Jane McAlevey speaking at the 2018 Edinburgh May Day rally. Image by Pete Cannell CC0

Jane McAlevey 1964-2024

Activist and writer Ian Allinson pays tribute to and assesses the work of Jane McAlevey, the US-based organiser and author who popularised many organising concepts and techniques, and who inspired and trained thousands of activists.

Even for those of us who knew that Jane McAlevey’s cancer had returned with a vengeance, the news that she had stopped all work for hospice care came as a terrible blow. The context was set out movingly in her recent profile in the New Yorker, but it is still hard to imagine this hurricane of energy and enthusiasm being stopped. While she will be greatly missed and mourned, her impact lives on, and in this appreciation I will attempt to give a flavour of her work and the debates she was part of.

Jane McAlevey had a global impact which reached far beyond the organising campaigns she was directly involved in. This wasn’t just because her writing used a story-telling style that often made her books read more like thrillers than organising manuals or academic reports. In 2019 she teamed up with the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung to deliver online Organising 4 Power training which has reached 35,000 people from over 1,400 organisations in over 110 countries. More than that, despite depending on being paid for her organising and training work, Jane was enormously generous with her time and advice for individuals and groups who couldn’t pay her.

I am sure there are people all round the world with parallel experiences to my own. I first met Jane in 2014, when the late Colin Barker encouraged me to hear her talk at the Historical Materialism conference in London, having been impressed by her first (2012) book, Raising Expectations and Raising Hell, My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement. I was impressed enough to write up my notes for publication. Jane became friends with Colin and his wife Ewa, and stayed at their house in Manchester on a number of occasions. This gave me wonderful opportunities to pick her brains about her ideas and about challenges I was facing organising in my own workplace, round Colin’s kitchen table. In 2015 Jane delivered free organising training sessions in Manchester and London, hosted by rs21. Rob Owen interviewed her for our website the following year. When she was working on her PhD, which became her second book, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, I was among many people asked to comment on her draft, and then rs21 hosted her Manchester book launch, the video of which is online. Jane agreed to run a free training session hosted by Manchester TUC in 2018.

Though Jane was never shy of blowing her own trumpet to an extent that few in Britain would, she also built up those around her. Her books are full of praise for many of the people she worked with in campaigns, and her behaviour in person followed the same pattern. Her enthusiasm and confidence were infectious.

How new? How radical?

Jane was always clear that little of the approach she advocated was original, but she was deeply frustrated with union leaders who persisted in ‘choosing to lose’ by pursuing approaches that consistently failed. She was interested in working-class power, which she defined as ‘the ability to get what you want and stop that which you don’t want’ and believed that high participation was key, if not sufficient, for power. She understood that maximising power meant winning over, politically educating and organising new people, not simply mobilising those already convinced. In Jane’s view, workplaces offer great opportunities to build power because they are pre-existing ‘structures’ where you can speak to every worker, rather than only those who self-select to get involved. She argued that workers have to be able to cause disruption with a greater cost to decision-makers than the concession they want, and to create a crisis for those decision-makers to force them to act.

The focus on power led her to challenge assumptions common within unions and the left about who has potential power. She argued that a focus on ‘structural’ power (derived from workers’ position in the production process or the economy) often led people to focus on male-dominated industries such as manufacturing and logistics, and ignore feminised industries such as health, care and education, which make up a growing share of employment in developed countries. Her experience organising in health and care, and the waves of educators’ strikes which have swept the USA since the Chicago teachers’ strike in 2012, show that workers in these social reproduction industries can cause crises for governments.

Many of the techniques Jane advocated are fairly mainstream, even if they are important and often neglected, such as charting who is in each work group and planning structured one-to-one organising conversations. She popularised the idea that in every group of workers there are ‘organic worker leaders’ or ‘natural leaders’ who are trusted and respected by their colleagues and have disproportionate influence. Instead of ignoring them and relying on the most enthusiastic supporters, Jane argued for systematically identifying these influential workers and winning them over. She urged people to use ‘semantic drill’ to break the habit of using language that gave the impression that the union was a third party or left workers passive. She also advocated systematic ‘Power Structure Analysis’ to understand the power of our allies and enemies, and to map out the often under-valued connections of workers themselves. Inoculation is helping workers explore their fears about how management might react, so that the bosses’ poison has less effect.

‘Life is a structure test’ was one of Jane’s favourite sayings. A structure test is an action organised through your organisational structure of influential workers, where you record on your charts who takes part, so that you can assess your strength and identify weak areas. This useful concept is sometimes seized upon by union leaders to justify delaying or avoiding action. Similarly, the focus on organic worker leaders has been used by some officials to justify sidelining activists and subverting union democracy. Her ideas have been misrepresented by both the union bureaucracy and parts of the left.

Challenging the norms

Some of her ideas more clearly challenge labour movement norms. ‘Whole worker organising’ is an approach that recognises that workers have issues and connections far beyond their job and seeks to link them to the organising effort. This challenges any narrow and depoliticising focus on ‘jobs, pay and conditions’ alone, which undermines workers’ power and is particularly likely to limit the participation of women and other oppressed groups. ‘Wall to wall’ organising includes everyone in a workplace, irrespective of employer, occupation, employment status or which union they are in. This is a big challenge to the sectional ‘craft’ unionism that is prevalent in many industries, including health and education in Britain.

Her most recent book, Rules To Win By, focuses on some of her most radical ideas. Too often, particularly in large bargaining units, workers have little knowledge of negotiations, let alone participation. This misses opportunities to educate workers, fails to bring their power to the bargaining table, and makes it harder for workers to democratically control negotiations. ‘Open bargaining’ rejects negotiations being confidential and means workers can attend negotiations. ‘Big bargaining’ involves having lots (sometimes hundreds) of workers in the room. Employers hate this, but Jane argued that if we lack the power to force the employer to negotiate on our terms, we lack the power to win what we want and should focus on building that power rather than negotiating from weakness. Rather than a blueprint that might be impossible to follow in all circumstances, Rules To Win By outlines twenty key elements of high-participation, high-powered negotiations – and includes case studies of their use.

Jane explicitly argued against models of organising based on the ideas of Saul Alinsky, which are dominant in the USA and are increasingly influential in Britain, having been imported via various not for profit organisations. Unlike Alinsky, her model has a class-struggle belief system, is based on mass participation and political education, and rejects approaches to leverage and negotiation which marginalise the workers themselves.

Jane worked as an environmental and then union organiser, but never had experience as a rank-and-file worker activist. Though she was often involved in conflicts with union leaders, and these form an important part of Raising Expectations, she never experienced the structural conflict between rank-and-file workers and the union bureaucracy in the way many activists do. Her role as a paid organiser also influenced her perspective in other ways. Because she never articulated a structural analysis of the union bureaucracy, this allowed some officials to adopt many of her techniques but gut them of their class-struggle content. This opened the door to some of the misrepresentations highlighted above.

Jane was also  never convinced by the idea that there are waves of struggle, something she and Colin Barker repeatedly argued about. I think this was connected with an exaggerated view of the role of organising. As I argue in Workers Can Win, ‘We can’t wish a strike wave into existence. Organising is labour-intensive and there will never be enough paid organisers to close the unionisation gap.’ We can neither cause a new wave of strikes and unionisation, nor predict what the spark for such a wave will be, but what we do matters. And that sense of the power of activism was at the heart of her work.

A major reason why her training proved so popular was her brilliance at distilling her ideas down to a number of key concepts that were easy to grasp. This had the downside that people sometimes didn’t do the work to adapt them to their own circumstances. However, she has left thousands of workers inspired and better equipped to take on their bosses, some of whom already have important successes under their belts. Solidarity to all those grieving – Jane will be greatly missed but her work lives on in those struggles.