Factually! with Adam Conover - Organizing for Power with Jane McAlevey

Episode Date: March 22, 2023

Adam talks with legendary organizer Jane McAlevey about why organizing is the only way for unions, workers, and activists to win gains, and how to do it in practice. Pick up Jane’s book at��http://factuallypod.com/books Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You know, I got to confess, I have always been a sucker for Japanese treats. I love going down a little Tokyo, heading to a convenience store, and grabbing all those brightly colored, fun-packaged boxes off of the shelf. But you know what? I don't get the chance to go down there as often as I would like to. And that is why I am so thrilled that Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box, chose to sponsor this episode. What's gotten me so excited about Bokksu is that these aren't just your run-of-the-mill grocery store finds. Each box comes packed with 20 unique snacks that you can only find in Japan itself.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show once again. Let's jump right into it. Capitalism is coming for all of us, and the companies are more powerful than ever. They're getting bigger and bigger, and this century we have seen the creation of brand new strategies the companies use to dominate and crush workers, finding new and exciting ways to exploit us and pay us less. The only way for the little guys, that's us workers, to fight back and provide for

ourselves is for us to come together and fight collectively for what we need. In other words, when you're fighting against a big adversary, you need to make yourself big. And that is what a union does, at least when a union does when it's supposed to. See, unions don't always work. They're organizations that sometimes get flawed. They stop using member power, and instead they try to fight through the courts or through marketing campaigns or through lobbying politicians. And when they do that, they usually start losing. What makes a union work is something more fundamental, and that is organizing. Organizing is the process by which individuals come together to figure out our common

needs and then build power to fight for those needs. It's how real unions win our gains by forcing concessions from the management. And it's also how other movements have won gains throughout American history, whether that's auto workers, farm workers, or civil rights advocates. Organizing is how we win. It's the fundamental building block of positive change. And here on the show today, we have an incredible expert who is going to tell us about exactly how to do it. But before we get to that, I want to remind you that if you want to support this show, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Just five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad-free and a bunch of other goodies, and you'll be supporting me and this show, and I thank you for doing so. And just a reminder, I am also going on tour this year, doing my brand

new hour of Stand-Up Comedy Live. If you're in Austin, Texas, come see me between March 23rd and 25th. And I'm also going to be in San Francisco in May, San Antonio later in May, and Batavia, Illinois, just outside Chicago in June. Head to adamconover.net for tickets. And now let's get to the interview. My guest today is Jane McAlevey. She is a legendary organizer and organizing trainer. And she is the author of the new book, Rules to Win By, Power and Participation in Union Negotiations. She is absolutely a luminary and leading light of the labor movement. And I am so honored to have her on the show. Please welcome Jane McAlevey.

Jane McAlevey, thank you so much for being on the show. I am so excited to be here, Adam. Thank you. I'm so excited to have you because you're a legendary organizer, a legendary trainer of organizers. Last year, I read one of your earlier books, No Shortcuts, which has been really invaluable to me in my own organizing work. I'm actually, folks who listen might know, I'm a member of the Writers Guild of America West. And this year, I am actually on folks who listen might know, I'm a member of the Writers Guild of America West. And this year I am actually on our negotiating committee. And as we sit here recording this, we're going to negotiations next Monday. And so you're kind of the perfect person for me to talk to.

I can't really talk about those negotiations in detail because I'm under strict confidentiality. Oh, we're going to talk about that. But anyway, that's great. Okay, great. Oh, I'm so excited for this. I don't believe in those, just so you know. And it's the first thing I say in the book. But anyway, continue.

I love that. Okay, so you're the perfect person for me to talk to. And I think for our listeners to hear from at this moment when we're under so much pressure from so many giant companies and organizations that are crushing us to a pulp. And we're trying to figure out what can we as little people do to fight back? How can we organize? You have a new book out and you bill it as a guidebook on participatory social change. What does that mean and what's it about? Oh, God, that's like what, you know, some marketer at Oxford University Press did.

That's unfortunate. Seriously, that's unfortunate. To me, you know, it's called Rules to Win By, Power and Participation in Union Negotiations. So that's really the title. And it's filled with methods and great stories and case studies. And it connects the dot between, you know, the dismantling of American democracy and the dismantling of workplace democracy. Right. One came first. That would be the dismantling of workplace democracy to the degree that it existed for some short period of time. And I draw links to Welcome to the United States, you know, now with the Supreme Court out of control,

monopoly power, that's totally insane. Bank, Silicon Valley banks that don't follow deposit rules and we're bailing them out today. Like corporate greed at like, you know, an epitome of power and a concurrent lack of rights for all of us. Anyway, the book is by accident in some ways incredibly well-timed, not just for your negotiations, by the way, but because there's a lot to learn about how negotiations and how we conduct them has so many lessons for like policymaking going up against loony bins like Marjorie Taylor Greene and the current house and things like that. So the book goes back and forth between some quaint notion that there once was like respectful employers who sat down respectfully with workers at the negotiations table 40 years ago, you know,

and that there used to be like polite negotiations in the Senate and the House and between the two to do budget reconciliation. And that crap went out the door with, you know, the era of the Tea Party. And I just I parallel it. And frankly And I just, I parallel it. And frankly, I don't just parallel it, I talk about how to beat it. Beat it, how do we beat it? So that's what I'm all about, is how do we teach people how to win,

despite all this crap? Well, okay. I mean, how do we win? I presume you don't think we do it by sitting down and being nice and having respectful negotiations. Because a lot of people want that. They say, well, why do unions have to go on strike?

Why do negotiations have to be contentious? Why can't cooler heads just prevail and treat things rationally like adults? Yeah. Wouldn't that be great? Look, for starters, I think, Adam, we know that actually on our side, we are prepared to do that. I mean, I say in the book on negotiations and preparation with every single committee of workers I've ever had the pleasure of leading through negotiations, I start by saying, and I say it across the table to the employer, and we say it, of course, in our caucuses ahead of time, look, we're going to give this employer the benefit of the doubt.

We're going to assume that they're actually here to negotiate with us. Now, if we know that we're going up against Jackson Lewis lawyers and a multi-billion dollar union busting operation, obviously, I know that that's not true. But I'm going to try and own it in the opening session anyway. I'm going to try and create the mature grown-up space that I believe workers occupy, everyday workers, who have far less power than the companies that we're going up against. And I'm going to open it by saying, you know, we are here, in fact, to ask you to share a little bit more of the profits so that the people who actually co-produce the profits with you can have

a better life. And if you're game for that, then we can get in and get out of here pretty quickly. Could be smooth, could be great. The amount of times that's happened in my life as a negotiator in 25 years, I can count on one hand. And luckily, I actually have had that experience, you know what I mean? Because it's important for me to be able to contrast what a non-ideological, non-class war employer feels like at the table versus one who's literally out to just kill the union and kill the workers in the process. So that's most of my life are those other types. So yeah, as an opening salvo, I think, you know, the new book is a sort of an evolution organizing for power. The one that you read subtitle is important because I think it's really true right now.

Organizing power in the new gilded age. Roddy wrote those words in 2016. We are in the new gilded age and bailing out the Silicon Valley bank where no one followed the rules. The libertarians just put their money in, didn't pay any extra insurance, and now they're going to get bailed out. And we can't bail out college students from bad debt. I mean, give me a break. Right. So the power is so insanely skewed in this country that only with really good organizing. And I think negotiations is tied to that only with really good what I mean by organizing and which we should come to in a minute. Do we stand a chance of actually beating these people and

meting some justice back for everyday people? Because, you know, the billionaires are really off the leash. They spent the pandemic flying out to their yachts. You know, I have all these crazy statistics from reading the Financial Times. That's my favorite paper to read, the British version of the Wall Street Journal, because they're much more clear about class war. You read the Wall Street Journal and they pretend that you can put yourself up by the bootstraps and stuff. You know, over in the Financial Times, where they're used to having royalty and stuff, they're just like, yeah, we have the money and the power. We have yachts and y'all can die. You know, much more clear in the British class war system. But anyway,

so the new book, like all of my books, really is a focus on how do ordinary everyday people learn to take on these corporations? And so that's what the new one is about. And I think we could jump off even on something that you said, which is that you're not allowed to talk much about your negotiations, which is fascinating to me. Please. Yeah. I mean, yeah. What is your view on that? That's the way that we do things in the Writers Guild. It's one of the unions I'm a member of. But I actually know from reading your previous work that that's not an approach that you suggest that unions take and why is that? Yeah. I basically think, so for everyday people, we have one source of power, just one. That's our large numbers. That's it, right?

The media company, the world, you're in the media companies we're going up against, literally have the media. The corporations have the military. They've got all the money in the media. The corporations have the military. They've got all the money in the world. And what everyday people have is one simple access to power, and that is that we outnumber them by a lot. So we hear the phrase a lot, the 99% versus the 1%. And I have to tell you that phrase grates on my, it's like nails on a chalkboard for me when people say it. Yeah, because that's all potential power. That's all just theoretical. I mean, if it was as simple as,

oh, it's 99% versus 1%, we wouldn't have a planet on fire and being destroyed, atmospheric rivers happening in California, snowstorms happening in front of me right now in New York City in March, late March, whatever day, mid-March with a blizzard happening, you know, tornadoes and rolling for the 90th time through Kentucky, right? I mean, they're destroying the planet and they've destroyed a lot of the quality of life for most people. And the pandemic really exposed how little the employer class cares about workers. So if it was as simple as saying, hey, we're the majority, it's the 99 percent versus the 1 percent. Well, then it would be easy. We could all go home and we'd look like Sweden in 1978.

You know, there's a there's a wish in that in that sentence and the 99 percent versus the 1 percent. And it it makes people frustrated because you say, well, hold on a second. If there's so many of us and so few of them, why aren't we winning? We should, but we're not. So how do we? Exactly. Yeah. So it starts by the negotiations, the approach to negotiations that I lay out in the book, that's official publication date is March 21st, is called high power, high participation. Or actually it's called High Power, High Participation. Or actually, it's called High Participation, High Power. I used to call it transparent, big and open negotiations when I was writing about it a couple of years ago.

And I'm a little obsessive about semantics in our work, because I think the words we use matter. So I realized everything I'm describing really adds up to high participation and high power. So if our side has one strategic advantage, which is our numbers, then our challenge is to turn them from numbers into an organized force. So how do we go from random large numbers into a super majority, super majority strike where every single worker can walk off the job until the employer does actually what we start out negotiations saying we're here to do, which is have a little fairness negotiated. And if the employers only agreed to that kind of fairness, we wouldn't have to go on strike, Right. That's the point. But so so so I think in order for people to participate, this is not a novel idea, by the way. In order for people to participate, which is what our side requires.

Right. You don't get to 100 percent outstrike. That's 100 percent participation. 100% outstripe, that's 100% participation. You don't, in my life experience, you don't get to that unless there's a hell of a lot of participation, which means there's a hell of a lot of an understanding about what's going on, for example, in the negotiations process. So when I was trained as a young negotiator by people who were from the original, like 1199, I have to say the original because 1199 today is a little bit different than it was 50 or 60 years ago. So it's the world, by the way. But the people who trained me, I'm three generations from the founders of 1199. And we can all literally, in our union, we can trace who was trained by who. We actually do it. And we know exactly what

training we got. Just tell me a little bit more about the name of that union, 1199? Yes. Thanks. Good question. District 1199 was the voluntary, it was called at the time, the Voluntary Health and Hospital Union, began in New York City. It's the only union that both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King would jointly come to strike lines. And there's amazing photographs in the union hall I grew up in showing the two of them together. It was really a black union and certainly communist or socialist or red in the best sense of that word, as were many of the unions of that generation. And it escaped McCarthyism in some interesting ways. Now that I finally stopped running campaigns nonstop long enough to read more history

and then write some books about it. But like 25 years, I didn't stop. So I kept thinking, how did our union escape the destructive force of McCarthyism? And it's because 1199 was new at the time. It didn't have the history that a lot of the industrial unions had at that point. And they honestly, they didn't see black and brown women in the hospital sector as a threat yet. They would go on to absolutely see the union as a serious threat, like when Malcolm X and Martin Luther King showed up, for sake of argument.

So the people who trained me. It's a very historic union. Unbelievable. And the best of it, I mean, the local I come out of, 1199 New England, that's the union that trained me in the basics of the negotiations that we'll discuss and in the basics of organizing. I think I added elements to the work there, which was a struggle and a pleasure in the end. And I'm back doing a bunch of work with them right now, actually. But that's a more advanced thing. So let's get there afterwards about what I'm doing with my old union right now. But what they trained me was, the basic concept was, the more workers in the room, the better.

Yeah. The more workers in the room representing every single kind of worker covered by the collective agreement. Let's just start there. If in something like a hospital or something like your industry, in any industry, there's like a ton of different positions. And what the labor movement and what most unions tend to do is elect. If they elect them, elect or appoint one of the two, very, very small committees. And then they hire either a negotiation specialist or they hire a lawyer. Mostly it's a lawyer. I mean, this is typical. And then it's a very small committee compared to the size of the workforce. It's not representative, meaning not every kind of worker is there,

not every kind of worker based on the kind of shift they do is there. If they have a multiple shift kind of an environment. And then often one of the first things they do is negotiate gag rules, it's called ground rules. And the ground rules, which are permissive, they're permissive, this is super important. There's all these, you know,issive. They're permissive. This is super important. There's all these, you know, labor law is not meant to be understood. First of all, I call it management law because it's for the bosses.

So management law, otherwise known as labor law, is really not meant to be easily understood. It's totally Byzantine. So part of what the new book does, and it really is the first book ever written for the worker side, ever. It's always management, getting to yes. There's always huge trade books on management, on management negotiations. There's industrial relations books written for people with PhDs. And there's

nothing for our side. So this book fills that gap, right? It's like me talking in story tone. As I mentioned to you, I open it up with a up with a story that depicts what happens in this country. We'll come back to that in negotiations. But there's three kinds of topics in negotiations frameworks. There's subjects that are permissive, subjects that are mandatory, and subjects that are prohibited. So there's three categories under labor law. We'll just call it labor law. Just note that I call it management law, really, but under labor law, those are the three categories. And what I argue in the book is that things go from permissive. The boss doesn't have to agree to talk about them and we don't have to agree. I argue that things go from the column called permissive to mandatory based on the power that

we build across the negotiations table. But let's start with one that I love, which is ground rules. Ground rules, which is when, you know, the union, which I would prefer to think of as a group of workers, sits down with the people from the management side, before negotiations begins and hammers out something called ground rules. As a young negotiator, my left-wing and brilliant mentors said, never, McAlevey. Never. They never called me Jane. I don't even know what that word is, right? I was called McAlevey my entire, I'm still called, but I was just with them. You know, the old guard, they're like, McAlevey, how things going? You know, it's like, never called Jane. So it was like, McAlevey, don't ever sign ground rules. And don't ever sign a gag order, which is the most typical

form of a ground rule. And don't ever limit the engagement of the workers, participation in their own negotiations process. So that most people in most unions, because I've worked with a lot at this point, and now it's worldwide, right? Now I work all over the world with unions. And most people believe that ground rules are mandatory, that you must discuss them with the management side law firm or whoever it is representing management. And then most people think that you actually must agree to gag rules of some kind. And the gag rules can be really egregious. They go from a loose version of you can't talk to the press. That's one form of them, which I wouldn't agree to any of these. Two, you can't tell anyone outside of the room what's happening in negotiations, meaning the members of the union.

That's 90 to 95 percent of American unions agree to that clause. The super vast majority of negotiations in America take place with members not knowing what's going on in the negotiations room. I find that astounding. And also, it's just so common. So every place I've ever gone subsequent to leading a union and been brought in to lead negotiations, the very first thing I say is, so what's the logic behind not having our members engage day to day in the negotiations process, especially if it's going to take a lot of power to win that which the workers want to win? That's just an open question. Well, look, I'm a member of two unions, OK, without getting too much into detail about them. I'm a member of the Writers Guild of America West. I'm also a member of another entertainment union,

which I won't name because I don't want to cast too many aspersions. Okay, it's SAG-AFTRA. And so I'm a member of the Writers Guild of America West. We have a very democratic, largely transparent process. I have a feeling if you looked at the whole process, you'd probably find some areas where you're like, I think you could be even

more democratic and transparent than you are in area ABC. But but in my view, we we organize the members. We you know, we have gigantic meetings where members are able to ask whatever question they have of the people leading the negotiations. We actually change the negotiating strategy based on what they say. We update them regularly. We're about to head negotiations for two weeks after we come regularly. We're about to head into negotiations for two weeks. After we come out, we're going to give everybody an update and move on from there. It's like very, very participatory.

SAG-AFTRA, on the other hand, has some meetings that don't really mean anything with people who aren't involved in negotiations that you can participate in if you want. Then they head into negotiations. They tell you nothing about what's happening. They come out at the end and they say, hey, we got a great deal. Vote yes. And that's all that they that's all that they tell you. And then last time we had one of those, we all voted yes. And then we turned out we took a health care rollback that they didn't tell anybody about. And thousands of members were kicked off of their health care. member of SAG-AFTRA. I'm proud of the union. I receive a lot of benefits from being a member of that union. I'm supportive of it. But, you know, these are two unions that operate in very different ways. And I think the norm for American unions is probably the latter, which is why I don't, which is why I feel even bad for casting aspersions, right? Because there's a lot of good

folks who are working really hard in the traditional way that a lot of American unions work. It just happens to be a way that, you know, we feel is less productive and the results bear that out. So why is it that unions that have, you know, have a history of, you know, radical worker democracy in America, that was the philosophy and there's been thinkers such as yourself for the last 150 years of union history pushing that. Why are we in a situation where so many unions behave the opposite

and they don't actually organize their workers? They instead behave in a top-down way that results in rollbacks and things like that. I know that's a huge question, but that's what's foremost in my mind hearing you talk about it. Yeah. Oh my God, I almost forgot.

We have to take a quick break. This conversation has been so good. So I'm going to have to ask you to answer that question after the first ad break. So we'll be right back with more Jane McAlevey when she answers the incredibly long question I just asked her. Okay, we're back with Jane McAlevey.

Jane, why don't so many American unions organize? Why are they not transparent and why are they not democratic? What is the source of that shift? I think there's a lot of reasons, but I think it comes down to, you know, some people say it's because, you know, the more the more transparent the functioning of the union is, the more you involve the workers, the more workers might have a different idea than that. I call them position holders. I mean, leadership to me means something specific. And position holder means people who are holding positions. A lot of times in these same unions, I prefer to say they're position holders versus leaders. So, you know, if you want to hold

on to your position, the less people know about how the organization functions, the less they're going to know about running for office against you or something like that. Right. So that's at the most cynical level. And by the way, that's true in plenty of unions, okay, at the local level, national levels. It's true. On the other hand, I think even for the set of unions that I call the unions that are still trying, categories, so the unions that are still trying to, like, make advances, win things, not lose the health care plan, not to tear it, not whatever they're doing. And even for those unions, they tend to be risk averse. Organizing work is hard. It's hard. It's actually really hard work. Like I don't you know, I run 16, 18, 20 hour days for months on end in a campaign. And that's absolutely no exaggeration. And it's risky. Well, that's yeah. And they're risk averse. Right. And that's absolutely no exaggeration. And it's risky. Well, yeah, and they're risk averse, right? So that's the thing.

If you have a union that has resources and you occasionally get an audience with the Biden White House and some state laws get passed that are good for you and you're terrified of the conditions around you. And you're just trying to hang on. It makes them risk averse. I would argue at this point, teetering on fascism, and I do not use that word lightly.

I would never have used that word even six or seven years ago. I would have been like, don't use that word. It's not helpful. We're actually teetering towards, I mean, if you look at DeSantos, massive book banning, libraries being taken over. You know, we can't talk about black history. I mean, we are, we have a Supreme Court, again, unaccountable, out of control. And you look at a set of factors right now, and we are actually in trouble. So at this point, it's like, I appreciate your risk aversion for the last 25, 30 years. I say to union leaders all the time, but what the hell right now? I mean, we know that there's at least two immediate crises we're facing,

which suggest it's time to stop being so risk averse. One is the climate crisis. And the kind of trade union leaders that you and I are talking about, when I talk about the unions that are still trying, these are well-intentioned people. They believe in climate science. They know there's a problem. But the sense of urgency has somehow not changed. And I don't really understand that because for a lot of my life, I would say, all right, well, we'll change this union. We'll win this contract. We'll improve this union. We'll win this contract. We'll just keep doing it until we get more success and now i'm at the point where it's like that clock is different that clock is really different because the climate crisis is super real i mean i was in the bay area for the eight atmospheric rivers in

a row um in december and early january before escaping it was like escape from entebbe or something was insane trying to get on an airplane at SFO and like take off in the middle of the storms. It was nuts. So, you know, so I think that's one reason why the time for at risk aversion and being safe over it. I am I am over it and prepared to call out every trade union and social movement leader on this question, because the clock is ticking. And if people, if you just look out the window every day, and I'm looking at a snowstorm in New York right now, it's like the clock is ticking. And then secondly, I was going to say, I was going to say the fascism thing is ticking. I mean, we are losing the Supreme Court. You know, this, they're taking up a case this session,

The Supreme Court, you know, they're taking up a case this session that's going to try and functionally make unions. It's going to be another death blow towards having strikes. So one thing I want to say in this show is now we have to agree for illegal strikes. Right. Do you know that case, Glacier Northwest? I don't. Please tell me about it. Tell me about it. Okay. So the U.S. Supreme Court, getting very little attention, went and did what they've been doing on every labor law, every labor-related case or worker rights-related case since 2012. There's been a whole series.

It started with Knox v. SEIU. There's been, you know, I document them. So the latest one that people do not even know about is called Glacier Northwest versus the Teamsters. out is called Glacier Northwest versus the Teamsters. And it, in essence, is going to break, you know, private sector labor law says the National Labor Relations Board, defunded, maimed, deflated as it is. But then we still have rights, workers still have rights under the National Labor Relations Act. And we still have rights in the private sector under the National Relations Board. We do. And I like to take advantage of them every day. What this case does is it says it's going to remove decision-making around strikes from the federal protections and the judicial system called the National Relations Board. We should talk about this. It's actually

very significant. You know, when, yeah, let me just finish the sentence and come back to how the judicial system within the National Labor Relations Act works. Because it's like labor law has its own mini court system, right? And that's where legal fights begin. So what this Supreme Court case is doing is it's going to say it's basically changing it. So it's I got to get this down faster. It's changing it so that unions will be held liable for damages caused by a strike. This is a very vicious right wing lawsuit. And the way they're going to do it, it's a mechanism because under the National Relations Act, you couldn't sue a union for damages for going on strike. It's not, we have a protected right to strike. So what this case does is it's going to set a precedent.

And by the way, let me just boldly predict right now, the case is going to go through the way the bosses want. It's a bold prediction. Okay. They didn't, this case just came out of nowhere, which means the Supreme Court, the right wing on our Supreme Court went and poached the case that no one had ever heard of. Every liberal lawyer I worked with. Put it on the docket. Put it on the docket. A case that's like literally was not on anyone's radar. They put it on the docket. So it's, it's gonna, it's gonna go with the employer's decision because we have a right wing Supreme Court, most pro-business Supreme Court since the last Gilded Age.

That's a fact. Judicial analysis as right-wing as the 1920s and the last Gilded Age. So they're going to rule in favor of this company, Glacier Northwest, where cement workers, by the way, the story is they were going on strike. The boss has been completely recalcitrant at the bargaining table, making no movement in negotiations. The workers announced a strike. These are cement truck drivers. They have some structural power. They announced a strike. They gave the boss more time to be reasonable at the table. Boss went to impasse. Workers said, fine, we're going on strike and drove their cement trucks in and turned off the key and left. So like 150 trucks got ruined because the cement went dry in them.

So they're suing the union for damages over their unwillingness to negotiate a contract, right, in essence is what the case is about. And so what it's going to do is shift it to like tort and liability and damages law, which is how they're going to actually break the National Labor Relations Board. They're breaking the act in this case. So people need to get even better at the work that I like to teach workers to do, because now it's not just, talk about risk averse unions, now it's not just, are you going to go on strike? It's, are you prepared to take an illegal strike? And that has to be all of us. And to take an illegal strike. Are you prepared to be sued by the companies? Not just are the

workers going to be able to take on the risk and the potential sacrifice of a strike, but is the union itself prepared to be sued by the companies for, in the case of, I don't know, an entertainment union, oh, we had to cancel a movie. So we're going to cancel you. We're going to charge you $100 million. Yeah. Yes. For real. And people said to me, oh, it's just going to apply to like that cement truck thing. And I said, are you smoking crack?

Like, have you been watching the Supreme Court? Like, I do health care strikes and education strikes mostly. Like, that's the work I've been in. Right. And, you know, when we strategically target like elective surgery, since we since we want to kill people, but we want to cost the employer money. We're doing a hospital strike. Right. We're going to shut elective services down. Right. For sake of argument, because that's where all the big money is for hospital CEOs. So doesn't hurt anyone. They're elective surgeries. This is one example. You bet your bottom dollar that they're going to come right at us and say, you cost, you cost the hospital X many millions of dollars in elective surgeries

for the week you were out on strike. So that's going to be built on in June. That's the point of a strike is to cost the company's money and say, well, look, as someone who is a participant in this kind of organizing, you always have people who say they want to make the moral case first. They want to say, we deserve more. Let's make that case to the companies and explain to them why. And my understanding is, well, you go and you make that case. You say, hey, workers deserve more.

Here's our sad story. We can't make ends meet. People are losing their health care, et cetera, et cetera. And the companies hear the moral case. And then the lawyers and business people on the other side say, oh, well, that's very sad. No, we can't afford it. Like, bye. And that's it.

And then so what do you do next is the big question. That's right. And the question and the answer is you have to make it more expensive for them to not give you what you want than it is to give you what you want and you make it more expensive by withholding your labor and letting the the cement dry in the cement trucks making the movie not be made whatever it is that is your only source of power right at the end of the day and if they're going to sue you for that, for costing them that money, well, then that undermines your entire – the only power that you have as a worker. Am I getting it right? You are totally getting it right.

That's what's about to come down. And people don't know it. And I think that people don't even know about it, honestly. Glacier Northwest versus Teamsters. I think people don't even know about it. Do you remember the Janus case in 2018? Okay. So the reason why I think, this is going a little bit to a criticism of some of my- This is a case that let people not pay dues, right? It let in public employee unions that they could be a member of the union, but they didn't have to pay dues if they didn't want to,

which has had a really negative effect on some unions, I understand. Like I saw a figure here at UTLA, the public teachers union here in Los Angeles, that a pretty large portion of their membership had opted out of dues under this decision, which is like starving the union. It's allowing people to freeload and to get the benefits of the union contract without actually paying into the union that gave them those benefits in the first place. Yes. But two things.

One is actually I think UTLA is at this point doing fine in terms of the membership numbers, but many other unions are not. But again, this was an architecture of power question. So when I talk about negotiations, I talk a lot about creating the architecture of power. The right wing is better at it than we are. I mean, better than most of us. Right. So what they're doing with the Janus decision did was in right to work states, which were 25 of the 25 states for a long time. Now it's 27 of them under right to what's called the right to work for less you know i call it but the right to work laws basically the former confederate slave holding states you know became immediately right to work states under labor law it's just just a simple fact um so they always had the ability within the public sector um to do that and the right wing couldn't get at the new yorks the californias the washingtons the New York's, the California's, the Washington's,

the Massachusetts's, the New Jersey's. And what the right wing was trying to do was gut our funding in national elections. They're super clear about their objective, right? So they could not, like, if you read the literature on the Janus case, which of course I did, um, their, all their statements were about, their real statements were about gutting the power of unions because they understand that unions stand between them and really the Gilded Age for all of them. Yeah, because unions are a big supporter of non-right-wing politicians nationally. And we believe in regulation. Yeah. And if they can undermine those unions in those other states.

We believe in health and safety laws, Right. We believe that that in a pandemic, workers should have the right to stay home until they have a mask, until we know what the pandemic is like. We believe in not killing ourselves. So that's a that that means we believe in regulation. We believe in vaccines, whatever it is. Right. It's like we actually believe in laws. We believe in environmental laws. We believe in. So that's regulation. actually believe in laws. We believe in environmental laws. We believe in, so that's regulation. And, you know, a whole bunch of people in the power structure are not interested in any regulation and unions are a form of regulation, right? We're regulating the workplace where we exist, right? We're a form of regular, we hold back the employer from killing us on the job if, if we're strong enough to do it. And, and by the way, that wasn't the case during the pandemic. I mean,

the death toll among workers, if we get real, was extraordinary. Among healthcare workers, the people I work with who had to go in every day and wrap their arms around people with plastic suits and no masks at the height of the pandemic, the number of healthcare workers who died on the job and brought the pandemic home to their families or decided to sleep in their car for weeks on end because they didn't want to go into their house was so amazing. And it's like, we forget already how intense that period was. So the Janus case is really important. Architecture of power. I'm just going to say those words again. The Janus case wanted to be able to weaken California, Washington, New Jersey, New York.

All these states where huge money was still going into the national coffers of political races. And they couldn't do it because they're democratically governed states with mostly democratic politicians who wouldn't make their state's right to work. They had to take a case in the Supreme Court to change national law, to fabricate national law, and now say the entire public sector is essentially right to work because they made up a fiction that dues were a threat to your freedom of expression. I mean, First Amendment rights. This is total insanity. So and it's the national law now. Glacier is the same for the private sector. In essence, it's removing the ability of the National Relations Act to govern workers and labor law by putting it under liability law. a million little lawsuits in every strike. I got to say that that's going to mean the pressure by the more conservative, small C, small C. And I'm talking about some good people, but conservative actors in the labor movement, it's going to push them even further from strikes.

And so rank and file workers and everyday workers and members are going to have to push, you know, I was just part of the 48,000 person strike in the UAW because I have a position at Berkeley. So we're going to have to push even harder to force unions to say the choice to not continue to challenge organized capital right now and corruption and big corporations is a choice literally to die, is to have the next generation dying in heat and floods and fires and starving and not having pensions. And we know that we can win when we do the work right. And that's what every one of my books shows. We actually can keep winning a lot. Like we actually can beat them. And there's a set of methods and a set of disciplines and practices. And when we do them, we win. And that's really important. Well, I want to hear what those methods and a set of disciplines and practices. And when we do them, we win. And that's really important. Well, I want to hear what those methods and practices are, but we got to take one more quick break. We'll be right back with more Jane McAlevey.

So, Jane, you said right before the break that there is a set of practices that we can use to beat them. This is what we need to hear. This is what people have come to this interview to hear. What are those set of practices that everyday people can use to beat these gigantic corporations, even as they are winning Supreme Court cases that are lessening our structural power? Yeah, exactly. Ironically, the words you just used, I'm going to pick up on. So traditional workplace organizing is what falls under a category that I call structure-based organizing. And the structure is the workplace. And this is going to sound a little bit technical, but it really actually matters. And it matters for

the climate justice movement, and it matters for everyone. I was taught a method, which when my mentors taught it to me, they didn't say, you're learning structure-based organizing. They just said, here's how you're going to organize 100% strike. You're going to make sure that in every single department and in every single shift, there's at least 90% participation in the life of the organization day in and day out. And how are you going to do that? You're going to start by first of all, understanding that there is a structure that you have to map and understand and chart. And charting, this word charting that I use and teach all the time, is about understanding human power relations just among the workers. And to be honest, there always is one. So

there are workers who are leaders and lead their co- one. So there are workers who are leaders and lead their coworkers. And there are workers who are very committed activists, but for any number of reasons are not the kind of coworkers who can lead their workers into a high-risk strike. A typical what I call organic leader is someone who's often one of the best on the job. Management knows it. is someone who's often one of the best on the job. Management knows it. That worker tends to already have a lot of good rights on the job because they're a very, very good worker. And what sort of separates- They have the respect of their co-workers? They have the total respect of their co-workers because they're the worker that when a newer worker or someone new to your unit doesn't understand how to get something done, it's the

one that everyone points you to. Like, they'll be like, I don't know how to do that procedure. I'm talking about hospitals. You know, I forgot how to do that. Go ask so-and-so. And then so-and-so, what cuts the difference between a real leader and an arrogant SOB, there's not many of them in my life work, but there are some really good workers who don't care about anyone else. We don't mean them. So they're off the, they're not it. And they're not a majority. Of really good workers who don't care about anyone else. We don't mean them. So they're off the, they're not, they're not it. And they're not a majority of really good workers. Most of them really want their coworkers to succeed and they want good outcomes at work. And so they're going to make the time to actually teach and mentor and coach, essentially organize their coworkers naturally every day. They're natural. They're really natural organizers. A natural leader

is really a natural organizer in the workplace, and they hold respect. So you've got to start by figuring out who is that worker. And they don't step forward. They do not step forward with a badge that says, hey, I'm the leader, so pick me. They don't. They have obvious traits. And in union organizing, it's quite obvious to figure out who they are. And it's just by talking openly with coworkers about who is it that the workers turn to when there's a problem. No secret to it. It's not a secret trick. It's not a trick. It's an open conversation. Do you want to build the kind of power to restore the healthcare benefits that were taken away from you? What you and your coworkers have to do is build a network inside this facility or in your employer

of the most respected workers. That's what we call it. And when you can build that network of the most respected workers, that's one. Two, are they breaking for the union? Because the hardest thing is that a lot of those natural leaders are treated well by management. And in a unionization, I spent most of my life unionizing, like unionizing workers without a union. And then I started spending a lot of time rebuilding, you know, dead unions or more of unions. But the skill set comes from new unionizing, right, where a lot of those workers are initially averse to the union. Why would they pick a union when they've already got it pretty good for management? They get the vacation schedule they want. They get the best shifts because they're really good workers and management's

trying to keep them happy, too. So you've got to then have what we call a credible plan to win to help that organic natural leader, who's kind of a natural organizer, most respected worker in their work area and on their shift. You've got to have a credible enough plan to win that they're going to eventually make the decision, huh, the way we're going to really win staffing standards or a pension or something that isn't their manager giving them their vacation schedule, like that's pretty limited. So if you're a really good worker and you want really good outcomes at work for everybody, you know that the only way you're going to be able to do that is the collective power of forming a union and winning the kind of union contract that's actually going to shift massive policy that your employer has. So there's a method called, you know, what's a good structure organizing conversation? You actually need to know how to have that to move those hard to move worker leaders. But once you do, once you've identified in conversation with workers, who's the most respected worker, once you've succeeded

at helping recruit them, now you're talking about moving to supermajority power and supermajority strikes. And the union I come from, this 1199 New England union, when I was coming up in the late 1990s, we were still doing what's called strikes for recognition. Like if the boss, you know, was not honoring either a demand for car check, or we couldn't even get to the NRB election, we would just 100% walk off the job and demand recognition until the boss said the union's recognized. That was a much, and in the 1950s and 60s, 40s, 30s, 40s, and 50s, until McCarthyism, most workers were being organized by strikes for recognition. So that's like pre the

expanded labor law, which is now a contracted labor law again. But it's all about, can you build that kind of unity and supermajority participation, which goes back to why you shouldn't have gag rules in the negotiations table, because you need workers to understand and participate in. And the more the skeptical worker is invited to understand that their boss is being an asshole at the table, that it's not that the union is too weak to fix the health care problem. It's that the boss is fighting tooth and nail. Like to me, I take really skeptical workers in negotiations who have not yet signed a union card and just invite them right in. And I usually invite them in the day that the vice president of finances or whatever their title is, is going to come in and tell us some bullshit lie about how little money they have.

And then we're going to have a researcher go pull what they told the shareholders, you know, pretty different story the shareholders got than what we got at the bargaining table. And we're going to have all those skeptical workers come in and listen to their employer say why it is that their family can't have health care. And it's going to change the attitude of that worker who's resisting getting involved in the union. So there's a whole set of methods. They're seeing what the employer is doing right in front of them. And I think maybe you've started to see in a lot of workplaces those sort of workers have that realization without even needing to be brought in the negotiating room because the companies that Americans are working for are being more and more brutal, are taking more and more away, are being less and less cute about it, right? They're being more blunt in telling people what they can't have. And people are starting to feel it emotionally more directly. I don't know if you've experienced that.

No, I think it's absolutely true. There's no question, right? We see this huge surge right now, whether it's Trader Joe's, Starbucks, Amazon, right down the line. We've got a lot of workers. I mean, I think the heat was already happening before the pandemic. That's what all the wave of education strikes were in 2018, 2019, like the UTLA strike. That was 100% out, by the way, 100% out strike by 34,000 people. And they won a lot because of it. So we were seeing heat and frustration pre-pandemic. And the pandemic just kind of let everybody know what their boss really thought about them. And if you were a grocery store worker, you know, the head of local 770 from Los Angeles

called me the first week of the pandemic. Everyone else was, you know, teacher union leaders were calling to talk about what it meant to do remote work. And then I, and then, you know, I come out of the healthcare sector. So our people are at work and dying. And the grocery store workers in Los Angeles were dying. And the head of the grocery store workers union called me and said, well, about two months. And he said, I've been to more funerals in two months of our members than I've ever been to in my life. Like that's what the employer class thought about essential workers, that you could literally die. And they immediately started organizing and they started walkouts. And when somebody tested positive or when we started to learn someone was sick, they were just shutting down stores. And so that's kind of, that's the epitome of

great behavior, right? The shop steward just said, someone's coughing and sick and their nose is running and whatever's going on in the back room, we are walking out of the store and shutting it down. And then they want to, you know, hazard pay along the way, but that's a strong union that understands you got to shut it down. Now, here's the problem. As I see it with some of the great new energy, there actually is a lot of, there is a lot of skill and method and not, it's not, everyone can do it. When I say that organizing the way I'm describing it, how do you get those reluctant leaders? How do you get the, how do you get to super majority? You have to actually,

you have to spend most time talking to the workers who don't want to talk to you. That's kind of what organizing is. And what most union people do is they spend all their time talking to the workers who don't want to talk to you. That's kind of what organizing is. And what most union people do is they spend all their time talking to the workers who want to talk to them. You know, why would you go to a workplace if you're like a union professional or even a volunteer? You know, if you're going to go down the hall to try and talk to another unit where people don't want the union and they scream at you, why would you go talk to them? Right. You're going to go back to your unit where people want the union and just

stay with them. The problem is you're going to lose that way. So there's like, there's like, there's everyone can do this, but there's actually a set of principles and a set of methods and disciplines. You know, if you want to write a show or be an actor or be a producer or trying to relate this to your world, you know, from the first film you make, whatever your role in it is to the 20th, you're a hell of a lot better on the 20th film. Right. You've learned's the story I tell in the opening of the book, like, you know, literally being violently beat up by union busters. Like there's a few things I've learned along the way, right? Because I'm hundreds of campaigns in to this work.

And so I love the surge. I love the new energy and all the people who are engaging in it just need to know, cause they're not getting first they're not at the negotiations table right we're at the we're just about at the year mark of the jfk8 amazon unionization election we're a year into the starbucks elections we're rounding a year into a bunch of this stuff and no one yet is even in negotiations well there's some method and discipline and approaches that people need to take that if you're brand new and you're like, hey, man, we just won. Like you think, oh, well, now we're just going to pull up to the bargaining table.

Oh, hell no, not in the United States of America. Now you have a bigger battle to fight. So we can do it. We can win. Organizing for Power, you know, the book that you held up, I document and show a ton of examples of workers still winning in the brand new book. And there's one in between a collective bargain. Each of them takes brand new because I'm interested in here and now. So the new book rules to win by

power participation in negotiations is all brand new cases from the last couple of years, again, is all brand new cases from the last couple of years. Again, showing method and discipline win the day. If you can build supermajority strikes and create a crisis, you can win a great contract. And do you feel that these methods can turn around, you know, the labor movement in America? Because as we're talking about the union surge and the support that everybody has, that the labor movement has, and look, even here in Hollywood, right, among the Hollywood unions,

even the less militant Hollywood unions, you can tell the companies have been such motherfuckers to them that they've had to sort of saddle up for the first time. IATSE took a strike authorization vote for the first time in decades, you know, last year or two years ago. We're starting to see movement like that. There's all these encouraging signs. Public support for unions is at an all-time high. You've got things like Starbucks, etc. At

the same time, you see headlines that say, well, every single year, union membership drops in America on a percentage basis a little bit, despite that surge happening. And you've got all these laws. You've got new laws. You've got new bad Supreme Court decisions. Do you feel that these methods, which are the harder methods, right? What you're talking about, figuring out who the leaders are and mapping the social structure and going to the workers one by one and getting 100% participation. It's all harder. You're saying yes. And tell me why.

Yes. Yes. Because it works. I'm 25 years into this shit and hardly have ever lost. I don't mean to be an asshole. I'm saying a fact. Like, I'm at the point where I'm exhausted from these debates. Like, I come from a tribe.

There's a tribe of us. You know, we call ourselves a tribe. There's a whole tribe of organizers. And it's only because I decided, well, it's because I got cancer in 2009 and wrote the first book. It's the only goddamn reason I ever wrote a book. I'm like accidental book writer. I had zero plans to ever write a book. Like that was not like I get up to teach workers to learn the power required and the methods that work to beat the shit out of their employers and extract some concessions. That's my life. Okay. Cancer grounded me in 2009 and I

disappeared for a year. And I think the bosses and some of the national union leaders are pretty happy. Like, oh, maybe she went somewhere else, you know? Yeah. Bed at Sloan Kettering. Okay. Boom. Done. And I wrote Raising Expectations and Raising Hell because I was bored. And because I was really bored, you know, when you go from like 19 hour campaign days, like I had to lay in a hospital bed for how long? You just wrote a book. So I wrote this book accidentally and it was all about how the hell we won every campaign that I'd been on for 10 years.

Okay, one, we lost one by two votes and that's really a killer. But anyway, so, and the point is I'm not so special. I am not. I am part of a tribe and a culture of organizers in this country. And you will never know the name of some of my, people will never know the name of like hundreds of my comrades who actually are also winning all the time. They just didn't have cancer and accidentally then write a book and then realize, oh shit, people actually liked it and they learned something from it. So to me, my book writing has just become an extension of my organizing. Like I can teach

a thousand nurses in a fight. I can teach 20,000 nurses in a multi-employer fight. I can teach, I'm, you know, they were all translated into German now. I'm working with the German labor movement really intensely the last few years because all the union bustings now have gone to Germany where people think it's like worker's paradise. Are you effing kidding me? Anyway, so every single place I go, the story is the same. Where we turn our strike muscle back on, where we can use the methods that we know work, that do take hard work know, if I'm going to frame the choice right now, the choice is death by climate change, death by fascism, or yeah, we're going to work a little bit harder and use the methods that some of us have continued to use. We didn't invent them. They come from the thirties and forties. I didn't make any of this up. I had great mentors and I

have spent the last 15 years attempting to mentor. No, not attempting. I have spent the last 15 years now myself mentoring about 100 incredibly successful younger organizers. And now the books mirror an extension of that. It's like I'm going to end the training courses I do for free with Rosa Luxemburg German Money. Right. We're wrapping the last one of a series right now. Right. We're wrapping the last one of a series right now. We've put twenty five thousand rank and file workers through a free online training course in the last two and a half years. And to a person, they are winning campaigns now all over the world once they go through the course. So and that's free and no one's making money on it. Like it's just we're out there doing it because unions got rid of their organizing departments, stopped teaching people how to do this work. And where the books, the free training courses, my work at Berkeley training people in the labor movement and program called Skills to Win, like all of the training programs are like, how can we contribute to scaling up the movement as fast as we need to? Because we need to scale up fast right now. And that Glacier Northwest case, even more so.

Because it's going to be illegal strikes. And I got to tell you, for people who want to read about an illegal strike, there was an amazing one in Ontario. I'll send you a link. Maybe you can post a link to it. But there was a group of workers who went out on an illegal strike. And it's almost caused the first general strike in Canada in 100 years. And this was in November. And hardly anyone in the States heard about it.

And they all took our courses. And the premier of the province was a little Trump guy, a little Ford, Ford of the crazy brother Ford with the crack problem was the mayor. That guy's brother is the provincial leader up there. And this was all in November. No one even knows it. Educational workers, 55,000, mostly black and brown women getting ready to strike using all the methods. Like they actually, they took the courses, they rebuilt their union. They rebuilt the union in six months, right? When you go from, I don't know how to do this to I know how to do this six months later. So you said, can we rebuild?

Yes, we can rebuild. This does not take long. It takes a commitment. Right. So in six months, I got to take this course. Sorry, keep going. Six months, they changed the union. And then they announced that they're going to go on strike. The right wing provincial leader calls calls an emergency session of parliament, passes an anti-strike law just for them, basically says, if you strike, we're going to charge the union $200,000 a day and every worker $5,000 a day. Now, these are 55,000 educational support workers, pretty poor, like they're pretty poor. That's why they're going on strike, right? So they're ready. People are flipping out in Ontario, right? This is the most populous province in Canada. And they're like, holy crap, they just passed a law to say that you can't strike. This is the Glacier North

hinting at what we need to do when Glacier Northwest, if any court case comes down in June, which is get ready to do what they did there. And they said, we're going. And they walked. And it was the best lesson in power in Canada in decades. The entire labor movement stopped in its tracks. No one thought they were going to walk. These are workers who don't have $5,000 a day. Are you effing kidding me?

They don't have, they're making $38,000 a year 38 000 whatever like they're workers who are not making nearly enough and they had the chutzpah just say that to walk off the job with the premier's finger in their face saying we will charge you x amount every day you walk and they were so united, they walked. And by the weekend, the labor movement in Ontario began to announce to the press that if the premier didn't take the law back, there would be a general strike in the province. And they began talking about shutting ports down and airlines down and airports down. walked again on Monday. It was a Friday. And they walked again. And then there was a press conference where the entire Ontario Federation of Labour was about to announce a general strike in solidarity with these low-wage women who did what the big burly guys could have done fricking decades ago, right, to cause this crisis. And they said, there's going to be a general strike if you don't repeal that law and the premier announced an immediate repeal of the law right and then they went on to win the highest rate could they have

won more maybe sure there's debate about that i love when people armchair this shit then they won the biggest race that anyone in the public sector had won in like six years in that province that is so inspiring to me because it's so inspiring you got to read about it. It's amazing because you're describing, you know, the, the, the, the threat of lawsuit that we were just talking about with what this reminds me of is how, you know, a hundred years ago when workers were striking, they were doing so into gunfire, you know, they were being, they were being killed on, uh, on the strike lines and they went on strike anyway, and they took that great risk upon themselves. But by taking that risk, they showed they're resolved in their solidarity and they won great things for all of us here in the future. And they also inspired others through that bravery. And

that's no matter what the Supreme Court decides, we still have that power to do that. That's right. To do that again. That's right. Oh, my God,'s so wonderful. Okay. I want to, I want to ask you two questions to end. All right. Um, uh, because you are so concrete about this and I feel like a big part of the answer is going to be, you got to take my course and I want to take the course now after talking to you. But, um, uh, there's, there's two types of person that I would, I want to get your advice towards. Uh, the first group is the person who is in a union who is that is currently working top down. That is not the type of union that world. There's not a fighting union, as we've been talking about, but is the other other type of union. You know, I'll just say again, SAG-AFTRA, I'm very proud of this union, but I want to see change in it. However, as opposed to the Writers Guild, there's a small union that operates very democratically that invited me in as a member of leadership.

And I was able to have an effect on. SAG-AFTRA has 100,000 members. It has a local system, right, that's spread across the country, basically an electoral college system that diffuses worker power. It's got no – if you show up and you start making noise at a meeting, they shut you down. They don't bring you in. They sort of push you out. I've seen that happen to people who are trying to make change in that union. don't bring you in, they sort of push you out. I've seen that happen to people who are trying to make change in that union. And so for people who are a member of that sort of union and they're

like, oh my God, I want my union to be better, but where the fuck do I start, right? In a union that's so big and I'm so small. That's my first question. And then after that, I want to know, what is your advice to people who are working at that un-unionized job and just want to take that first step towards organizing their own workplace? But let's start with the first one. Yeah. They're similar, actually. I mean, the answer is going to be similar. So one is just know that two things are true, whether you're in what I call a do-nothing or dead union and you want to rebuild it, or whether you don't have one. I mean, they're different, but they both require being able to do what I just described to you,

which is build supermajority unity. And again, that's not impossible. It's not even that hard and you can learn it, right? So I think a couple of things. One is figure out who, which coworkers of yours want to figure out how to do this because you can't do it alone. So first is start having conversations with you, whether you have an existing union or whether you have, whether you don't have a union yet, same basic approach, start quietly talking to coworkers to figure out, Hey, who wants, who thinks that we can do better here? Who wants to take a run at it? Um, and then, uh, create a book. I mean, this to take a run at it um and then create a book i mean this is how a lot of it's been happening create um a book group of some kind let's say

you have less reader oriented people versus not um maybe you're going to chip in some people are going to chip in um and get the book on tape version of a handful of key books that help people understand this um you're going to do a reading circle together. You're going to take probably the two, in the United States, probably the two places that you can go that won't break the bank, that people can afford, are either free courses

that we're running constantly or that are called Organizing for Power. And at Berkeley, they're called Skills to Win. They're recharged, but we have a sliding scale. And if a group of workers came and said, we really have no money, they would get in, by the way.

Just saying that out loud. Don't tell my boss. I'm kidding. But they would because it's a sliding scale. And by the way, I'll tell you that last year after that IATSE moment, when I taught a workshop. So in March and May, we're teaching. We'll be rerunning a three part series on how to do big open negotiations. Right. High powered, high participation negotiations UC Berkeley, at the Labor Center. And that's close to free. It's almost free. And in all of these trainings, you have to come in teams. Last year in February, when we ran the course a little bit earlier in the year, I'll just say that there were like seven different IOTC locals there because people were pissed. You know what I mean?

And there are a bunch of other entertainment unions and I had never had so many entertainment unions in one of my courses. So something was happening there. So one is, one is look for either skills to win at UC Berkeley or organizing for power. People can find all of them on my website and direct you to people and they're free or close to free. And they're free or close to free. And then there's good books to read. And the other place is,

particularly for people who have the problem of the existing union, where they've got a problematic existing union, Labor Notes also offers courses that people can take. I think that they're better for the existing union problem, honestly, than the unionization from scratch problem. Anyway, but they're a good resource so, but there, but there are good resource for

folks out there for sure. Um, and, uh, yeah. And then book group it, study group it, start finding the resources. Um, my website is just filled with free resources. Um, there's even videos on there. There's all sorts of crap that people can just the description of the organic leader and wall charting that I told you about. There's an 11 minute video that's just free and that sits on my website that explains what's wall charting, how do you do it? How do you build a committee of the most respected workers? It's going to take more than that to actually do it, but that's what people can do. There are really free resources out there and I want to encourage people to get them because some of this stuff is so not hard. And

it's also so not self-evident. And once you begin to do it, it makes a lot of sense. But until you do it, you think you're doing well. Like let's say in the non-union workplaces, you know, you start getting people to sign up on union membership cards and it's like gonzo in the beginning. You hit like 20 percent, 25 percent. And you're like, well, I'm cooking with gas. Everyone here wants a union. And 30 percent is the amount of workers that you need to file for a union election. So people often make the mistake of thinking this is great. Let's just get to 30 and file for a union. And the problem is that's what I call the easiest, the easier to get one third. And in the classes I teach, I say from the opening, I say in the opening session of every class, this course on organizing is about how do you get

to that next two thirds? Because it's a hell of a lot harder. And you're not going to win without getting to super majority, not in a unionization election. You know why? Because the boss is going to shave 25 to 30% of your numbers with a hellacious campaign with union busters of the ilk that I've gone up against many times. For example, the story that I told you, I opened up the new book with, which is opening line is something like, you know, most days union negotiations don't end with assault and battery charges, but I want to tell you about one that did, right? I have literally gone up against some of the craziest motherfucking union busters in this country. And it's not that I've gone up against them.

It's that we have taught workers openly these very methods to overcome and beat and defeat some of the most vicious people. They're not Pinkertons with guns like they were, as you said, but they're not that far off in some of these campaigns. They're not that far off. And you still can beat them. And we do. We do like we do over and over again. Not just me. Like I'm not some I'm not special. I just write about it. I am surrounded by worker organizer colleagues. I'll give you an example. When the pandemic hit, a whole bunch of us, there was like an immediate moment.

Like they announced the whatever. We thought it was all going to be two or three weeks, right? The shelter in place. When that announcement hit, a couple of us put out an email to everyone else, text thread and said, we got to jump on an emergency call and figure out how the hell we organize under these conditions. Are the assumptions the same about the work we do? Or is everything about to change? And like, I'm going to say about 80 of us who all know each other from a whole ton of campaigns over the last 25 years,

who call each other, who call us in for reinforcements when we need it in a hard fight, jumped on a bunch of calls and realized the fundamentals, the methods are not going to change in the pandemic at all. We might have to use a new tool, might have to use Zoom, might have to use something else, but the methods are going to be the same. And that played out true. So I'm just saying, I wish I could name all their names, but you know, people who taught me, people who inspire me, which is a ton of workers every single day, a ton of worker leaders in every fight I'm in. And then hundreds and hundreds of, I'd like to say thousands, but I'm not there, but there are hundreds and hundreds of winning organizers in this country who have gone up

against serious union busters and who teach thousands of workers how to do it. And then they're changed forever because they then know how to do it. Like my job as an organizer is just to teach. I'm a teacher. I'm an educator. My job is to teach tens of thousands of workers how to win, how they themselves can build the power required to beat that boss. And it isn't that hard, but like everything, you need a good teacher. So give people a URL to where do they go to get some of this teaching from you

and from folks like you. And they can just go to jaymackleby.com and it's gonna redirect them to all sorts of stuff. Poke around on my website. The only reason I have it is for this purpose of just like go poke around, redirect. They can go to the Labor Notes website. They can go to many places. They can go to some of the university places like the Labor Center at the University of California at Berkeley, the Labor Center at Rutgers.

Like there's a handful of Cornell's labor center. There's a handful of CUNY, the City University of New York has a labor center. So a lot of those labor centers also often offer free or very low cost courses. I think part of what, the one thing I think that we do differently in the courses as I get older and older is this issue of setting, but I don't teach individuals anymore. I only teach in teams. So there's a team threshold for every course I teach because my basic attitude is if you can't get the threshold for negotiations is 10, the threshold for the organizing courses is 20. If you can't get 20 other people to come, you're not ready to organize yet. You need to go read some more books and

figure out how to recruit a few more people, and then you're ready to come to the course, right? So yeah, like tomorrow is the final day of a course that has 7,000 workers from across the world in it in 84 countries. And we're teaching in nine languages in this course with simultaneous translation. And this morning and yesterday with all the co-trainers of mine from around the world, we have a global training team now of organizers around the world who speak all those languages and come from all over the world. And this is the series called Organizing for Power. And what the Canadians had taken before they succeeded at staring down the premier, what the Canadians had taken before they succeeded at staring down the premiere, right?

Like literally the same course a year earlier. And the last class, we invite all the different groups from across the world to submit. So 7,000 of them. We teach it twice a day to accommodate two time zones in the world. We call it the A and B session because someone's always waking up and going to bed somewhere in the world. So we straddle and teach two different sessions in all these languages. And then the last class is we invite them to submit a plan to build what's called their first, to conduct their first, what's called majority structure test, right? Which is the strike is the ultimate structure test. So it's, how do you start to know that you're ready to get to a strike? And they submit them. And then we workshop them. We select three for the A session. That's

like Africa and Europe, mostly in Brazil, 700 Brazilian trade unionists in this course, for example, 500 Argentinian nurses, like it's crazy numbers and they come in huge groups. So, and I just spent the last two days reading the proposals and like eliminating, you know, because we can only do three per session. And we're going to workshop them in front of all these workers of the world to say, here's what you did well in your first written attempt to have a majority structure test. Here's what you know. I want to ask you some questions. Hopefully you're going to realize where they could do a little bit better in what's called the structured organizing conversation wrap that they're going to launch a petition with in their workplace. So there's really hands on stuff going on in any language you need it in. But come in a team and learn it because the planet's burning down and the fascists are taking over and we have a lot of work to do.

And I believe we actually can win. We actually because we do win. Yeah. Which means actually can win. We actually, because we do win, which means we can win. Yeah. And you are training people how to do it. You make me feel so positive talking to you because it's not just, we need to win. We must win. We can win. It's that if you use the methods that you're talking about, we do win and we will win. And you will teach me how to do it and my coworkers and anybody else. So I love talking to you. So your website is jmachalevy.com. But what is the name of the new book?

Rules to Win by Power and Participation in Negotiations opens up with the story of me, unfortunately, dealing with one of the most, and he's still out there, but he's quieter now, one of the most vicious union busters in the United States, who, by the way, had on his team an international gun runner and several others terrorizing thousands of nurses. Yeah, they're pretty special people. So they really were like Pinkertons. I cannot wait to read this. And they got beaten and run out of town, even though they were probably spending,

we think, $10,000 a day, the hospital corporations that sent them in to try to destroy the union. And we ran them out of town. It was a year long war. I mean, it was a war. I mean, I am really describing class war. And we won. So we can win. And there's nothing like winning, you know? I mean, that is part of, in the Writers Guild, we've won so many battles. We've won them recently in the last few years. Yeah, you've done some great,

your union's doing some great work. Oh, thank you for saying so. Well, I will take your blessing into our negotiations. Let's start next week. Good. Right on. And folks, if you want to pick up a copy of the book, you can, of course, get one at factuallypod.com slash books. Jane, thank you so much for coming on the show.

I hope you come back sometime. I love talking to you. My pleasure. Happy to do it. And I really appreciate that you had me on and that you're sharing the ideas. And I appreciate the work that you're doing. And I think the negotiations are going to be really exciting. And yeah, maybe grab a book and take a look and

think about the gag rule. Anyway. I will. I'm going to bring it up. I'm going to bring it up. All right. Thank you so much, Jane. Nice to see you. Take care. Nice to see you as well. My God, thank you so much to Jane McAlevey for being on the show. Once again, her website, janemaclevey.com, or you can pick up her book at factuallypod.com slash books. And when you do, you'll be supporting

not just this show, but your local bookstore as well. Once again, you can support this show on Patreon. I want to thank everybody who supports this show at the $15 a month level. Our most recent $15 a month patrons

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