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


  • ​​​​​​​ Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist
    The United States and Israel: The Tale of Two Rogue Settler-Colonial States United by A Commitment to White Supremacy and Barbaric State Violence
    29 Oct 2025
    The genocide in Gaza, the threat to Venezuela, and the targeting of Iran are not isolated crises. They are coordinated fronts in a single war effort attempting to enforce imperial dominance.
  • Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    STATEMENT: The Challenge to the Colonial Powers, Delegates to the Fifth Pan-African Congress, 1945
    29 Oct 2025
    “Africans, as a last resort, may have to appeal to force in the effort to achieve Freedom, even if force destroys them and the world.”
  • Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
    The US Targets Colombians by Sanctioning Gustavo Petro
    29 Oct 2025
    “I do not have a dollar in the United States. There is no account to freeze for me.”  - Colombian President Gustavo Petro, solidarity rally in Bogota, 10/24/2025
  • Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
    Hourly, Hate America Rallies Stampede Through heads of Cruel Reich Cultists
    29 Oct 2025
    "Hourly, Hate America Rallies Stampede Through heads of Cruel Reich Cultists" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
  • Mosaab Baba
    El-Fasher's Fall: A New Chapter in Darfur's Ethnic Cleansing
    29 Oct 2025
    The world's worst humanitarian crisis just found a new epicenter. The capture of El-Fasher signals the start of a worsening chapter in the history of Sudan.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us