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Jane McAlevey’s Plan for How to Build a Fighting Labor Movement [1]

['Jane Mcalevey', 'Tyler Austin Harper', 'Jared Abbott', 'Fred Deveaux', 'Cori Bush', 'Shawn Fain', 'Daisy Pitkin', 'Barry Eidlin', 'An Interview With']

Date: 2024-07

Jane McAlevey

It starts with the foundation of a good union already being there before I arrived. I show in the chapter that in the decade or so leading up to those campaigns, that union had been constantly on strike. When workers were voting in 2016 and 2017 (it was seven different hospitals of mostly nurses voting to form unions in Philadelphia), they were doing it because they had seen a gigantic 2010 strike at Temple University Hospital, where the workers went out on an open-ended twenty-eight-day strike and took on management. In the end, they won pretty much everything they went out on strike for.

When I was brought in, I was doing my PhD. I needed to work during the PhD process. So I had carved out only one or two contract campaigns at a time — that’s what I could handle while also finishing my PhD in five years.

In 2016, when it was clear to the leadership that they didn’t even have enough people to negotiate the contracts, I began to get phone calls from the head of the union saying, “Something is going on in Philadelphia. There’s a whole lot of heat down here. We keep winning elections, and we can’t even stop to negotiate. Can you come down and start coordinating the first contract campaigns?” I keep saying no. Next thing I know, they invite me to be the keynote speaker at the convention. The whole leadership was organizing me, and I didn’t know it until I got there.

I go to their convention, which is in April, and I get surrounded by thirty-five worker-leaders from Einstein Medical Center who come up to me and say, “The employer filed charges against our election. The employer filed charges to get the election thrown out. This is the biggest hospital in the whole campaign in Philadelphia. And the employer filed charges against the National Labor Relations Board. We’re asking you to come down and help us get over these legal charges.”

We get there, and the truth is, what was tricky about the election was that the employer is contesting the election completely, so there is no union officially. The boss was putting out a message that says a majority of nurses never voted for the union — which is actually technically true. A majority of total workers had not affirmatively voted for the union if you counted those who didn’t vote. But by American democracy it was a slamming victory.

So the boss is putting out this constant message. That was the day-one thing. I met the workers, and I said, “To overcome that employer message, guess what you’re going to have to do? This thing called a majority petition, which is a petition that only you and your coworkers sign, no one else.”

That petition is going to say, “we demand the employer drop the legal charges, recognize the union, and get to the negotiations table.” These petitions are always very short. This is a structure test.

It was not easy, because there were whole anti-union departments at that point. The union busters don’t go away. They hadn’t left the hospital.

So this was an ongoing, daily, intense organizing campaign to get to that 90 percent supermajority across that hospital, even though they had already voted to form the union. It was constant organizing, and it was not until they hit barely a supermajority, 65 percent of them signing that petition — because we couldn’t move a couple of the key anti-union units [in the hospital] yet. So 65 percent of them sign a supermajority petition, saying it’s a lie.

And we immediately have the workers themselves blow the petition up into a gigantic poster. It’s called showing the boss. We immediately had delegations of nurses in their scrubs delivering it to every member of the board of trustees, the mayor, the city council, the media, everyone you could possibly imagine to say, “The boss is lying. The proof is in every signature on the paper.”

The reason why PASNAP brought me there was because like at Amazon or Starbucks, the employer is going to continue contesting and using lawfare to stop workers from ever getting to the contract.

That’s the first pivot in the campaign. Meanwhile, the employers lose the charge, but they keep filing appeals. And we know that’s the whole point. The reason why PASNAP brought me there was because like at Amazon or Starbucks, the employer is going to continue contesting and using lawfare and the legal process to stop workers from ever getting to the contract, unless the workers can figure out how to create a crisis for that employer that brings them to their knees. Which is exactly what the workers did in Philadelphia.

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[1] Url: https://jacobin.com/2023/05/jane-mcalevey-interview-labor-movement-strategy-whole-worker-organizing-supermajority-leadership

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