Jane McAlevey: the Behind the News interviews

Jane McAlevey, the organizer, writer, and frequent BtN guest, died on July 7. To remember her, I ran an excerpt from a March 2017 interview with her. Here’s what I said to introduce the interview, and below that is a list of her appearances on the show. The dates are links to the entry in my radio archive.

Jane McAlevey, the organizer, writer, and human dynamo, who appeared on this show nine times over the years, starting in 2012, died on Sunday, July 7, at the age of 59. I met Jane over 20 years ago, and loved and admired her enormously. The word tireless is a bit of cliché, but she was exactly that. I feel the loss personally, since we were real-life friends, but those feelings pale next to the loss to the workers’ movement.

Jane had been fighting multiple myeloma for some time with the same fervor she brought to organizing workers, but the disease proved a more formidable opponent than the employers she confronted for over 25 years. She was most famous for working with health care workers and teachers in the US, but she had a worldwide influence through her books and consulting work.

She was full of ideas—developed through practice—on how to organize unions, which she saw as essential to making this a better society. Among those ideas: organize to win rather than make symbolic points. Make sure you have very strong support for strikes and other militant actions—don’t start something you can’t carry though. Understand the larger power structures that workers and their employers operate in. Involve workers in negotiations and don’t just treat them like extras in your play. Identify the natural leaders of a workforce you’re trying to organize and focus on enlisting them in the cause.

If you want to learn more about Jane’s career and philosophy, check out her books, like Raising Expectations and Raising Hell, from 2012, and No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, from 2016. Her website is here.

I’d say Rest in Peace, Jane—but that wasn’t her style.

Behind the News interviews with Jane McAlevey

April 15, 2021 Jane McAlevey on why the union lost to Amazon in Alabama (Nation article here)

January 24, 2019 Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of the Los Angeles teachers’ union, and Jane McAlevey, author and organizer, on the union’s great victory in their LA strike, protecting public education against the plutocrats’ attacks

October 25, 2018 Liza Featherstone and Jane McAlevey on #metoo, one year later, and why Hands Off Pants On would be a good model

December 7, 2017 Jane McAlevey on power, strange alliances, and serious threats to workers • Jane McAlevey and Liza Featherstone on sexual harassment, capitalism, and power

March 30, 2017 Jane McAlevey, author of No Shortcuts, on real organizing, not fake organizing

July 16, 2015 Jane McAlevey, author of Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell), on Alinsky, power, and organizing

February 19, 2015 Jane McAlevey, author of this article (and this book) on Bruce Rauner’s attack on public sector unions in Illinois and on how labor and the left need a theory of power

April 3, 2014 Jane McAlevey, author of Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell), on the UAW in Tennessee, etc.

December 6, 2012 Jane McAlevey, author of Raising Expectations (And Raising Hell), on how to revive the U.S. labor movement