Legendary American trade union organiser Jane McAlevey died last week after a long battle with cancer.  Born in Manhattan, McAlevey was the youngest of nine children. Her father, John McAlevey, a WWII fighter pilot, lawyer, and progressive politician, was at one stage a mayor. Her political education began as an infant, as she attended civil rights and anti-Vietnam war marches with her parents.  

While her activism began at school, it was in university that she first demonstrated her flair for leadership. In 1984, while at the State University of New York at Buffalo, McAlevey was elected student body president and later became president of the 200,000-member Student Association of the State University of New York (SASU). Recalling that time, McAlevey later told of the campaigns they won on tuition fees, rent increases and divestment from South Africa.  

Her political education took her from the US to the Soviet Union in 1984 for the World Festival of Youth and Students organised by the Komsomol, to Nicaragua during the height of the revolution to support the Sandinistas. 

Back in the US, Jane spent several years in the environmental movement before working at the Highlander Research and Education Centre, known for training civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks. Jane later emphasised that Parks' role in the Montgomery bus boycott was the result of years of training and disciplined movement building, not a spontaneous act. 

It was here she discovered old organiser training manuals and that the dots began to connect up in her head. McAlevey authored four influential books on member-led organising. Her works include "Raising Expectations and Raising Hell" (2012), "No Shortcuts: Organising for Power in the New Gilded Age" (2016), "A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy" (2020), and "Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations" (2023), co-authored with Abby Lawlor. 

Her writings wove together memoir, manifesto, and manual.  The key to Jane’s organising recipe was to ensure that there was a “continually expanding base of ordinary people, never previously involved” at the centre of things.   

Through her writings and trainings, Jane hammered home the principled differences between what she called advocacy, mobilising and organising. Advocacy often ignores “the only concrete advantage ordinary people have over elites: large numbers. In workplace strikes, at the ballot box, or in nonviolent civil disobedience, strategically deployed masses have long been the unique weapon of ordinary people.” 

Jane emphasised the need for approaches that would “expand the universe of people in our movement” and talked about “waking up in the morning with an explicit plan.”

Within the unions, Jane pushed for the adoption of methods like whole worker organising, power analysis and structure tests. Whole worker organising means recognising people aren’t hermetically sealed in little boxes between 9am - 5pm, but that we live in an ever-shifting society where conversations happen at large - and that power can be wielded just as much in the community as the workplace. 

In exploring the applications of the McAlevey model, one thing is clear: it's one which advocates for a conversational approach to engaging workers in identifying their challenges, asserting their voices, and formulating their solutions. It isn't about imposing strategies on people; it's really about something "that enables ordinary people to understand their potential power and participate meaningfully in making strategy."

Ultimately for Jane: “When people understand the strategy because they helped make it, they will be invested for the long haul, sustained and propelled to achieve more meaningful wins." 

In November of 2023, McAlevey promoted her fourth book Rules To Win By in the Fórsa’s Dublin head office. 

Reflecting on the event, Fórsa general secretary Kevin Callinan said: “It was an inspirational evening for all present. Although not so well, her message was delivered in the usual clear and direct way. Organise, but organise to win. The methods that she had developed, and in which she had trained thousands of trade unionists around the globe, are designed to do just that.” 

In a tribute to Jane posted online last week Kevin talked about how he met her for the first time in-person in May 2023 in Cork when she was visiting to deliver a workshop for Fórsa and says they struck up an instant connection that led to an all-staff training being organised earlier this year. 

While Jane couldn't provide the training herself, Kevin was keen to ensure she knew the impact of her team's training on Fórsa staff: "Although very seriously ill and unable to travel, I messaged her to describe the electricity in the room and to let her know that we were creating a great legacy for her, that could in time change our country and our world. She replied, ‘that's such a beautiful and powerful note.’ It was always about power. That's how I'll remember her.” 

In an era where algorithms designed in Silicon Valley sow seeds of division to disrupt and destroy conditions for workers around the world, Jane’s approach offers hope of a reset button. 

She may not have had all the answers, but she knew the right questions. With the legacy she has left, and the thousands of people that have passed through her trainings: her organising is nowhere near done yet.