No Shortcuts Quotes

“The 1 percent have a vast armory of material resources and political special forces, but the 99 percent have an army.”
― Jane F. McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age

“Part of the legacy of people like Ella Baker and Septima Clark is a faith that ordinary people who learn to believe in themselves are capable of extraordinary acts, or, better, of acts that seem extraordinary to us precisely because we have such an impoverished sense of the capabilities of ordinary people.”
― Jane F. McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age

“Today, corporate campaigns continue to locate the fight in the economic arena by threatening to disrupt profit making, but not through workers withholding their labor. Instead, a new army of college-educated professional union staff bypass the strike and devise other tactics to attack the employer’s bottom line. New Labor’s over-reliance on corporate campaigns has resulted in a war waged between labor professionals and business elites. Works are no longer essential to their own liberation.”
― Jane F. McAlevey, No Shortcuts

“An incorrect power analysis can lead people who want to end capitalism to think that small numbers of demonstrators occupying public spaces like parks and squares and tweeting about it will generate enough power to bring down Wall Street.”
― Jane F. McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age

“[Organic leaders are] almost never the workers who most want to talk with us. More often than not, [they’re] the workers who don’t want to talk to us and remain in the background. They have a sense of their value and won’t easily step forward, not unless and until there’s a credible reason. That’s part of the character that makes them organic leaders.”
― Jane F. McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age

“Solidarity among human beings can happen spontaneously, as in a flood or fire, or by design, through organizing.”
― Jane F. McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age

“to reverse today’s inequality requires a robust embrace of unions—but of unions that are democratic, focused on bottom-up rather than top-down strategies, and place the primary agency for change in workers acting collectively at work and in the communities in which they reside.”
― Jane F. McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age