Fix your union, fight for journalism, repair the world
RIP Jane Frances McAlevey, 1964-2024.
There are few people who may end up having as much of an impact on contemporary American newsroom culture as the labor organizer, journalist and scholar Jane McAlevey, who died yesterday of multiple myeloma in Muir Beach, California. She wasn’t wading decisively into our industry’s trench wars over editorial focus and journalistic objectivity (no clear winners or losers but plenty of casualties nonetheless). McAlevey’s true intellectual impact was bureaucratic: Her frameworks for building worker power helped rank-and-file journalists put dents into the longstanding ethos of editor-knows-best managerialism that has long dominated American newsrooms, big or small, commercial or nonprofit. If there’s a group of journalists near you running open bargaining tables and visibly driving their employer insane, there’s a good chance they’re wielding parts of Jane McAlevey’s organizing playbook.
I first encountered McAlevey’s work in her 2012 book “Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell).” The memoir lacks the now-canonical handbook status of her 2016 “No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age,” but to me, none of McAlevey’s books exemplifies the McAlevey ethic quite as vividly. “Raising Expectations” features McAlevey getting in trouble as often as she’s building big tents, bringing skeptics into the fold, making the right enemies and then kicking ass for the public good. What really brings the book alive is that McAlevey seemed just as disturbed by profiteers in the healthcare sector as she did by the union leaders who weren’t taking them on effectively. When she was bedridden in 2009 and 2010 after recovering from surgery to treat ovarian cancer, McAlevey recounted having “literally dozens, if not hundreds, of conversations” that began like this:
FRIEND: Wow, Jane, I heard all about the bad news, how are you feeling? When do you think you will be better?
JANE: It’s been hell, really devastating; I don’t know how long it will take to really recover.
FRIEND: Aren’t the doctors able to give you a prognosis and timeline?
JANE: Oh, you’re asking about the cancer? They are cutting everything out. I thought you were asking about SEIU.
Jane McAlevey stridently opposed what I would call bullshit unionism. This entails everything from stifling rank-and-file democracy, practicing secrecy at the bargaining table, and most of all, avoiding strike action. Over and over, McAlevey hammered the distinction between one-on-one organizing (hard, unglamorous) and mass mobilization (corner-cutting fakery) as forms of advocacy. Or as she diagrammed it, building “actual power” versus “pretend power.”
Mobilizing is when the “same people” show up “over and over at every meeting and rally for all good causes, but without the full mass of their coworkers or community behind them,” McAlevey writes in “No Shortcuts.” “This is because a professional staff directs, manipulates, and controls the mobilization; the staffers see themselves, not ordinary people, as the key agents of change. To them, it matters little who shows up, or, why, as long as a sufficient number of bodies appear — enough for a photo good enough to tweet and maybe generate earned media.” We’re all familiar with this kind of astroturfery. It’s the come-and-go hashtag campaigns, or the nonprofit industrial complex’s lengthy but inert email lists, or the community activists who are really communities of one. McAlevey was old-school in that she thought we live in a class war, and to win a war you need an army. Preferably one where the soldiers know each others’ names.
So Jane McAlevey preached a secular version of what Pope Francis might call a culture of encounter. One of the canonical figures in McAlevey’s organizing tales is the vocal anti-union worker who’s leading the opposition to one of McAlevey’s union drives; instead of writing them off, McAlevey sees a natural leader who’s probably good at their job and respected by their coworkers. They’re engaged with in good faith; trust builds with time and openness, and they flip and show up at bargaining ready to strike, shocking the bosses. Cue credits.
Jane McAlevey’s biggest impact on newsroom unions was through her advocacy for open bargaining, where workers not only get to watch but actually participate in the negotiations for their own collective bargaining agreements, a practice now widespread in The NewsGuild-CWA, one of the fastest-growing private-sector unions in America. (Me and my home union, the Los Angeles Times Guild, were profiled in McAlevey and Abby Lawlor’s 2023 “Rules to Win By.” Jane signed my copy with a kind note and drew a peace sign.) Most unions aren’t this transparent in negotiations. But it’s mostly a no-brainer for skeptical journalists who expect accountability in all things, including from their own coworkers.
Open bargaining is good democratic hygiene, but it’s also a huge reality check on the way the world works. Few workers remain unmoved once they see how their bosses’ lawyer talks about them while rejecting a modest improvement to working conditions. If you’re not at the table you’re on the menu is one of those dog-eared labor axioms that remains as true as the day it was coined. “The chief factor that scholars overlook and that is absent from the literature on union decline is the one factor that unions and workers can control: our own strategy,” McAlevey wrote in the introduction of “Rules to Win By.” Nobody waved a magic wand in front of thousands of journalists’ faces to make them engage in dozens of work stoppages over the past year at a volume that would have been simply unimaginable in the 2000s and 2010s. A lot of this is workers getting a glance at the clock and correctly reading the time.
Where does all this end? Few industries are poised to undergo as much change as journalism in the years to come, and not all of them will be for the better. Big Tech platforms will continue to choke off access to news while mining journalists’ labor for AI training data; the smaller private equity extractors still hanging around will continue to extract; a pivot to influencer journalism as a mode of production will yield ever-worsening working conditions while bringing growing exposure to corrupting market pressures. At all turns, journalists will be faced with a dehumanizing world to be coped with instead of a world they would have preferred to build for other people.
McAlevey was skeptical of the kind of nonprofit neoliberals who keep rooting for a philanthropic turn in local journalism, in which the public interest of the week will be determined by wealthy donors and their appointees. “Starting in the early 1970s, and for the next four decades, the rise of something known as ‘liberal philanthropy’ advanced a model of change predicated on pacifying the majority while lawyers and specialists ‘advocated on behalf of others,’” McAlevey wrote in her 2021 book “A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy.” “This philanthropic agenda also endorsed the end of unions, seeing them as something that were a vestige of a bygone industrial era. It’s time to realize that approach was and is a colossal failure. Democracy, it turns out, requires a thinking people.” McAlevey concluded by connecting the popular declines of both unions and journalism as forms of participatory enlightenment and self-emancipation:
Newspapers seem old-fashioned, but we are now seeing the results of losing the function of newspapers, which was never simply ‘the paper,’ but real news. Unions get billed as last century too, but the point of unions isn’t their buildings or bureaucracy; it’s the political education, solidarity, and confidence-building among the many that comes from people acting collectively, including strikes, for their own betterment.
There’s a big fight out there to be won. Jane McAlevey believed we could win it, but only if we worked together.