The New Yorker:

The renowned organizer and theorist died yesterday at the age of fifty-nine. From 2023: McAlevey explains why organizing is an art not of telling people what to do but of listening for what they cannot abide.

By Eleni Schirmer

This past January, Jane McAlevey spent a week in Connecticut leading an organizing blitz. 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. 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. 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. 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.”

For 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. 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. This was not a problem that could be solved by unions alone, but unions, if strategically harnessed, had the horsepower to fight it. 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. (“Note to labor,” McAlevey wrote about this campaign, years later. “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. By the time the campaign finished, more than four thousand workers had their first union and new contracts to boot. 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.

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