We live in times when the argument for nihilism feels compelling. The World Health Organization estimates that this year about a quarter million people will die worldwide due to the excessive heat brought on by climate change. On our national political stage, front-and-center we have a convicted felon who regularly and openly declares his contempt for democracy leading the polls to become President. Israel continues its genocide against Palestinians — babies are starving to death.

At the same time, certain TV political pundits expect us to buy into their absolute certainty that we will overcome and that we will prevail.

It’s precisely in uncertain times like these that the words of Jane McAlevey resonate in my head with incisive clarity. Jane taught me that in politics and organizing, the future is radically unknown. Our national politics might creep closer to fascism, or we might fight for and win a progressive future. The national labor movement may continue to shrink, or we may realize SEIU’s vision of organizing a million workers over the next decade and enacting real sectoral bargaining in the United States. The crucial point is that it is up to us. It is precisely because the future is uncertain that we are able to take up the opportunity of collective action — and indeed, we can realize the future we need, but only if we choose to come together and believe in our power to organize.

Jane taught me that beliefs are not rational statements; beliefs become real only when they are enacted and struggled for in a narrative sense. That I may feel uncertain yet take action anyway is actually the precise necessary condition upon which a belief can exist meaningfully — otherwise, there would be no point to a belief. Ultimately — as any good organizer knows — it is precisely when we come together in action that we can begin to genuinely imagine more for our collective future. In “Raising Expectations,” Jane’s first book, Jane writes that to organize is to make workers demand more “about what people should expect from their jobs; the quality of life they should aspire to; how they ought to be treated when they are old; and what they should be able to offer their children. About what they have a right to expect from their employer, their government, their community, and their unions. Expectations about what they themselves are capable of, about the power they could exercise if they worked together, and what they might use that collective power to accomplish. Ultimately, expectations about where they will find meaning in their lives, and the kinds of relationships they can build with those around them.”

Jane raised expectations for tens of thousands of people, including most of the folks I hold dearest in the labor movement. Through her online training program “Organizing for Power,” she trained 36,000 people in 130 countries on the fundamentals of organizing. She trained 4,500 organizers through her workshops at the UC Berkeley Labor Center — I was one of them. These numbers don’t even begin to account for trainings she led outside these two institutions and the hundreds of thousands she inspired through her books.

Speaking personally, she trained me to be a lead organizer when I first started as a lead organizer at SEIU 1021. This was in April 2020, right when the pandemic hit. COVID-19 was killing tens of thousands of people every month in the USA. At the time, I was leading SEIU’s Northern California field campaign against Proposition 22, which was Uber’s ballot initiative to take away app-drivers’ employee rights, and I was fielding endless calls of absolute misery — drivers who were scared, often sleeping in their cars and having to choose between food and critical medicine. Not having answers for these drivers felt hopeless. In addition, I was dealing with intra-SEIU politics that felt disillusioning at the time. On a personal level, two weeks before the lockdowns happened, my then-girlfriend became my ex. I was hopeless, I was depressed, I was miserable.

Obviously, I didn’t get to know Jane very well through a two-week-long lead organizer training, but I will never forget her presence and her spontaneous capacity for understanding others and connecting with them. At one point during the training, I expressed my dread and depression about the world. She affirmed me, and I felt deeply seen in the ways that defy description. She told me, “Your uncertainty is real, and that’s why you organize.”

Jane’s contributions to the worldwide workers’ movement are too numerous to list — her popularization of “whole-worker organizing,” expanding union organizing into the community and involving the community with labor; her inspiration to thousands of workers to take control of their unions from the bottom-up; and more.

All these were major contributions. But what I will remember Jane most for is her wisdom that in dark times, especially like those we face now, hope is something we create together through our collective action. I do not believe the doomsayers who tacitly accept a fascistic future, nor do I believe those naively blinded by optimism. Fundamentally, I do not know what our future holds.

As Jane taught me, it is precisely the space within uncertainty that creates an opening for our collective action — only we, together, determine tomorrow.

Thank you, Jane, for inspiring me and so many others. May you rest in peace.