Acuff Hits Road For "Getting America Back To Work"

(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)

If you didn’t know he has a new job, you’d think Stewart Acuff (r) was still out on the labor hustings, exhorting organizers to give their all. Not quite.  Instead, the longtime AFL-CIO Director of Organizing – and former President of the Atlanta Labor Council -- now the chief of staff for Utility Workers President Mike Langford, is out on the book-signing trail, talking up his easy-to-read, kitchen-table language book about how we got into the present economic mess -- and how to use collective action to get out of it. Sales of the 85-page Getting America Back To Work, by Acuff and economist Richard Levins, are rising among unionists.  Now he’s taking it, published by Tasora Books of Minneapolis and illustrated by Twin Cities artist Steve Sack, on the road.
            Acuff’s travel schedule between now and Labor Day reads like that of a man who’s still organizing -- which is what the book advocates as the solution to taking back the U.S. from the greed that’s consumed it and eaten up the middle class for 30 years.
            From Harrisburg, Pa., on May Day through a Green Jobs conference in D.C. that month -- the book strongly advocates creating well-paying U.S.-based green jobs to help restore our industrial might -- to Chicago (May 11-12), the Steel Workers in Pittsburgh (May 19), and New York City on June 9, Acuff is on and off the road.  
            Later stops are in Tennessee, a community organization in Norfolk, Va. -- the book strongly advocates organizing joint labor-community campaigns -- two days in August in his hometown of Atlanta, an Oklahoma City labor fair visit, and the 124th annual Labor Day parade in southern Indiana, in Booneville.
            Through it all, he keeps to the theme of the book: How the laissez-faire policies starting in the 1980s, abetted by both parties, drove the economy into the ditch, making it tough for workers to pay for their mortgages, their rent, clothes and college for their kids and for setting savings aside for old age -- if they have jobs at all.
            And the solution: Organizing, both within and without the labor movement.
            “We have suffered through a 30-year assault on our values, on our society, on our people, on our institutions and on our standard of living,” the book declares in Acuff’s preaching cadence.  “Contrary to 4,000 years of human history, wisdom and sacred teachings, we have been told that greed is good, that you are not your brother’s and sister’s keepers, that you are on your own.
            “Enough is enough. It is time to choose,” it adds.   The U.S. can continue down that road, aiding just “the financial elite,” it warns.  “Or we can bargain our way out…and once again have an economy that works for ordinary working Americans,” it concludes.      
- Press Associates, Inc.; photo courtesy United Steelworkers