Remembering Master Union Organizer and Strategist Jane McAlevey
Review of Rules To Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations by Jane McAlevey and Abby Lawlor (Oxford University Press, 2023)
Jane McAlevey passed early Sunday morning. It is hard to type these words, but doing so is a way to begin to come to grip with the reality that my friend is gone. I was asked to review what turned out to be her last book before Jane began her final battle in her fierce war with cancer.
I will miss her greatly: her warmth, her generosity, her ferocity, and her brilliance. We will miss her dedication to building lasting and durable power for working people. Too often, segments of our movement are seduced by “shiny new toys” that are grounded less in the wonderfully diverse working class and more in a constellation of political forces not accountable to that working class. Jane knew there are truly “no shortcuts” to building the Beloved Community most of us desire, but with faith in workers — real workers, in all their complexities — and hard and smart work, we can help workers struggle together, forge stronger collective bonds, build strong mass participation institutions, and change the world.
I first “met” Jane McAlevey in 2000. I put “met” in scare quotes because I really didn’t meet her — I read about her and her work in the Stamford Organizing Project . The project seemed one of the bright lights in labor as the movement struggled to find its way out of disastrous decline. A key element of the project was the notion that workers weren’t just workers, they were “whole workers” with relationships, social formations, concerns, hopes, and dreams that went far beyond the workplace; if unions respected this reality and dealt with workers’ lives both on and off the job, they could simultaneously win organizing campaigns and improve living conditions in working class communities.
I actually met Jane in person in 2003, when she gave a workshop on how to conduct a power analysis before the California Union Leadership School organized by the University of California’s Institute for Labor and Employment. Her presentation was deceptively simple: if we study the balance of forces that shape the context we seek to change and the power that working people (and their various relationships and organizations) bring to this context, then working people have the capacity to change this environment and improve their lives.
These principles — a view that working people are whole workers, an understanding of the need to build power to change the world, and a belief that working people have untapped potential power — have been central to McAlevey’s practice and writings. Her latest book, Rules to Win By: Power & Participation in Union Negotiations, is filled with examples supporting these principles. An example from the six case studies presented in the book highlights this. In 2016, nurses in the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals (PASNAP) carried out a tough fight for a better contract. The union analyzed the power dynamics in their situation and realized that a Black ministerial alliance — the Baptist Pastors and Ministers Coalition — had the power to influence the CEO of the hospital system they were battling. Because the union deeply engaged members in the power analysis, one member saw the name of the coalition, realized her pastor was head of the coalition, and immediately texted him for his support. As a result of the previously unrecognized relationship, the power of these Black ministers was wielded on behalf of the nurses.
This book is an extension of McAlevey’s previous three books. While all three books are filled with vivid examples of successful organizing, the examples reinforce different angles on the idea. Her first, Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement, is a memoir. Her second, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, is both a “how-to” book and an overview of successful contemporary and historical models of union and community organizing, important for its distinguishing between advocacy, mobilizing, and organizing models for social change. Her third book, A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy, highlights the role of unions in preserving and building democracy.
Rules to Win By combines the broader view of the centrality of unions to democracy with six detailed case studies of unions that have engaged in high-participation contract bargaining to advance members’ interests. McAlevey believed that the attack on democracy by the growing authoritarian movement in the United States manifests in the workplace as the attack on workers’ fundamental freedom of association through union-busting. But rather than simply issuing high-minded pleas for democracy, McAlevey argues that properly conducted negotiations are “democracy building,” and the more unions win at the bargaining table using the high participation approach, the stronger our democracy will be. This is because members will not engage their unions unless they believe unions are their tool to achieve a better life. (An obvious corollary beyond the workplace: people will not defend democracy if they do not believe democracy will improve their lives.)
In addition, high-participation bargaining changes the relationships both between workers and the company and workers and their union. On the former, the more workers sit across the table from their employers and see how the company attempts to stonewall their legitimate demands, the more workers see themselves as equals to their employer and see more clearly how the company’s interests are fundamentally opposed to their own. On the latter, the more a union methodically engages members at all steps along the bargaining process — formulating contract demands, negotiating with the company, discussing proposals with other members, ratifying the contract — the more the slogan “we are the union” is operationalized.
The book begins by detailing the three main components of high-participation bargaining: they are transparent (no ground rules, consistent communication with union members), big (large elected negotiating committees representing all groups of workers); and open (any worker can attend a session, and the goal is to get each worker to attend at least one session). McAlevey then presents twenty basic aspects to conducting high-participation bargaining, broad guidelines to be used creatively based upon a concrete analysis of a specific situation. The book’s case studies span the spectrum of situations workers and their unions find themselves in. Some cases involve public-sector unions, some private-sector; some cases are in sectors that are relatively fixed in a local place, some in sectors where technology’s threat to job security is central; one case involves a union with a history of progressive activism. One case involves a sector with tremendous demographic diversity; two cases involve statewide unions; one case is a union in Germany. Given the heterogeneity of union drives, a “one-size-fits-all” approach to using the elements would fail.
What is true across all the cases is the need to engage in a three-step power analysis. Step one requires an understanding of the relevant labor market, what power shapes labor market outcomes, and where the power of the employer fit into this. Step two requires an analysis of power dynamics within the workplace to understand where the union is strong, where it is weak, and what worker networks need to be engaged to strengthen the power of the union. Step three requires an understanding of how the relationships union members have outside the workplace can generate power that can be brought to bear on the employer.
The PASNAP case study provides several examples of the value of power analysis. In addition to the example above illustrating the importance of uncovering members’ relationships and how they fit into the broader power structure, the case also presented evidence of the importance of understanding the context within which the union’s contract campaign took place. In 2016, the union held a series of elections in hospitals throughout the city. One hospital, Albert Einstein Medical Center, began to employ standard union-busting tactics of delaying after the April vote in which a majority of nurses supported unionization. Among their tactics was filing charges against PASNAP and the regional office of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). A board finding in May dismissed their charges. After, the hospital continued refusing to recognize the union, a second finding was issued which re-affirmed the unionization vote. This second finding gave the hospital a deadline to appeal the ruling.
Normally, companies continue to stall hoping to demoralize the workers seeking union recognition. This time, the larger power dynamics — and hence, the importance of the power analysis — came into play. In 2016, Philadelphia was host to the Democratic National Convention. Leading up to the convention, unions belonging to the Central Labor Council (CLC) signed a labor peace agreement so the convention could proceed without the threat of disruption. At the time, PASNAP was independent of the CLC and thus not bound by the agreement. The hospital had not wanted to comply with the series of NLRB rulings mandating union recognition, but when faced with the prospect of nationally televised picketing of a largely female-workforce during a convention set to nominate the party’s first female presidential candidate, the Democratic power structure forced the hospital to find common ground with the union.
Another important component of high participation negotiations involves moving beyond pro-forma discussions with members and toward conducting structured conversations. In the case study of the New Jersey Education Association, the union had a history of holding bargaining surveys prior to negotiating with school systems. However, as they moved beyond the paper surveys toward targeted talks with members guided by specific open-ended questions, many members said, “No one ever asked me my opinion before.” This answer reflected the reality that members never made a strong connection between the survey and the union attempts to figure out key bargaining issues. This changed with the structured conversations, and the engagement of the members with their union deepened.
The case study of the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA) illustrates the importance of recognizing the historical context of the current bargaining. Greenfield, Massachusetts had a history of labor activism because the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) represents manufacturing plants in the region. This not only provided a legacy of militant unionism but also meant the area had a history of strong labor-community alliances which the MNA could build on. Equally important, the leaders of the 2017 contract campaign detailed in the book first came together during the bruising 2012 contract campaign. The previous campaign identified new leaders and tested key strategies and tactics. These experiences were the basis for the successful 2017 fight. Thus, the use of the twenty elements of high-participation bargaining occurred in a setting far different from the other case studies.
One lesson from the case studies of the NewsGuild-Communication Workers of America (NewsGuild-CWA) and UNITE HERE Local 26 was the need for representative bargaining committees. In the former case, NewsGuild-CWA was dealing with a rapidly changing industry and a change in ownership. The workers at the Los Angeles Times had never formed a union, and the shift from fiercely anti-union family ownership (the Otis and Chandler families) to ownership by a newspaper conglomerate (first, the Times Mirror Company and later the Tribune Company) brought with it a gradual disinvestment in the newspaper publishing business. In January 2018, LA Times workers voted to join the NewsGuild-CWA. That same year, the paper was sold to a biotech investor who pledged to reinvest in the paper.
Entering into negotiations, union leaders recognized that some departments were much more active in union affairs than others, so the interim executive committee of the union made sure the appointed bargaining team was comprised of representatives from all departments, not just ones that had traditionally been strong. The idea of having an appointed committee rather than an elected one “violates” one of McAlevey and Lawlor’s twenty elements, but it reflected the specific realities of the NewsGuild-CWA at the time, and the committee took great pains to adhere to other elements. With Local 26, the hotel workforce was extremely diverse, with union members hailing from countries throughout the world and no immigrant group claiming a majority in any department. Labor solidarity required a large bargaining team that reflected the membership’s diversity.
The case involving Vereinte Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft (ver.di) is interesting because it is a German union representing workers covered by sectoral bargaining. The challenge here was two-fold. First, the nature of this particular sectoral bargaining resulted in many workers feeling the union was a third party and not their organization. Second, under German sectoral bargaining laws, employers could avoid the sectoral agreements by outsourcing the work or simply seceding from the arrangement. These challenges forced ver.di to painstakingly strengthen the union through a series of activities building toward super-majority support.
In one of her final interviews, McAlevey said she wished she could write another book entitled Leave No Power on the Table. One can only imagine what insights that book would possess. Rules to Win By takes a very typical task that all unions face, engaging in collective bargaining, and lays out steps whereby, if done properly, members emerge from the process with a better contract and a stronger union. What other “mundane” union tasks — contract servicing, electoral work, engaging community organizations, supporting members in their challenges outside of the workplace — could be approached with the same level of concreteness and attention to the specificity of each context, with the intention of using each task as an opportunity to build greater member engagement and a stronger union? Understanding how to build a high-participation union in all these facets of union life would help us create a better workplace and create a vibrant democracy that works for working-class people — the project that McAlevey dedicated her entire life to.
[1] Janice Fine. Building Community Unions. The Nation, December 14, 2000 (.https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/building-community-unions/); Daniel HoSang. All the Issues in Workers’ Lives ShelterForce Magazine, May/June 2000 (https://shelterforce.org/2000/05/01/all-the-issues-in-workers-lives/)
