Jane F. McAlevey, who empowered workers across the globe, dies at 59

In her writings, including for The Nation, as what the magazine described as its “strikes correspondent,” Dr. McAlevey became a vocal critic of what she saw as the complacency, ineptitude, and corporate collusion of many US labor leaders.

“What almost no union does is actually organize their members as members in their own communities to build community power,” she said in an interview for this obituary in November. “I teach workers to take over their unions and change them.”

After leading successful campaigns for the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union from 1997 to 2008, Dr.
McAlevey transitioned to consulting, coaching labor groups nationwide on how to energize the rank and file, attract new members, and fight off employers’ aggressive antiunion tactics.

She also worked with immigrant rights organizations, tenant groups, and climate activists, and she traveled internationally, advising German hospital unions, Irish communications workers, and labor organizers in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

A magnetic speaker with a dry sense of humor, Dr. McAlevey expanded her global reach in 2019. She led a free, intensive six-week online course, “Organizing for Power,” at the Berlin-based Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, a democratic socialist nonprofit. Over four years, 36,000 people in 130 countries logged onto the workshops, which were simultaneously translated into a dozen languages, including Arabic, Hindi, Portuguese, and Russian.

Her books and courses drew on long-established organizing techniques, said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University. But “Jane’s charisma and her teaching methods inspired people around the world, especially young people, to use their rank-and-file power to organize.”

She also drew about 4,500 participants over four years to workshops at the University of California Berkeley Labor Center, where she was a senior policy fellow. In 2022, United Food and Commercial Workers local No. 770, a large Southern California union, sent 100 members and staffers to the workshops as it prepared to bargain with grocery chains, the group’s president, Kathy Finn, said.

As a result, the union opened staff-led negotiations to rank-and-file workers. The transparency led to “huge numbers of members voting to strike,” Finn said, a turnout that elicited corporate concessions, averting a walkout at the last minute. “More and more unions are using her tactics,” she said.

Jane Frances McAlevey was born on Oct. 12, 1964, in New York City. She was the daughter of John F. McAlevey, a local politician in Rockland County, New York, and Hazel (Hansen) McAlevey, who died of breast cancer when Jane was 5. She was the youngest of seven siblings.

Growing up in suburban Sloatsburg, N.Y., where her father was mayor, Dr. McAlevey accompanied him to campaign events, civil rights marches, and protests against the Vietnam War.

“I got the fighter pilot gene from my old man,” Dr. McAlevey said of her father, who flew bombers over Germany during World War II.

In college, at the State University of New York Buffalo, Dr. McAlevey was drawn into protests against tuition hikes and was elected student body president. She went on to lead the system’s 64-campus student association.

In April 1985, when the board of trustees was resisting divesting from companies doing business in South Africa, Dr. McAlevey hid a chain and padlocks under her dress and helped hundreds of students occupy a SUNY building. She served 10 days in jail for trespassing.

After college, McAlevey spent a year in Central America teaching people to read and rebuilding homes in a war zone in Nicaragua.

After a decade in the environmental justice movement, Dr. McAlevey joined the AFL-CIO to lead an innovative multiunion campaign organizing nursing home workers, taxi drivers, janitors, and city clerks in Stamford, Conn., a corporate hub with few union members at the time.

Workers were upset not just about wages and benefits but also about the lack of affordable housing in the Stamford area. Dr. McAlevey broadened the union campaign to push for housing, an approach she called “whole worker organizing.”

Labor organizing, she said, “is more than what happens when you punch the clock. It’s bigger than that. Do your kids have a good school to attend? A clean and safe park? Affordable housing? Transportation?”

Over four years, the Stamford Organizing Project would unionize and win contracts for more than 4,000 workers, as well as partner with community groups to save public housing from demolition.

After joining the Service Employees International Union in 2002, Dr. McAlevey undertook a campaign to organize nurses and other hospital staff in Nevada, which is a right-to-work state, in which employees cannot be required to join unions. This also meant that union-represented workers could forgo paying dues, weakening labor’s clout. She was credited with reviving a moribund local chapter and leading strikes to gain contracts with higher wages and better benefits.

But her four-year Nevada tenure was tumultuous. She was nicknamed “Hurricane Jane,” and some local union officials resisted her initiatives. Her biggest fight was with the SEIU’s national leadership, which at the time was forging private deals with hospital chains to restrict strikes in some areas, including Nevada, in exchange for tolerating organizing elsewhere.

Dr. McAlevey left the SEIU in 2008 and learned she had cancer in 2009. While recovering from surgeries over the following year, she wrote a memoir, “Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement” (2012), with journalist Bob Ostertag. It laid bare with unusual candor not just the tactics of worker combat with hospital chains in Nevada, but also the internal union power struggles that sabotaged its gains.

Her vivid account led to a new career. Invited to study for a doctorate at City University of New York, she turned her dissertation into a new book, “No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age” (2016). It dissected a dozen campaigns — both successes and failures — to offer a nuts-and-bolts guide for organizers.

Labor and progressive groups waste energy on “feel good” mobilizing and “eventism,” such as rallies of supporters and news conferences, Dr. McAlevey contended. She advocated “deep organizing” — patient, one-on-one conversations to persuade indifferent or hostile workers.

In September 2021, Dr. McAlevey, whose primary home was in Manhattan, learned her cancer had returned. She underwent chemotherapy and a bone-marrow transplant only to find out after collapsing on a picket line in Oakland that the treatment had failed.

Even after doctors told her that she had just weeks to live, she defied expectations, celebrating the publication of her fourth book, “Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations” (2023), traveling to Ireland to research a fifth book, and lecturing online to workers from New Zealand to Zambia.

She leaves four siblings: Benedict, John, Thomas, and Birgitta McAlevey, as well as two stepbrothers, Mitchell and Clifford Rotbert. Her sister Catherine died of breast cancer in 2013, and her brother Peter died of liver cancer in 2014.

In April, with her cancer “attacking with a ferocity that has taken away the breath even of my medical team,” as she put it, Dr. McAlevey posted an open letter to family, friends, colleagues and newsletter subscribers — titling it “I Have Loved Being in This World With You,” — reporting that she had entered hospice care at home.

Even as she spent her remaining time with loved ones, she wrote, she would be “loudly applauding every worker in every fight against what has become a rapacious, vicious new gilded age elite.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.