I finished reading Jane McAlevey's Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell) (Verso £12.99) last night. It was her first book, and probably the most interesting for a wider audience. She recounts her work in Las Vegas to organise workers in the hospitals and local government and lead them as they secured significant improvements to their employment contracts. It also gives her account of how she came to fall out with the national leadership of that union, the SEIU.
My line "she recounts her work in Las Vegas to organise workers" doesn't sound like a great sales pitch for a book. But if you're in any way interested in the left or workers or unions, it's a good read. The reason it is a good read is that she selected points in the events in the various battles so that they tell a story, and the stories across the various hospitals and hospital owners (companies and not for profit entities) have enough variation and tension to drive an engaging narrative. She tells them well, and attributes that to her co-author, Bob Ostertag. There are gaps and questions, but it's her choice of story. If it were not a polemic and memoir, those questions would come more to the foreground. (Dropping the union recognition drive in one of the hospitals is skipped over, and I wondered about the workers in a union-hostile hospital who had been exposed in the work to try recruit union members.)
I finished the book by reading the acknowledgments, which she had tucked in at the end, after the last chapter. After some of the names of those she had worked with she had added "(presente)".
I initially wondered what that was about, and then when I saw it for some names but not others, I wondered if these were people who had died. A search on the internet for some of their names, combined with the name of the union, confirmed they had died.
After college, McAlevey spent time in Nicaragua, and I expect that experience is where her use of 'presente' comes from. James Phillips wrote in Counterpunch that in Honduras on the Day of the Disappeared (30 August), at ceremonies "People shout ';'Presente!' as the names of the disappeared and assassinated are mentioned". Nicholas Hayes-Mota wrote that in the USA, protesters would mark the anniversary of the murder in El Salvador of eight people – a woman, her daughter, and six Jesuits for whom the woman worked. They had been killed by soldiers trained by the US military at the School of the Americas (SOA). The commentators would gather "at the SOA campus to participate in a prayer vigil to commemorate the martyred dead of Latin America, to affirm them as '¡presente!'."
The use of "presente" by people on the Left is not unchallenged. Miguel, in The Volunteer, noted: "The expression 'presente!' was (and is still) an expression USED BY FASCISTS to glorify their dead 'heroes'".
McAlevey's later three books are more like guides or the nearest you can get to a left (and more honest) version of the self-help genre (or maybe "selves-help" because she is immensely clear that securing power for workers must be a collective task). No Shortcuts (Oxford University Press, £15.99) is based on her PhD dissertation. A Collective Bargain (HarperCollins £12.99) is a good entry for interested trade union activists and the most the "selves"-help one of her four books. Rules to Win By, co-written by Abby Lawlor (Oxford University Press, £20.99) extends No Shortcuts to give greater space to the negotiations after the workers have (been) organised. It also usefully includes a case study from outside the USA (Germany).
During COVID, McAlevey worked with the Rosa-Luxemburg Foundation to develop the Organising For Power programme, which continues to train trade union leaders on enmpowerng their members to win.
McAlevey died last month. She leaves behind a heavily subscribed training programme, four books and that intangible legacy of inspiration to justify the phrase "Jane McAlevey (presente)".
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