![]() The project is significant for two reasons. When McAlevey went back to Connecticut this past winter, she hoped that the campaign would form the basis for a book about the whole-worker methodology. (McAlevey informally advised the New Yorker Union during negotiations for its first contract, which was signed in 2021.) If at any point during this past hot labor summer, or the decade leading up to it, you encountered a group of workers strutting on a picket line or jubilantly making demands well beyond the scope of their own wages, chances are that many of them had been reading McAlevey. She then leads workers through a series of escalating actions, from attending a meeting to wearing buttons to work to joining walkouts: she calls these “structure tests.” During the past decade, Amazon warehouse workers and Los Angeles teachers have drawn on McAlevey’s approach. She advises organizers to first conduct what she calls a power-structure analysis, which asks who has the power to change an issue (not always the most obvious targets) and what power workers have to influence those actors. Rather than instructing organizers to run as hard as they can in whatever direction they happen to be facing, McAlevey emphasizes strategy. She has written four books that have become touchstones for a new generation of labor leaders. In the intervening decades, McAlevey has become not just an expert organizer but a social scientist of organizing’s methodology. ![]() Their efforts also saved multiple public-housing projects from demolition, won fifteen million dollars for the units’ improvements, and secured new ordinances that mandated affordable-housing levels going forward. By the time the campaign finished, more than four thousand workers had their first union and new contracts to boot. “Workers relate more to their faith than to their job, and fear God more than they fear the boss.”) Soon the city’s most powerful preachers were hosting bargaining sessions in church basements. (“Note to labor,” McAlevey wrote about this campaign, years later. McAlevey began organizing workers in four different sectors-janitors, cabdrivers, city clerks, and nursing-home aides-and determined that they could exert influence through the city’s churches. This was not a problem that could be solved by unions alone, but unions, if strategically harnessed, had the horsepower to fight it. In the nineties, a lack of affordable housing in Stamford-located in one of the wealthiest counties in the country-overshadowed nearly every other issue on workers’ minds. McAlevey and her team told them, “This is a new program to bring power all of you have, but often aren’t aware of, to the table.”įor McAlevey, one of the nation’s preëminent labor organizers and strategists, the project presented a chance to revisit a strategy that she had advanced twenty-some years ago in Stamford, Connecticut, known as the “whole worker” method. For seven days, McAlevey and about two hundred other organizers went door to door, talking to thousands of people-mostly Black and brown women employed by nursing homes, group homes, and home health-care companies. The campaign’s goals were ambitious-to bring some twenty-five thousand home health-care workers into a fight not just against their bosses but against the broader social and economic problems weighing on them, including issues such as a lack of affordable housing, insufficient public transportation, and the need for debt relief. In union parlance, a blitz is a quick, concentrated organizing effort, designed to engage as many workers as possible in a short period of time. This past January, Jane McAlevey spent a week in Connecticut leading an organizing blitz.
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