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Stewart Acuff

Stewart Acuff

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Stewart Acuff was named Director of Organizing for the AFL-CIO in October, 2002 by AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, who noted Acuff’s “strong leadership skills and a deep passion for the potential of unions to lift working people's lives.”

As organizing director, Acuff coordinates strategies to help working men and women join and form unions across the federation’s 53 member unions. He has been a community organizer and union organizer for 25 years, except for a brief stint as a truck driver. From 1977 to 1982, he worked as a community organizer in Missouri, Texas, Tennessee and New Hampshire for organizations affiliated with ACORN and Citizen Action.

In 1982, he joined the union movement as the organizing coordinator for the Service Employees International Union in Texas, where he was responsible for a campaign in which employees of 12 Beverly Enterprises nursing homes organized into the SEIU. In 1985, he became executive director of the Georgia State Employees Union/SEIU Local 1985. He helped build a union of 2,500 state workers despite the fact that public employees in Georgia had no collective bargaining rights, no dues check-off, no rights to meet and confer and no provisions for union recognition.

Acuff was elected president of the Atlanta Labor Council in 1991, where he served for nine years. In 2000, he joined the AFL-CIO staff as deputy director of field mobilization for the Midwest region. He served as deputy director of organizing from 2001 until becoming director.

Acuff writes and speaks extensively. He has written articles for the Atlanta Constitution, Labor Research Review, In These Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy and Focus Magazine, Labor Studies Journal, New Labor Forum and several Georgia newspapers. He also has written essays in Which Way for Organized Labor? (edited by Bruce Nissen) and Organizing for Justice in Our Communities (edited by Immanuel Ness and Stuart Eimer). He is a member of the Federal Reserve Bank Advisory Council, the National Steering Committee of Jobs with Justice, the First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta and numerous other organizations.

Acuff was born Dec. 17, 1954, in Trezevant, Tenn. He graduated from the University of Missouri magna cum laude with honors in sociology. He lives in Silver Spring, Md., with his wife, Mary Denham, and their children, Samuel and Sydney.

Blog Entries by Stewart Acuff

Called By His Struggle, Challenged by His Sacrifice: Remembering Dr. King

Posted April 4, 2008 | 01:42 PM (EST)

The following is a speech I delivered today, April 4, 2008, to the Southern Regional Meeting of Central Labor Councils in Memphis to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Thank you for your welcome, but most importantly, thanks for all you do...

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To Reduce Economic Inequality, Protect Workers' Rights

5 Comments | Posted March 12, 2008 | 10:43 AM (EST)

By Stewart Acuff, Organizing Director, AFL-CIO, and Sheldon Friedman, Research Coordinator, AFL-CIO Voice@Work Campaign

A hearing Friday by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee shined a welcome spotlight on obscene pay for CEOs of corporations whose financial manipulations sowed the seeds of the mortgage crisis. In the process, the...

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Remembering James Orange: He Spent His Life Standing Up for Others

Posted February 20, 2008 | 01:46 PM (EST)

Last Saturday evening, Feb. 16, America lost one of our greatest warriors for social justice, and I lost one of my best friends. The Rev. James Orange died at Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta after being hospitalized for gall bladder-related issues.

During the 1960s and 1970s, Rev. Orange was...

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Restoring the Freedom to Form Unions: A Long-Lasting Boost for a Faltering Economy

Posted February 13, 2008 | 02:36 PM (EST)

By Stewart Acuff, AFL-CIO Organizing Director, and
Sheldon Friedman, AFL-CIO Voice@Work Research Coordinator

Amid the chatter about the worsening economy and what to do about it, a key factor has been omitted, even by progressives who ought to know better: an underlying structural cause of the current...

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After Election Push, Employee Free Choice Act at the Top of the Agenda for the AFL-CIO

Posted November 28, 2006 | 12:07 PM (EST)

With International Human Rights Day, December 10, less than two weeks away, the AFL-CIO and its affiliates are preparing to commemorate the day with renewed vigor, resolve, and hope that we can restore fundamental workers' rights in America.

For three years now the AFL-CIO has maintained that restoring American workers'...

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Doing the Job Congress Wouldn't

Posted October 31, 2006 | 07:05 PM (EST)

By Stewart Acuff, organizing director of the AFL-CIO, and Maude Hurd, National President of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).

When members of Congress rushed home a month ago to begin frantically campaigning for re-election, they left undone a job that could have helped them peel off...

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Korean/U. S. Free Trade Agreement

Posted September 13, 2006 | 07:39 PM (EST)

This speech was delivered on Sept 6 in downtown Seattle at a protest of the Korean-U.S. free trade agreement negotiations. It is significant in part because there were 75 union activists from South Korea in the demonstration with speakers from the Korean labor movement and farmers' organization. In July...

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