Jane F. McAlevey is a union organizer, scholar, author, and political commentator. She has contributed to The New York Times, The Nation, Jacobin, In These Times, Catalyst, Politics & Society, AlterNet and other publications. In June 2019, University of California, Berkeley Labor Center announced the appointment of McAlevey as a Senior Policy Fellow. She was also named Strikes correspondent for The Nation magazine. She's written three books about power and strategy and the essential role of workers and trade unions in reversing income inequality and building a stronger democracy: No Shortcuts - Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, Raising Expectations and Raising Hell, and her third book, , which was published by Ecco Press in January 2020. She is also writing the fourth book, Striking Back, to be published by Verso Books in 2020. McAlevey has appeared on numerous television and radio shows as well as podcasts.
Early background
McAlevey was the youngest of nine children. Her mother died of BRCA#1breast cancer when she was not yet in kindergarten. Her father was an executive of Rockland County, New York. In high school, she organized student strikes and walk-outs over issues ranging from sexist gym requirements to stopping nuclear energy to the possible reinstatement of the draft. In the spring of 1984, while at the State University of New York at Buffalo, she was elected student body president and ran with a slate of young radicals who swept all student government seats. She went on to be the president of the statewide student union in New York’s public university system. She orchestrated the takeover of the SUNY state university headquarters, which resulted in the SUNY trustees voting to divest the university system from entities doing business in South Africa. It was the largest act of divestiture by anyone in the USA at that time.
Environmental activist to labor union organizer
After traveling and working in Central America, McAlevey was recruited to move to California to work out of David Brower’s new Earth Island Institute on a project aimed at educating the environmental movement in the United States about the ecological consequences of U.S. military and economic policy in Central America. She was co-director of EPOCA, the Environmental Project on Central America, one of Earth Island's projects. After two years working on coalition building in the US and the international environmental movement, she was recruited to work at the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee, where she helped create a joint program between the Highlander Center and the National Toxics Campaign on globalization.
Labor organizer & contract negotiator
After the New Voices leadership came to power at the AFL-CIO in 1996, she was recruited by senior AFL-CIO leaders to work for their new organizing department and head up an experimental multi-union campaign in Stamford Connecticut. The Stamford Organizing Project, her first foray into union organizing, developed a model for rank & file worker-based social movement unionism that McAlevey calls the “whole worker organizing approach.” Rather than unions focusing only on workplace issues, this approach requires equally intense union-based organizing around the many issues afflicting the working class. The key to the method is to deliberately connect workers' non-workplace issues to their relationships in their families and communities. Union members draw on their relationships to their own churches and faith-based institutions, sports clubs, social groups of all kinds, and help carry success on a broad range of issues from the workplace into their own communities and local politics. From the AFL-CIO she was recruited to become the national Deputy Director for Strategic Campaigns of the Health Care Division of the SEIU. From there she was hired by SEIU Nevada, a statewide union, as their Executive Director and Chief Negotiator in 2004. From 2004 to 2006, the Nevada local had more hospital organizing wins than any other SEIU local. The Nevada local also reached the highest membership level in a right to work state in the history of the SEIU, leading to unprecedented success in Nevada including achieving fully employer-paid family healthcare, preventing the rollback of public pensions, stopping and in some cases reversing two-tier collective bargaining agreements, and using an approach to contract negotiations that gives every worker the right to sit in on their workplace negotiations. Following her career at SEIU, McAlevey completed a doctorate in sociology at the Graduate Center, CUNY under the supervision of Frances Fox Piven and advised by Dan Clawson.
