Full Name
Jane McAlevey
Job Title
Senior Policy Fellow - Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, UC Berkeley
Speaker Bio
https://janemcalevey.com
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Jane McAlevey is an organizer. More recently, with a later-in-life PhD, she added author and scholar, writing three books on organizing, with a forthcoming new book in early 2023 on how to democratize union negotiations and build significantly more worker power by practicing transparent, big, and open negotiations. Her first book, Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell), was named the “most valuable book of 2012” by The Nation magazine. Her second book, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (2016), has been used as the basis of study groups with thousands of unionists. Her third book, A Collective Bargain, Unions, Organizing and the Fight for Democracy (2020), focuses on the links between the attack on workplace and civil democracy, and how the tactics of the right-wing can be overcome.
From 1984-2009, most of McAlevey’s time was spent organizing campaigns large and small, in a variety of arenas, but always organizing the multiracial working class to win on issues that matter. From 2010-2015, she earned a Ph.D., followed by a two-year Post Doc at the Harvard University Law School. She is the Strikes Correspondent for the Nation magazine. She is currently a Senior Policy Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley’s Institute for Labor & Employment Relations, where she teaches trade union and community-based organizations the core fundamentals of organizing, and now negotiating to win. She also designed and leads an international organizing training program in conjunction with the Rosa Luxemburg foundation in Germany that since the pandemic, has trained over 25,000 trade unionists worldwide in twelve languages. Her focus is teaching people how to win and win big, despite the challenges.
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Jane McAlevey is an organizer. More recently, with a later-in-life PhD, she added author and scholar, writing three books on organizing, with a forthcoming new book in early 2023 on how to democratize union negotiations and build significantly more worker power by practicing transparent, big, and open negotiations. Her first book, Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell), was named the “most valuable book of 2012” by The Nation magazine. Her second book, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (2016), has been used as the basis of study groups with thousands of unionists. Her third book, A Collective Bargain, Unions, Organizing and the Fight for Democracy (2020), focuses on the links between the attack on workplace and civil democracy, and how the tactics of the right-wing can be overcome.
From 1984-2009, most of McAlevey’s time was spent organizing campaigns large and small, in a variety of arenas, but always organizing the multiracial working class to win on issues that matter. From 2010-2015, she earned a Ph.D., followed by a two-year Post Doc at the Harvard University Law School. She is the Strikes Correspondent for the Nation magazine. She is currently a Senior Policy Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley’s Institute for Labor & Employment Relations, where she teaches trade union and community-based organizations the core fundamentals of organizing, and now negotiating to win. She also designed and leads an international organizing training program in conjunction with the Rosa Luxemburg foundation in Germany that since the pandemic, has trained over 25,000 trade unionists worldwide in twelve languages. Her focus is teaching people how to win and win big, despite the challenges.
