Jane McAlevey has been an environmental activist and a union organizer. She is author of No Shortcuts, Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (Oxford 2016) and Raising Expectations and Raising Hell (Verso 2012). She is currently writing her third book, Striking Back. Listen in as she speaks with Sarah Jaffe about the future of labor and the roots of the new resistance to worker exploitation.
Listed to the full podcast here, excerpts below:
Sarah Jaffe: What is the best thing you can say about the labor movement under Trump?
Jane McAlevey: I am incredibly excited that there continue to be strikes. That was true even before the West Virginia education strike. Most people don’t know about strikes I have been writing a little bit about. They have been more in the healthcare sector and people have been winning them and they have gotten virtually no attention. But they reinforce a core argument I make in No Shortcuts: strikes are a very particular form of protest and they are unique in their ability to generate the kind of power that the working class needs. So, if you fast forward, I am on fire with excitement and joy at the moment because of what just happened in West Virginia, which is a strike that people can’t ignore and was absolutely freaking incredible, to use my most doctoral dissertation thesis language. It was just an extraordinary strike at so many levels, so people paid attention to it, but I am hoping that everyone pays as much attention to other strikes that are both happening and have recently happened under Trump. That is the form of resistance that I have been paying most attention to and that I still remain most hopeful about.
I am interested in what is going to work and I am terrified that we have entered serious authoritarianism already and that it may be getting considerably worse.
“Strikes are a very particular form of protest and they are unique in their ability to generate the kind of power that the working class needs.”
Part of why West Virginia was so important is because they took on a trifecta of red, meaning the Governor, the Senate, the House, which we have in a lot of states right now. They actually effectively mounted a super-victory against a trifecta red power structure at the state level and they did it in the public sector. (I don’t agree that there is a private or public sector, but most people think that there is and so, for the moment, I will talk about that, even though in my view there is just one big economy and the right wing has created this fiction called the public sector and the private sector.)
What is important about West Virginia is it was done in the “public sector.” It was done against a Republican governor, a Republican senate, and a Republican house. There were three decision-makers on the side of the employers that had to be defeated and they defeated all three. To essentially get to ratification, they had to get three Republican institutions controlled by pretty big majorities in the case of the senate and the house, and then the governor who was a Democrat when they endorsed him. We should all acknowledge that, though he Trumped.
There are so many aspects of that that give us the kind of insight that I am hopeful about and campaigning for in general in the movement, which is that we need more strikes and we need what I call real strikes, which are supermajority strikes.
Q: Let’s talk a little bit about that, the mobilization versus organizing, because we have seen a lot of marches. This weekend is going to be the March for Our Lives. Let’s talk about what organizing means in contrast to these big periodic mobilizations.
McAlevey: I am super excited about everything that is coming out of Parkland. I think that young people have always played a really important and special and unique role in capturing the imagination of a larger swath of society than the rest of us do. I think that is part of why they are having so much success. In addition the fact that every time I listen to one of their leaders, I am like, “Yeah!” They are smart.
I have been plenty of big marches since Trump won. I love big marches. Put on your marching clothes and go and scream and shout and make fun placards and climb up buildings. I am the first to sign up and go to every big march and small march. I love direct actions. But they are greatly limited compared to what I think of as deep organizing. To me, what organizing means is that you are expanding the universe of people from whom we can mobilize. You are actually expanding the base of people who we can then turn out for the Women’s March or for climate marches or for “Let’s get rid of guns in our society” marches. That is the core difference.
“I love direct actions. But they are greatly limited compared to what I think of as deep organizing.”
By the way, West Virginia can challenge a little bit of what I say, it might be interesting to come back to that, mobilization vs organizing in the context of that particular strike, because I think they did both particularly well, but it was maybe even more mobilizing than organizing at one level, not at all of them. Organizing to me, in general, means we are expanding the base of people from whom we then get to put in our Twitter feed, social media feeds, and get out to either the polls, either to vote – one form of very important mobilization – or to huge marches or to huge direct actions.
Mobilizing is essentially talking to folks who are already with us. They are already converted. They are already somewhat with whatever “us” loosely means. I think that is great. I think the problem is, as an absolute number, the percentage in our society has been shrinking over the last 40-45 years, of people who self-identify as progressive and who we can therefore tap to come out to big mobilizations. To me, organizing has been a life obsession. It is what union organizing does not uniquely, but nearly uniquely. Faith-based organizing has always stood to have a high capacity to do base expansion as well, because it is structure-based and because you start with a bunch of people who come in for one reason and they are in relationship to each other and so having a conversation with them to help them themselves come to an awareness that something is really deeply wrong, that also lends itself to serious base expansion.
We saw that in the civil rights movement in this country, the framework of the black church was a particularly powerful mechanism for building the only other seriously powerful movement we have had in this country besides the labor movement, which is the civil rights movement. I still think both are possible. The slight difference is, one of them doesn’t involve having to debate questions of faith. It is the boss and you are trying to help people understand that the root cause of the crisis in their lives is the boss. It is their employer. Whereas, we get into much more complicated debates about root causes and ultimate solutions when we get into faith-based organizing.
Progressive faith-based organizing to me matters a lot, but nothing is actually more important than organizing in the trade union sector and with a sub-emphasis on structure-based organizing.
Q: Explain for people who are not familiar, what does structure-based organizing mean?
McAlevey: It means that that there is a set of people who come to work every day in the case of the workplace or church or synagogue or something. It means that there is a bounded structure of some kind around a defined number of people. So, in West Virginia, strike, for sake of argument, you had schools in 55 counties and if you were going to take a strike vote or if you were doing something leading up to a strike vote, you could very quickly assess, because the number of teachers is defined. There are 100 teachers in a middle school somewhere in a county in West Virginia. If you are a mobilizer or an organizer and you are trying to understand, “Do we have a supermajority of people with us in this movement, in this mobilization we are attempting?” you are going to do something called a structure test, which means you are testing within a defined structure to see, “Do you have a majority?” which means 51% in the lowest threshold for a majority.
I use the word supermajorities, because, supermajorities is what it takes to win strikes, not simple majorities. So, simple majority might win a union election. It is not going to win a strike. It is really different. To win something really significant like a contract after workers by simple majority maybe win an election or a card count, it is going to take an even bigger by order of magnitude number of people, which is a supermajority, to actually win a successful contract to have a successful strike threat. In this country, it is 90% out or more to actually defeat a very powerful boss.
So, structure-based really means there is a defined number of people. There are 100 workers in a school, if I take a strike vote, there are two things I am measuring. One, did 100% of 100 people actually turn out for that vote? That is one measure of your strength. Because if only 40 people showed up out of 100 teachers and out of that 40, 35 vote to strike, that is a failed structure test for an organizer. There are two things that are important about structure tests and structure-based organizing. One is, you know how many are participating and then, how many agree with you. You actually have to measure both.
Q: When we are talking about strikes in a political context, community support seems like a really important part of the conversation.
Healthcare workers and education workers have a unique ability to bring their entire community into their struggle.
McAlevey: It is essential. I am obsessed about healthcare and education strikes in part because I think that healthcare workers and education workers have a unique ability to bring their entire community into their struggle. In West Virginia, it was definitely not only 34,000 workers, which was the number who struck between the teachers and the service personnel, it was actually hundreds of thousands of people brought into the contestation for power against a very conservative power structure because the students went with them. So, you bring 227,000 students into the struggle with you--nearly every student supports the teachers in education strikes. Let alone, by the way, their bus drivers, their cooks, their janitors, those people who pick them up and drop them off. They love those people.
. . .
What is interesting to me is that (mostly) men in our movement over the last 25 years have had a consistent line that the private sector matters more than the public sector and that the private sector is the most important place that we have to do our work. Like, if we are going to re-build the labor movement, it has to happen in the private sector and not until we get the private sector numbers back up to something close to the public-sector numbers can we win again. I have taken a decidedly fairly public different position, which is one sector does not matter more than the other and, in fact, where I have been evolving to lately is that if anything the public sector matters more. Not only because it is where we still have, until Janus, a majority of the membership of the labor movement.
But, it is the mission-driven, largely female, often people of color – certainly not in West Virginia, but elsewhere – who are the people suffering the consequences of austerity and who have the capacity to fight back because of those incredibly deep structural relationships they have with either their patients in the healthcare sector or their clients in the home care part of the healthcare sector. People who they serve and take care of or the students and the parents and the families in the case of education workers. Austerity is going after them. The austerity front is around healthcare and education. That is where massive cutbacks are happening.
It is the mission-driven, largely female, often people of color who are suffering the consequences of austerity and who have the capacity to fight back because of deep relationships with patients, clients, and parents.
It is the same set of workers everywhere. There is a huge struggle going on in England right now around the NHS, around saving the National Health Service, NHS, which is the socialized healthcare system, that is absolutely an incredibly effective and efficient system. So much more efficient than the American system, the super-privatized American ridiculous healthcare system with capitalists making money off of us getting sick.
In England, the same struggle exists. They are trying to go after the NHS, to try and privatize it, and the fight back is going to come mostly from the nurses, mostly from the female side. There are 280,000 registered nurses working for a single boss in England right now, through the Royal College of Nurses. You saw strikes by junior doctors last year. Mostly men. It is a good example to me of militancy without doing a power analysis, sorry, guys. It is going to take the women in the NHS to actually defend and save the system. They have the capacity to do it because everywhere in the world, nurses are highly trusted people.
Everywhere in the world, despite a multi-million dollar attempt, from Waiting for Superman on, to decimate the image of teachers. Even though the pages of The New York Times or any other mainstream liberal media outlet occasionally will agree, ordinary parents in strike after strike choose to stand with their teachers. Students stand with their teachers. No matter how many millions of dollars they try and use to degrade and attack and insult every educator--they haven’t moved on nurses yet, but as I am studying the attack on teachers, it is like it doesn’t matter how much money they waste, the relationship that is forged every day organically between mission-driven workers, workers who care deeply about their work, mostly female in the healthcare and education sector, is like an inseparable bond. That is why it becomes organizing and not just mobilizing, because they are bringing hundreds of thousands more people into the struggle and helping them understand who is to blame for the pain in their lives.
Q: I want to talk about the Poor People’s Campaign. Where do you think this is fitting into the landscape of “resistance” at this point?
McAlevey: I am excited about it for some of the same reasons that I was mentioning earlier which is, depending on how the Poor People’s Campaign plays out, I am excited about it because it is embedded in the faith-based world and that is structure-based by definition. What I am hopeful is that even though it may capture many people outside of the faith-based environment, I am hoping that inside of the Poor People’s movement, they keep the dogged focus on having more of an organizing approach and less of a mobilizing approach. Meaning, they are going to be counting how many congregations, how many synagogues, how many mosques, how many temples, how many churches, how many in which sector of faith we are talking about, how many members are involved, how many are taking action.
It takes its origins from the Moral Mondays movement, as you mentioned, and from Reverend Barber’s work in North Carolina. What I try to point out to people a lot about the name we know now, Rev. Barber, is that Rev. Barber’s, one of his first, most significant campaigns that he was involved in before he became more of a household name among the progressive movement was the Smithfield’s Food campaign in North Carolina. It was such an important campaign. It was another deeply important structure-based fight.
I interviewed him for the book because when I was interviewing the worker leaders and the organizers connected to Smithfield, it was very clear that when Rev. Barber, a young Rev. Barber in 2006 becomes elected as head of the state NAACP and one of his very first acts, because Rev. Barber has unassailably good politics, was to turn back a $10,000 annual check that Smithfield Foods used to give to the NAACP year after year and the old NAACP leadership that existed in North Carolina before Rev. Barber and a bunch of smart people decided, “Let’s take this institution back,” they had been happily accepting contributions from a…not just union-busting workplace, a seriously sick, twisted, racist, evil corporate leadership at Smithfield Foods. Rev. Barber wins and a bunch of people go to him and he is already aware of it, because he is working with faith-based leaders in the black community in North Carolina who helped him win office. He is like, “Smithfield? Don’t we have a problem at Smithfield?” and they get in touch and he famously rips up the check and sends it back to the Smithfield leadership and says, “The old NAACP may have been accepting contributions, but we are not. We are going to stand in solidarity with the workers.”
He becomes, along with several other important faith-based leaders in that state, a crucial player in the end game at Smithfield foods. When I talked to him, he had already started Moral Mondays and what made me so very pleased, this is back in probably 2013 when he starts Moral Mondays, I asked him did he feel like there was an ongoing relationship between the 5,000 workers at Smithfield and the work at Moral Mondays. He smiled and said, “They send at least one bus every single Monday from Tar Heel, North Carolina to Moral Mondays.” He counts on the rank and file workers at Smithfield getting on buses to come.
I think he has, as I said, unassailably good politics. He has been advancing them for as long as I have known his name, which is 2006. I think what he is trying to do right now is incredibly important. Again, I hope the sort of methodical organizing on the faith-based side is happening as they are also creating an important mobilization vehicle for people. Also, I think part of the reason why the faith-based community is so important, in general, and in the context of in solidarity with labor struggle is not just because most workers also go to a house of faith, but it is because they bring the ability to bring a critical, moral critique of out-of-control capitalism. They have moral authority to criticize a political and economic system in this country that is, frankly, immoral, amoral, rotten to the core, and they can criticize it, in some ways, more effectively than union leaders can.
Q: We have to get to Janus. I would like to pretend it wasn’t going to happen, but unfortunately, that has done nobody any good. It is almost certainly going to overturn the Abood case and make the public sector… We still don’t have another word for Right to Work. It is going to screw over the unions of many, many hundreds of thousands or millions of people, most of whom are women. Again, there are two parts to this question. What have people been doing that you have seen that has been good to prepare for this? What do you want to see more of?
McAlevey: Strikes! But, I mean, they are most effective to take on the power structure, but they also can be the most effective way to continue having the rank and file membership engaged.
Q: Yes. After West Virginia, people have signed up many, many hundreds of people are signing up as members of the unions.
McAlevey: I think it is thousands. We don’t have the numbers yet. I asked a couple branch leaders and they are like, “It is at hundreds in some of the counties,” which is why I am pretty confident it is going to be many more.
There have been several different responses to Janus. One is, no change of behavior. “Bye.” They are in deep trouble. That is out there. Then, there has been the attempt since the Friedrichs vs California Teachers before…
Q: And Harris v. Quinn before it was Friedrichs.
McAlevey: Harris v. Quinn went through.
Q: But they could have done the thing that they are going to do in Janus back then.
McAlevey: We could have learned our lesson then. Then, Friedrichs was coming. Several significant unions, certainly including AFSCME, certainly including SEIU, CWA, depending on the state and the sector, but several better than average unions have been out there recommitting from Harris v. Quinn on, recommitting the idea that they have to really have an intentional plan. But, this is the problem, the actual word choice I am going to use, that they have to have an intentional plan to actually sign up more members. The problem with that word is that is not about engaging people in a serious and significant way in the life of the union. That is another reaction.
Then, I would say the very best reaction is where unions are coming to learn that it is actually by engaging members and workers, not members, because they are usually not members yet. It is by engaging the workforce in participating in the very life of the organization. The day to day work of the union, politics in the union, opening up endorsement processes, opening up negotiation sessions. It is by actually small-d democratizing the union, focusing on increasing participation, that then the membership flows in and follows. The strike being the highest level of it, but I am going to argue there are two other ways that you can seriously involve the rank and file in the work and that is through the endorsement process in most unions.
Strikes will be the third level of building what I think where Rick Fantasia first labelled a culture of solidarity, what many of us talk about, the kind of solidarity that gets built in a strike, which we certainly still see in Chicago, when it is six years after the initial strike now.
I am not worried about the membership numbers in Chicago and I am not worried about what the membership number is going to be in West Virginia and I am not worried about what the membership numbers are going to be with the Massachusetts Nurses Association and I am not worried about what the membership numbers are going to be in a whole bunch of unions, but I could name, unfortunately, generally by name, because, in fact, they have opened the doors on different processes, they have opened negotiation processes. They actually genuinely see the union as the rank and file. Those unions are going to survive and the more unions that quickly adapt to a small-d democracy model in the union are actually going to do fine.
The problem is, most aren’t moving to that right now. So, am I nervous? Absolutely. I think the most immediate effect is going to be on political donations to the parties. That is the most immediate effect, is going to be a significant draining of the coffers in terms of how much money we have. As much as I disagree with most of how unions do most of their endorsements, the fact of the matter is, they still matter. The fact is, resources and money matters in our elections right now. I don’t think that they matter as much as we think they do or as much as contemporary people often theorize they do, but they damn well do matter. When you have the capacity to hire folks, when you can put them out there, when you can have them convert from rank and file volunteerism to doing nothing all day long from morning until sleeping at night, but campaigning because you have capacity to pay them to help drive other members out in campaigns, that actually matters a lot.
I will also say that even thinking about elections in a post-Janus world comes back to the need to seriously revive the strike. There are two important things to say about Janus. One of them is our political system, this is not a new idea, the political system is completely broken. We had three major Supreme Court rulings. There is no way that we are competing. Even if Janus didn’t happen. Even if trade union money stayed at the current level, the system is fully corrupted at this point and completely broken between voter suppression, between the amount of money that the Mercers and the Kochs and company can dump into owning the airwaves, that only under-girds the reason why we going to have to create a crisis in the economic arena. I don’t think we can take down, not just Trump, but the forces behind Trump, which is more important to me than Trump, because he is going to take himself down at some point. He is going to do 20,000 illegal things.
SJ: Stormy Daniels is going to do it for him.
McAlevey: But, the forces that put Trump in power and that will remain when his face gets out of all of ours, to take them down is going to require creating a crisis in the economic arena. The more economic concentration is in the hands of a handful of people, the more they control the political system and the more we are going to be forced in this new gilded age back to a kind of warfare in the economic arena to take on the capitalist class. I think that is real.
“They are actually arguing that collective bargaining, that the idea of collective, is an infringement on free speech rights."
The last thing I want to say about Janus: Where I believe they are really going with analogizing free speech, union dues and stuff as free speech, I think it is not even going to be about dues. If you read some of the briefs…and when we get the transcripts from the debate on February 26th in the Supreme Court…where they are really going is to say that anything collective is a violation of free speech.
They are actually arguing that collective bargaining, that the idea of collective, is an infringement on free speech rights. Which basically means we are heading towards saying unions are illegal and an infringement of individual free speech rights. . . . I am going to predict here with you, that the next case they are setting up is literally going to say, “Collective bargaining is an infringement on free speech rights,” and they are heading towards banning collective bargaining and unions in America.
But, we can beat them!
Q: That is probably the thing I quote you the most on, “People are ready to fight.”
McAlevey: : They are!
Q: How can people keep up with you and your work and find your books and all of those things?
McAlevey: Okay, I learned how to Tweet. I haven’t really learned how to Tweet. @RSGEXP, which is Raising Expectations. Then, I have a website and I have a couple of books.
Interviews for Resistance is a project of Sarah Jaffe, with assistance from Laura Feuillebois and support from the Nation Institute. It is also available as a podcast on iTunes. Not to be reprinted without permission.