Power and Participation in Negotiations and Politics with Jane McAlevey: How to democratize union negotiations and build significant worker power by practicing transparent, big, and open negotiations

• May 23, 2023
• Posted in Elections, Interviews, Podcast, Strikes, Unions

Jane McAlevey talks with Gordon Lafer and Adolph Reed Jr. about the impact of negotiations as political education, for building strong unions and for rebuilding democracy. Listen here >>   Read More

These Unions Are on the Front Lines Fighting Against the Uberization of Us All: Some long established unions are challenging Silicon Valley’s agenda by pushing back on AI, surveillance, and wage theft.

• May 13, 2023
• Posted in Labor Movement, Mobilizing, Organizing, Strikes, The Nation, Unions

In the past year and a half, start-up unionization efforts such as those at Starbucks, Amazon, Trader Joe’s, and Apple have been satisfying to witness for those of us hungry for social justice in the United States. We have their backs, and we’ll continue to root for them. But the workers with the best chance of actually slowing the spread of oppressive technology (which aims to supplant humans with artificial intelligence and tries to maximize productivity by surveilling workers and controlling their time down to a fraction of a second) and stopping the Uberization of the workforce (which replaces full-time workers with contractors, turning good jobs into underpaid gigs with no benefits) are in unions that are already established. Read More

How Open Bargaining—and Not Letting Management Set the Ground Rules—Led to a Union Victory: In 2017, Kentucky became the most recent “right-to-work” state in the US. Which makes the recent victory by the Amalgamated Transit Union all the more significant.

• April 19, 2023
• Posted in Class Struggle, Labor Movement, Mobilizing, Organizing, Strikes, The Nation, Unions

In this right-to-work state where only 7.9 percent of the workforce are covered by union contracts, the members of Local 1447 of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) beat back racist divide-and-conquer proposals by management last November to win a great contract. But their victory relied on method—not luck. Read the complete article here >> Read More

How to Build a Fighting Labor Movement with Jane McAlevey: How to organize mass numbers of new workers into unions that wage mass strikes to fight employers and revive the labor movement

• April 19, 2023
• Posted in Class Struggle, Climate Change, Interviews, Jacobin, Labor Movement, Mobilizing, Organizing, Strikes, Unions

Transcript: The Making of an Organizer MICAH UETRICHT Before we get into your new book and any of your work, let’s start at the beginning. You write in your books about a history of coming from a political family and being a student organizer at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and working for a while in the environmental movement and politics, but you eventually ended up in the labor movement. Read More

Getting to Contract: Negotiating and Winning Against the Odds: Workers learn governing power through high-participation negotiations. That’s also how they can get employers to the table.

• March 6, 2023
• Posted in Class Struggle, Labor Movement, Mobilizing, Organizing, Strikes, The Nation, Unions

Whether a union is new and independent or long-established, the questions of how to negotiate, and how to get to the bargaining table, represent strategic choices. Workers can’t begin the process of realizing the concrete gains that will lead to a better life—from ending torturous scheduling to achieving real cost-of-living wage increases to obtaining the health care and retirement plans everyone deserves—until they secure a first union contract. Read More