Stewart Acuff

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Stewart Acuff

Stewart Acuff is a leading labor official and socialist. For many years he was the special assistant to the president of the AFL-CIO. Currently he is organizing director of the National Union of Healtcare Employees, 1199 in Philadelphia.

Supporting the Wheeling-Pittsburgh Strikers

In the June 14, 1997 edition of People's Weekly World Stewart Acuff , President Atlanta CLC, was listed among those who sent their support to the 4500 members of the United Steelworkers of America who have been on strike against the Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel Corporation since October 1, 1996:

YDS meeting

In Spring 2009 the University of Colorado at Boulder Young Democratic Socialists chapter teamed with Jobs with Justice to bring AFL-CIO organizing director Stuart Acuff for a talk. "Acuff jazzed up the crowd of forty, saying EFCA might return labor to the strength it once enjoyed."

Jobs with Justice

In 2009 Stewart Acuff served as a Board Member for Jobs with Justice. AFL-CIO

America's Future Now!

Stewart Acuff was one of the 148 speakers who spoke at the 2010 America's Future Now Conference.

Communist Party speaker

Speak Progress is the speakers bureau of the Communist Party USA. Listed speakers, as of October 2014, included Stewart Acuff

Stewart Acuff is the national organizing director of the National Union of Hospital and Healthcare Employees 1199. Formerly, he served as the national organizing director for the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation representing over 12 million union members, serving in that capacity from 2001-2008.

Acuff started union organizing in 1982 as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) organizing coordinator in Texas where he and his team organized 12 nursing homes in two years. In 1985, Stewart Acuff went to Georgia where he founded SEIU Local 1985 and built that union up to 3,000 members. In 1990, he became president of the Atlanta AFL-CIO where he organized and led the historic campaign to unionize the 1996 Olympics, one of labor’s biggest victory ever in the South.

Under his tenure the labor movement grew by more than it had in a generation. Acuff developed the policy and legislation which became the Employee Free Choice Act and led the campaign to pass it. Stewart Acuff then worked as Chief of Staff of the Utility Workers Union of America until May, 2012.

Acuff has been a regular guest on PBS, NPR, CNBC, BBC, NBC, Fox and C-Span. In 1996 he was a UN Election Observer in Sierra Leone during their Civil War. He has been jailed more than a dozen times for nonviolent civil disobedience.

He is the author of the autobiography Playing Bigger Than You Are: A Life in Organizing.

References

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