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
    Lifting the Veil on International Human Rights Day: How Gaza Exposed the Oxymoron of Western Values and Human Rights
    10 Dec 2025
    The genocide in Gaza has torn off the West’s human rights mask. This naked colonial violence demands a new path where rights are won through people's struggle, not granted by the very states that…
  • Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    INTERVIEW: “We have to be together to withstand the fury of this wounded beast…” Shirley Graham Du Bois, 1975
    10 Dec 2025
    “...the point was to come together to stand against the common enemy. And this is the lesson that I hope we learn…”
  • Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor
    Women for Peace Collaborate to Support Rwanda, Congo, and Rwandan Political Prisoner Victoire Ingabire
    10 Dec 2025
    CODEPINK is collaborating with the International Women’s Network for Democracy and Peace, which works for peace and democracy in Africa, on a webinar on Rwanda, Congo, and the case of Rwandan…
  • Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
    DUI Hire
    10 Dec 2025
    "DUI Hire" is the latest from BAR's Poet-in-Residence.
  • Afro-Venezuelan Organizations Network , Regional Articulation of Afrodescendants of Latin America and the Caribbean
    Afrodescendants: Casting Off Illusions, Preparing For Struggle
    10 Dec 2025
    Drawing on a history of resistance, Afro-Venezuelan organizations are mobilizing their communities to meet the threat of military action by the Trump administration and calling on the people of the U…
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us