It is all incredibly exciting to me. UAW President Bob King is one of my favorite people in the labor movement. He is a man of principles, values, faith, and he is a great organizer.

The outline for the mobilization workshops will become our next mini e-book that we will offer free from our website: stewartacuff.com.

We will discuss power. Some of us shy away from power, because we think it is unseemly or bad. In fact, power is neutral. Power is how you get things done. Right now in America, power is most often exercised by those who use the levers of government to redistribute more and more wealth from the majority, the middle class, the working poor, and our elders to those who already hold more wealth than they could spend in several lifetimes.

The labor movement derives its ability to make things happen, to raise living standards, to change policy from the power of the number of its members united and moving in unity.

Just numbers alone are not enough. Those numbers give us the raw power. But to win we must wield that power. And wielding that power means putting those members in motion – united. Members moving together in unity, taking action at the workplace, turning out progressive voters at election time, marching, rallying, lobbying together – that is how we wield our power and win for workers.

The Steelworkers Union have the very best internal mobilization structure in the American labor movement. I was very happy to hear that the Electrical Workers are building an internal mobilization structure.

The American labor movement must get off its ass, organize and mobilize. Build power and wield power for our people.

© Creative Commons Copyright 2013

You can read the Part 1 by CLICKING HERE and Part 2 by CLICKING HERE.

Welcoming All Who Organize

We must broaden our definition of the labor movement to include worker organizations that don’t have the opportunity to bargain collectively, but represent and organize workers. It is critical that organized labor’s tent is big enough to include immigrant worker centers, Interfaith Worker Justice, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, and others. I had the privilege of helping to negotiate the relationship between the National Day Laborers Organizing Network and the AFL-CIO and to fund that partnership from the AFL-CIO’s organizing budget. With immigration, a changing economy, and different forms of worker organization, the traditional labor movement must welcome as full partners all who organize and represent and build power for workers.

Staying Attuned to the Needs of Workers

We must give up our membership in the Washington Elite, the Beltway Elite. That only poisons our thinking and deafens us to the needs and desires of America’s workers. Our thinking should not be guided by the chattering class and the Beltway punditry, but by research, the voices of workers, and our knowledge of what working families need and want.

Our Values

We must talk openly, freely, and confidently about our values. These are fundamental human values: human dignity and respect, social and economic justice, the tearing down of the OTHER, the goal of eradicating poverty, collective action, fairness, peace, and the one family of humanity.

We Must Rebuild

It goes without saying that we must rebuild. The American labor movement is at a tipping point, under assaults we haven’t seen since the 1920′s and 30′s. We are already funding way too many unions with savings put away by past generations.

American democracy cannot survive the death of American unionism. We have to rebuild, and we have to rebuild from where we are now, not where we used to be.

Creating an Open Movement

We must stop acting like an exclusive club and create an open movement. When I was president of the Atlanta AFL-CIO, all sorts of people said the best place to find out what was going on in Atlanta was the labor council. The bosses and the rightwing will never like us. Good. We will get bad media. OUR PURPOSE IS TO PUSH WEALTH AND POWER DOWN FROM THOSE WHO HAVE TOO MUCH TO THOSE WHO HAVE TOO LITTLE. That makes the rightwing, the bosses, the Financial Elite, and lots of media mad. Fine. Our goodwill should come from the workers we help fight. We will not finesse or cutesify our way out of our crisis. We have to fight our way out.

Global Solidarity

We have to take a leadership role in reforming and rebuilding our global instruments of solidarity so that high-minded statements can become down and dirty actions.

It hasn’t always been this way. During the heyday of the middle class, Federal income tax rates were many times higher. When President Reagan took office, the maximum Federal tax rate was 70%. Even that was low compared to the 91% top rate during the 1950′s. In fact, the last time our maximum Federal tax rate was as low as it is now was… during the run-up to the [Great] Depression. During those years, the maximum rate was 25%.”

- An excerpt from Getting America Back to Work, coauthored by Dr. Richard Levins and Stewart Acuff .

Click here to buy the book now.

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Stewart Acuff is America’s best-known and foremost labor organizer. He is the former organizing Director of the AFL-CIO. Acuff has also written two books: Playing Bigger Than You Are: A Life in Organizing, and Getting America Back to Work, coauthored by Dr. Richard Levins.

Stewart Acuff has spent 35 years in the labor movement working for economic and social justice for working people, In his new book Playing Bigger Than You Are: A Life in Organizing he shares some thoughts and experiences on how we can organize effectively against monied interests intent on keeping their stranglehold on American democracy. Acuff says he’s seen bitter defeats and sweet victories for working people in his life of organizing, but through it all one thing is clear – organizing works to empower people.

[Stewart Acuff ]: “We’re in a crisis in this country right now. It appears to me that a handful of rich people intend to run this country and destroy the democracy that we have through the Citizens United decision and buying elections and doing what Scott Walker did in Wisconsin and John Kasich tried to do in Ohio – to destroy workers’ rights. And the antidote for that is organization – political organization, community organization, union organization – but a collective demand that average people in America have a right to a decent life.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that the moral arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice. Acuff’s life in organizing has taught him to add this caveat.

[Stewart Acuff]: “And what Stewart Acuff says is yeah, it bends a lot more when we’re leaning on it, when a bunch of us are leaning on it.”

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Stewart Acuff is America’s best-known and foremost labor organizer. He is the former organizing Director of the AFL-CIO. Acuff has also written two books: Playing Bigger Than You Are: A Life in Organizing, and Getting America Back to Work, coauthored by Dr. Richard Levins.

Written by Dr. Richard Levins

Why would anyone working person be hopeful in these bleak times for politics and the economy? I sometimes have a tough time with that question, but not today. My friend Stewart Acuff is in town. His visit gave me a chance to see him and several of my local friends in the labor movement. Seeing so many good people in such a short period of time was inspiring, to say the least.

read from his new book, Playing Bigger Than You Are: A Life in Organizing, on several occasions during his visit. He reminded us of words we don’t hear often enough as we struggle for a better America. He talked of justice, of power, and of hope. There is no substitute for seeing Stewart Acuff in person. The best I can do is let you read something he read out loud with the passion that is Stewart Acuff’s trademark:

”We organize to give people a voice.

We organize people no one has listened to and give them a voice everyone has to hear.

We organize for a place at the table of decisions.

We organize to make the city council or the CEO take notice.

We organize for the common good.

 We organize for those things that make all of our lives better.

 We talk about the stop sign to slow down speeders and make the streets safer for our kids. 

 We organize to make the job less difficult or dreary or dangerous.

 We organize for power.

 We know that the only source of power for us is collective power, the power of our numbers.

 We organize because we’ve learned that power goes either to the Financial Elite or to average folks who’ve joined forces with one another.

 We organize for justice for all Americans.

 We take our place in the lineage of those who worked with Tom Paine and Sam Adams during our struggle for national independence, with Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth in their fight to rid the country of slavery, with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to win the right to vote for women, and with Dr. King and Rev. Jackson to rid the country of racial segregation.

 I tell you how I played my part in Playing Bigger Than You Are: A Life in Organizing. Now it’s your turn.

Hasta la Victoria!”

Please help get the word out on Stewart’s new book. We need a hopeful message now more than ever.

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Stewart Acuff is America’s best-known and foremost labor organizer. He is the former organizing Director of the AFL-CIO. Acuff has also written two books: Playing Bigger Than You Are: A Life in Organizing, and Getting America Back to Work, coauthored by Dr. Richard Levins.

- An excerpt from Stewart Acuff’s new book Playing Bigger Than You Are: A Life in Organizing.

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Stewart Acuff is America’s best-known and foremost labor organizer. He is the former organizing Director of the AFL-CIO. Acuff has also written two books: Playing Bigger Than You Are: A Life in Organizing, and Getting America Back to Work, coauthored by Dr. Richard Levins.

- Mark Schultz, Policy Program Director of The Land Stewardship Program

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Stewart Acuff is America’s best-known and foremost labor organizer. He is the former organizing Director of the AFL-CIO. Acuff has also written two books: Playing Bigger Than You Are: A Life in Organizing, and Getting America Back to Work, coauthored by Dr. Richard Levins.

Click the link to listen:

http://www.radiolabour.net/acuff-090512.html

Stewart Acuff is America’s best-known and foremost labor organizer. He is the former organizing Director of the AFL-CIO. Acuff has also written two books: Playing Bigger Than You Are: A Life in Organizing, and Getting America Back to Work, coauthored by Dr. Richard Levins.

- An excerpt from Playing Bigger Than You Are: A Life in Organizing written by Stewart Acuff.