Jane F. McAlevey, Who Empowered Workers Across the Globe, Dies at 59

Jane F. McAlevey, a fierce labor organizer and scholar who trained tens of thousands of workers across the globe in strategies for taking charge of and shaping their unions, died on Sunday at her cabin in Muir Beach, Calif. She was 59.

Her stepbrother Mitchell Rotbert said the cause was multiple myeloma.

Ms. McAlevey (pronounced MACK-a-leevee) dedicated her life to increasing working class power. She believed that worker-driven unions — led from the bottom up rather from the top down — were the most effective enginesto combat economic inequality.

In her writings, including for The Nation, as what the magazine described as its “strikes correspondent,” and in frequent media interviews and podcasts, Ms. McAlevey became a vocal critic of what she saw as the complacency, ineptitude and corporate collusion of many U.S. labor leaders.

“What almost no union does is actually organize their members as members in their own communities to build community power,” she said in an interview for this obituary last November. “I teach workers to take over their unions and change them.”

After leading successful campaigns for the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the Service Employees International Union from 1997 to 2008, Ms. McAlevey transitioned to consulting, coaching labor groups across the country on how to energize the rank and file, attract new members and fight off employers’ aggressive anti-union tactics.

She also worked with immigrant rights organizations, tenant groups and climate activists, and traveled internationally, advising German hospital unions, Irish communications workers and labor organizers in Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.