Acknowledgments
List of Figures
List of Tables
1. Introduction
2. The Power to Win is in the Community, Not the Boardroom
3. Nursing Home Unions: Class Snuggle vs. Class Struggle
4. Chicago Teachers: Building a Resilient Union
5. Smithfield Foods: A Huge Success You've Hardly Heard About
6. Make the Road New York
7. Conclusion: Pretend Power vs. Actual Power
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Jane F. McAlevey is a Post Doctoral Fellow in the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School. A longtime organizer in the environmental and labor movements, she is the author of "Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement" (Verso).
"McAlevey's decades as a labor and community organizer means that
she knows what organizers do, or should do. This book lifts the
lessons McAlevey takes from that craft into the intellectual realm
of power and politics. This book is for anyone who wants a
democratic society in which ordinary people share power." --
Frances Fox Piven, author of Challenging Authority: How Ordinary
People Change America
"Jane McAlevey is a deeply experienced, uncommonly reflective
organizer. In No Shortcuts, McAlevey stresses the distinction
between mobilizing and organizing and examines how systematic
conflation of the two has reflected and reinforced the labor
movement's decline over recent decades. More than a how-to manual
for organizers, No Shortcuts is a serious, grounded rumination on
building working-class power. It is a must read for everyone
concerned with social justice in the US." -- Adolph Reed, Jr.,
Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania
"Jane McAlevey is one of the few analysts of social movements today
who takes class power and class struggle seriously. McAlevey
understands their ineluctable concreteness and force from years of
organizing democratic unions that have effectively battled powerful
corporations. This is a book for citizens and activists--but also
for students and scholars of social movements--who want to
understand how the world can and has been changed for the better."
-- Jeff
Goodwin, Professor of Sociology, New York University
"Whether it is Black Lives Matter, climate change, feeling the
Bern, or worker rights, success hinges on the ability to build real
and sustainable power. Jane McAlevey gives us both a practical
guide and a set of underlying principles to understand how
organizing matters more than any other available strategy to grow
power, and, what it means to organize. A must read for anyone
hoping to create a better world." -- Dan Clawson, Professor of
Sociology, University
of Massachusetts at Amherst
"For those of us grappling with the near-overwhelming difficulties
of the 'how-to' of changing our workplaces, communities, and
society, No Shortcuts is an invaluable resource." --Jacobin
"The heart of No Shortcuts is composed of four case studies that
show how those unions still committed to organizing have managed to
do it. Some of this, like her treatment of the Chicago Teachers
Union, will be familiar, but there is much that is new. For
instance, her account of the heroic United Food and Commercial
Workers (UFCW) campaign to organize a sprawling Smithfield Foods
pork plant in the small town of Tar Heel, North Carolina a story
that
went largely unreported because of a gag order imposed on the union
uncovers one of the most inspiring episodes in recent labor
history."
--New Labor Forum
"No Shortcuts outlines some of the reasons for the decline of trade
union power in recent decades, but crucially it also offers
solutions. This is undoubtedly one of the best books written in
recent years on trade unions and should be considered required
reading for anyone with an interest in tackling the decline of the
labour movement."
--Ruairi Creaney, Freelance Lefty
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