In the decades since publishing her first book, the memoir Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement, veteran organizer Jane McAlevey has become a singular figure in the labor movement. She has written four books on labor, all focused on tactics and strategies to organize mass numbers of new workers into unions that wage mass strikes to fight employers, in order to revive organized labor’s flagging fortunes. She regularly comments on labor for national and international outlets, and she’s continued to work on a wide range of union fights throughout the United States and the world, both individual campaigns and in her “Organizing for Power” online training course taken by thousands of workers across the world.

Her latest book, coauthored with Abby Lawlor, is called Rules to Win by: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations. In it, McAlevey and Lawlor focus on mass-participation union contract negotiations with an eye toward engaging mass numbers of workers in those negotiations to force bosses to give unions what they want. The book focuses on several campaign case studies, including several that McAlevey herself worked on.

In a guest-hosted episode of the podcast the Dig, recorded at a public event at the People’s Forum in New York City on March 25, 2023, Jacobin editor Micah Uetricht spoke to McAlevey about her life and work. You can listen to the episode here. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.