Friday 5 May 2017

"No shortcuts: organizing for power" book launch









You are invited to the book launch of “No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age” by Jane McAlevey on May 18th, 6:30pm at Mandate offices, O’Lehane House, 9 Cavendish Row, Dublin 1.

How do we rebuild power for the many, when all the odds appear stacked against us?

This is the question that US union organiser Jane McAlevey has grappled with in her new book “No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age”, published by Oxford University Press.
Join us for the book launch and get involved in the discussion on how to take things forward in the trade union movement. Copies of the book will be available on the night at a special discounted rate. This is McAlevey’s second visit to Dublin. In 2014, she launched her first book “Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell)” – you can watch the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlV8dHFuk7o

This event is sponsored by the Communication Workers’ Union, the Financial Services Union and Mandate Trade Union.

Acclaim for No Shortcuts
“Jane McAlevey is a deeply experienced, uncommonly reflective organizer. In NO SHORTCUTS, McAlevey stresses the distinction between mobilizing and organizing and examines how systematic conflation of the two has reflected and reinforced the labor movement’s decline over recent decades. More than a how-to manual for organizers, NO SHORTCUTS is a serious, grounded rumination on building working-class power. It is a must read for everyone concerned with social justice in the US.”
~Adolph Reed, Jr., Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania
“McAlevey’s decades as a labor and community organizer means that she knows what organizers do, or should do. This book lifts the lessons McAlevey takes from that craft into the intellectual realm of power and politics. This book is for anyone who wants a democratic society in which ordinary people share power.”
~Frances Fox Piven, author of Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America
“Whether it is Black Lives Matter, climate change, feeling the Bern, or worker rights, success hinges on the ability to build real and sustainable power. Jane McAlevey gives us both a practical guide and a set of underlying principles to understand how organizing matters more than any other available strategy to grow power, and, what it means to organize. A must read for anyone hoping to create a better world.”
~Dan Clawson, Professor of Sociology, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
“Jane McAlevey is one of the few analysts of social movements today who takes class power and class struggle seriously. McAlevey understands their ineluctable concreteness and force from years of organizing democratic unions that have effectively battled powerful corporations. This is a book for citizens and activists–but also for students and scholars of social movements–who want to understand how the world can and has been changed for the better.”
~Jeff Goodwin, Professor of Sociology, New York University