"Demonstrates that good organizers can in fact succeed." -Frances Fox Piven
Jane McAlevey Jane McAlevey spent twenty-five years as an organizer in the student, environmental, and trade union movements. She is a Contributing Writer at the Nation, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
This book is gripping, funny, sad, and very thought-provoking. Jane
McAlevey uses her own experiences in a movement that has been
undergoing dramatic changes-within a workforce that has undergone
even greater changes-to suggest to the reader the necessity and
potential for a transformation of the union movement into a real
labor movement. Once I started reading it, there was no
stopping.
*Bill Fletcher Jr., author of "They’re Bankrupting Us!" And
Twenty Other Myths about Unions*
This book casts a bright light on the problems of American unions.
Jane McAlevey gives us an on-the-ground account of the obstacles
the union hierarchy throws in the path of a bold and energetic
organizing effort that scored a string of brilliant successes
before the hierarchy cracked down. We need to read this book and
learn its lessons partly for what it tells us is wrong about
unions, but also because it demonstrates that good organizers can
in fact succeed. That message is heartening because the simple
truth is that we can't rebuild a democratic left in the United
States without a revived labor movement.
*Frances Fox Piven, author of Who’s Afraid of Frances Fox
Piven?*
Raising Expectations is a breath-taking trip through the
union-organizing scene of America in the 21st century. In the
battles McAlevey recounts, hardly anyone comes out standing tall.
But her story, along with those of so many brave health care
workers, fills me with hope.
*Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed*
This book renews my faith that organizing works. It calls for a new
kind of unionism and makes a compelling case for a new vision for
the American labor movement. In the 'whole worker theory' that
McAlevey tested and retested in real life campaigns, all the issues
negatively impacting the poor, working and middle class become the
cause of unions, not simply wages and narrowly defined workplace
conditions. At a time when climate change is wreaking havoc at home
and abroad and communities of color are becoming the vital center
of progressive social change, this book offers one path to building
a movement that can and must tackle many issues. Raising
Expectations is so refreshing because it aspires to tell us how we
can rebuild a movement that can win.
*Van Jones*
McAlevey's message-that unions alone give working people voice at
the bargaining table and the ballot box-burns with conviction. She
makes for bracing company in interesting times.
*The Plain Dealer*
McAlevey burns with a passion for the cause
*Tribune*
McAlevey promotes the concept of 'whole worker' organizing, which
seeks to go beyond the 'labor-community' paradigm in a manner that
recognizes that workers are rooted in, and not separate from,
communities and also recognizes the value of bringing community
organizing techniques into the realm of labor and vice versa.
*Book News*
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