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


  •  Black Agenda Radio for Week of January 18, 2021
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    Black Agenda Radio for Week of January 18, 2021
    19 Jan 2021
    US Imperialism Was in Disarray in 2020
  • Lumumba Assassination Changed Black American Politics
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    Lumumba Assassination Changed Black American Politics
    19 Jan 2021
    A panel of academics and activists marked the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first elected prime minister, by agents of the US and Belgium.
  •  US Genocide Against Blacks, Now and in 1951
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    US Genocide Against Blacks, Now and in 1951
    19 Jan 2021
    The Black leftists that presented a petition to the United Nations, 70 years ago, charging the US with genocide against Black Americans, understood that “there is a linked fate between what’s happe
  •  US Imperialism Was in Disarray in 2020
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley and Glen Ford
    US Imperialism Was in Disarray in 2020
    18 Jan 2021
    Black Alliance for Peace national organizer Ajamu Baraka told a year-end conference of the Black Is Back Coalition that “the US settler state is facing the most serious crisis of l
  • White Settler Uprising at the Capitol
    Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor
    White Settler Uprising at the Capitol
    14 Jan 2021
    Last week’s assault on the Capitol was essentially a race riot, the product of white racial grievance.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us