Jane McAlevey

Background

Jane McAlevey has been involved in movements and political campaigns throughout her entire life. McAlevey was the youngest of seventeen children, and her mother died of breast cancer when she was not yet in kindergarten. Her father was a locally elected politician—the county executive of Rockland County—who had innovated progressive land use planning concepts in suburban New York. As a little girl, she was exposed to raucous campaign politics.

By junior high school she was engaging in politics of her own, organizing student strikes and walk-outsover issues ranging from stopping nuclear energy to the possible reinstatement of the draft.

While at the State University of New York at Buffalo, in the spring of 1984 she was elected student government president at age 19, after being recruited, sweeping all six offices with her slate of candidates. She went on to be the president of the Student Association of the State University of New York (SASU), one of its most effective presidents. She orchestrated the takeover of the SUNY business office which resulted in the SUNY trustees voting to divest the university system from entities doing business in South Africa.

From Environmental Activist to Labor Union Organizer

McAlevey was recruited to move to California to work out of David Brower’s new Earth Island Institute on a project aimed at educating the environmental movement in the US about the ecological consequences of U.S. military policy in Central America. She was involved with EPOCA, the Environmental Project on Central America, one of Earth Island's projects. She risked her life on this project, helping protect environmental activists from attack by death squads.

After two years working on coalition building in the US and the international environmental movement, she was recruited to work at the Highlander Research & Education Center in Tennessee where she created a joint program between the Highlander Center and the National Toxics Campaign on globalization and toxics.

McAlevey became Associate Director of the Highlander Center, after being recruited, where her exposure to the thinking and mentorship of John Gaventa occurred, she eventually left the south and became a program officer at the Veatch Program, a foundation that is at the center of financing many progressive social change organizing organizations in the U.S.A. While at the Veatch program, she was involved in funding immigrant worker centers and union democracy institutes hoping to nurture the more progressive parts of the labor movement.

Labor Organizer

After the New Voices leadership came to power at the AFL-CIO, she was recruited by senior AFL-CIO leaders to work for their new organizing department and head up an experimental multi-union campaign in Stamford Connecticut. The Stamford Organizing Project, her first foray into union organizing, developed a model for social movement unionism that McAlevey calls “whole worker organizing approach.” Rather than focusing only on workplace issues, this approach requires attention to workers' relationships in their families and communities. Union members can draw on their relationships in churches, sports clubs, and informal businesses to support of the union campaign.

McAlevey's work has become the subject of considerable attention from both journalists and scholars, with chapters of books and journal length articles in several academic and contemporary journals, including: The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements, Building Community Unions, Race Meets Class in Stamford, CT, and It Takes A Community, Organizing Unions from the Outside In

From the AFL-CIO she was recruited to become the national Deputy Director for Strategic Campaigns of the Health Care Division of the SEIU (2002 to 2004). From there she was hired by the Nevada local as their Executive Director in 2004. From 2004 to 2006, the Nevada local had more hospital organizing wins than any other SEIU local. The Nevada local also reached the highest membership level in a right to work state in the history of the SEIU (more than 70% union wide), leading to unprecedented wins in Nevada including achieving fully employer paid family healthcare for every worker in the union.

In addition to her work on the ground, McAlevey continues to be a "thought" leader - penning pro-union pieces for The Nation: "Labor's Last Stand" and "Making Unions Matter Again" as well as contributing to the New Labor Forum and AlterNet.