While with the Clothing Workers I became active in the burgeoning civil-rights movement. I participated in lunch counter sit-ins in Eastern Maryland and in Virginia and addressed conferences of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other civil-rights organizations on economic and labor issues. As a result of my contacts in the Southern civil rights movement, I became involved in the planning committee for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1962-63 and was appointed labor coordinator for the March by Bayard Rustin, the chief organizer. During these months I visited the national headquarters of many major US unions, meeting with their top officers in order to convince them to endorse and donate funds to the March. Needless to say, the concept of a mass march was still controversial in many quarters, including perhaps a majority of trade unions, including the AFL-CIO President who vehemently opposed it. Nonetheless I succeeded in securing the support of a dozen, mostly industrial unions, including the United Auto Workers, Packinghouse, Clothing and the Rubber workers unions. In August 1963 some 200,000 people converged on Washington and heard speeches from Martin Luther King, jr., UAW President Walter Reuther and A. Phillip Randolph. The March was a key event in the enactment of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts in the next two years. In 1963, I formed an independent committee of unionists, intellectuals and activists to support the efforts of a dissident wing of the United Mine Workers whose leadership was eventually indicted and convicted on charges of corruption, but not before it had undoubtedly arranged for the murder of Joseph Jablonski, the main leader of the movement.

In order to stay closer to my children in 1964 I accepted a job as Northeast Regional Organizing Director of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers' Union (OCAW). But since Puerto Rico was part of the region, and the union had major organizing campaigns on the Island, I found myself staying away from home nearly as much as when I had national responsibilities. Responding to my childrens' need for my presence, and my own doubts about the direction of the labor movement in the Vietnam war era, in 1967 I took a leave of absence from OCAW, and returned to school to earn my Bachelor's degree and worked for the Manpower and Career Development Agency of the City of New York. I had already published articles on labor and was known to some professors as a scholar. After I took the Graduate Record Examinations, scoring high on the Verbal, Social Science and Humanities sections, the New School was willing to grant the degree on the basis of a senior thesis (which I wrote in a year). I received my degree in June 1968 and entered the Graduate Faculty as a student in the Sociology program. Meanwhile in connection with my job I organized the first Public Service Careers Program that provided education, training and permanent jobs in schools, social services and administrative agencies for thousands of welfare recipients. In late 1968, after a period as a consultant for several New York voluntary, non-profit social services agencies, I was offered a job as associate director of Mobilization for Youth, perhaps the largest youth agency that focused on work and training, as well as medical and legal services, in the United States. Two years later I left to direct the planning and development of the first post-war public experimental high school in East Harlem and neighboring Yorkville. The planning process was funded by a $143,000 Ford Foundation grant and start-up funds from the High School division of the NYC Board of Education.

My interest in education was piqued by these experiences; I had taught workers in a variety of union settings, was a part-time teacher in the high school I started, and my first academic job was as an adjunct at Cooper Union where I taught a required social science course to graduate engineers. So when a friend suggested I might be interested in a position at the College of Staten Island, in 1972 I became an assistant professor of community studies. I was awarded a grant of $150,000 from the Federal government's Fund for the Improvement of Higher Education (FIPSE) to found, in collaboration with a psychology professor at the State University at Stonybrook, a new Youth and Community studies baccalaureate. At Staten Island we would award the Associate's degree and upon successful completion of the major, students would transfer to Stonybrook. I hired another faculty member, the historian David Nasaw, and together with a small adjunct staff, we established four centers of the program: on the College's campus, Brooklyn's Bedford Stuyvesant, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and Flatbush, Brooklyn. Except for the branch on the college campus, we negotiated collaborations with community agencies such as the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation and a social action agency on the Lower East Side. Our students were drawn from the staffs of these agencies and, in some instances, their clients. We had about one hundred fifty students, many of whom went on to Stonybrook, schools such as Amherst and Hampshire, or the senior colleges of CUNY.

Although I earned some 30 graduate credits at the New School, the four years of intensive education organizing, writing and teaching made for slow going in my quest for a PhD. From 1968 through 1973, all of my waking time was absorbed by my children, Aronowitz-3, my job(s) and a book project on the history and sociology of the American Working Class. In 1971 I signed a contract with McGraw-Hill to write the book and received a small advance. In Fall 1973 False Promises: the Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness appeared and quickly became one of the more widely discussed and read theoretical and historical works about American labor during that period. I received many offers to give talks at some of the country's leading universities including Harvard, Princeton, Yale and, in some instances, to become a visiting professor at several campuses of the University of California and the Universities of Paris and Cambridge. In the Spring term of 1976 I visited and taught in the Literature Department of the University of California-San Diego for a quarter, and then spent the rest of the Spring teaching at the University of Paris at Vincennes. When I returned I was offered a Visiting position in the History department of the University of California at Irvine for 1976-77. Sometime in the Fall I was offered and accepted a tenured position of Professor of Social Sciences and Comparative Culture at the University, in preference to another attractive offer from the Sociology Department at the University of Oregon, where I had lectured during the Fall 1976 semester.

And in 1973 I found a place where I was not obliged to attend classes to fulfill the PhD requirement. Union Graduate School (now Union Insititute) was started by a consortium of “experimenting colleges”: Antioch, Franconia, Goddard, the black college, Shaw, and several others. The administration accepted my New School credits, and my two books, articles and GRE scores as evidence that I was prepared to write a PhD thesis. My requirements were to submit an extensive autobiography, detailing my practical achievements as well as my intellectual development which included an extensive bibliography of what I had read—some of which was discussed in tutorials conducted with my advisor—and a thesis Technology and Labor. My thesis defense, in Fall 1975, was held at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, attended by a hundred and twenty-five people and lasted four hours.

In 1979 I went to Columbia University as a visiting professor in the Political Science Department. It was there that I developed my interest in the theory and politics of power and, since I replaced Mark Kesselman, who was on leave, and whose work with Ira Katznelson on power was widely read and used in undergraduate classes, I taught courses in this area. I had no particular interest in staying at Columbia, but returning to New York convinced me that I missed my kids and my hometown. In order to look for a job and reestablish my roots I accepted an offer to teach a second year at Columbia. It was in the 1980-81 academic year that I began to plan and develop a new college program for working adults with Joseph McDermott, the education director of a large Teamsters municipal employees local union in New York. By winter 1981 a proposal to establish a new center tailored to the needs of adult working people was presented to, and approved by, the administration of the City University and by its Board of Trustees. I worked with a committee from CUNY to develop the curriculum for a BA program and did most of the recruiting by visiting key officers and staff of New York unions. The City College Center for Worker Education began to offer classes to union members from a half dozen, mostly municipal employees' unions in Fall 1981. Since I was obliged to return to Irvine, I did not teach the first semester. But I came back in Spring 1982 as a visting professor at the Center.

My absence from Irvine for two and a half years forced me to make a choice. The Dean of Irvine's Social Science School was unwilling to grant another leave for academic year 1981-82. But CUNY did not have a permanent position to offer me. It seemed that after the fiscal crisis of 1975-76 there were virtually no new full-time jobs created by the 18 campus system. Since I had played a key role in starting the new school, I decided to resign my position at Irvine anyway, and accepted a second visiting appointment on the hope that a permanent position would materialize. I guess I was fortunate that this seemingly remote possibility finally arrived. In 1983 I was appointed professor of sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center with a part-time assignment to the Center for Worker Education, where I taught until 1987. By 1987 the Center had 1,000 students from a dozen unions and began to accept family members and individuals without union ties as well. Since I felt I was performing two full-time jobs I elected to place all of my efforts to the Graduate Center, where I have taught full-time ever since.

By then I had widened my horizons to include cultural sociology and social theory. With a Chancellor's grant of $135,000 for four years I assembled a committee to explore the formation of a Center for Cultural Studies which was approved by the CUNY Board of Trustees in 1988. I remain the director. In 2000 we changed the Center's name to the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work. This reflected the research program of the Center as well as the interests of its most active faculty and student members. Since 1990 we have received numerous grants from some of the nation's leading foundations on topics such as the privatization of culture, globalization, the new Latino and Carribean immigration, and changes in the accounting profession. (Our study anticipated the Arthur Andersen scandal: we pointed out the conflict of interest between auditing and consulting functions for corporation clients). We have also received grants from the training and upgrading fund of the Hospital Workers union to evaluate some of their programs, and from the Library Guild to chart changes in the nature of clerical work since computerization. In 1993 the Ford Foundation awarded our Center and the Graduate School $225,000 to plan a new PhD program in Intercultural Studies that would combine cultural studies with African American, Latino, Women and Lesbian and Gay Studies. I chaired the planning process, which involved dozens of participants from throughout the University. In the end the Graduate Center administration did not accept our proposal, so it never went forward. The tacit reason was that the administrations of City and State governments had changed and, since the Governor and Mayor appoint members of the CUNY Board of Trustees, the GC President and Provost felt that discretion was the better part of vainglorious combat.

In 1992 our Center was awarded $250,000 from the Aaron Diamond Foundation to start a three-year New Visions in Higher Education program at CUNY. Individuals and groups from the campuses were invited to submit proposals to establish a new major, concentration or, in some instances, a new program or department. I asked the Graduate Center President to appoint a representative faculty committee from the campuses to act as referees and I chaired the committee. During the first three years New Visions received more than 120 proposals and funded about twenty-five of them. The program was sufficiently successful to induce the central CUNY administration to award an additional $60,000 to sustain it for a fourth year. Environmental Studies, Childrens Studies, a new program in earth science at a community college and many other still existing programs resulted from the granting and review process.

Since 1973 I have published dozens of articles and more than two dozen books, the majority of them as sole or co-author. My books cover labor, science and technology, education and cultural topics, and I have written on social and cultural theory. My work on education is widely adopted in college courses as are my books on labor, technology and work. In addition I have always been a public intellectual and social activist. I am a member of the executive council of the Professional Staff Congress, the union of faculty and staff at CUNY and have lectured extensively on higher education, especially curriculum. From 2001 to 2004 I was a consultant to Metropolitan College of New York where I wrote an Urban Studies core curriculum that was successfully submitted to the New York State Education Department. I have appeared on television and radio and recently was the keynote speaker at several conferences. Some recent ones include a conference on cultural studies at Teachers College, Columbia, in 2005; a conference on education, work and lifelong learning in Toronto in 2005; and a conference on Antonio Gramsci in Michigan in 2007.

I have written op-eds for the New York Times, Newsday, and Los Angeles Times and articles for The Nation, The Progressive, New Politics and other magazines of opinion.