Brian Laird on WNYC and from campus organizing, we turn to labor organizing.

Since 2021, thousands of workers at companies like Amazon, Starbucks, and Apple have won union representation elections.

That year, public support for labor swell.

The Gallup poll showed that 71% of respondents approved of labor unions the highest level since 1959.

Some victories were hard fought, and some are still moving on to the equally hard step of

contract negotiations. Others like a Starbucks challenge to the National Labor Relations

Board's reinstatement of fired baristas are going before the Supreme Court for a hearing today.

And yet the momentum has been building. Just last Friday, the United

Auto Workers unionized at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee. It was the first time workers at a foreign-owned

auto plant in the South have unionized. It was the world's only non-union VW plant, according to

the Guardian, or it is now. But a lot is at stake for the National Labor Relations Board in the upcoming elections.

Board members are appointed by the president for five-year terms.

One of the nation's preeminent labor organizers and scholars, Jane McAlevy, has been on the forefront of some of these fights,

participating on the picket lines,

as well as writing several books, basically how-to manuals for how to help unions win the vote

and win their bargaining agreements.

Amazon warehouse workers and Los Angeles teachers have followed her approach, as well as

people like Naomi Klein, the leading climate activist who told the New Yorker that

Jane's quote, focus on winning helped the movement to reframe the climate crisis as a power

struggle. In September 2021, Jane McAlevy was diagnosed with a high-risk variety of multiple myeloma.

She has now entered hospice.

But true to form, she's still fighting to transform the labor movement, and she joins us

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