Jane McAlevey is a fourth-generation union activist and organizer who, after spending the first half of her life in community organizing and activist movements, took what she calls a “vacation” to earn a Ph.D. That “vacation” led to her second book, “No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the Gilded Age.”
McAlevey then returned to fieldwork, helping workers defeat a union-busting firm, stopping their employer from using legal delaying tactics, and ultimately leading to the first contract negotiations for a new Philadelphia hospital union.
She is a correspondent for The Nation and a senior policy fellow at UC Berkeley’s Labor Center. Her most recent book, “A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy” was published in 2020 by Ecco Press. A fourth book, “Striking Back,” is in the works.
McAlevey recently sat down with Blue Tent to talk about the necessity of “good” relational organizing, why the most exciting union organizing is going on at the local level, why unions need to look beyond workplace issues, and how no one reads those mass email blasts that are supposedly from Michelle Obama.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Blue Tent: In a March interview with Vox last year, and most recently in a Nation article last month, you basically argue that national labor leadership and the left, in general, are “build[ing] power all wrong.” Are there any union groups, union-affiliated groups, that you feel are doing the kind of work you’d like to see done that you think is going to actually make a difference?
McAlevey: The best work happening in the trade union movement happens at the level of local unions or state councils, less so through the national organizations. The rubber hits the road at the local union level. National unions may adopt a set of priorities, they may adopt a set of strategic campaigns for the next five years or something. But whether or not that work happens is largely a function of the leadership of local unions. I think there is and has been some extremely dynamic work happening at the local level.
Blue Tent: Is there a particular example you’d like to mention?
McAlevey: I think the work that United Teachers Los Angeles did, UTLA, which is the big teachers’ union in L.A., who had the incredibly successful strike just two years ago, in January of 2019.
It’s always interesting to me, because the strike is what the public will see, but the work leading up to the strike in January of 2019 is really where the interesting work was happening.
When you see the rare 100-percent-out strikes or 99-percent-out strikes, that level of solidarity and that level of unity and the level of organization required to pull off a 100-percent-out strike—all of those things are a reflection of a really healthy, small “d” democratic organization.
UTLA is a terrific example of this because they have established really good direct relationships with parents. They prioritized that for several years. I document this in my most recent book, but they really went way out building relationships—teacher to parent, teacher to parent, teacher to parent—for several years with deliberate attention to understanding the struggle to create good public schools in this country [after 40 years’ worth of attacks and under-funding of public education].
Blue Tent: The synopsis for your most recent book talks about a patient-centered approach to healthcare union organizing, and in this example, you’re talking about parent-centered organizing. Basically, you’re arguing the unions need to look beyond the workplace to organize successfully.
McAlevey: Oftentimes in this country, unions are the strongest organization that workers will have. And so my life argument is, why do our efforts stop when a worker punches the time clock and leaves work? If they’re going to leave the workplace and go home to a giant affordable housing crisis, and boy, is that going to be big right now, a huge eviction crisis coming in this country. Why, if your union is the strongest organization that you’re a member of, would the union not take up the anti-eviction crusade in this country?
Why would your union not take up the cancellation of medical debt, or the cancellation of student debt? Or more to the same analogy, some kind of campaign to reset who’s going to pay back landlords and mortgage payments coming out of this pandemic when we have thrown 30 million people out of work?
So yeah, my life argument is that there are a set of, it’s often called “community and labor issues,” and I try to re-frame that. Because I think when we say “community and labor,” it’s acting as if workers don’t live in their community. They live in the community, they work at work. And workers don’t divide their brains between what’s important at work and what’s important at home.
If you just won a small raise at work, but you’re about to get evicted from your home because your hours have been so reduced in the pandemic, it’s hard to argue that a 25- or 50-cents-an-hour raise is more or less important than whether or not you and your family are going to get evicted.
When I did my Ph.D., which for me was like taking a vacation—whatever, it was a serious, less stressful time for me—part of what I got to do is really read a lot more history of the U.S. labor movement. Which is not, when you’re running campaigns, something you have a lot of time for.
I always say everything old is new again. A lot of the ideas that I put out, from the time that I was 25 years old as a young trade organizer straight through to now, have a long history that you can trace to the 1930s and the 1940s.
The best of trade union organizing in the 1930s and 1940s, the heyday of what set up and built a middle class in this country, was a trade union and movement that was fundamentally way more connected and deeply integrated into workers’ non-workplace lives.
If we want to return to rebuilding the middle class and to winning worker justice coming out of a pandemic, which has just decimated people’s livelihoods and their lives, we’re going to have to use some of the best tools in our toolbox, which come out of the 1930s and 1940s.
Blue Tent: So are you talking about relational organizing?
McAlevey: It is relational organizing. And the difference between the ’30s and ’40s and contemporary times is... the falling rates of community civic participation in general in America. The general societal participation is down.
Related to that, it used to be that we had very large communities built up around very large factories in the ’30s and ’40s. People tended to live together more closely. When you went to work in a factory with 5,000 people, you built relationships pretty quickly and differently.
Part of what I began doing in the late 1990s was realizing it is true that participation in all of civil society, including our unions, is down. And it is true that workers are more dispersed. It’s not a giant factory that thousands of people punch into in the morning and then leave on a shift and can meet in the parking lot and plan and talk.
The method I developed [is] something called “whole-worker charting.” And it’s about workers beginning to actively chart the relationships they have outside of the workplace. Where do their kids go to school? What kind of parents can they meet there? Do they attend a house of faith? When I do this, we find all the time that there’s a ton of workers who work for the same employer sitting in the pews in a church, and they have no idea they work for the same employer.
So we’ll start to have workers do this charting exercise, where they start to identify all the ways that they relate to their community. Then we start to do overlays, to look at where those connections are, and we actually start to bring them together by political precinct, by church, by temple, by synagogue, by PTA.
The difference these days is we have to be very intentional, so it’s relational, but it’s an explicit form of relational when I’m talking about the trade union movement. And it’s our obligation to understand where all the connections lie among workers, because then you are building what I would call a bottom-up relationship between the union and the community via the lives of the workers. And that takes some intentional work in an organized model.
Blue Tent: Obviously, this brings up—when you talk about people going to places—COVID. Do you see any long-term impacts in the ability to find these relationships, to start creating relationships? Because people seem more suspicious of each other than ever.
McAlevey: Yeah, they are, which is why solidarity building is so essential. We just went through four bruising years where divide and conquer came from the White House in America, and inflamed suspicion of one another. So I think that COVID, for me as an organizer, has forced us to do some adjusting.
We have readjusted to teach people how to do what we call “site-structure building” through Zoom. None of this is using traditional digital tools, but it is still using the format of a group meeting or a one-to-one.
Instead of hitting an email to 30,000 educators, we’re not going to do that. We’re still going to say, “We need all of our site leaders, our school leaders, to call individual meetings with all the educators in their schools, and/or with all the parents connected to the educators in their schools,” and run that discussion as a Zoom group meeting, and not get cheap and dirty and turn it into some big blast approach. The emails you never read, I’m not reading them, either! So the principle of trust still holds. I used to hate when I got [an email] like, “from Michelle Obama.” You and I got the same emails, I bet.
So anyway, if you got an email from someone who you actually knew and trusted, the chance that you’re going to open that email and actually engage in that conversation that they’re asking you to engage in, it’s so much higher than some random blast email—which I’m ignoring, you’re ignoring, and frankly, most everyone on planet Earth is.
We’ve been working during COVID to very actively—and successfully, I’m going to argue—teach people how to adapt all the same principles of good relational organizing and put it into an online format. And it takes intentional thought, just like it takes thought to help workers see all their connections in the community.
It’s doable. I think COVID slows the work, but it slows it not because the method isn’t there, it slows the work right now because people are in a state of complete, fundamental exhaustion.
Blue Tent: What have I not asked that you wish I had? Especially for an audience of people who want to be, or are, progressive organizers or lawmakers?
My second book is called “No Shortcuts,” and I say it all the time, but I actually mean it. I think when you look at [the fact] that more than 70 million people voted for a candidate who just literally couldn’t care less if you killed them, the fact that more than 70 million people voted for that candidate has to suggest to people that there is no other way to do our work but a return to good relational organizing, which helps people understand who is actually on their side and who’s actually trying to hurt them.
You can’t do that through an email blast. And you can’t do that from political campaigns every four years, in presidential years, running in with a ton of resources into a swing state, and then moving back out.
I mean, I think some people really literally think the texts that they made and the phone calls they made and the money they sent between November and early January is what won Georgia. Come on! Georgia worked narrowly, and overcame incredible odds on those two Senate seats, because there was serious, on-the-ground, deep organizing. Relational organizing, deep organizing [they’re] the same words for me.
