After main profitable campaigns for the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the Service Employees International Union from 1997 to 2008, Ms. McAlevey transitioned to consulting, teaching labor teams throughout the nation on methods to energize the rank and file, entice new members and combat off employers’ aggressive anti-union ways.
She additionally labored with immigrant rights organizations, tenant teams and local weather activists, and traveled internationally, advising German hospital unions, Irish communications employees and labor organizers in Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.
A magnetic speaker with a dry humorousness, Ms. McAlevey expanded her international attain in 2019. She led a free, intensive six-week on-line course, “Organizing for Power,” on the Berlin-based Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, a democratic socialist nonprofit. Over 4 years, 36,000 folks in 130 nations logged onto the workshops, which had been concurrently translated right into a dozen languages, together with Arabic, Hindi, Portuguese and Russian.
Ms. McAlevey ’s books and programs drew on long-established organizing methods, mentioned Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor schooling analysis at Cornell University. “But “Jane’s charisma and her instructing strategies impressed folks world wide, particularly younger folks, to make use of their rank and file energy to prepare.”
She additionally drew about 4,500 individuals over 4 years to workshops on the U.C. Berkeley Labor Center, the place she was a senior coverage fellow. In 2022, United Food and Commercial Workers native No. 770, a big Southern California union, despatched 100 members and staffers to the workshops because it ready to cut price with grocery chains, the group’s president, Kathy Finn, mentioned.
