It's the Brian Lera Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. I actually want to start the show today

with a thank you and a message of sympathy and condolence to anyone who personally knew a frequent guest on this show

who passed away last week. I only learned of her passing yesterday. It was Jane McAlevy,

the labor organizer and scholar. She succumbed to multiple myeloma at the much too early age of 59.

Jane was last on the show in April after she disclosed her terminal diagnosis to talk about

a historic organizing win at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee and to talk about the big picture

of union and other labor rights in her lifetime.

Here's 30 seconds from that appearance, putting the Tennessee victory in a historical

and big picture context. I'm not sure Americans understand that our labor laws are so intensely

anti-union that the U.S. South has become to European and Asian automakers what Mexico and China have become to a lot of the production

facilities that make clothing, electronics and things like that in the United States. A cheap and

compliant source of compliant really key. Cheap and compliant source of labor is the U.S. South.

Coming out of a long history, we cannot disconnect from slavery straight through to today.

Jane McAlevy here in April.

She had been on the show 10 times going back to 2016.

The New York Times obituary for Jane included these lines.

Ms. McAlevy dedicated her life to increasing working class power.

She believed that worker-driven unions led from the bottom up rather than the top-down

were the most effective engines to combat economic inequality.

In her writings, including for the nation, is what the magazine described as

it strikes correspondent, and in frequent media interviews and podcasts, Ms. McAlevy became a vocal

critic of what she saw as the complacency, ineptitude, and corporate collusion of many U.S.

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