Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement - Softcover

Mcalevey, Jane; Ostertag, Bob

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1781683158 ISBN 13: 9781781683156

Publisher: Verso Books, 2014

Synopsis

In 1995, in the first contested election in the history of the AFL-CIO, John Sweeney won the presidency of the nation’s largest labor federation, promising renewal and resurgence. Today, less than 7 percent of American private-sector workers belong to a union, the lowest percentage since the beginning of the twentieth century, and public employee collective bargaining has been dealt devastating blows in Wisconsin and elsewhere. What happened? Jane McAlevey is famous—and notorious—in the American labor movement as the hard-charging organizer who racked up a string of victories at a time when union leaders said winning wasn’t possible. Then she was bounced from the movement, a victim of the high-level internecine warfare that has torn apart organized labor. In this engrossing and funny narrative—that reflects the personality of its charismatic, wisecracking author—McAlevey tells the story of a number of dramatic organizing and contract victories, and the unconventional strategies that helped achieve them. Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell) argues that labor can be revived, but only if the movement acknowledges its mistakes and fully commits to deep organizing, participatory education, militancy, and an approach to workers and their communities that more resembles the campaigns of the 1930s—in short, social movement unionism that involves raising workers’ expectations (while raising hell).

About this title

About the Author

Jane McAlevey has been an organizer in the labor and environmental justice movements for the last twenty years. She is a PhD candidate at CUNY Graduate Center and lives in the San Francsico Bay Area. Bob Ostertag is the co-author of 'Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell)' and author of 'People's Movements, People's Press: The Journalism of Social Justice Movements' and 'Creative Life: Music, Politics, People, and Machines.' He has also published two movies and over twenty CDs of music, and covered the Central American civil wars as a journalist. He currently teaches at UC Davis and lives in San Francisco.

Edition details

• Publisher: Verso Books
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1781683158
• ISBN 13: 9781781683156
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336