“We lose when we don’t put workers into struggle.” There’s no more important lesson for the Left to learn from the past year, which began with flashes of hope and ended in disaster.

The saying is one of twenty aphorisms that make up “1199’s Advice to Rookie Organizers,” a document compiled in the mid-1980s when 1199 was a standalone organization, before its merger into other unions. This advice from a militant, left-led union now serves as the opening for No Shortcuts, Jane McAlevey’s newly issued set of case studies on organizing among the US working class today.

McAlevey is a longtime organizer and strategist in the student, anti-apartheid, Central American solidarity, environmental justice, and labor movements. She is perhaps best known as the author of Raising Expectations (And Raising Hell), an account of her years on the staff of several unions.