Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire

Rahm Emanuel & Bruce Rauner On Jihad to Eliminate Unions in Chicago, says Former Union Organizer Jane McAlevey
01 Apr 2015
🖨️ Print Article

by Doug Henwood at KPFA's Behind The News

US living standards for ordinary people have deteriorated the last 40 years because Democrats and Republicans have systematically de-unionizeds the country, says former union organizer Jane McAlevey.  Illinois governor Bruce Rauner and Chicago's Mayor Rahm Emanuel are on a jihad to kill the last unions in Chicago, the better to impose more privatizations, cuts in child care, wages, education and more austerity.

McAlevey, author of "We Need Syriza Here In Illinois" published last month in The Nation, declares the distinction between people working in the so-called “public sector” and “private sector” is nonsense. There are not two economies, there is one, and there are not two ways that workers get treated, depending on whether they work for government or corporations, there is one.    She reminds us that real unions create traditions and institutions of internal democracy, which is not the same as "horizontalism" that they run strikes regularly, and that they are frequently led, as the Chicago Teachers Union was in 2012 by black women.  

McAlevey was a remarkably successful union organizer for SEIU in Nevada, a so-called right to work state.

Left economist Doug Henwood, among much else the host of KPFA's Behind the News, interviews Jane McAlevey on the connection between Bruce Rauner, Scott Walker and Rahm Emanuel, how the 2012 Chicago Teachers Union strike kept Mayor Rahm Emanuel from closing 100 Chicago public schools instead of just 50, and the ultimate collective power of organizing the workplace.

Catch Doug Henwood's program every week here.

McAlevey is the author of Raising Expectations, Raising Hell.

 

 

 

 

 



Your browser does not support the audio element.

listen
http://shout.lbo-talk.org/lbo/RadioArchive/2015/15_02_19.mp3

More Stories


  • Interrogating Systemic Racism and the White Academic Field
    Nelson Maldonado-Torres 
    Interrogating Systemic Racism and the White Academic Field
    01 Jul 2020
    The US university is marked by the dominance of intellectual white liberalism in tension and complicity with conservative nationalism and neoliberalism.
  • A Southern Vanguard, The Lost History of Communism Below the Mason-Dixon Line
    Robert Greene II 
    A Southern Vanguard, The Lost History of Communism Below the Mason-Dixon Line
    01 Jul 2020
    Alabama Communists helped lay the foundation for the organized civil rights movement that emerged in the late 1940s and early ’50s.
  • The Struggle to Abolish the Police is Not New
    Garrett Felber
    The Struggle to Abolish the Police is Not New
    01 Jul 2020
    Prison and police abolition were key to the thinking of many midcentury civil rights activists.
  • A Black Scholar on How Today’s Abolitionist Movement Can Fundamentally Change the Country
    Jeremy Scahill and Robin D.G. Kelley
    A Black Scholar on How Today’s Abolitionist Movement Can Fundamentally Change the Country
    01 Jul 2020
    If there’s ever a time when a Reconstruction might actually lead to democratization and the end of American imperialism, this is the opportunity, says Robin D.G. Kelley.
  • The Self-Confessed Bankruptcy of Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba
    Adofo Minka
    The Self-Confessed Bankruptcy of Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba
    01 Jul 2020
    Jackson, Mississippi’s Black mayor is celebrated as a “radical” in some quarters, but his cops kill, maim and abuse Black people just like police forces everywhere in the US.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us