No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age is a 2016 non-fiction book by union, environmental and community organizerJane McAlevey. Drawing upon her experience as a scholar and longtime organizer in the student, environmental, and labor movements, McAlevey examines cases from labor unions and social movements to pinpoint the factors that helped them succeed - or fail - to accomplish their intended goals. She argues that meaningful change can only happen with organizing that puts ordinary peopleat the center of their own struggle: there are no shortcuts to lasting social change. She also provides an analysis of power for movements and unions that often don't understand their own sources of power or how to use it effectively. McAlevey writes that progressives in the United States lose on so many issues because of a crisis of the progressive movement, which is so evident that nothing less than a fundamental rethinking of its basic assumptions is required. McAlevey makes the case that the great social movements of previous eras gained their power from mass organizing, a strategy today's progressives have mostly abandoned in favor of shallow mobilization or advocacy. She concludes that, in order to win, progressive movements need strong unions built from bottom-up organizing strategies that place the power for change in the hands of workers and ordinary people at the community level. A German edition was published by VSA: Verlag, a division of Springer Science+Business Media, in February 2019.
Overview
Chapters include "The Power to Win is in the Community, Not the Boardroom," "Nursing Home Unions: Class Snuggle vs. Class Struggle," "Chicago Teachers: Building a Resilient Union," "Smithfield Foods: A Huge Success You've Hardly Heard About," and "Make the RoadNew York." As she dissects each case, she identifies the reasons for the movement's success or failure.
Reception
reviewing the book in Harper's Magazine wrote "No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, by Jane McAlevey, argues that all organizers have something to learn from labor. A study of successful strike campaigns since 2000, the book makes the case that mass participation is the key to winning broad democratic reform. Though not a book about feminism, it has implications for feminists and working women generally." In his review in Jacobin, Sam Gindin wrote "In No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Guilded Age, she argues that only a radical rethink of strategy — which implies a wholesale top-bottom restructuring of everything about how unions function and allocate resources; how they relate to their members, the community and employers; how they develop leadership and how they bargain; and how they understand “politics” — has any chance of rebuilding working-class power." Charlie Heller, writing in Paste, said "Imagine if you didn’t know how to play basketball, and all anyone told you was “pick and roll!” For someone new to political work, this is what the calls to “get organized” can sometimes feel like. Thankfully, in the most nitty-gritty book here, veteran labor and community organizer Jane McAlevey provides a series of case studies that detail exactly what successful organizers do."
