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


  • Hanna Eid
    Iran and the Strategy of Tension
    28 Jan 2026
    The Cold War-era "strategy of tension" has evolved into a modern system of hybrid warfare targeting sovereign nations that challenge Western hegemony.
  • Julia Wright
    The Photos of a Five Year Old ICE Terror Doesn't Want Us to See
    28 Jan 2026
    The arrest of a five-year-old captured public attention and ignited a prisoner revolt inside a U.S. ICE detention center. Powerful imagery is a useful tool for the people, but dangerous in the hands…
  • Al Jazeera Staff
    ‘If you sleep, settlers will burn your house’: fear in the West Bank
    28 Jan 2026
    The Palestinian village of Ras Ein al-Auja has held out against violent Israeli settlers – until now.
  • Gabrielle Emanuel
    A vaccine trial is called 'unethical' and a 'unique' opportunity. What's its fate?
    28 Jan 2026
    A controversial hepatitis B vaccine study, funded by the U.S. but paused by Guinea-Bissau, has become a flashpoint in the political battle over vaccine safety and scientific integrity. In the January…
  • Indrajit Samarajiva
    Wolves Crying Wolf (Canada, Denmark, etc)
    28 Jan 2026
    Nothing demonstrates the hypocrisy of the "rules-based order" faster than seeing its enforcers shocked when the same rules of imperial force are directed at them.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us