A bitter foe of “pretend politics,” she always said she wanted “to teach people: Can we have the confidence to win?”
![Jane McAlevey and her horse, Jalapeno.](https://timesofsydney.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/jane_and_jalapeno-1440x907-1.jpg)
This time, it’s personal.
Like everyone else with more than a passing interest in American unions, I had been reading Jane McAlevey’s work for years. My copy of Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell), a no-holds-barred account of her adventures in successfully reviving a moribund local of the Service Employees International Union—only to run aground on the SEIU leadership’s cozy relationship with corporate bosses—was beginning to physically fall apart when I first wrote to Jane (or “Dr. McAlevey,” as I addressed her, since she had a Harvard e-mail at the time) in the fall of 2015.
I was heading to Nevada to report on the upcoming Democratic primary campaign, and since she’d spent time there as an organizer, I wondered if she could suggest some union people for me to talk to. After a thorough grilling on my background, intentions, and political orientation, Jane sent me a brief but incredibly useful memo on Nevada union politics and introductions to a nurse and a Las Vegas municipal worker who both turned out to be terrific company—and even better sources.
When I wrote afterward to thank her, she asked about my relationship to The Nation, where I was then listed on the masthead as “Editor at Large.” It turned out she was having trouble getting her pieces into the magazine.
“Despite what it says, I don’t actually edit,” I replied. But I promised to look into the situation, and when I did was told that Jane was “difficult.” “I’ll work with her,” I said.
And so we began, first with a long interview about her forthcoming book, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age. Then with coverage of a Massachusetts nurses strike, and the wave of “Red for Ed” teachers’ strikes. By that time, Donald Trump was in the White House, and militant unions offered what looked like the only durable organized resistance to Republican rule.
When Katrina vanden Heuvel asked me to take over as editor of The Nation, Jane was the first writer I called. We met in a bar in Penn Station near the LIRR tracks as I was on my way into the city for the Nation announcement and she was on her way to JFK to fly back to California. I asked if she’d write a column for us. “How about ‘strikes correspondent’?” she countered. “Don’t you think a lefty magazine should have one?”
By then we’d already met a few times—first in London, where I was living and she was doing some consulting work for one of the big unions, then in Vermont, where Jane had learned organic farming as a young woman. I recorded a long interview with her there where she talked about her mother dying before she ever really got to know her, and about feeling like a prop in her father’s political campaigns (but also how much she’d learned from “the old man”—above all, the notion that when you enter a fight you’re in it to win: “Winning matters a lot to me…. My father’s attitude was that you don’t run a left campaign against the Democratic Party just to run it. You fuckin’ run it to win”), and about her own struggles with the cancer that had already taken a brother and a sister. And then in San Francisco, where my daughter and I stayed in the house next to Jane’s tiny shack on Muir Beach while I was on tour to promote The Next Republic, a book whose first chapter is titled “Jane McAlevey—Winning Under Conditions of Extreme Adversity.”
Jane took us to feed carrots to Jalapeno, her beloved horse, cooked amazing meals in her outdoor kitchen, and sent us off to see the redwoods so she could get some work done.
Was she difficult? She certainly could be. I’ll never forget the shouting match we had the day after the vote in 2020. I was on a street corner in downtown Reading, Pennsylvania, at a rally organized by Pennsylvania Stands Up, when Jane called to tell me The Nation had to “get your people out on the streets now!” to stop the Republicans from stealing the election. She’d been in Miami in 2000, she reminded me, when the “Brooks Brothers riot” halted the count in Dade County, opening the door for Bush v. Gore and so many of our current troubles. As I tried to remind her that we were a magazine, not a mass membership organization, the shouting grew louder and louder, and when I noted that we didn’t exactly have “people” we could just send out into the streets, she hung up on me.
But we soon patched that up—as we patched up all our battles, whether over a “really fucking stupid” headline I’d written that “totally ruined” one of her pieces, or running a photo that (in her view) undercut her analysis, or her habit of filing at the very last minute—and then sending in endless revisions. She was a perfectionist, in life as well as writing, and expected others to rise to her standards.
But I always knew she had my back. As I had hers, especially after her masterful postmortem on Amazon’s failed campaign in Bessemer, Alabama—a piece she’d written weeks in advance, but insisted on holding until after the vote lest she discourage a single pro-union sympathizer. Jane’s refusal to sugarcoat reality, to indulge in wishful thinking, made her a lot of enemies, especially among the ranks of labor’s faithful cheerleaders. But she always felt that they—along with the sectarians whose hard work and persistence she respected, but whose vanguardist arrogance and deeply antidemocratic politics were the bane of her existence—were good enemies to have.
Because despite her long blond hair (until it, too, got sacrificed to chemo)—and encyclopedic knowledge of her beloved Raiders—Jane McAlevey was nobody’s cheerleader. She was a clutch player: a tireless, brave, and inspiring organizer; charismatic teacher; gifted writer; brilliant strategist; and wise and loving sister, aunt, and friend.
But perhaps the last word should go to my daughter, at the time still an undergraduate, who turned to me as we were both struggling to match Jane’s pace on a steamy evening hike up Mt. Tamalpais (not far from where she died on Sunday) and said, “She really is such a badass!”
Popular
“swipe left below to view more authors”Swipe →
That she was. If there’s a heaven, the bosses better look out. Rest in Power, Jane.
Thank you for reading The Nation
We hope you enjoyed the story you just read, just one of the many incisive, deeply-reported articles we publish daily. Now more than ever, we need fearless journalism that shifts the needle on important issues, uncovers malfeasance and corruption, and uplifts voices and perspectives that often go unheard in mainstream media.
Throughout this critical election year and a time of media austerity and renewed campus activism and rising labor organizing, independent journalism that gets to the heart of the matter is more critical than ever before. Donate right now and help us hold the powerful accountable, shine a light on issues that would otherwise be swept under the rug, and build a more just and equitable future.
For nearly 160 years, The Nation has stood for truth, justice, and moral clarity. As a reader-supported publication, we are not beholden to the whims of advertisers or a corporate owner. But it does take financial resources to report on stories that may take weeks or months to properly investigate, thoroughly edit and fact-check articles, and get our stories into the hands of readers.
Donate today and stand with us for a better future. Thank you for being a supporter of independent journalism.
More from The Nation
![These Corporations Are the True “Winners” of the War on Gaza](https://timesofsydney.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/ORNER-Ackerman-COLTftr.jpg)
From Colt to Caterpillar, American companies are earning big profits off of Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, turning the horrors of war into boardroom victories.
![Participants wave French national tricolors as fireworks light up the sky during an election night rally following the first results of the second round of France's legislative election at Place de la République in Paris on July 7, 2024.](https://timesofsydney.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/left-triumphant-election-getty.jpg)
The socialist mayor of Paris has promised that the Olympics can make Paris greener, cleaner, and safer. With the left triumphant, will this actually happen?
![Exterior of the US Supreme Court Building the statue is titled “Authority of Law.”](https://timesofsydney.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/joe-biden-watch-getty.jpg)
As Joe Biden flirts with the Samson Option—threatening to bring his party to ruin in November—he needs to realize that the election isn’t just about him.
![Jane McAlevey](https://timesofsydney.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Jane-McAlevey_121kb.jpg)
The Nation’s strikes correspondent believed that no one is coming to save us but us. And that we are enough.
The effects of the high court’s rulings will be enduring and almost impossible to overturn without a serious reckoning by Democratic lawmakers.