Jane McAlevey, Los Angeles Teachers, and Fighting to Win
The Los Angeles teachers’ union was profoundly influenced by Jane McAlevey, writes former president Alex Caputo-Pearl. If the loving and assertive push was her trademark, then thinking audaciously big was its complement.
Jane McAlevey with Alex Caputo-Pearl at a Los Angeles event on her book A Collective Bargain in 2019. (Courtesy of Alex Caputo-Pearl)
Few people did work calls earlier in the morning than Jane McAlevey. Shortly after taking office as president of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) in 2014, I was struggling with a group of members who argued that educators did not need training in organizing because teaching was similar to organizing, and, therefore, teachers organized intuitively.
I will not forget Jane’s words to me in one of those early calls, which she reiterated in an email: “Organizing takes discrete skills that people learn — just like people learn discrete skills, and practice them over and over, to become a teacher, a nurse, a carpenter, a top athlete. Some people already have some of the skills — and we need everyone to have the full set. If we are serious about building power, then we train people in organizing, and we adapt as we learn more.”
As usual, Jane followed this by mentioning mentors she learned from — in labor from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 1199 New England, and in racial justice community organizing from Anthony Thigpenn of California Calls. She was a learner, teacher, and adapter.
The loss of Jane is devastating. She was young, with much more life to live, and much more to give her loved ones and the movement. Jane loved life in unique ways, loved people, loved the planet — and she knew how to show it, fiercely and multidimensionally. She did it through her infectious laugh, her deep seeing of people in front of her, her joy on the dance floor, and her stories of pride about the people whom she loved — and, of course, through her world-changing work.
It is entirely true, and critical, that a massive group of us across the country and around the world will continue to call on Jane’s inspiration and teachings to fight tooth and nail for the world we need. Yet it is profoundly sad that Jane will not be with us for the joys, struggles, debriefs, and victories along that path.
UTLA was profoundly influenced by Jane. While she touched many organizations, Jane’s engagement with UTLA paints some of the picture of who she was, as a human being and a mentor.
Teaching LA Teachers to Fight
In 2014, progressives from the Union Power caucus built on years of their organizing, campaigned hard, and won election to leadership in UTLA — Cecily Myart-Cruz, Betty Forrester, Juan Ramirez, Colleen Schwab, Arlene Inouye, Daniel Barnhart, and myself. We initiated a union transformation project, now continuing under Myart-Cruz’s presidency, that has made UTLA one of the most powerful local unions in the country and has made deep contributions to the national Red for Ed movement.
I met Jane in 2011 through Bill Fletcher Jr, former director of TransAfrica and coauthor, with Fernando Gapasin, of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and A New Path Toward Social Justice. At the time, we had not yet built the rank-and-file power within UTLA to initiate a transformative agenda, but progressives were educating members about organizing. I was part of the team that invited Jane to speak at the 2011 UTLA Leadership Conference. This was a big opportunity. Jane was a structural change–focused leftist who believed in socialism, but she invested most of her time in building real structures through concrete campaigns with masses of people, rather than in abstract debates that preoccupied some of our fellow travelers.
Jane’s speech in 2011 at the UTLA conference piqued interest among members in the ways we needed, and the themes of her speech became a reference point for the future — build hard-as-hell campaigns, organize internal and external structures during those campaigns, fight to win, learn while you fight, win and get to the next platform, and fight again for more on the path to structural change.
Jane was classically Jane in the way she got to and from that 2011 conference, which was in the desert, two hours from LA. She carpooled there from the LA airport with a rank-and-file member she had never met before, lovingly probing the member on her life, story, and insights on UTLA. For the trip back to LA two days later, I loaned Jane my beat-up old Honda Civic, which became a running joke between us.
Once in leadership, starting in 2014, we were exposed to a network of organizers who had been trained in similar methods as Jane. Some had worked with Jane and shaped her thinking, and vice versa, over years of campaigns. Others had not worked directly with her, but her writing was beginning to crystallize and evolve many lessons out of their shared organizing tradition. Glenn Goldstein and Jessica Foster were working with UTLA through the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and UTLA hired Brian McNamara and Jollene Levid. These organizers’ work, in combination with the work of longtime UTLA staff, transformed the union’s staff over time. Katie Miles, an organizer who had worked closely with Jane and came out of 1199, was hired at UTLA in 2019 and added more to this dynamic mix.
From 2014 to 2020, Jane was a critical thought partner as we built the systems and structures necessary to democratize the union, be in dialogue with all thirty-five thousand members and be able to exercise supermajority power. We did this through structure tests, which Jane would later detail in a chapter on UTLA in her book A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy. Over four years, we did more than twelve mass actions that helped us assess our strength, developed rank-and-file leaders, and strengthened rank-and-file bodies and committees, and allowed us to develop reach and depth across 925 worksites and all itinerant and special category groups.
Over these years, these tests and the strategic campaigns they were a part of led to an 82 percent all-member vote to revise the constitution and raise dues by 30 percent; two winning contracts; the preservation of health care in three bargaining cycles; a mass membership card process protecting us from harm caused by the Janus decision; hard-fought school board victories and losses; a 99.9 percent outstrike; a contract with first-time bargaining for the common good victories; and a democratic process endorsing Bernie Sanders for US president.
Throughout these years, UTLA staff studied sections of Jane’s No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age and small regional study groups of Union Power rank-and-file members did the same. The overall organizing approach resulted in durable, democratic, power-building structures — an elected building representative at each site and within each itinerant and special category group, an elected board of directors immersed in strategy, rank-and-file area steering committees leading organizing, a comprehensive organizing database, and more.
In a full-circle moment, we invited Jane back to the UTLA Leadership Conference in 2019 — eight years after her first speech. In classic Jane fashion, she congratulated hundreds of member leaders and staff on their roles in the 2019 strike in a deeply grounded, exuberant, and “I see you” way — and then she, lovingly and assertively, pushed us further. With Sanders speaking at that conference as well, Jane pushed us on how to more deeply bring union power into politics and elections, to fight for the best possible political conditions under which to win and build more power.
The Push
That was a Jane trademark: the loving and assertive push. For years, Jane lovingly and assertively pushed us on expanding our bargaining teams, which we gradually did — larger for the 2014–15 cycle, larger for the 2017–19 cycle while also building structures for future expansion, and larger yet for the 2023 cycle under Myart-Cruz’s presidency and Inouye and Jeff Good’s leadership as bargaining cochairs. McNamara’s experience from other sectors with large teams, Goldstein, Foster, and Hong Bui’s modeling of tactics with charter school rank and file, and the training that Jane developed at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, Power and Participation in Negotiations — now an ongoing core program at the Labor Center for unions across all sectors — were essential to these bargaining team expansions.
As we pushed ourselves to experiment with building power at new scales, Jane lovingly and assertively pushed us more. In 2016, we formed the California Alliance for Community Schools (CACS), made up of many of the largest education union locals in the state. When we brought Jane into the group in 2019, she helped us train hundreds of rank-and-file members across the unions in fundamental organizing skills in the Skills to Win training she developed at the University of California, Berkeley, also now an ongoing core program at the Labor Center.
Jane worked methodically with elected leaders in CACS to help us prepare to line up contracts for 2025 and envision how coordinated campaigning could work. She helped us think through how to use the organizing structures built from 2014 to 2020 to create a structure-based organizing approach for the California Calls–led Proposition 15 progressive taxation campaign in 2020. Jane invited UTLA officers Myart-Cruz, Gloria Martinez, and Alex Orozco to a strategic leadership academy in the Bay Area in late 2019, focused on deepening the statewide work.
If the loving and assertive push was a Jane trademark, then thinking audaciously big was its complement. To win structural change, Jane knew we needed strong locals — with strong, strategic national unions and powerful international solidarity. Starting in 2021, the National Education Association (NEA) and Midwest Academy’s Strategic Campaign Institute partnered with Jane and a skilled team at the UC Berkeley Labor Center. The Labor Center has provided both Skills to Win and Power and Participation in Negotiations trainings for countless rank-and-file and staff teams from NEA and AFT locals, many of whom have also attended Organizing for Power, the parallel international training that Jane developed. Since 2019, many UTLA organizing, communications, and political staff have participated in these trainings.
One of the most awe-inspiring organizing moments I have experienced was when I was on a Zoom meeting as part of a team of NEA local union leaders from the institute, in dialogue with worker leaders from Africa, South America, Europe, and beyond, to become a multinational set of trainers for Skills to Win and Organizing for Power — with Jane providing her unique, inspirational, and supportive leadership. It has been moving to see formal and informal tributes to Jane coming in this week from all parts of the world, and from NEA and AFT locals across the country, including many in the “red” states that Jane felt were so critical for organizing.
Losing Jane McAlevey is devastating. There is not a way to sugarcoat that, nor should we try. I will miss my friend tremendously. Yet, while we hold those feelings of grief, Jane has given us a gift to hold simultaneously. Let us love life, those around us, and the planet as fiercely as Jane did. And let us fight like hell to change the world, through principled struggle, discipline, pushing each other, building power, broadening participation, and getting to scale, with big doses of love, laughter, dancing, and joy along the way.