In July, the indomitable Jane McAlevey passed away after her three-year battle with multiple myeloma. Jane was a fierce labor organizer, teacher, and scholar, having devoted her life to the craft of building power with working people. The Institute for Christian Socialism has been deeply influenced by Jane’s life and work. Despite not having been a Christian partisan herself, Jane provides Christian leftists with a template for how to be faithful ministers of the Socialism of the Gospel.
Ode to Jane
Born the daughter of progressive New York politician John F. McAlevey, Jane first cut her teeth in organizing during the 80s as a student leader and activist at the State University of New York where she led and was arrested for South African divestment protests. Shortly after her arrest, the university conceded to the students’ demands and became the largest U.S. institution to divest from South African apartheid at the time. This was the first of many wins to come for Jane.
In her young adulthood and early career, Jane worked as an environmental and anti-imperial organizer, living in Central America for a brief period. She then returned to the United States before being recruited to work at the Highlander Research and Education Center as a radical political educator. It was at Highlander–the training ground for multiple civil rights initiatives and their leaders–that Jane discovered the powerful legacy of the organizing partnership between labor and the black church that built power for poor and working people in the 20th century. Jane became hooked on what working people could win with discipline, organization, and courage.
After a few years, Jane’s organizing acumen caught the attention of progressive leaders in the labor movement–including longtime friend and mentor Richard Besinger–who recruited her to become a union organizer. Accepting their challenge, Jane joined the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and later Services Employees International Union (SEIU) to head up organizing and negotiation projects, especially in healthcare fields. From Stamford to Las Vegas, Jane spent the late 90s and 00s winning big with workers by implementing strategies that gave them, their families, and their communities more agency in forming democratic unions and winning meaningful contracts. Jane called her strategy “whole worker organizing” because of its focus on the class and social contexts that form workers, not just their on-the-job experiences.
Catalyzed by her first bout of cancer in 2009, Jane largely switched her focus to the academic study of labor. She began training workers based on her research and experience for most of the 2010s. (Though she never stopped being an active organizer). Her first book, Raising Expectations and Raising Hell, was a memoir that she began writing while undergoing treatment. Her second book was her doctoral thesis-turned-labor manifesto No Shortcuts. This book was an instant classic in labor and Left politics, and has since inspired countless organizers in our current era of labor resurgence. Her theory of change – rooted in concepts such as whole-worker organizing, organic leadership, and structure testing – quickly gained popularity among workers who wanted to learn how to organize their workplaces. In 2019, Jane teamed up with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation to launch Organizing for Power (O4P), a free, recurring six-week organizing crash course based on Jane’s practices and theories. O4P has since trained 40,000 workers and organizers in over 100 countries and has broadcast in almost 20 languages.
ICS has been directly blessed by Jane and her work. In summer 2022, ICS recruited and sent a delegation of members and allies to attend the O4P training. Later that same summer we hosted Jane for a publicly streamed webinar to discuss labor organizing and Christian socialism. ICS had the privilege of sending another delegation to train with O4P this spring, shortly after Jane’s public announcement of her fight with cancer and the decision to enter hospice. It would be Jane’s last time teaching for the course.
As her ideas and methods continue to gain traction, Jane will go down as one of the great labor organizers and progressive leaders of the 21st century.
Labor, Organizing, and Christian Socialism
Jane did not identify as a Christian, or within any particular faith tradition for that matter. But her academic writing and organizing practices have much to offer for advancing the socialism of the Gospel. Specifically, Jane taught us how Christians can support workers and the labor movement and how, using organizing methods, we can deepen the commitment to direct-action and democracy in our churches and ministry organizations.
Her strategies were rooted in her view of workers. Jane understood workers as whole people, “embedded in a range of social relationships in the workplace and in the community,” who belong to families, friendships, and social organizations. Often chief among these organizations are “houses of faith,” as Jane typically called them, which include churches. Jane’s nuanced conception of working people as communal creatures influenced the founding of ICS in the first place. As co-founder and former board member Tim Eberhart attests in Jacobin’s profile of ICS, our organization formed to fill a spiritual void that had been missing for many radical workers and organizers during the neoliberal era, understanding that faith is important for why they do what they do. Not only is ICS a spiritual and intellectual home for radical Christians, it also offers them a context from which to support themselves and other working people in their fights against managers and capitalists.
In No Shortcuts, Jane recounts how important Christian leadership was in the organizing drives of Smithfield Foods workers in Bladen County, North Carolina. Over the course of the late 90s and early 00s, Smithfield workers had been attempting to organize over issues of workplace safety, fairer wages, and environmental protections. They were largely unsuccessful.
In the late 00s they launched a whole-worker organizing campaign that sought to engage local houses of faith. Catholic priests were invited to play a mediating role between workers and their management because many of the workers were Catholic Latin American migrants and trusted their local clergy. As negotiations broke down, the workers invited other local clergy, largely Catholic and Black Protestant, to learn more about the goals of the organizers, the plight of migrant laborers, and how Smithfield was attempting to sow racial discord between the black, white, and Latine employees. The education radicalized many pastors and their churches in favor of the workers, who were also their parishioners. The pro-worker sensibility spread nationally. Among these pastor-organizers was Rev. William Barber III, the former leader of the Moral Monday movement in North Carolina and current co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign. With the help of these faith groups, the Smithfield workers and the United Food and Commercial Workers Union won their union election in December 2008 and went on to win big gains in their first contract, which included a minimum wage of $15 per hour.
ICS, as an explicitly pro-labor Christian organization, is well positioned to follow in the mold of our Christian siblings from Bladensburg in joining workers on picket lines, at cookouts, and in door-knocking. But our role in the labor movement should also go deeper. While it is important to support union campaign drives wherever we can, the real genius of Jane’s work is not just in showing us how to be sufficiently pro-labor as individual Christians or churches. Rather, her genius lies in showing us how to organize Christianity into being a pro-worker force in public life. The church and parachurch organizations cannot see themselves as entirely separate from the rest of civil society’s superstructure. As Jane pointed out during her talk to ICS, churches and their corresponding denominations are still among the only institutions left where people are often brought together across social positions of race, class, and gender. Churches, no less than any other part of society, are influenced by the political inequality and exploitation of capitalism, are composed of waged and unwaged workers, and are shaped by predominant social and cultural dynamics. This reality offers largely untapped organizing opportunities, at least by the most radical and progressive elements in Christianity.
Not only can we join the labor struggle on the side of workers, but we can also act as a training ground for rank-and-file church members to bring serious organizing methods, like those of Jane and her ilk, back to our individual congregations and Christian communities. What would it look like for churches to rally around working class causes? This is a question which ICS and its members are attempting to answer.
Inspired by Jane’s talk to ICS in 2022, ICS member Greg joined our 2024 delegation to O4P. Greg felt compelled by Jane’s challenge to learn how to “win real power” for poor and working people and was grateful for the opportunity to learn from her one last time. ICS member Trey, who served as our 2024 delegation leader, was similarly energized by Jane and O4P. Following the course, Trey is looking into organizing his church around food justice initiatives and building green space for the working-poor side of his Louisiana town. Trey also wants to bring members of a halfway house he works with to the next training sessions.
ICS member Caleb, with whom I attended O4P in 2022, told me that after taking the course he worked to implement Jane’s organizing methods among young people in the Georgia church where he served as a youth minister. Unfortunately, the church fired Caleb because of his organizing before he was able to see his efforts forward. Now, Caleb says he is a high school world history teacher and incorporates labor history and tactics into the curriculum so that students can learn how to organize around the events they experience–a pedagogy largely inspired by Jane’s work.
As individual Christians and Christian communities, we can either choose to be on the side of labor by involving ourselves in the whole worker strategy or on the side of capital by remaining silent when our fellow congregants cry out as workers. Greg, Trey, Caleb and other ICS members are organizing their communities for the latter. Thanks to Jane, they and all of us have some tried and true methods for getting there.
Rest in Power, Comrade Jane. We’ll see you at that Great Worker Jubilee.
Ben Dormus is a proud union member and labor organizer who serves on the ICS board of directors.
Photo Credit: Alice Attie
