In the summer of 2004, as a young graduate student, I emailed Stanley Aronowitz asking for a meeting to discuss an idea for my doctoral dissertation. He replied that there are three reasons to be a professor: June, July, and August. He asked me, politely, to write him again in September.

That was the moment I realized I wanted to be a college professor, which eventually, by incalculable strokes of luck years later, I became — much to Stanley’s dismay.

Stanley had what he called “the last good job in America,” the college professor. It provided reasonable income and autonomy at work, a degree of free expression. He had a union, of which he was a leader, and he loved the job much of the time.

Yet in the essay “The Last Good Job in America” that eventually became a book, he stakes out what I take to be the abiding concern of his entire intellectual career. Written in diary form, near the beginning, he faux-complains about caring for his sick daughter, Nona — he had to “minister to the puking” — which interrupted his workday. It is a day which, when he finally gets around to laying it out, sounds downright leisurely by today’s standards. “Except for the requirement that I teach or preside at one or two classes and seminars a week and direct at least five dissertations at a time, I pretty much control my paid worktime,” he writes.

Stanley was a distinguished scholar of labor, work, unions, class, education, American politics, and Marxism. What sewed these issues together for him was a concern over our collective control of time, time which is so central to our individual concerns of daily life as well as human destiny as a whole under capitalism. He felt that labor unions had surrendered the fight for shorter hours, forfeited their original mission, and were, as a result, doomed to bargaining — “collective begging” he always put it — over a narrow slice of bread-and-butter issues.

Stanley came from the trade union movement. At times, he seemed to be at the center of things, as when he was appointed by Bayard Rustin to coordinate labor support for the March on Washington. By his own account, though, he was a persistent thorn in the side of union officialdom. As an organizer and a proud shit-starter for the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union in north New Jersey, he was “exiled” to Puerto Rico by union leadership where, thankfully, he finally had time to reflect.

When he eventually returned to the states, his experience as a unionist and a voracious reader of history and social theory transformed into a coherent critique of work — including what he saw as work’s apologists, the unions themselves — in False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness. Part critique of the postwar labor movement, part reflection of the Western Marxism of the Frankfurt school, it is the most wide-ranging exploration of working-class consciousness I’ve ever read.

In it, he lays the foundation of his concern with the classed nature of “leisure or unbounded time.” “The distinctions between the private and public realm that constitute the real basis for the cultural autonomy of the working class are constantly being undermined,” he wrote. “Yet the resistance to such invasion is the fundamental condition for the development of a working class movement capable of charting its own historical course.”

Eventually, he landed a full-time teaching gig at the City University of New York (CUNY) in sociology — a discipline he, incidentally, always distanced himself from. Stanley hated the taxonomy of the social sciences, insisting the boundaries were arbitrary, rigid, and mostly for professionals rather than genuine advancement of social phenomena.

Somewhere, sometime, someone will write a full reflection on his life’s work. They will wade into The Crisis in Historical Materialism, an underappreciated reconsideration of Marx in light of the demands of the New Left. What many argued were strategic blind spots of the old union left — the ignorance of “merely cultural” demands for gender, racial, and sexual justice — Stanley saw as cause to rewrite Marx’s seminal argument about the force that served as the engine of historical change. In Stanley’s mind, it wasn’t that Marx was incorrect about the central role of class struggle; it was that Stanley’s definition of what constituted class struggle was far broader than the old man’s.

It was a theme he revisited in How Class Works in 2003, the year I met him, in which he argued for the “sundering the traditional sociological distinction between class and social movement.” Genuine social movements — struggles to “overcome divisions between black and white, native and foreign, men and women, to create a workers’ movement independent of capital” — were, in his telling, synonymous with class formation.

Future Stanley historians will also have to contend with his careful analysis of the role of technology in the workplace, as he elaborated in The Jobless Future (coauthored with his good friend William DiFazio), and notably in a coauthored book chapter called “The Post-Work Manifesto.” Stanley was less recognized as a scholar of education, though it didn’t stop him from writing two books on the topic, The Knowledge Factory and Against Schooling. I long wondered why he never wrote something extensive about sexuality. He often grappled with the topic when dealing with social theory and labor, and saw much value in studying the libidinal and erotic theory of Freud and Reich in working-class studies.

And then there was that time in 2002 he ran for governor of New York as a Green. George Pataki won the race, but Stanley finished a respectable fifth with 41,797 votes — nearly three times as many, it should be noted, as Andrew Cuomo.