Rahm Emanuel & Bruce Rauner On Jihad to Eliminate Unions in Chicago, says Former Union Organizer Jane McAlevey | Black Agenda Report

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.

listen

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

More Stories

Margaret Kimberley, BAR senior columnist
Freedom Rider: Impeachment Theater
17 Feb 2021
Democracy is hanging on by a thread -- not due to marauding Trumpsters – but because of bipartisan support for neoliberal policies.
Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor
What isn’t in Judas and The Black Messiah is Just as Important as What is
17 Feb 2021
Hollywood is big, mostly white, capitalist business, so it’s no surprise that its new film on Fred Hampton provides little information on Black Panther politics and history.
Editors, The Black Agenda Review
MANIFESTO: Ten Commandments of Democracy in Haiti, September 25, 1991
17 Feb 2021
Almost 20 years ago, the president elected by Haiti’s poor majority gave the United Nations a lesson in the meaning of democracy for historically oppressed peoples.
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
What did low Barr know?
17 Feb 2021
Liars, liars your loaded dice/tilted table theater’s on fire— But prosecutors and gas-lighting lawyers concur on Empire…
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
Kizito Mihigo and the Struggle for Rwandan Truth and Reconciliation
17 Feb 2021
Rwandans around the world celebrate the life of the nation’s most popular singer, apparently killed for opposing Paul Kagame’s ethnic and military dictatorship, writes Ann Garrison.