 12 campaigns (both successful and unsuccessful) and offers a practical guide for organizers.
McAlevey argued that labor and progressive groups were wasting their energy on “feel-good” mobilizations and “event-ism” like supporter rallies and press conferences. He advocated “deep-deep organizing” — patient, one-on-one conversations to persuade apathetic or hostile workers.
She believed that by building a large, strike-ready majority within companies, she could counter the rightward shift of the blue-collar classes.
McAlevey loved horses and had a horse named Jalapeño that he would ride from town to town, joking that the horse was his “great love.”
McArevy was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in September 2021. She underwent chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant, but learned her treatment had failed after collapsing on a picket line in Oakland.
After doctors told her she only had weeks to live, she defied the odds and celebrated the publication of her fourth book, Rules for Winning: Power and Participation in Trade Union Negotiations (2023). He has traveled to Ireland to research his fifth book and given online lectures to workers from New Zealand to Zambia.
Mr. McAlevy is survived by four brothers, Benedict, John, Thomas and Birgitta McAlevy, and two brothers-in-law, Mitchell and Clifford Rothbart. Her brother Peter died in 2013 from breast cancer. He died of liver cancer in 2014.
In April, McAlevey said the cancer “hit me with such force that it took even my medical team's breath away,” and he wrote an open letter to his family, friends, colleagues and newsletter subscribers titled “Glad to have you in this world with me,” in which he announced he was receiving hospice care at home.
Still, her last article appeared in The Nation in May, analyzing the United Auto Workers' election defeat at a Mercedes plant in Alabama. Among other missteps, she wrote, the union had failed to rally the local community around its campaign.
She stuck to her beliefs to the end, and while spending the rest of her time with her loved ones, she wrote, “I want to give a big round of applause to all the working people who are fighting against the greedy and cruel New Gilded Age elite.”
