Honoring the passing of a Hero: Activist Jane McAlevey

Jane McAlevey’s whole-worker organizing model views workers and the community they live in as a whole: workers are part of the community, and community members engage in work. She explained, “What almost no union does is actually organize their members as members in their own communities to build community power. I teach workers to take over their unions and change them.”[4] The underlying theory of change requires a systematic, grassroots mass organization of workers.

Central to her approach is the labor-intensive task of having one-on-one conversations with each constituent. Organizers’ main activity is listening, in order to identify people’s most pressing issues, with interjected specific questions that frame “the hard question,” asking the individual to choose between enduring the problems alone or joining in collective action.[11] A strike in this whole-worker model requires sustained action by an overwhelming majority of workers to put maximum pressure on management.

Source: Wikipedia