I saw no dedicated diary in this forum to announce the death this month from cancer of the influential labor organizer and educator, Jane McAlevey, October 12, 1964-July 7, 2024. (If that diary was written, and I missed it, I’m providing another response to her passing.) I never personally met Jane, but hers was a guiding presence in teacher-union labor-organizing trainings in which I’ve taken part since 2017. Jane’s writing included books like No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy, and numerous articles. Her printed words formed a Bible for teachers like myself, who stood in the face of official grid-lock to create tenable working conditions and student outcomes befitting taxpayer-funded schools.
Jane was born about when I was. She and I were in high school when Reagan was elected, and during Reagan’s put-down of the 1981 PATCO air-traffic controllers' strike. We came of age during a time when organized labor was not only ruthlessly vilified in individualistic consumer culture all levels, but was rumored to be dying. In young adulthood, she and I witnessed first-hand the era’s decline of traditional blue-collar employment and the rise of the service economy—which, supposedly, drove the nails in the coffin of worker expectations for dignity. I bought the 1980s conventional wisdom about unions. For years, I felt quite alienated from any collective push by affected individuals to improve their worldly lot. That seemed futile to me; obsessive “self-improvement” beckoned as some one-way ticket to happiness.
Unlike me, Jane never bought the lies. She dedicated her career, among other things, to highlighting fierce, effective labor struggles you’ve probably never heard of--for pay, working conditions, and common good--in diverse industries that might surprise you. Jane’s (sadly pay-walled) writings on the 2019 strike by Los Angeles teachers and the 2012 Chicago Teachers' Union strike emphasized and celebrated their epochal wins--and also looked for what could be learned, to do even better next time.
It was Jane’s work that taught me the distinction between “organizing,” a conversation-based labor-movement-building strategy, on the one hand, and on the other, “mobilizing,” a tactic to drum up public demonstration for some-or-other cause. It was only the former that guaranteed workers’ acting on their own self-interest, and in the common good.
I could go on. Let this brief tribute suffice. RIP, Jane McAlevey. Your legacy gives hope in these hard times.