Belabored Podcast #115: Organizing for Power, with Jane McAlevey
Belabored Podcast #115: Organizing for Power, with Jane McAlevey
Jane McAlevey joins us to talk about her new book, No Shortcuts, strategies for workplace organizing, and what’s wrong with Saul Alinsky.
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In recent years we’ve seen many, many ideas and gimmicks and tricks put forward, each pledging to “save the labor movement.” Our guest this week, longtime organizer and sociologist Jane McAlevey, says that there are no tricks to it; in her new book, titled No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, out now from Oxford University Press, she studies winning labor and social movement campaigns, and argues that organizing—real, base-building organizing—is the only way to build real power for working people.
We also check in on the Harvard workers’ strike from last episode, and talk to Jamie Phillips at Clarion University about a fourteen-campus strike in Pennsylvania last week; look at the children making fast fashion in Turkey; and for Argh, we talk about trade and the refugee crisis, and labor’s role in the struggle at Standing Rock.
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News
Harvard Dining Services workers Contract Pays $35,000 Per Year, Covers Copays (The Crimson)
Faculty Strike Rocks 14 Pa. Colleges, 100,000 Students (USA Today)
Strike Ends: APSCUF, PASSHE reach tentative agreement (Berks-Mont News)
The Kids Who Have To Sew to Survive (BBC)
Conversation
No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (Oxford University Press, 2016)
Argh, I Wish I’d Written That!
Michelle: Zoe Williams, Europe isn’t just about trade. It’s about humanity too (Guardian)
Sarah: Trish Kahle, The Standing Rock Split (Jacobin)
