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Stewart Acuff

Stewart Acuff

Stewart Acuff is one of America’s best-known union organisers, with a 40 year career in community and union organising, mainly in the Southern USA. In 1990, he became president of the Atlanta AFL-CIO where he organized and led the historic campaign to unionize the 1996 Olympics, labor’s biggest victory ever in the South. He served as Organizing Director of the national AFL-CIO from 2001-2008, and under his tenure the labor movement grew by more than it had in a generation. He developed the policy and legislation which became the Employee Free Choice Act and led the campaign to pass it. Stewart then worked as Chief of Staff of the Utility Workers Union of America until May, 2012.

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    Playing bigger than you are: Lessons from US organising

    Stewart Acuff on book tour

    I’m so excited to be doing my first international book tour, bringing my new book, Playing Bigger Than You Are: An Organizer’s Life, to Britain, and working to deliver training for the TUC’s Organising Academy. The book is all about the 40 years I’ve spent as a community and union organizer in America, mostly in the American South.

    I’ve been blessed to be in the middle of several historic moments in America – the civil rights movement, new organizing in the South, taking on the Ku Klux Klan (and being threatened with being cut “from asshole to appetite” for my trouble), tackling America’s extreme right and being threatened by the rightwing militia with being stalked and assassinated.

    As I travel around Britain next week, I will be focusing on the lessons of my work organizing on some of the most difficult turf there is – and the work of the British unions to organize in new sectors and new workplaces. 

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    Posted on January 25th, 2013 by Stewart Acuff filed under: Union organising