Jane McAlevey

Jane McAlevey is an organizer, author, and scholar. Her first book, Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell) was named the "most valuable book of 2012" by The Nation. She is a regular commentator on NPR, Jacobin, and local media. She continues to work on union campaigns, leads contract negotiations, and trains and develops organizers. For decades, intractable social and economic problems have been eating away at the social fabric of the United States. The crisis is now so deep it's threatening democracy. Income inequality has reached epic proportions, resulting in a lopsided political system that bestows tax breaks on the rich while the rest of the country has been economically abandoned. There's a single, obvious solution to these problems, one with a long, successful history, but one that too many have forgotten: unions. In A Collective Bargain, longtime labor, environmental, and political organizer Jane McAlevey makes the case that unions are the only institution capable of fighting back against today's super-rich corporate class. Since the 1930s, when unions briefly flourished under New Deal protections, corporations have waged a stealthy and ruthless war against the labor movement. Today, McAlevey argues, it's time for unions to make a comeback. Want to reverse the nation's mounting wealth gap? Put an end to sexual harassment in the workplace? End racial disparities on the job? Negotiate climate justice? Bring back unions. Alongside McAlevey, we travel from Pennsylvania hospitals, where we're thrust into a herculean fight in which nurses are building a new kind of patient-centered unionism; to Silicon Valley, where tech workers, fed up with the illusory promise of a better world, have turned to old-fashioned collective action; and inside the most promising anti-austerity rebellion in years, the one being waged by America's teachers. A rousing and electrifying call to arms, A Collective Bargain shows us why we must strengthen and defend the only force capable of fighting back against social injustice and the alarming right-wing shift in our politics: a strong, democratic union movement.

Rebuilding Unions, Rebuilding Democracy

A Collective Bargain

Katy Watkins

Both slavery and union busting are uniquely American in violence, in virulence, and in their existence as fully legally sanctioned.

The NLRA radically changed the power equation in the United States by extending the freedoms of a democracy from the rather limited sphere of civil society into the heart of market capitalism: the economy and the workplace.

You could say that Republicans have taken a page of out of union busters' playbooks. Long before Donald Trump entered the presidential race, employers have been weaponizing many key elements of his campaign strategy against workers who attempt to unionize. I can count as high as exactly zero the number of NLRB elections I've been involved in where the hired union busters didn't stoke racial and/or ethnic divisions early, often, and throughout the campaign; where gerrymandering hasn't been routine (entire units of workers carved out of the list just before the NLRB election); and when voter suppression hasn't been a central part of their strategy.

Billionaires and the corporations that undergird their 1 percent superpower status have so skewed the discussion that we no longer debate a worker's right to strike or even their freedom to assemble in their workplace through a union. With the rise of Silicon Valley, we now argue over whether a worker is even a worker.

A Collective Bargain quotes

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