There once was a union maid, she never was afraid Of goons and ginks and company finks and the deputy sheriffs who made the raid.
My notes from that evening don’t say whether labor organizer and author Jane McAlevey actually used the phrase “Not so fast!” But the whole tenor of her argument was one of skepticism, and caution, as she pulled apart what she called “the myth of demography as destiny.” It is July 2016—the week of the Democratic Convention—and we are sitting in a Mexican restaurant in Center City Philadelphia eating nopales and arguing. Buoyed by the ecstatic reception given to Bernie Sanders’s prime-time speech earlier in the week—and, no doubt, by the margaritas we’d ordered—I’m waxing optimistic about Hillary Clinton’s upcoming victory in November. With the Democratic Party platform essentially drafted by the Sanders campaign, and with Clinton herself now able to turn her formidable organization toward an all-out fight with Donald Trump, and given the Democrats’ widening demographic advantage among the Rising American Electorate of women, millennials, and people of color, surely progressives can stop worrying about the election, and start focusing on how best to push the next Clinton administration to the left?
“She hasn’t sealed the deal,” says McAlevey. Sure, Clinton had finally come out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership—a huge issue for labor, and therefore a big deal for McAlevey, a veteran union organizer. Though Clinton had been endorsed by labor leaders—not just the national AFL-CIO, but everyone from Steelworkers and Teamsters to the American Federation of Teachers—McAlevey wasn’t convinced rank-and-file union members really bought her change of heart. And when it came to the suburban women the Democrats were clearly targeting during the convention—and who were supposed to be sufficiently repelled by both the tone and the substance of the Republican campaign to make their overwhelming support for Clinton in November merely a matter of getting out the vote—McAlevey was emphatic. “I’ve been in the state for months working for PASNAP [the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals, an independent union representing hospital workers], which means I spend a lot of my time listening to women, and talking politics, and she hasn’t sealed the deal with suburban women. I don’t think she’s going to win Pennsylvania.” For a reporter on the campaign trail, those last few months of the 2016 election were like watching a train wreck. Even though it all seemed to be happening in slow motion, there was nothing I could do about it. But unlike a lot of other horrified bystanders, I couldn’t say I hadn’t been warned.
Spend any time with McAlevey and you will hear a lot about winning. “Those of us who still win hard strikes . . .” Explaining why Democrats were wrong to take the Rust Belt for granted: “In Wisconsin, we couldn’t win over the union households we needed to get rid of the worst antiunion governor in modern times. In Michigan, the unions put [a measure on the ballot] to enshrine collective bargaining in the Michigan Constitution. In the heartland of the United Auto Workers, we couldn’t win over most union households to vote for collective bargaining.” Or why she thinks Ralph Nader–style consumer advocacy, however well intentioned, is a futile tactic: “Because it can’t win any serious fight. It can only win small gains.”
McAlevey has been in one serious fight after another for the past three decades. Her first arrest, at age nineteen, came during a campaign, ultimately successful, to force the State University of New York to divest its financial interests in South Africa. A few dozen arrests later she’s led strikes by janitors in Stamford, Connecticut; built houses and schools in Nicaragua; fought for environmental justice in Central America; run a project on the dangers of toxic pollution in poor rural communities in the United States; organized thousands of hospital workers in Nevada—and been pushed out of the Service Employees International Union over her candid criticism of union leaders’ cozy relationship with corporate bosses. Raising Expectations and Raising Hell, her unsparing account of her success in winning strikes and securing contracts—and her defeat by the union hierarchy—has become an underground bible for a new generation of labor activists. When we met in Philadelphia she was in the middle of a campaign to organize nurses at seven area hospitals—and had just won a series of crucial votes, adding thousands of members at a time when labor unions were supposed to be in terminal decline.
“Winning matters a lot to me. A lot. It comes from the old man. My father’s attitude was you don’t run a left campaign against the Democratic Party just to run it, you fuckin’ run it to win.” A decorated fighter pilot in World War II, John Francis McAlevey was born in Brooklyn to a family with deep union roots. “My father’s father was in the boilermaker’s union. My uncle, Dan McVarish, was the head of the Brooklyn building trades.” Returning home after the war McAlevey’s father finished his degree at Manhattan College and then, thanks to the GI Bill, enrolled at Columbia Law School. But his was not a conventional corporate career.
“My father came home from the war a pacifist. He and my mother were both involved with Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker.” Though today she is little known outside Catholic circles, Day’s journey from hard-boiled reporter to Greenwich Village bohemian to missionary to America’s forgotten men and women once inspired a generation. At the height of the Great Depression—long before Oscar Romero, liberation theology, or the notion of a “preferential option for the poor”—Day and her collaborator, Peter Maurin, forged a synthesis of radical politics and Catholic social teaching, founding the newspaper Catholic Worker and a string of “houses of hospitality” whose inhabitants continue to live among, and minister to, the poor in 216 communities across the United States and in 33 overseas locations from Argentina to Uganda.
John McAlevey was going to be a civil rights lawyer. “He and my mother were living in Shanks Village”—a former army camp in Rockland County that had been turned into low-income housing for veterans and their families. Rent was thirty-two dollars a month. As the youngest of seven, Jane McAlevey is a little hazy on some of the details. “I grew up without a television. By the time I came along my father had a good narrative about it, which was that TVs were just idiot boxes. Much later my older siblings told me he’d made that up to not feel badly that we couldn’t afford to replace the only TV that we had—that broke before I was born.”
Jane McAlevey was born in Sloatsburg, where her parents had bought a tumbledown farmhouse and some land—and her father had become “an accidental politician. He was new to the area, and the local Democratic Party probably thought, ‘He has the right profile: World War II vet, fighter pilot, bunch of kids.’ My mom had been in the WAVES [Women’s Naval Reserve]. So they asked him if they could put his name on the ballot for village mayor. No Democrat had won for a hundred years. But it was the Kennedy sweep and he won.” After two terms, he ran for supervisor of the Town of Ramapo, a commuter town on the west side of the Hudson River just north of the New Jersey state line. The campaign bumper sticker shows little Jane, blonde and barefoot, in her father’s arms next to the slogan “Ramapo: A Nice Place to Live.”3
“I was basically a prop for my father’s campaigns,” she says. “We had a very complicated family relationship, but he was an amazing political mentor.” During his four terms as supervisor, John McAlevey built parks, public swimming pools, and a municipal golf course; established the Ramapo Housing Authority to build public housing for elderly and low-income tenants; instituted a development easement program to preserve open space on privately owned land; and pioneered the first “controlled growth” law, requiring developers to provide schools, sanitation, utilities, and other infrastructure before building—rather than expecting the town to pick up the cost of growth. The town’s approach was upheld by the New York State Supreme Court in a 1972 decision, Ramapo v. Golden,4 that is still considered a landmark in planning law.
Her father’s positions were not always popular. “I got called names at school. But the idea that you can build public housing and invite black people into the suburbs, and that developers had to pay, were cornerstones of my youth, and they’ve never gone away.” She has nothing but fond memories, however, from another of her father’s causes.
“I grew up on picket lines. In ’68 and ’69 black workers walked out at the Ford plant in Mahwah [New Jersey]. The factory was just over the border from us, and a lot of the workers lived in our town. My father famously said he’d put any of the striking workers who lived in Ramapo on the town payroll so they could get health care and hold out.”
But if McAlevey credits her father for her obsession with winning, memories of her mother are all about loss. “Actually I only have one memory of my mother. She’s sitting in a big leather chair in our old farmhouse kitchen. I didn’t understand any of it, I mean, she was already dying. But there was a huge black La-Z-Boy moved into the kitchen because she couldn’t really walk around very much. I was like two and a half or three years old. She was sitting in it and I jumped on the arm, fell off, and screamed. I split my tongue in half. I don’t remember the whole moment, but I remember that I got lots of popsicles. My big brothers, many of them, all wanted the grape ones— that was the best flavor. And I remember her yelling I got the grape popsicles. That’s literally the only memory I have of my mother.”
During World War II Hazel Hansen McAlevey had been a Link Trainer instructor, teaching instrument flying at Corpus Christie Naval Air Station in Texas. Born in the Swedish-speaking part of Finland, she was, according to her obituary, “fluent in Swedish and a perfectionist in English.”5 Though Hazel McAlevey didn’t actually die until shortly after Jane’s fifth birthday, she disappeared from her daughter’s life much earlier. “She functionally left home when I was three. The idea was that babies—toddlers—shouldn’t see a dying person. So she got taken away to slowly die of cancer.”
McAlevey says she was raised by her siblings, with a little help from “Moster [the Swedish word for “aunt”] Hannah and Moster Lottie,” her mother’s sisters, “who pretty much only spoke Swedish. When I was a little girl, they would give me crème de menthe in Brooklyn.
“I was out in the woods all the time. I was a super-serious tom-girl with a bunch of boys who were teaching me how to be a tom-girl and my sister Catherine was sort of raising us. She did her best. She was twelve when my mom died.”
Emotionally “my father was just . . . completely absent.” Unable to talk to his daughter about her mother’s death, he gave her a pony instead. “Yeah. I got a pony to distract me from my mother dying. Who had a Shetland pony when they were three years old?” Afterward “my father married several times trying to find someone who would take care of all these kids”; his third and final wife, a second-grade teacher, “was an activist in the teacher’s union. They were endorsing my father.” By the time McAlevey left home at sixteen she’d acquired two Jewish stepbrothers, and an impressive command of Yiddish curses.
“I wound up going to SUNY Buffalo, because I could afford it. I waited tables and worked as a maid, and then every holiday and vacation I went to my sister Bri [Birgitta]. She lived in something called the Harlem River Women’s Collective, a mostly black radical lesbian collective that my blonde sister found herself in. It was a crazy-great house of women who taught me amazing things about race and gender.”
Meanwhile, back at school, the newly elected governor, Mario Cuomo, had just proposed a whopping tuition increase. As McAlevey tells it, “I organized a bus to go to Albany to protest, and then I became student body president and then I dropped out of school. We ran a radical left slate against the jocks—the athletes—and the Greeks [fraternities and sororities]. I told them, ‘You have to run a whole slate,’ because that’s what the old man always did. We had a campaign plan, we worked the student buses between the campuses. We door-knocked every dorm like three times. We swept every office.”
Besides stopping the tuition increase, McAlevey and her friends protested against Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars program, instituted a radical lecture series, sent money to aid the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and campaigned hard for divestment. After a year she became president of the Student Association of the State University, which gave her a seat on the SUNY board of trustees. “I went to the trustees meeting in Albany. I wore this very bulky outfit and I had chains and padlocks [under my clothes] and a swipe card for the back door. After they voted against divestment, I said I was going to the bathroom, slowly clinking out of the room, and I went downstairs, and opened up a back door and let all the students in.” The students then barricaded themselves in the university finance office. Arrested and convicted of criminal trespass, McAlevey was offered the chance to pay a fine if she’d promise not to demonstrate for a year. She refused, and served ten days in Albany County jail, where she was subject to daily body cavity searches.6 “It was an organizing tool, so we made it as big as we could make it, and by the time I got out of jail” the trustees voted to divest. “It was the largest single anti-apartheid divestiture in the US up till that time, and we won. Winning mattered—not winning like a Stalinist, but winning to teach people: Can we have the confidence to win?”
Instead of finishing her degree, McAlevey went to Central America, first to Guatemala to learn Spanish, then on a construction brigade in Nicaragua, and then doing “Witness for Peace work”––shadowing local activists to deter violence, “which was terrifying”––with Architects and Planners in Support of Nicaragua. Eventually she realized her place, and her work, was back in the US. “I came home, broke.” The search for a truly useful skill took her to northern Vermont, where she spent nine months working on an organic farm.
And then one day she got a phone call. “It was Josh Karliner, who at the time was the founder of something called the Environmental Project on Central America, EPOCA, part of the Earth Island Institute, which had been started by David Brower, who’d been at the Sierra Club and founded Friends of the Earth. He said, ‘We understand you speak Spanish, you’ve lived in Latin America and you’re familiar with integrated pest management organic farming and you know how to organize?’ So I moved to San Francisco and began to work for the environmental movement full-time. That was my first paid job.”
She enjoyed the work. And felt useful. “I was traveling in Latin America a lot. And I was learning a lot. Josh left, so I had to learn how to talk to donors. We got into the nexus of war and trade and military policy and the environment. But I really thought that the people I was working with were middle-class and white—they were the best of the global environmental movement at the time, but that is what they were—and I found it very stifling. Even though by actual measures—because I believe in actual measures—we were doing good stuff.”
In 1988, EPOCA held a conference in Managua on international development and the environment. “EPOCA suggested to David Brower that we should have a delegation of poor people from the United States who are fighting toxic contamination. We should bring a delegation from the United States to explain to the rest of the quote-unquote Third World that we have a Third World, that we have a South in the North, right here.”
Which is how she found herself working at the Highlander Center, the legendary training school and cultural center founded by Myles Horton in Monteagle, Tennessee, in 1932. It was Horton’s wife, Zilphia, the center’s musical director, who’d adapted the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” from a gospel hymn sung by striking tobacco workers—and then taught it to Pete Seeger. A generation later young civil rights activists—Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Ralph Abernathy, John Lewis, Ella Baker, and most of the leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that attended Septima Clark’s workshops at Highlander—picked up the tune.
“Myles Horton had just died, and John Gaventa was the head. Highlander sent down a delegation of poor whites and African Americans to our conference, and just before we left [Nicaragua] Gaventa said to me, ‘So you’re gonna move to Tennessee? You’re gonna start a program on globalization at Highlander and teach southern factory workers that it isn’t Mexicans stealing their jobs, it’s corporations.’
“I said, ‘You’re smoking crack.’ And within a year I was in the hills of Tennessee. He won. When I got there they didn’t have any place to put me, so they created an office for me in the library.” Which also housed the Highlander archives, kept in a sealed, climate-controlled room—the only respite from the searing summer heat. Where, gradually, McAlevey discovered that this place she knew only through its role in the civil rights movement actually had its origin in the labor struggles of the 1930s.
“White liberals obsess about the civil rights movement in ways that irritate me. Ask them about labor or unions and they talk about corruption, self-dealing . . . I hate the way we reify the civil rights movement and trash the labor movement as nothing but a bunch of corrupt thugs.” In the archives, McAlevey saw the famous photograph of Rosa Parks at Highlander in the summer of 1955, taken just a few months before Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus. But she also found labor education material from the 1930s and ’40s, when Highlander had been the official labor education school for the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
“In the Highlander workshops that were going on in the ’30s and ’40s they were dealing with the same issues” McAlevey found herself facing half a century later: the splintering effect of racism on organizing, a deeply hostile political environment, and the need to connect labor to broader struggles beyond the shop floor. “You had a labor movement, built by socialists and communists, that helped give birth to the civil rights movement. One movement helped give birth to the other.” Looking for a way to escape the heat, McAlevey stumbled upon “the through line for the two movements.” In the CIO handbooks from the 1930s she also found a way of working— and looking at the world—that was very different from the community organizing model, derived from the writings of Saul Alinsky, that had come to dominate not just the American labor movement but the whole of the American Left.
Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (1971) has been required reading for progressives for decades, influencing everyone from Hillary Clinton (who in her Wellesley senior thesis wrote approvingly of Alinsky’s view that “radical goals have to be achieved often by non-radical, even ‘anti-radical’ means”)7 and Barack Obama (who worked as an organizer on the South Side of Chicago, not far from Alinsky’s “Back of the Yards” neighborhood) to groups ranging from ACORN and the United Farmworkers to the Tea Party.
In her second book, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, McAlevey argues that far from providing a useful blueprint, Alinsky’s ideas and influence have been an obstacle to change. Though Alinsky did work briefly for the CIO, his focus on local issues and winnable fights—and his determined exclusion of any larger ideology—represented a profound break from the labor organization, many of whose most gifted organizers were committed Communists and Socialists. But what really offends McAlevey, even more than Alinsky’s repeated insistence that organizing was a man’s job, is the rationale he provided for removing agency and accountability from the organizations he inspired.8
“Unlike the left-wing organizers in the CIO,” she writes, Alinsky “wanted to defend and protect capitalism.” To his funders, Alinsky vowed “to beat the Communists at their own game.”9 Partly by deliberately not connecting his organizing with any larger structural issues. Partly by fostering an elite corps of so-called outside organizers who, like the young Barack Obama, were typically parachuted into communities where they had no organic ties or prior loyalties. But whose role in guiding—or manipulating—the membership was concealed behind a rhetoric of humility, in which the organizer exists merely to do the bidding of “leaders”—indigenous activists who “make all the decisions.” In reality, as McAlevey points out, “the organizers in the Alinsky model make a lot of key decisions.”10
Her relentless deflation of the “hero organizer” has made McAlevey a lot of enemies. As has her trenchant critique of the “corporate campaign,” in which, rather than organizing the workers, unions focus their efforts on mobilizing public opinion to inflict damage on a corporate brand, or a company’s share price. Her argument that the Fight for $15 campaign to raise the minimum wage, while “a totally worthwhile and noble effort,” ultimately “makes workers symbolic actors in their own liberation” is viewed as heretical by many on the left.
McAlevey doesn’t care. She isn’t interested in accolades. She’s interested in winning. “If you want to win, you have to be able to create a significant crisis for the employer. A strike where one worker at a fast food outlet stands outside for the press conference, surrounded by every liberal clergy member in town and a bunch of great activists, is not a strike. It’s what I call pretend power. Pretend power— and fooling ourselves with pretend-power gimmicks—has resulted in thirty-seven state houses flipping red and Trump in the White House.”
What does real power look like? It starts with wall charts. Although she never finished college, McAlevey recently completed a PhD at the City University of New York and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship by Harvard Law School. She can talk theory when she has to. But she’d much rather show you her methods.
“The charts are about half the size of a big window—they’re big! I was trained at 1199 New England in big wall charting. You could talk to ninety-eight percent of the organizers in the so-called labor movement in the United States and they don’t know what a big wall chart is. Talk about a skill gap . . . Because all of us who are doing it are still winning.
“They start out blank—the workers have to fill them in with the names of everyone in the workplace. When I was working in Philadelphia, on the second day, the young organizers raise their hands. They go, ‘You know Jane, hey, since you were in grad school’—like that was the way they could say it—‘we have really sophisticated databases we can just print out.’ I just looked at them. ‘That’s so charming. Do you think we didn’t have databases in 2008 in Nevada? This is how you’re gonna teach the workers how to build a structure. Not build a structure yourself, in your fucking database.’ So that’s wall charting. I’m obsessed with wall charting.”
In Nevada, a state whose right-to-work law makes organizing extremely difficult, McAlevey took a moribund SEIU local from 25 percent dues paying membership to 75 percent—and went on to lead successful strikes resulting in some of the best hospital contracts in the country. Before that, in Stamford, she’d led a combined campaign that organized 4,500 workers, including Haitian taxi drivers, Jamaican health care workers, and Latin American janitors11— gaining not only improved pay and conditions, but enough political power to force one of the wealthiest enclaves in the country to cancel the planned demolition of four public housing complexes, instead committing to $15 million worth of improvements, along with a new “inclusionary zoning ordinance.” Because although she gets hired by unions, McAlevey’s method is fundamentally political, with applications that go far beyond the shop floor or the hospital ward.
So when McAlevey said they needed wall charts, the organizers got wall charts. On the first page, she writes down what she calls “the five core concepts” that underpin all her work:
- Structure versus Self-Selecting
- Leaders versus Activists
- Majorities (of workers) versus Minorities
- Whole Worker versus Community-Labor Alliances
- Organizing versus Mobilizing
McAlevey uses the word “structure” a lot—even more than she talks about winning. In this case it means any preexisting institution where people congregate. “Marx said the workplace because he had this theory of class struggle, which is right, but I’m arguing that class struggle plays out in more than just the workplace.” Here, too, the influence of the Highlander archives comes through: “From the 1930s to the mid-1960s, we had movements focused on ordinary people in two core structures: the black church and the workplace. Then we shifted to a model where we just talked to ourselves all the time”— the single-issue activism that McAlevey refers to as “self-selecting.”
“It’s people who are already with us. They already agree that Wall Street’s a problem. They already think climate change is a problem. They already think racism is a problem. They’re already standing with Black Lives Matter. It was like an inverse relationship. At the same time progressive movements turned insular, moved to Washington and thought all we had to do was implement a bunch of laws—Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the Voting Rights Act, the Clean Air Act—the right wing says, ‘Jesus, we have to go build a base,’ and literally ‘Jesus’ because they go out and start building that evangelical conservative base, the National Rifle Association, the Christian Coalition, the Moral Majority, Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum.”
McAlevey tells her organizers “we have to spend most of our time talking with—not at, or to—the people who aren’t talking to us. That’s what separates organizing from activism—or Trotskyism.” Where can those people be found? In churches, mosques, or synagogues—but also at PTA meetings, soccer matches, tenants’ committees, bowling leagues. “Having a defined structure allows you to assess constantly whether you’re building majorities or not. A self-selecting movement where you put up a Facebook post that says, ‘Come to the meeting if you want to stop the pipeline’”—everyone who shows up wants to stop the pipeline, so what are you measuring against?
Because the people who respond most enthusiastically to a union—or to any potentially risky political campaign—are “activists.” And however wonderful or energetic or enlightened they may be, they are seldom numerous or influential enough to amount to a majority. “In most of the community organizing world now, if someone comes to a meeting twice, you put them on a leadership development track. That’s such a ridiculous threshold if you’re trying to build to a strike. All you’re doing is testing their commitment to the organization.”
The only way to build and hold together an effective majority, says McAlevey, is by recognizing that workers already have leaders—and already know who those leaders are. “It’s the guy on the assembly line that makes the whole shift hum. Or the nurse who holds the emergency room together. People say to me, ‘Do the workers know?’ That’s how I can tell someone hasn’t ever done real organizing. Of course they know!” But if identifying organic leaders is easy, recruiting them—persuading them to stick their necks out—is the organizer’s core skill.
Such people, says McAlevey, are seldom found among the activists. “They’re always the best workers. So they get what they want. That’s why they think they don’t need a union. The boss ain’t gonna let them go. In a hospital, the doctors and nurses love them. In an auto plant, the line manager loves them. Because they get shit done! You have to find out what are the one, two, or three things they can’t get individually from the boss. That they can only get through collective action in the power of a union contract.” Which means a lot of awkward, face-to-face conversations. “One of the axioms of good organizing is that every successful organizing conversation makes both people in the conversation a little bit uncomfortable.”
Sitting with that discomfort, really listening, and then challenging people to take risks—that’s half the job. The first goal is to persuade not just a majority, but a supermajority—75 percent of the workers—to sign cards authorizing a union election. “Because we know the boss can shave 20 percent off our margins at any given moment. Think about Trump as the boss . . . In the workplace they use every tactic Trump and Bannon used, turning the working class against itself. Black against white, women against men, Jew against non-Jew. Hate and division and misogyny and racism are the choice weapons in every union-busting fight in this country.”
Teaching the workers to fight back effectively—helping them figure out how to shift that power balance—is the other half. “It’s almost impossible to win without first analyzing how much power the employer has, as against the kind of power we can potentially build. Because the bosses start with existing power: control of the plant, or the hospital. Often they’re exercising massive political control—as we just saw in the election. We only have potential power.”
Once again the charts come out. These charts map the employer’s power—economic, political, and social. “Who are they connected with? What other businesses? What politicians are they donating money to?” This kind of analysis has been part of the progressive toolbox since C. Wright Mills published The Power Elite in 1956. What distinguishes McAlevey’s approach is what comes next—an equally detailed mapping, on the same wall charts where they first tracked relationships inside the workplace, of the workers’ own social capital: where they pray, where their children attend school, where they live, what sports they play, what community, fraternal, or religious organizations they belong to.
It is her attention to this complex web of identity, affiliation, and agency that McAlevey calls “whole-worker organizing.” Instead of seeing the community as an outside entity or a potential ally, it acknowledges that workers are already in the community, and that the artificial wall—which conventional unions treat as an impenetrable barrier—between the workplace and the world only deprives them of the leverage they need to win. Whether it’s by picketing the supermarket where they shop, or asking elected officials for letters of support—“They have to be written,” McAlevey insists. “How else can you be really sure they’ve done it?”—or getting parishioners to ask clergy if they can hold a bargaining session in the local church, the goal is for workers to discover and exercise their own power.
Which is what finally distinguishes the organizing work McAlevey does from mobilization. “What’s the role of the worker in the actual effort? Are the workers central to their own liberation? Are they central to the strategy to win a change in their workplace and in their communities? For years we’ve been running campaigns in this country where the workers’ voice has not been decisive . . .”
While mobilizing is “an activist-driven approach” that aims to maximize turnout—to the polls, at a march or demonstration—among the like-minded, organizing “is about expanding the base. It isn’t just: Can we get some people to a rally? It’s: Who are we getting to a rally? It’s: Who got them to the rally? And it’s: How long can we sustain the rally? That’s a really, really fundamental difference.” The difference, you might say, between wishful thinking and a structure test.
In 2009, right after she parted company with SEIU, McAlevey found out she carried the BRCA-1 genetic mutation, meaning she was at greatly increased risk of developing the breast cancer that killed her mother and older sister. When a biopsy revealed early stage cancer, she opted for radical surgery.12 Wishful thinking isn’t her thing.
If organizing begins with a series of uncomfortable conversations between people who don’t agree with each other, it progresses by means of structure tests. “From day one, we tell the workers it’s on them. We’re gonna coach you—but in most cases we’re not even legally allowed into the workplace.” Each step of an organizing campaign—from getting a supermajority of union election cards signed, to marching on the boss’s office, to voting to authorize a strike, to contract negotiations—is designed both to gradually increase the risk taken, and to constantly test the workers’ commitment. “You’re building a structure strong enough to win a strike—or a precinct in an election.”
No Shortcuts is filled with blow-by-blow accounts of organizing victories (none of them by McAlevey) won under the most difficult conditions imaginable—by unions in right-to-work states, despite constant harassment, and, in the case of the lengthy battle to organize workers at the Smithfield pork processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, against an employer long practiced in turning native-born African American and immigrant Hispanic workers against each another. As her title suggests, progress can be slow—the Smithfield fight took fifteen years. (Though as McAlevey also points out, thirteen of those years were wasted on campaigns that didn’t measure up to her standard of “whole worker organizing.” When “a real organizer, Gene Bruskin, was assigned, and he used all the correct methods, they won.”)
But as McAlevey also tells workers who ask her help, “If you can do all these steps, you’re probably gonna win.” Otherwise, “we’re gonna say it’s really great to know you and we’re gonna walk away. If something changes and you actually believe you can get to your majority—supermajority—come back to us.”
When they do, the workers learn not to fear strikes, but to see them as the ultimate structure test. “A strike is the most powerful weapon the working class has. It’s powerful as a concept, not just a symbolic word. A strike means you are causing and creating a significant crisis for your employer. It means ninety percent or more of the workers walk off the job.” A strike isn’t just a tactic, it’s a manifestation of power—the power of the majority.
“To win the hardest fights—to win a presidential race, to reclaim the United States of America at the state house level, to actually tame global capital—we cannot rely on advocacy and mobilizing. Because they surrender the most important and only weapon that ordinary people have ever had, which is large numbers.”
“Citizens United and McCutcheon [two Supreme Court decisions removing limits on donations to political campaigns] blew the doors on spending. It’s going to be impossible for the social-change movement, including unions, to compete in any significant way on dollar-for-dollar spending in future elections. If we can’t create a crisis for employers—workplace by workplace and [in whole] sectors of the economy—I don’t think we can win right now.
“The civil rights movement couldn’t outvote the political establishment in the South because blacks couldn’t vote. That was the whole point. It was only when they could create a crisis for corporations and businesses in the South and get the businesses to say, ‘We’ve got to stop this because it’s causing economic harm,’ that’s when they won. It’s the only way that we’re going to win in the new Gilded Age.”