简·麦卡利维

Jane F. McAlevey (October 12, 1964 – July 7, 2024) was an American union organizer, author, and political commentator. She was a Senior Policy Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, and a columnist at The Nation.

McAlevey contended that only workers have the power, through organization, to force significant change in the workplace and in society at large. Her model, what she called whole-worker organizing, sees workers and the community they live in as a whole. The underlying theory of change requires a systematic, grassroots mass organization of workers.

McAlevey wrote four books about organizing and the essential role of workers and trade unions in reversing income inequality and building a stronger democracy: Raising Expectations and Raising Hell (2012), No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (2016), A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy (2020), and with Abby Lawlor, Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations (2023).

Early life

Born in Manhattan, McAlevey was the youngest of nine children. Her father, John McAlevey, a World War II fighter pilot, lawyer, and progressive politician, was mayor of Sloatsburg, New York, then Supervisor of Ramapo, and member of the Rockland County Board of Supervisors. As a baby, her parents took her to civil rights and anti-Vietnam War marches. When she was 5, her mother died of BRCA-1 breast cancer, and her father began taking her to work with him. He advocated for open-space zoning and public housing, which led to her harassment in school: You'd go to school and get screamed at irrationally by the parents of other kids because 'your father is going to bring black people to Rockland County.' It was good to get taught principles early, to look in the face of fear a little bit and not look back," she recalls. She began attending anti-nuclear protests on her own at age 13. In high school, she organized a successful student walkout, protesting against sexist female gym uniform requirements.

Education

In 1984, while attending the State University of New York at Buffalo, McAlevey was elected student body president. She went on to be elected president of the Student Association of the State University of New York (SASU), the 200,000-member statewide student union in New York's public university system. As president, she also assumed the sole student representative position as a voting member of the board of trustees of the State University of New York (SUNY). There, she orchestrated a student occupation of the SUNY headquarters building to protest the university's investments in South Africa. McAlevey was one of the "SUNY 6" organizers arrested for trespass; she and two others accepted 15-day sentences and went to prison rather than agree to refrain from protesting during a probationary period. Four days after their release and announcement of further protests, the SUNY trustees voted to divest the university system from entities doing business in South Africa; it was the largest single act of divestiture in the United States at that time.

McAlevey left the State University of New York at Buffalo before completing her undergraduate degree. In 2010, at the urging of Frances Fox Piven, McAlevey returned to university to pursue a PhD. In 2015, she earned a doctorate in sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), under the supervision of Piven and advised by James Jasper and Dan Clawson. She then completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in the Labor & Worklife Program at Harvard Law School (2015–2017).

Career

After leaving university, McAlevey traveled through Central America, spending time in Nicaragua working to support the revolution led by the Sandinista National Liberation Front. She then moved to California to work out of David Brower's Earth Island Institute on a project aimed at educating the environmental movement in the United States about the ecological consequences of US military and economic policy in Central America. She served as co-director of EPOCA, the Environmental Project on Central America. After working on coalition building in the US and in the international environmental movement for two years, she was recruited by John Gaventa to work at the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee, where she served as an educator and as Deputy Director.

Work for labor unions

After the insurgent, change-oriented "New Voice" leadership came to power at the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) in 1995, McAlevey was recruited by senior AFL-CIO leaders to work for their organizing department and head up an experimental multi-union campaign in Stamford, Connecticut. From 1997 to 2001, she ran the Stamford Organizing Project, an unusual approach built around a multi-union partnership–a rarity–and extensive community involvement. It was her first foray into union organizing, where she developed a model for what she called "whole-worker" organizing, bringing together union members and community with the view that they were not two separate groups.

From the AFL-CIO, McAlevey became the national Deputy Director for Strategic Campaigns of the Health Care Division of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), from 2002 to 2004. In 2004, she was appointed Executive Director and Chief Negotiator for SEIU Nevada, a state-based union that went on to success in achieving employer-paid family healthcare, preventing the rollback of public pensions, and using an approach to contract negotiations that gives workers the right to sit in on their workplace negotiations.