With Justice for All?

"I don't want to single out Warburg, because the company helped us get a good contract," says McAlevey. "But this is the third bargain that Warburg has made with the State of Connecticut, and each time, Warburg threatens to move to New York City or Chicago. Their game is to pit city against city, state against state, squeezing the taxpayers. They are bargaining down the quality of life."

Origins of an Organizer

Jane McAlevey has made a lot of waves -- and has made her mark -- since she arrived in Connecticut two years ago. John Cunningham, former head of the Connecticut Carpenters Union Local 210, and something of a legend among the state's labor movement, already rates McAlevey as "one of the three great labor leaders in Connecticut history."

To be sure, there are plenty of people who dismiss McAlevey's ideas as tired rhetoric from a bygone era. McAlevey recalls a housing-commission meeting during which Dennis Hrabchak, a fellow member of the commission, called her proposals nothing more than a "union manifesto." McAlevey chuckled, leaned into the microphone on the table in front of her, and quipped, "I'd say you're dating yourself, Dennis. My generation has never even heard the word 'manifesto.' "

That's classic McAlevey. She refuses to allow herself to be categorized politically, calling herself "a nonsectarian post-Cold War thinker." ("I didn't reach voting age until after Reagan was in office," she points out.) In fact, McAlevey was born to the struggle for poor people's rights. The youngest of nine children, she grew up at the feet of her father -- a left-leaning lawyer who was swept into the mayor's office of Sloatsburg, a conservative city in New York State's Rockland County, on the Kennedy wave of 1960. McAlevey's mother died when she was 5 years old, and her father dragged her around from campaign to campaign. She played with crayons under his desk while he fashioned zoning legislation that would maintain open spaces and bring affordable housing to the area.

In 1984, McAlevey was elected president of SASU, a student organization with 220,000 members at the time, while she attended the State University of New York at Buffalo. But even the successful battles with Governor Mario Cuomo over tuition hikes weren't enough to keep her interested in college. "School bored me to tears," she says.

So McAlevey headed off to Central America, taking public trains and studying Spanish in Guatemala, building houses and churches in northern Nicaragua. Her aim was to see firsthand the impact of U.S. economic and foreign policy. In the late 1980s, she took a job as director of the Environmental Project on Central America, a project of the Earth Island Institute, a research-and-policy group. In that job, she shadowed Salvadoran environmental and human-rights leaders so that the death squads would think twice before blowing up their cars or before kidnapping them in front of an American witness. During one of those trips, in the middle of a particularly bloody regional struggle, McAlevey's contacts kept her hidden under the floorboards of an activist's home, while soldiers went from house to house shooting rebel sympathizers.

McAlevey's current battles are decidedly less dangerous -- but they do involve serious challenges to established power. Against a stiff antiunion campaign at the Atria Courtland Garden's assisted-living residence (the owners put a tableful of groceries in front of the workers, along with a sign that read, "This is what your union dues will cost"), the Stamford Organizing Project persuaded workers to overcome their fears and ratify the union. "Atria was charging clients up to $6,000 a month and paying their workers $7 an hour," says McAlevey.

When the CEO of Atria came to Stamford to speak with local leaders about keeping the union out of his facility, he ran into staunch support for McAlevey and her team by ministers and politicians. George Jepsen told the CEO, "My personal view is that ... an honest and fair union is the best way for [workers] to improve themselves and their economic position." Within six months, the union had negotiated a contract that provided for a 30% wage increase, a 50% reduction in health-care copayments, and a pension plan. Courtland Garden became the first of several hundred Atria facilities nationwide to be unionized.

Business leaders would likely prefer to keep the needs of McAlevey's constituents off their already crowded to-do lists. But her campaigns are hard to ignore. "I have the greatest job in the world," she says. "I am able to walk into someone's home and say, 'I'm here to help make your life better.'" McAlevey describes the feeling of watching Haitian health-care workers negotiate with lawyers: "There they were, bargaining for their futures, for their children's futures. The first time I saw it, I started to cry."