When Jane McAlevey died on July 7, aged 59, the left lost a brilliant organizer, author, teacher, and comrade. After early experience in environmental justice and anti-apartheid activism, McAlevey found her calling in the labor movement, starting in the 1990s. As a staffer with the AFL-CIO and later SEIU, McAlevey helped organize new shops and win hard-fought strikes, defying the moribund trend of most US unions. The practical challenges of organizing workers deeply informed McAlevey’s strategic philosophy, which she developed across four books and countless articles, talks, and interviews. Her great project, per the subtitle of her most popular book, No Shortcuts, was “organizing for power”: To build an effective union, campaign, or coalition requires moving beyond a marginal minority of like-minded activists, toward a diverse rank-and-file majority. It means identifying who holds power—a boss, a landlord, a politician—and working with relentless focus and tactical creativity to pressure them toward a common goal. Through her writings and workshops, McAlevey taught thousands of organizers around the world, both aspiring and experienced. Terms she coined or popularized—organic leaders, structure tests, deep organizing—have entered the lingua franca of American social movements.
I myself was among a cohort of bright-eyed would-be socialist militants who looked to learn from McAlevey in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. In 2018, on a visit to New York, she made time to come in person to our No Shortcuts reading group. Perched on a bench in the corner of a dingy Brooklyn art space, ringed by two dozen young fans, she warmly, patiently answered our many questions. More than anything, we wanted to know how: how to mobilize your coworkers for a strike, how to talk to your neighbors about a negligent landlord, how to retain members in an all-volunteer organization. As Elizabeth Oh notes below, how was McAlevey’s element. She gave us tools for both the daily effort and the long haul of building power against capital, in a country where capital can seem to have all the power.
Jane McAlevey left us far, far too soon. Since her death, countless tributes to her legacy have appeared. Here we feature remembrances by a few of McAlevey’s many friends and admirers, joining this global chorus. Such a collective celebration is perhaps the second-best way to honor a life dedicated to collective action. The best, surely, is to regain our resolve, find our target, and get back to the work of winning.
—Colin Vanderburg
I first met Jane McAlevey—in print, at least—when my officemate Jusselia sent me a scanned PDF of No Shortcuts. Fresh out of college, I was working at the Legal Aid Society in New York, and had just become a member of 1199SEIU, the union representing Legal Aid support staff. I was poor and desperate for a pay raise, and had just learned what a “contract fight” was.
Having grown up in the immigrant rights movement, I thought I was familiar with the nuts and bolts of organizing. After all, I had spent many days and nights camped in front of the White House; I had lobbied members of Congress to pass humane immigration reform. But Jane, in her always clear authorial voice, distinguished between mobilizing—simply turning people out for actions and events—and organizing. The latter required deep relationships, developing leaders by bringing them into a strategy to build power. To win, she said, we needed to organize the whole worker; we needed not just to mobilize a minority, but empower a majority. For me she solidified the why of a union, what it would take for us to bring our coworkers into the contract fight, and above all, how to win.
The majority of Legal Aid support staff were Black and Brown, and most were women. We were acutely aware that the attorneys (who skewed white and male) had been able to negotiate substantive pay raises over the past decade, while we had not: in fact, 1199 workers had not received a raise that kept pace with inflation in eleven years. In our tiny, windowless office, a few of us began power-mapping the various Legal Aid offices across the city, identifying leaders, and cobbling together a campaign committee. We methodically held one-on-one conversations with our colleagues, particularly those we deemed organic leaders: known and trusted employees who had been working at Legal Aid a long time, who could move their coworkers to take action.
At first, I was nervous even inviting my colleagues to take photos of themselves holding union support posters, for use on social media. But to my surprise, they were happy to talk about life and how they were struggling to make ends meet: all I had to do was ask. We learned that our base pay was far below that for comparable positions at other legal services organizations, and an internal survey we conducted found that roughly two-thirds of 1199 members were living paycheck to paycheck.
Our staff organizer could be heavy-handed—she once ripped up an agenda I had drafted, calling it “disrespectful”—but with time, our steady groundwork brought her to our side. During contract negotiations, management offered proportional base pay increases that varied by position; we rejected that proposal, pushing for an equal minimum rate across all roles, raising the floor for our lowest-paid workers. When we finally won the pay raise we deserved and voted on our contract, I was stunned: Jane’s model had worked. We had successfully built a fighting union.
Jane’s legacy lives on for me not only through this contract fight, but as a cornerstone of the socialist campaign for the Build Public Renewables Act, passed by the New York State legislature in 2023. No Shortcuts was required reading for Ecosocialists of the NYC Democratic Socialists of America, who spent four years organizing to ensure New York State would fund and build publicly owned renewable energy. Before Jane passed, she told a comrade of mine that socialists should campaign to build green social housing, since housing insecurity was a main obstacle to working-class power. An organizer to the end, she did what every good organizer must do: she made an ask.
—Elizabeth Oh
Many people say they believe in organizing—in the workplace, in the neighborhood, or in the statehouse—but very few people commit to the slow, methodical work of doing it well. Even fewer commit to the art of developing and training the organizers themselves: giving people the skills they need to build an organization where they work or live. Instead, organizing is too often reduced to an adjunct of mobilizing or advocacy, a way to get just enough people activated to give a campaign a more “grassroots” flavor: a colorful backdrop to a press conference, or a community member to tell their story of woe in a lobby meeting. Teaching workers or tenants to become organizers themselves and to lead their own campaigns is secondary to the goal of winning a particular policy.
This, of course, does not describe Jane McAlevey. She was a true labor organizer and trainer. She was deeply dedicated to disciplined organizing and to teaching thousands of others her craft. While I did not know McAlevey personally, one need not have known her to appreciate her tremendous contributions to the work of building powerful social movements. In more than a decade as an organizer myself, primarily among renters in New York City and State, I have taught many students in the field—and McAlevey has taught me.
I learned from No Shortcuts that creating and sustaining powerful organizations is itself the strategy to win social change. Rather than siloing organizing and campaigning as separate departments or activities, as many progressive groups do, McAlevey shows that dynamic, successful campaigns are driven by a rigorous commitment to growing an organization. No Shortcuts does not pull any punches about what does and does not work: mobilizing only people who already agree with you, or simply supplying smart policy ideas to people who already hold power, is insufficient to deliver lasting, structural change. She challenges readers—organizers and would-be organizers—to focus on “an ever expanding base of ordinary people.” The energy of the book is infectious. Since I first read it, I must have taught No Shortcuts ten times, and watched as people were inspired to talk to their neighbors and take on their landlord.
Community organizers in particular have much to learn from the style of labor organizing that McAlevey practiced and promoted. Community is a maddeningly vague term that can describe any self-selecting set of people who walk into an office or show up at an event. Mobilizing such a set can only get you so far. To take on an industry like real estate, the most powerful in New York State, requires more. It requires building structure—defining a universe of people, not just those who are already on your side—and talking to them, recruiting them into an organization, and bringing them into a collective strategy. If that feels overwhelming, don’t worry: McAlevey gave us a set of remarkably adaptable guides to equip any tenant or worker to map the balance of power in their building, neighborhood, or job, and build an organization. Over 35,000 people have taken part in her Organizing for Power training series: a project of structure-based organizing on a mass scale that most community organizations dare not even dream of.
Beyond these tools, though, what Jane gave us was a belief in hope over cynicism. The left has an uncomfortable relationship to power: too many of us either don’t want to win, or don’t believe that we can. As a result, we grow comfortable in the role of underdog, agitating indefinitely. But McAlevey demanded more of us. Speaking truth to power, she said, is not enough. We have to be power-hungry, dream ambitiously, and trust in our ability to win if we work together. And we must tirelessly build the organizations that will get us there.
—Cea Weaver
Jane McAlevey was a true dynamo in the labor movement. Like any good organizer, she wore many hats: strategist, teacher, scholar. I wasn’t part of McAlevey’s inner circle, much less a close friend. But I was a comrade who admired her work. Like most of her readers, I knew her through her writing, her trainings, her podcast appearances. And what I want to preserve is not only her legacy, but even more, her boots-on-the-ground approach and her socialist orientation. Even from a distance, I could see that McAlevey’s contributions were firmly rooted in a socialist tradition, emphasizing the power of workers to transform the world they’ve produced, by carrying forward organizing principles and methods forged over generations of hard-fought struggles. Like these past fighters, she will live on in the material victories and transformative change that will come when we begin to organize on a mass scale, in the millions.
Last month, I was at a barbecue in Queens, where Amazon workers and Teamsters sat around a table discussing printed handouts taken from McAlevey’s book No Shortcuts. The workers shared insights on their own organizing at an Amazon delivery station, drawing comparisons with the methods and case studies in the book. Around the world, other workers are also studying McAlevey’s books and listening to her talks, equipping themselves with time-tested organizing tactics.
McAlevey taught the art of class struggle. She recognized that workers do not enter that struggle as fully formed leaders, but simply as people, complicated and contradictory. Yet through experience and learning, she believed, all workers had the potential to become effective organizers and leaders. The role of a union staff organizer—as McAlevey herself once was—is not to substitute themselves for workers on the shop floor, but rather to identify the “natural” leaders who hold sway with their peers: who can tap into righteous anger, build common ground, and help overcome the fear of retaliation? Who can bring people together to strategize and confront the boss? Still, even that’s not always enough to win when the deck is so stacked against workers and bosses rule like dictators. Workers are now tasked with adapting the lessons and tactics of past labor movement stalwarts to their own circumstances, across different workplaces—a feat of humility and courage, both personal and collective.
Long before McAlevey, organizations like Labor Notes had been disseminating these lessons through books, conferences, and trainings, aiming to foster rank-and-file organizing and bring a class struggle orientation to an increasingly depoliticized labor movement. But McAlevey was able to codify these lessons in her own writings and propagate them around the world in a way that few others had done before. In trying to equip workers to better know and fight their opponent in this struggle, McAlevey often mentioned the book Confessions of a Union Buster by Martin Jay Levitt, a former management consultant who had switched sides. “The enemy was the collective spirit,” Levitt wrote, about breaking a union. “I got a hold of that spirit and while it was still a seedling; I poisoned it, choked it, bludgeoned it if I had to, anything to be sure it would never blossom into a united workforce.”
McAlevey of course stood on the opposite side of this war. She wanted us workers to win, as a united class, fighting the bosses and their political lackeys. In that staunch commitment, she followed in the tradition of what Antonio Gramsci called the “permanently active persuaders”: socialists committed to spreading the methods and principles necessary for workers to finally seize power. May we fulfill that prophecy. Jane McAlevey: socialist cadre, ¡presente!
—Luis Feliz Leon
If unions are both a town hall and an army, as the labor leader and pacifist A. J. Muste once observed, then Jane McAlevey was laser-focused on building the army. Jane spent most of her life working with the few unions, like the United Teachers of Los Angeles, who dare to think big and go on the offensive. This means building up supermajorities of membership who are ready not just to defend what they have, but to fight for more. Jane knew from deep experience what labor’s opponents had long recognized: in the words of Morton Blackwell, founder of the right-wing Leadership Institute, “You owe it to your philosophy to learn how to win.”
When I was a young trade unionist, Jane’s first book, Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell), already resonated deeply with me. I found myself nodding along when she showed that the only thing that moves power is more power, and that trusting a boss—or the institutions serving the boss class—is always a mistake.
Later I would work with Jane directly, during my time as national director of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Jane believed in socialism, but to be honest, found most socialists off-putting and ineffective as organizers: too often they talked about the working class without forming real relationships with large numbers of working-class people or with the respected leaders among them. Toward that end, Jane’s second book, No Shortcuts, provided a clear roadmap for building organizational power. It appeared at a time when DSA was riven by conflict among the tens of thousands of new members who had joined in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 election. What is power? How and why do we build it? What is organizing? All these questions were up for debate. DSA’s rapid growth—the largest expansion of the organized left in a hundred years—brought competing anti-capitalist ideas into the organization, as well as masses of newly radicalized young people who had come of age in an era of hegemonic neoliberalism.
Naturally I reached out to Jane. I asked if she could help us develop new members at a national scale, to teach the craft of organizing, to develop a shared vocabulary. Most importantly, I hoped she could instill her central lesson: power comes from creating the structures and practices to bring in and build solidarity with huge numbers of people—most of whom we don’t know, and with whom we don’t already agree. Looking back, I should not have been as shocked as I was when she gave an enthusiastic yes.
Lacking the resources of a union, we had to find a way to reach DSA’s large and diffuse membership on a shoestring. In the spring of 2019, we asked DSA’s educational arm, the DSA Fund, to sponsor No Shortcuts book groups and produce an accompanying study guide. Jane sat down with us to adapt worksite organizing to DSA chapter organizing, and then she led three national Zoom trainings herself, speaking directly to hundreds of members across the country. Some people logged on individually, but at her urging, many gathered around kitchen tables, participating as chapter and campaign groups.
Jane’s model of union power doesn’t perfectly map onto a self-selecting organization like DSA. But with her help, a generation of new leaders grappled with what it would take to win campaigns of all kinds; and we built unity and strength in the process. We learned that there are no shortcuts to building a mass movement. Jane was happy to support DSA, and our Zoom sessions sparked her interest, well before the pandemic, in using the internet to train at scale. I like to think that, in exchange for her pro bono work developing DSA’s members, we planted the seed of her global online Organizing for Power program, which has now reached tens of thousands of participants in more than a hundred countries. Both institutions are vital today, as we once again face a choice between socialism or barbarism. The future is uncertain, but Jane’s legacy is stronger and surer than ever.
—Maria Svart
In 1993, I had the privilege to take part in one of a series of organizer exchanges that Jane helped lead, connecting US social movements with their counterparts in Central and Eastern Europe. In those couple weeks alongside Jane, I learned the humility that all organizers, especially those of us from the US, should have when we arrive in any new community or country. I learned that the only way to understand the conditions in which local leaders unite people in struggle is to ask good questions, and to listen.
For over a week in Budapest, and for a day and a night outside Debrecen, near the Hungary–Romania border, we listened. I remember the discarded Soviet-era uranium waste piled up along the roadside as we entered Debrecen; I can still feel Jane’s strategic presence that day, reminding us of what we had to learn from these Hungarian organizers and leaders, and what we could all learn from each other. However different our backgrounds, by sharing our experiences, we could strengthen our common cause.
Later in the 1990s, Jane and I served on the board of a small but mighty organization called Youth Action, which then existed to support, train, and develop the youngest leaders and organizers in grassroots economic justice, Black freedom, Indigenous, and environmental movements across the South and Southwest. By then we were ourselves no longer so young as organizers; I was just under 30 and she was just over. In those years, I learned even more from Jane about the role an experienced organizer can play even among a constituency they don’t belong to themselves: listen, listen, listen. But also, share your knowledge; be ready to frame the hard choices people must make to fight for their vision, and the risks they must take; and give them the tools to analyze and understand power.
Listen, share, push, build, fight, win, learn. Jane’s lessons in the fight for justice will always be with me. The world has lost one of the most fiercely effective, pragmatically visionary organizers of the working class. My daughter has lost one of the most beloved aunties in our village in Northern California, where Jane was our longtime neighbor. I’ve lost a comrade and dear friend of more than thirty years. Struggling with this deep loss, I pledge to hold fast to Jane’s methods in my work for justice.
—Deepak Pateriya
If you like this article, please subscribe or leave a tax-deductible tip below to support n+1.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!