Summer of Strikes—Plus, After Affirmative Action: On this episode of “Start Making Sense,” Jane McAlevey talks about unions, and John Nichols comments on the politics of education.

• July 7, 2023
• Posted in Class Struggle, Climate Change, Interviews, Labor Movement, Mobilizing, Organizing, Podcast, Strikes, Unions

Two nationwide strikes may be in the works right now. The Teamsters have been negotiating with UPS for a new contract, and the United Auto Workers have been preparing to strike at least one of the Detroit auto makers. These have the potential to provide swing-state voters with a political education in the lead-up to the 2024 election. Read More

Winning Is Only the Start: Jane McAlevey on Building Worker Power: Jane McAlevey on the long-game of building union power through contract negotiations.

• June 9, 2023
• Posted in Class Struggle, Climate Change, Interviews, Labor Movement, Mobilizing, Organizing, Podcast, Strikes, Unions

In April 2022, Amazon workers in Staten Island voted to form a union. But a year after that historic victory, union members at the JFK8 warehouse still don’t have a contract, thanks largely to Amazon spending $14 million on union avoidance consultants. That may be shocking but it’s not unusual. When workers vote to form a union, it takes an average of 465 additional days to sign a contract with their employer. 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

Unions Are a Pain in the Ass. Yet We Have No Choice but to Build Good Unions: An interview with Jane McAlevey

• June 5, 2021
• Posted in Interviews, Jacobin, Labor Movement, Mobilizing, Organizing, Strikes, Training, Unions

  Sam Fleischman and Wen Zhuang, from the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), spoke with McAlevey ahead of her training series on the rationale behind her Bessemer rebuttal, how union popularity should be matched with the right tools, and how these old and new organizing strategies can work in harmony toward building worker power that can win. Read More

Biden Needs to Talk About Jobs on Labor Day. And Every Day.: If he does, he just might win in November.

• September 4, 2020
• Posted in Election 2020, Labor Movement, Published work, The Nation, Unions

Instead of allowing a deliberate undermining of 21st century essential public services, Biden could stitch together race, gender, jobs, unions, and good government in one powerful speech. For example, he could explain that at union-busting FedEx, workers earn half what their counterparts do at the post office for service that is no better and often worse for higher charges—and that the difference is who gets the income: workers or shareholders? Read More