The profound defeat of the US labor movement over the past three to four decades is usually measured by the loss of things that workers once took for granted like decent wages and benefits. A less quantifiable but ultimately more decisive indicator is the retreat from possibilities. By extension, the labor movement’s renewal (or reinvention) is inseparable from reversing, through effective struggle, this lowering of expectations. Jane McAlevey captured this sentiment in the title of her first book, Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell), a memoir based on her experiences as a labor organizer.

The underlying argument of Raising Expectations was that while the threat of globalization, austerity, and anti-union legislation is real, these factors can also be an excuse; the mantra of “Globalization (or whatever) made us do it!” was not of course an entirely incorrect sentiment, but it avoided asking to what extent the problem also lay with the unions themselves.

Raising Expectations was full of struggles that McAlevey was directly involved in — struggles that showed what could be done despite the overwhelming power of capital. It had a personal, chatty feel to it and had an instant and powerful impact on rank-and-file workers and labor activists, quickly and deservedly making McAlevey a hit on the labor circuit as a speaker, trainer, and strategist.

The crisis within the labor movement has had all kinds of unions scrambling to find “new” models. But leaderships that were averse to institutional risk and lacked faith in their members — or worse, feared an awakened membership — gravitated to alternatives that were no alternatives at all: corporate campaigns that substituted PR and moralizing for organizing, deals with employers that left the members aside, mergers that added size but no energy or strategy. Refusing to build working-class agency, their eventual failure should not have surprised anyone.

As the title of McAlevey’s second book asserts, there are no shortcuts. In No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Guilded Age, she argues that only a radical rethink of strategy — which implies a wholesale top-bottom restructuring of everything about how unions function and allocate resources; how they relate to their members, the community and employers; how they develop leadership and how they bargain; and how they understand “politics” — has any chance of rebuilding working-class power.

No Shortcuts is more academic and more conceptual than Raising Expectations yet remains very readable. The prime concern of both books is working-class agency and No Shortcuts repeatedly emphasizes the fundamental differences in how advocacy, mobilization, and organizing proper deal with worker agency.

Advocacy is the lowest form of worker participation. It “doesn’t involve ordinary people in any real way; lawyers, pollsters, researchers, and communications firms are engaged to wage the battle.” Mobilizing does bring significant numbers of people into the fight, but they are, McAlevey contends, generally the already committed activists, not the mass of the workforce and community, “because a professional staff directs, manipulates, and controls the mobilization; they see themselves, not ordinary people, as the key agents of change.”

It is the third approach, organizing proper, that McAlevey insists on because it “places the agency for success with a continually expanding base of ordinary people, a mass of people never previously involved — that’s the point of organizing.” Campaigns of course matter in themselves “but they are primarily a mechanism for bringing new people into the change process and keeping them involved.” It is ordinary people who “help make the power analysis, design the strategy, and achieve the outcome. They are essential and they know it.”

No Shortcuts provides a wide variety of new examples beyond McAlevey’s own direct involvement that show others independently coming to similar approaches. The rich case studies range across the private and public sector. These clarifying examples include Chicago teachers and food workers in North Carolina, comparative strategic approaches among nursing home workers in Washington and Connecticut, and a worker action center standing outside the formal labor movement, Make the Road in New York. McAlevey also offers a comradely assessment of these movements’ strengths and weaknesses that broadens the discussion of what to do and how to do it.

To be clear, McAlevey makes no claim to inventing a new organizing model. Her model is inspired by the class-struggle unionism of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s and came to McAlevey through her mentors in the iconic SEIU Local 1199 New England. Her contribution lies in the adaptations made based on her own experiences and, as an obsessive organizer, pulling together the model’s core elements into a tight methodology of organizing that could be passed on and emulated by others (a how-to manual to complete this trilogy seems the next logical step).

There are criticisms of McAlevey’s approach, but before turning to them it is useful to summarize the basic elements of the organizing model she is encouraging:

1. Deep organizing.

Unions have been trapped in a mobilizing model that focuses on activists and workers who are already committed, when what is needed is an organizing strategy oriented to reaching the indifferent or opposed workers. Without that, unions cannot build the breadth and commitment necessary to address their powerful adversaries.

2. Full-worker organizing.

Union members (and indeed all working people) are more than “just workers.” They are simultaneously members of the community and have a range of untapped potentials as organizers in and outside the workplace. Full-worker organizing builds on those broader potentials.

3. Class perspective.

McAlevey laments the marginalization of class in progressive analysis — the dependence on selling your labor power to others in order to meet your needs — and places class at the center of her organizing. Quoting Ira Katznelson: “American urban politics has been governed by boundaries and rules that stress ethnicity, race and territoriality, rather than class, and that emphasize the distribution of goods and services, while excluding questions of production or workplace relations. The centerpiece of these rules has been the radical separation in people’s consciousness, speech and activity of the politics of work from the politics of community.” Building unity across these divisions is fundamental to building class power.

4. Organic leaders.

The development of workers into a social force capable of exercising power doesn’t occur spontaneously; it needs to be built and this depends on certain workers acting as catalysts. (“All people are not alike.”) Identifying such workers is one of the most important and difficult organizing tasks. These organic leaders may hold no elected position but fellow workers look to them for opinions and advice, and have confidence in following them. They carry out the crucial labor-intensive organizing tasks of one-on-one conversations about workplace and community concerns. (Among the issues raised here is how those appointed as organic leaders and those elected as workplace and local leaders relate to each other).

5. Power analysis.

Knowing your opponent is indispensable to building your power and strategy. This includes not just mapping your employer’s strengths and vulnerabilities but also that of the broader power structure you face geographically — in the community and at higher regional and sometimes national levels.

6. Documenting the potential power of workers themselves.

Keeping track of every worker’s involvement, assessing hierarchies of leverage within the workplace, and noting influential contacts in the community and support from other unions is the flip side of documenting the employer’s power. Power analysis and charting involve technical expertise but the process of gaining this information should also be structured to engage the members as part of their learning and development.

7. Direct action.

The model is biased toward direct action. Strikes are not only economic weapons but crucial to building capacities and relationships. The same goes for directly confronting management in the workplace over grievances rather than confining responses to legalistic forms.

8. Big bargaining.

The bargaining itself is distinct not only in terms of the demands put on the table, which must be sensitive to both the needs of the members and building community support, but in terms of the structure of bargaining. The innovation here lies in bargaining committees that include representatives from every department, every shift, every classroom, floor, functioning unit — the size of the bargaining team can number in the hundreds.

The justification for this break with the traditional structure of union bargaining teams is that it demonstrates to management the depth of the union’s strength; it exposes workers to management arguments and develops confidence in directly confronting them; and it is part of broadening the cadre base. (The extension of bargaining to broad involvement may have roots in anarchist thinking but here it is especially structured and disciplined).

9. Stress tests.

Constant self-evaluation is fundamental. Tests are built in so that the union is constantly assessing the strength and weaknesses of organic leaders, the members, and specific departments (for example, any department that cannot show it has a strong majority of its members supporting the union does not get a seat at the table — pushing such departments to do the organizing so they aren’t excluded).

10. Systematic organizing.

All organizing has to include strategic flexibility. But McAlevey is also adamant that the model is a totality and works because various aspects of the model are self-reinforcing. Cherry-picking pieces can derail success. As well, the fact that this model can be presented as a whole makes it easier to emulate.