Jane McAlevey

Um, Clarissa ended up getting fired for organizing at, at Kickstarter, but her and I teamed up, and we spent really many, many years together trying to push this agenda to the tech industry to get this idea out that, yes, tech workers not only deserve a union, but actually what we need to do right now is to organize unions and get recognition legally, um, in order to get our demands met.

And so, you know, that became our work for many years, and what we've realized in, in sort of doing this work for years, I mean, eventually working as staffers for an international, was that there was a fundamental mismatch between the, the sort of organizing approaches that, that, you know, we were advocating for under US labor law, that we were sort of taught from sort of the classics of labor organizing from folks like Jane McAlevey or, um, y- y, you know, th- these various trainings, um, that in- that international unions promote.

What we saw was a fundamental mismatch on, of these strategies and the tech labor process.

And so, you know, o- one example of this is, is the, the sort of traditional, the traditional approach of exercising workers' leverage in, in most other sectors is to withhold your labor, right? You want to go on strike, and the way you go on strike is you, is you, is you get a va- the vast majority of your bargaining unit of the workforce signed up to participate in the strike.

Amazing.

And Jo, I just wanted to touch on the name of the podcast, which is No Shortcuts, which is at least in part a tribute to the late American organizer, Jane McAlevey.

Yeah, so Jane, for anyone who doesn't know, was absolutely stalwart.

She died, sadly, way too young.

And that's what good communications do.

They meet people where they are.

And sometimes we go on a journey together about what we need to do as a union, the things we need to build, going back to Jane McAlevey and no shortcuts.

Sometimes actually we want to win all of the stuff that we think is important.

And so we also have to, as a left, like, look at what we've... done wrong at the mistakes we've made and where our weaknesses and foibles have been and get our shit together.

Because, like, you know, I always like to quote Jane McAlevey, the great labor organizer, there are no shortcuts.

And, you know, holding people in political formation is really hard work.

I think it's harder than writing, you know, because you have to deal with other people and they're mostly, they're difficult sometimes, right?

Yeah.

He would have been alive in the time of Jane McAlevey.

They're like, you know.

yeah and the other thing that's just like as a new yorker i thought was so funny was them being like one person is gonna take queens i was like do you know how long that's an entire borough what are you talking about it's

But we've got a compilation that we've been leaning on for years.

And But I will also say two years ago in 2024, we played a couple of interviews that we did with Jane McAlevey, the late great Jane McAlevey, who was a great union organizer.

And that's also worth revisiting.

I think if you remember, you're able to go back and check those out.

Yeah, I find those things in...

Jane McAlevey, very interesting, because it is sort of like that is the basics of, you know, people would have done that as a matter of course, in historical labor organizing, you know, it's just like tactically smart to discover what your strengths are before you take a big risk, right? But now we have to have like a buzzword for it.

And like a formula.

Yeah.