Forget Succession. If you want drama (and spicy talk), listen in to the latest Class Matters podcast. Episode 12 (link below) features Jane McAlevey who is prompted by Katherine Isaac, Gordon Lafer, and Adolph Reed Jr. to explain (1) how the work of organizing jumps off in earnest AFTER a union wins a certification election. (Getting to a first union contract is hard.) (2) how the health of any union depends on constant engagement with workers as a collective body, not as atomized figures in one-on-one grievance proceedings (3) how real democracy in a union or anywhere rests on “structuring participation.”
As I heard McAlevey explain how she’s cultivated broadscale participation (and transparency) in major contract negotiations, I kept wishing the late great historian of social movements, Lawrence Goodwyn, was here to hear her. Goodwyn once explained how it took him years to grasp the tactics of the natural-born democrats who invented the Populist movement of the late 19th Century…
In the case of Populism I looked at the cooperative movement for five years before I understood that it was an organizing – a recruiting – device. There wasn’t anything in my culture that taught me that to build a movement one has to create social relations among people that would cause them to be in a room where politics is the center of discussion. I’d been taught that what mattered politically was what people said in the room. But the key question is how to get people into the room to hear – and respond – to whatever is being said there.
Goodwyn mused “that ‘recruiting’ is not a category of political science.” And it wasn’t a category in his head before he began studying the Populists. But it was in their heads! And Ms. McAlevey surely has more than a clue there. Goodwyn would’ve been locked on her plain talk about building participation into contract negotiations and ensuring workers have “governing power” in their workplace (and beyond).
Though McAlevey can be a bit of a tease! At one point, she explains that she laid down a blueprint for how Biden et al. might’ve approached their Manchin-and-Sinema (the “wicked witch”) problem during the Build Back Better saga. She included the blueprint in the manuscript that became her latest book (co-authored with Abby Lawlor) Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations. But her chapter about bringing an organizing model of democracy to national politics got cut from Rules to Win By. Lafer and Reed underscore they’d love to read McAlevey’s prescriptions for how the Democrats should’ve created informed constituencies in West Virginia and Arizona to help turn those states’ traitorous Senators. Lafer and Reed share McAlevey’s sense that it’s imperative to talk back to pols who lack Lincolnian (i.e., of the people, by the people, for the people) principles. McAlevey cites Vice President Harris’s bum steer:
You don’t wanna watch sausage be made, and you don’t want to watch a bill be made. Sometimes it’s not a pretty sight, but the end result — I mean, unless you’re a vegan, of course — the end result is usually pretty good.
Heard tell McAlevey’s chapter-long answer to Harris (and undemocratic Dems) will see the light of day soonish. First will aim to be an amplifier when it’s a happening thing. But in the meantime, go hear now…