A friend died this week
JON QUEALLY for Common Dreams
Born on Oct. 12, 1964, McAlevey was the author of
numerous books on worker organizing, including "No Shortcuts: Organizing for
Power in the New Gilded Age" and "A Collective Bargain: Unions,
Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy." Despite a series of
battles with cancer since 2008, she continued to organize, teach, and write
nearly to the end.
In early April, McAlevey announced she would stop working to
enter in-home hospice care for the remainder of her days. "No matter how
much I love the challenge of a good fight, this was never one I could
win," she wrote at the time. On Sunday, a message posted to her website said
she died "surrounded by family and her dedicated care team" and her
stepbrother Mitchell Rotbert subsequently confirmed her
passing to the New York Times, citing the cause as multiple
myeloma.
"No individual did more in the 21st century to
spread the ideas and practice of a fighting, community-rooted, member-driven
labor movement than Jane McAlevey," wroteJacobin's editor Micah
Uetricht. "The United States and the world need her more than ever at this
exact moment. It's incredibly cruel that she's gone."
According to the Times:
Ms. McAlevey (pronounced MACK-a-leevee) dedicated her
life to increasing working class power. She believed that worker-driven
unions—led from the bottom up rather from the top down—were the most effective enginesto
combat economic inequality.
In her writings, including for The Nation, as what the magazine described as
its "strikes correspondent,"
and in frequent media interviews and podcasts, Ms.
McAlevey became a vocal critic of what she saw as the complacency, ineptitude
and corporate collusion of
many U.S. labor leaders.
"What almost no union does is actually organize their members as members
in their own communities to build community power," she said in an
interview for this obituary last November. "I teach workers to take over
their unions and change them."
Upon word of her death, longtime colleagues and friends
expressed their sorrow as they championed McAlevey's approach to working-class
politics and union organizing.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Jane was a friend of mine. I knew her as
an organizer and educator but what most of the testimonials miss is the role
Jane played within the foundation funder world. She and a group of other women foundation staffers did was mobilize money by the millions to
support organizing and groups working to actually change the conditions of
poverty. I worked for groups that benefited from those reforms and am eternally
grateful. Jane, you will be missed. – Will Collette
"Incredibly sad to learn that my friend, and one woman powerhouse, Jane McAlevey has passed away," said Jo Grady, general secretary of the University and College Union. "Literally everything she did—from organising workers, fighting right wingers, to hustling touts for tickets to sold out football matches—she did with effervescence and joy."
"Tonight," said Ethan Earle, a colleague of
McAlevey's at Organizing for Power, on Sunday evening, "my heart is at
once broken and full with the challenge she has left to us: to both mourn for
our dead and fight like hell for our living."
In a heartfelt tribute to his
colleague and friend posted on the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation website, Earle
writes:
She knew she was going to die, had known it for months,
and raced against the clock to complete as much work as she could towards the
organizing future that she knew she would not see. That, ultimately, is Jane's
legacy — a gift to all of us. The work output itself, but also her commitment
to that work, and the belief that we can in fact win, but only through real
discipline and real struggle.
Her track record was formidable — to her opponents but also perhaps to young
organizers seeking to follow in her footsteps. For foes and friends alike, Jane
had something of a magical aura about her. That said, she always sought to shed
that perception. Everything she did was the result of hard work and practice —
and all of it can be reproduced by those willing to put in the time that she
did.
So, read her books and take her trainings, but not to deify her — nothing could
be further from her mission. Take them so that you can put into practice the
same methods that Jane McAlevey spent a lifetime practicing, modelling, and
instilling in others. And then, as she would so often say at the end of a
session: Go forth and win!
The Nation's John Nichols said "union activists worldwide
will mark" the passing of McAlevey, who he described as "a brilliant
labor organizer and an even more brilliant human being."
Writing of the far-reaching nature of her career, Current
Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan Robinson wrote in April
how her "work should be carefully studied, because she has done as much as
anyone else to clearly explain the problem with the distribution of power in
this country, and show practically how that distribution can be changed."
With a clear-eyed view of how the world works and
no-nonsense style of communicating, McAlevey was a sharp critic of capital but
also self-reflective about the weaknesses of the left and shortcomings of
labor, especially leadership failures within union structures.
In Uetricht's mind, there are two big ideas central to McAlevey's
lifetime of work that people who want to understand her thinking and appreciate
her legacy should understand. The first is "a seriousness with which she
approached questions of strategy and tactics for organizers, rooted in her
obsession with actually winning." And the second was her "unwavering
belief that you can't change the world without the labor movement."
Asked last year in an interview with Jacobin why
she decided to focus on the labor movement as opposed to some other vehicle for
achieving a better world, McAlevey answered: "Oh my
god, because there is no other way."
"All of the work we do matters in the progressive
movement, but we live in something called capitalism," she said. "It
took me ten years of being in the environmental justice movement, the student
movement, the peace movement, to realize that in a country without real
democracy, the one thing that the employer class will respond to is when all
the workers walk off the job and create a crisis. That, at the end of the day,
is the most effective way to challenge unfettered corporate power."
With Sunday's news of McAlevey's passing dovetailing with
a historic win by the left coalition in snap elections in France which
organized to prevent further gains by the nation's far-right, president of the
Association of Flight Attendants-CWA union Sara
Nelson, a longtime friend and ally, posted this message:
Borrowing from the famous labor song, Joe Hill, labor
activist and organizer Mark Cunningham offered this tribute to McAlevey on
social media:
I dreamed I saw Jane McAlevey last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I "but Jane, you passed away".
"I never died" says she
And standing there as big as life
And smiling with her eyes
Says Jane, "What cancer cannot kill"
"Went on to organize"
"Went on to organize"
And as Grady put it, "Her passing is a huge loss
for the labour movement, but the legacy she leaves is a blessing. She will be
so deeply missed."
As she was famous for saying, there are "no
shortcuts" toward progressive victories, but by commitment, intelligence,
and harnessing the intrinsic power of workers, there is a way.
In her 2020 book, "A Collective Bargain,"
McAlevey argues that "power for ordinary people can be built only by
ordinary people standing up for themselves, with their own resources, in
campaigns where they turn the prevailing dogma of individualism on its
head."
She concludes the book by writing, "Good unions
points us in the direction we need to go and produce the solidarity and unity
desperately needed to win." In her career as an organizer and labor
educator and training, winning for the working class was always at the center
for Jane McAlevey.
"We can fight," she declared, "and we can
win."
