AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

In this Labor Day special, we turn now to remember the longtime labor organizer and scholar Jane McAlevey. She died in July at the age of 59 of multiple myeloma. McAlevey dedicated her life’s work to empowering rank-and-file workers, training tens of thousands around the world to effectively strengthen their unions. She was also a prolific writer and the author of four books, including Rules to Win By: Power & Participation in Union Negotiations and A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy.

In April, she came into Democracy Now!’s studios to give one of her last interviews. Shortly before she joined us, Jane had announced she was stopping all work to turn to home-based hospice. She spoke to us just after Volkswagen workers at a Chattanooga, Tennessee, factory voted overwhelmingly to unionize in a historic victory for the United Auto Workers. I began by asking Jane McAlevey about the significance of the UAW victory.

JANE McALEVEY: Yeah, because it’s such a great story. I mean, you had 4,300 auto workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on their third try — honestly, they should have had a union there 10 years ago, six years ago. But this win wasn’t just a win — it was what we would call a beatdown, honestly. I mean, they beat the employer by 72%. The numbers are astounding.

So, part of what was so great about it is they showed in Chattanooga a lot of what I have been talking and writing and practicing about for decades, which is they had a supermajority strategy. They said they wouldn’t file for election until they had what we call a supermajority of the workers engaged on public petitions, saying, “We’re ready to vote 'yes.'” And when you lead with a public petition that says, “We’re ready to vote 'yes,'” you are signaling to the employer, “We’re coming to get you.” And that’s exactly what they did. They were having parties. They were having T-shirt parties. They were walking around in red T-shirts in that plant for weeks leading up to the election. They were messaging all the things that those of us who win really hard campaigns — and I don’t know any campaign anymore that isn’t hard — it’s all the stuff that we do, those of us who have just kept winning in the last 40 years, while too many national labor leaders sat around debating, “We can’t really win. We have to change labor law. We have to do all these things,” when all we have to do is actually start trusting that workers are really intelligent, that if we teach them what it takes to win, which is building supermajority organization before the election, that’s going to carry them into a great first contract fight. And that’s just what they did in Chattanooga.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted to ask you about the role of Shawn Fain here. He spoke at a Labor Notes conference. For people who are not familiar with Labor Notes, this is the organization that has been backing rank-and-file movements for decades. And to have a UAW president speak at a Labor Notes conference, in itself, is highly unusual. I’m wondering your sense of the impact of the democracy movement that occurred within the UAW and its effect on the labor movement.

JANE McALEVEY: Yeah. I mean, this is a source of personal joy, because I’m a UAW member for many years, including that I was part of the 48,000-worker strike. So, I had the pleasure of voting in the ballot initiative to get direct democracy in the United Auto Workers. And then I had the pleasure of pulling a lever for Shawn Fain, doing some fundraisers on the West Coast with a bunch of folks for him.

So, to watch him go from winning the election, contested, highly contested, basically taking over in early March, walking into what was their national negotiations, every four years their national negotiations conference, in late March, going into and leading a series of unprecedented strikes, that resulted in incredible victories, had a direct impact on the workers in Chattanooga deciding, “Hey, we want some of that, right? Like, we want to top out at 40 bucks an hour instead of the low thirties that we top out at right now in Chattanooga, Tennessee.”

So, Shawn Fain is already becoming the kind of trade union leader that we need many, many more of. And I am thrilled that he is my union president. And I’m thrilled that I got to participate in the direct democracy movement that helped put Shawn Fain in, because we are seeing what one risk-taking, strategic, smart trade union leader can do in literally less than a year. He’s created a movement in less than 12 months.

AMY GOODMAN: Jane McAlevey, your incredibly strong voice doesn’t convey it, but in addition to fighting for labor rights, you are battling terminal cancer, in the fall of 2021 diagnosed with multiple myeloma. You recently wrote a piece titled “I have stopped all work to turn to home-based hospice for the remainder of my time.” Can you talk about this struggle?

JANE McALEVEY: Yeah, sure. I mean, it’s a struggle that’s basically coming to an end. I received what’s called a high-risk form of multiple myeloma, very dangerous. It’s called the 4;14 mutation. And from day one, they said you had a handful of years to live. And I just didn’t look back. I just woke up the next day and kept organizing, because, to me, while I was absolutely paying attention to my doctors, going through chemo, going through radiation, we got to the point where we had quickly run the clock on everything available to treat me. And I was moving into clinical trials. I was doing clinical trial drugs. And at this point, my cancer is ahead of the clinical trial drugs, and there is nothing left.

So, several weeks ago, I was hospitalized for a few weeks, kind of delirious, out of it, which happens a lot in the last three years. I would quietly just be hospitalized and not know what was going on around me. They thought I would be dead a few weeks ago. I’m out again. I’m riding my bike. I’m on your show. And I’m going to fight until the last dying minute, because that’s what American workers deserve. …

So, what breaks my heart about having to announce hospice, even though I’m sitting here talking to you, and I will keep doing work — I’m going to try and write a little bit right now — but is, I can never really stop, you know, but what it’s giving me more time to do is prioritize friends and family. And I have to tell you that the life of a trade union organizer, who’s generally going up against what we call A-level boss fights, meaning the toughest there are, where they call in 18, 20, 25 of them, terrorize them, captive audiences, fire them, all of it. Like every fight I’ve had has been that level, what we call an A-level boss fight. There’s an A level, B level, C level in organizer kind of lingo. You know, so, for me, it’s the courage of all the workers that I’ve had the pleasure of being with in these struggles for 20 years, where they have to get up and take risk and do things that are extraordinary, just to form a union, that I think is where I take the strength I have from.

So, I’m definitely spending more time with family and friends. I haven’t gotten enough time with them maybe over the years, because the campaigns are so relentless. I think a 19-hour day was an average for most of the last 20 years. I don’t think the lack of sleep has hurt my ability to heal, because I keep kind of bouncing back. To me, the only worthwhile thing really to say, I think, still about the cancer is just that this time there’s nowhere to go. So, each time I collapsed and went down in the hospitals, they would have a strategy, right? We’re strategists. I’m a strategist. I’d wake up, and I’d be like, “What’s the next strategy?” And when I came up this time, they said, “The strategy is hospice, because there is nothing else to do.” So, I’m really enjoying time with my friends and family. I’ve probably seen 50 people already in just the last two weeks. I am so blessed by so many good friends. And it’s, I would say, my tribe, I’ve always called them. I know it’s a holiday.

But, you know, there’s a tribe of organizers, like 400 of us, who just kept winning, in all the years that the national leadership kept saying we couldn’t win, just like 400 of us who just kept winning, whether it was the Chicago Teachers Union folks, the United Teachers Los Angeles folks. Now we’ve got the victory under Shawn Fain. I feel like 2024 and Chattanooga is a little bit of kin. And, boy, if they hit Mercedes, it’s really going to be true, like 2012, when the brilliant Karen Lewis, who we lost to cancer, came on and came out and led that incredible strike at a time when —

AMY GOODMAN: Chicago teachers.

JANE McALEVEY: Yeah, when big strikes hadn’t been happening for a very long time. And they got ready, and they did their work, and they had the community behind them. They did incredible preparation work for two years to get ready for that strike. They did supermajority — the same word I was using about Chattanooga. They built supermajority committees in every single school in Chicago. And when they hit in 2012 and took the country by storm, certainly took organizers by storm — we were like, “What just — what is going on in Chicago?” And everyone was going to Chicago to see what the mighty Chicago Teachers Union did in 2012.

That moment began to rebuild the idea that we could run big strikes and win. We could run big strikes and win. And that is what began to happen across education land. And we’ve had a whole hell of lot more of them. So, we know that when we do the work right, we can win. And that tribe of 400, probably 25 of whom have come zooming in to say their last goodbyes, which I try and turn into like a last cocktail or something nice in the evening with them and really talk about the reflections and how we win. And I think — I think, for all of us, there’s been this deep love across this crew of 300 or 400 of us all across the country, some of whom, by the way, were leading the campaign in Chattanooga, so are helping teach the workers.

AMY GOODMAN: Against Volkswagen.

JANE McALEVEY: Yeah, against Volkswagen. Some of the tribe was in the Chattanooga fight, because there are methods. There’s a discipline and a set of methods that we know. And we know they don’t always work. Nothing is ubiquitous. But they work a lot. And so, you know, I’ve almost never lost a National Labor Relations Board election in 20 years, and there’s a reason for that.

And there’s a lot of organizers. And I really — this is a really important thing to say. There’s a lot of organizers whose names, unlike mine, no one is going to ever know. I could start naming them. They’re an incredible — my comrades, my 400 or so, what we call the tribe, you’re never going to know their names. And they just helped the workers, they just coached the workers into the victory against Volkswagen. They’re going to be helping coach those workers what it is the boss is going to do next in that fight. You’ve got to stay ahead of the boss in the fight under our methods. There’s a way to stay ahead of the boss, we call “stay ahead of the boss,” in the fight.

And it’s only because I had that first cancer — really, I’m an accidental writer, honestly. And then Frances Fox Piven read the first draft and dragged me into the Ph.D. to write No Shortcuts, which was also not a plan. I didn’t finish undergraduate, because I was arrested too many times doing student protests in my college years, I just dropped out.

But, you know, there’s a lot of organizers who are every bit as good as me. We’re good. There’s a lot of us. And we like to win. And we like to teach workers how to win. What are the methods? What is it we can do? And now we’ve taken that — you know, we’ve trained 40,000 rank-and-file workers in two-and-a-half years, since COVID started, in our global training program, Organizing for Power. There’s another one starting on May 7. They’re six-week organizing courses. They’re free. You have to come in teams.

But I want to — I want to basically acknowledge all the organizers who are out there winning and have just kept winning and kept winning and kept winning, again, in the face almost of a cynical, kind of do-nothing national trade union leadership that lost faith in workers and that didn’t put the kind of resources into organizing and started hiring lawyers and did brand damage and did shareholder campaigns and did everything but talk to American workers. And it turns out, when we invest our energy into actually engaging with American workers, they vote “yes” for unions. And so, that team of organizers, who just kept at it — and are going to keep at it long after I’m dead — I love them, and they have a lot more people to teach.

And we’re in a hell of a moment right now. … And there’s also a lot of danger all around us, right? We’ve got Trump lurking. We’ve got polarization at really intense levels.

And one thing I want to say about a beautiful trade union campaign, the kind that we just saw where they won by 72%, you know, at Volkswagen, is that spreads. That kind of work actually spreads. And when you have a victory like that, other workers all around the country and the world, but especially the country, start to think to themselves, “Hey, we can probably do that. Like, how do we actually do that?”

So, we’ve had this position of 20 years of risk-averse national trade union leaders. Shawn Fain, breath of fresh air, just so different, so ready to go out there and be risk-taking and say, “I have faith that American workers are smart enough to know what’s right or wrong, as long as we can get into a one-on-one conversation with them.” You know, and they’re doing it. So, it’s pretty amazing. And I just want to acknowledge all those organizers who are not writing books.

I mean, I wrote the first book because I had cancer. And I wrote the fourth book on cancer. And to be honest, I had started my fifth book, and I’m sorry that I’m not going to get to finish it, called — I’ll just say it. It’s the theme of my life. But it was — to me, it was going to be my ultimate sort of final book on power, called Leave No Power on the Table. So, we leave a lot of power on the table in the trade union movement. And in my view, in every campaign, there isn’t room to leave an ounce of power on the table, if workers want to win and have life-changing contracts like they did in the UAW settlements.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Jane, I wanted to ask you — you’ve alluded a couple of times to your start as a student organizer in the divest from apartheid in South Africa. Could you talk about that and how that shaped your activism?

JANE McALEVEY: Sure. … Yeah, there were two rounds of it. I mean, to make a long story short, in the State University of New York, at 64 colleges, if you include the community colleges, 64 state colleges and community colleges, it’s the largest public university system in the country. And back in the day, when I was 18, 17, we had a very strong — we called it actually a statewide student union. We actually used the word “student union.” And people had to join. And we were going up against Young Americans for Freedom, who would run anti-dues campaigns, and we had to win the dues campaigns. I mean, it was a lot like running a union campaign, just a little bit less intense than I would find, you know, 20 years later.

But so, as student leader, I became the elected student body president at State University of New York at Buffalo, which is the largest of the campuses. And our grad students were in with undergrads in the student government. So I had a universe of 28,000 voters and was going up against actually a really hard campaign by the athletes and the sort of Greeks, who were like, “Who’s this left-winger who’s going to try and take student government?” We took every seat. We ran 28 people. We ran a slate. My father was a politician. He said, “You don’t just run alone. You want to govern. So you want to run a whole slate.” So, 28 of us ran for Student Senate, every single position. If there was dog catcher, we would have run someone for that. We took the entire student government, and then, basically, dove face first into the fight to divest the university from South Africa. And by a year later, I was elected head of the state student union, which made me the student trustee, like officially, legally the student trustee on the statewide board, which gave me access to documents, to all the financial records, to every single thing a board of trustee member gets. So, very unusual that you had a powerful-enough state student union that the president was actually a member of the board of trustees.

And to make too many long stories short, we had already introduced a divestment resolution several times before I became the president. And we made a few strategy changes. One was we began to focus much more on Mario Cuomo, Mario — smarter, I believe, than the son. But anyway, Cuomo wanted to run for president, too. And we decided we had to start shifting strategy and putting pressure on Mario Cuomo, this, like, lovely Democrat who was going to run for office. And we said, “Hey, you know, you’re the real governor of, in some ways, the State University of New York system, and we’re going to put this campaign on you, Mr. Liberal Democrat who wants to run for president. We’re going to put South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s arrest, the murder of people all over South Africa, and apartheid, directly onto your lap, if you don’t start getting involved in the campaign.”

The day of the fourth vote, which was my first vote as a trustee, we introduced the resolution. But I had access. I had the swipe pass to get into the back, because I was a trustee. So I wore a very large skirt that was covered with chains underneath it and padlocks. And step one for me was to get up, introduce the resolution. Predictably, they were going to vote it down. And then I was going to take a bathroom break, which I did and went downstairs. So, there were actually hundreds of workers secretly waiting. And we took the business office, because we wanted to stop the state business immediately, like so that the university couldn’t function. So, we had hundreds of students ready to take the finance office of the whole state university system, not just one campus. We shut it down. It was a pretty intense moment, actually. We had to ask all the nice secretaries, “We love you, but we recommend you leave now before we padlock the doors.”

And that campaign led to the biggest divestment in the history of the divestment movement at that time. We really drew it out. They overreached. They put me in jail, along with two other student leaders. I mean, imagine me at 19 like being sent off to jail. That wasn’t very smart of them. That’s when you learn a boss doing an overreach. We had the ANC testifying in our trial. We, like, made it into a trial. We’re like, “You’re going to put us — you’re going to actually charge us with real charges,” the three leaders, me and two others. And we said, “Strategy, strategy,” right? Like my father. Again, being the daughter of a politician was helpful, a left-wing politician, was helpful, because I went to strategy. So, they’re arresting us. No one else is getting arrested on charges that are going to put us in jail. We’re going to go to jail. Let’s take the trial. So, they tried to settle an agreement with us outside of court and say, “If you agree to never protest for your time as a student leader, we’ll drop the charges.” And I said, “Oh, hell no. You’re not going to stop me from protesting on college campuses. I’m like the state student leader.” And as soon as we said “no,” we had a trial.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Jane, I wanted to ask you in terms of the — how the changing nature of production and work in the United States has affected the ability of organizers to organize workers, because, clearly, more and more factory production is shipped overseas, and the employers go from big industrial operations to smaller ones. They try to contract out aspects of their work as much as possible to reduce class consciousness. How that has affected the ability of organizers in the United States to continue to build worker power?

JANE McALEVEY: That’s a great question. I think two things. One is, I mean, everyone who has continued to try to organize, and even the folks who are doing sort of mobilizing work, which, to me, again, is secondary in its effect, but everyone trying to win for the last — since, I’d say, 1995, when the change happened at the AFL-CIO, when John Sweeney took over back in 1995 — that’s sort of when I enter — everyone who’s been trying since then knew that two things were true, or they knew at least one thing was true. One is, we had to look for strategic targets who could not be forced out of the U.S., hence I become a hospital organizer, right? They still have yet to figure out how to have a registered nurse administer the kind of incredible care I’m getting, from Vietnam, China, fill in the blank, yet. When that’s going to happen, who knows? But so, we all spent the last 20, 25 years looking for “strategic” — keyword — targets, where they could not move the workers out of the U.S. And that’s part. So, that’s one.

Two, in order to win in those kind of campaigns where, Juan, the numbers became smaller, you know, a hospital — the larger hospitals that I’ve helped organize were 2,000 or 3,000 at a time, which is a nice number, 2,000 or 3,000 workers in one election, and going into negotiations. But a lot of them are smaller. A lot of it’s nursing homes. A lot of it’s, I mean, at the smallest, you can see a Starbucks, you know, 20 workers or so. But a lot of the targets, the strategic targets, became smaller. So I think we had to do a strategy adjustment, which was: How can we build deep community support around these workers? How can we, aggressively and strategically, quietly change the conditions that are going to make it so that healthcare workers, for sake of argument, or educators actually build really intense relationships, that are genuine, with the people who are going to be the first ones who might have turned their back on them when they walk out on strike demanding both better schools, better healthcare, better healthcare systems, better staffing ratios? All of those, I call that mission-driven workers. That’s a lot of my work, has been in what I call the mission-driven worker fields. And those workers have incredible capacity to recruit the whole community to their side.

Now, not enough unions do it, honestly. Like, not nearly enough trade unions make real connections between the workers in the campaign and the workers’ own community. I sort of probably became known for that, second to the debate about organizing versus mobilizing, for very deliberately in every campaign I’ve ever run. First we chart the workplace, what’s called charting the workplace. We make sure we have all the correct leaders identified. The leaders are leading all of their co-workers in the struggle. Because in the private sector — right? — no staff can go in. This is all about the workers. Like, the rank-and-file workers have to run these campaigns, because it’s the private sector, which is where I’ve spent my life fighting. You know, we get arrested if we put our toe on the sidewalk. So, the essence of a good trade union organizer in this era has been we’re teachers, we’re coaches. We have to teach the workers everything. They actually have to execute their own campaigns. And that’s been true in every fight that I’ve had the pleasure of leading.

So, once we have a majority built inside of a workplace — a nursing home, a hospital, fill in the blank — we then begin to chart very systematically. These are real words, “charting,” I’m using. We chart the workers’ connections to their faith leaders. Do they have a house of faith? Are they involved in the PTO? Are they involved in a local food bank? Do they volunteer to coach Little League or sports? Like, every worker has a ton of connections in their own community. And we systematically chart them. There’s probably five of us in the country who do this at the level I’m talking about — they’re in Chicago Teachers Union, too, by the way — like, who really dig in to show that the workers themselves can bring a whole new third front for power with them into the fight. And it’s been essential, frankly, to beat down the union busters in these kind of campaigns in the era when it’s easier to offshore jobs. It’s going to be true in Chattanooga, too. They’re going to have to have a hell of a community campaign around the workers, the 4,300 workers, who we should keep celebrating, as they go into their first contract negotiations, right?

Remember, in the U.S., round one is winning a hard-as-hell election, where people are being terrified and terrorized daily and fired and all sorts of things. And part two is winning the first collective agreement, which is why I wrote the fourth book. And again, sorry, I’m not going to get to Leave No Power on the Table, the fifth book. But the fourth book —

AMY GOODMAN: You might.

JANE McALEVEY: — I’m happy. Well, I’m happy, I’m really happy, to have gotten the fourth book out, on negotiations, because I think it’s the most radical change that a union can make overnight. I was taught to let all workers into the negotiations process. Most unions bring a lawyer, couple elected leaders. Maybe there’s five people in the room total. This is 95% of American labor, and I’m not kidding. That’s how negotiations happen. For those of us trained in a much more militant and democratic 1930s, '40s tradition, we bring all the workers. And I literally want all the workers. Like, anyone who's not on shift should be in negotiations on days that we negotiate. So, hundreds of workers are who the boss confronts when they walk into a room, if I have the pleasure of being the chief negotiator. …

And leaving that book to America’s workers, if you read nothing else, reading that book is a game changer, because when workers themselves see their employer across the table behaving like a total ass and trying to explain why what we heard on the Moody’s and Poor’s call about how many billions they’re about to make, and they’re telling us, “Oh, sorry, poor us, pockets are empty. We got no money,” it’s like my favorite negotiation session, is when we’ve shown the workers the real numbers that they’re telling their investors, you know, the corporations that we’re fighting — they’re all big private-sector hospitals now, too. They’re not little hospitals, mom-and-pops. These are huge corporations that own all these hospitals, mostly in the South, because they’re union busters. And then we bring in 300 workers for the day that we’re going to force the chief financial officer into negotiations, because you can do that when you have a union. You can actually say, “Someone has to come explain the financials you gave us.” Nonunion workers don’t have the right to the company’s financials. Unionized workers do. So, those are always some of my favorite sessions on capitalism. I don’t even have to say the word “capitalism.” This is today’s lesson in how capitalism works. They lie to you through their teeth, literally, about how much money there is, and then they get up and walk out of the room. And usually pretty much from that negotiation session on, it’s a game changer. …

And in all of those fights, if you look at a successful campaign, the number one thing we’re trying to do is build — first identify the most trusted worker leader, and then start building the confidence of the workers that they deserve a good healthcare plan, they deserve better pay, they deserve a real vacation, not just paid time off, they deserve a quality of life, that’s allowing their CEOs to go live on yachts and play with rockets. So, that’s some of the difference. And there were a lot — you know, there were a lot of differences. …

So, the reason why Power & Participation, that book, and maybe No Shortcuts really matter is that we’re going to have to be running a lot of illegal strikes. They’re coming. So, if we’ve got risk-averse national union leaders who are scared to do strikes right now, I just want to say, “Time to get over it,” because we’re not going to have time for risk aversion. If we do our work right, if we get public petitions, what we call a public petition, where 70, 80, 90% of the workers say, “I’m ready,” whether that’s illegal or legal, we’re going to have to start walking, because in the near future strikes will be illegal, or they will charge so much money as to have the effect as to make them illegal. So, nothing shy of 100% and 95% walkout, united, strong and together, with their community with them, is going to be able to win. So, people need to start practicing that right now, building supermajorities, winning like they did in Volkswagen, and a lot of other places, where people are finding elections every day. So, we’ve got to get on it in terms of teaching people. You don’t — you don’t do — you don’t take risk lightly and stupidly. You take it based on a set of assessments and a set of tests you’ve done as organizers with the workers, that the workers know every single assessment they’re doing. And when they’ve got 95% of people T-shirting up in the same color and walking out and having a party in the parking lot, you’re pretty much going to win. We’re going to need a lot more of that heading into a future that I think, with the current Supreme Court, is going to very quickly have strikes made illegal.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet you maintain so much hope. I just want to finally ask: As you confront your own mortality, how do you have this level of optimism, of brilliance, of lucidity, and to also offer hope to people who perhaps are in the same situation as you are as you deal with cancer?

JANE McALEVEY: You know, I, Amy, feel like I’ve had a really great life. I have been paid for 40, because the environmental justice, the Highlander years, the student organizing, that started before the trade union, the dominance of the trade union work in my life, but, you know, for essentially 40 years, I have been paid to teach workers and ordinary people how to beat the power structure, and beat it hard and win a lot. And so, I feel like my life — I feel like I had an incredibly fortunate life, purposeful. Family and friends probably complain that they haven’t seen enough of me in that 40 years. That’s why I’m hanging out and spending a lot more time with people right now, and that’s really important to me. But I have seen so many tens of thousands of workers win against stiff odds, that I kind of have endless faith in the ability of workers to continue to win. Takes methods, takes discipline. But for me, I am going to just keep cheering on every single worker in every worker campaign until the day that I no longer am with us. But I am going to hopefully keep writing as fast as I can right now on a few subjects that relate to power.

And for anyone who’s in a cancer fight, you know it’s a god-awful thing. It’s confidence-stripping. It is soul-stripping a lot of days. And what’s been amazing for me is the team I work with, the team I’ve been working with, on a very big campaign, in particular in Connecticut, got a multiyear campaign, getting ready for it, with a terrific union. You know, I know the work is going to continue. So that’s what gives me peace of mind. The books are out. The global and the domestic training programs are solid. I’ve replaced myself with staff everywhere at this point. I spent all of last year doing what I called — 2023 was the year of succession planning, because it was January — I call it the other January 6 — January 6 of '23, when they really said, “You're going to be dead in two weeks. And family flew in from all over the world to say goodbye, and then I popped back up again. So, again, that’s different than now, because they had a clinical trial drug to put me right into, which just magically worked.

But, you know, the work is going to go on. And that’s what makes me happy, is that I did a lot of succession planning, the work is going to go, and if workers just keep winning — one person falls, one soldier goes down — I’ve always thought of myself as a soldier. You know, one soldier is going to go down in the fight, and there’s a ton more soldiers being produced every day, in all of these campaigns, in all of the training programs. And I do think that they’re going to win, ultimately, because people have had it with capitalism in 2024.

AMY GOODMAN: And your advice to people who are caring for people with cancer? What is most helpful to you?

JANE McALEVEY: You know, showing a lot of love, also giving space sometimes. I’m the kind of person who needs some time alone each day, which is a struggle with my incredible caretakers, though most of them really understand it. But, you know, delivering food, mostly sending messages. Like, when I wake up in the morning, God, especially since I have not even yet read all of the letters I’ve gotten since the news about hospice, and it is unbelievable. If I’m feeling bad for a minute, I just turn and go to the next letter. I just read one from like, I think, Alyssa Battistoni that blew my mind. Like, so, just letting people know, you know, that their life has been worthwhile and that the struggle continues, I think that’s what people with cancer need, a lot of love, a lot of tenderness, a lot of healthy food, a lot of fun, if you can do it, you know? We’re trying to have a lot of fun. I did a book party called the Not Dead Yet Book Party, when Power & Participation came out, because I was supposed to be dead then, and had two comedians, Dominique Nisperos and Nato Green. I don’t know if you know them, but I had two comedians emcee the party where I was supposed to be dead. So, trying to keep it light. And then, for me, really doing the succession work.

But I think for a lot of people who are struggling with cancer, those who will survive, God bless, get on it. You know, do the work you need to do to recover. It’s hard work, and it’s exhausting. And for people facing, you know, a more terminal diagnosis like mine, I think we probably need all sorts of different things. But what we definitely need is a lot of love notes, a lot of texts, a lot of emails, and just a lot of support through the fight.

AMY GOODMAN: That was longtime labor organizer and scholar Jane McAlevey speaking on Democracy Now! in April, shortly after she announced she was entering hospice. It was one of her last interviews. She died in July at the age of 59. Go to democracynow.org to see the full interview.

When we come back, UAW President Shawn Fain.

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AMY GOODMAN: “The Women Gather,” performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock in our Democracy Now! firehouse studio back in 2003. The group’s founder, Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, died in July at the age of 81.