Two years after Aris Accornero’s death, the paper aims to highlight the main as-pects of his profile as a sociologist and intellectual through a comparison with Alain Touraine and Ruth Milkman. There are three obvious similarities. (1) Strong political participation in the struggles for emancipation and the economic and civil progress of workers and the most vulnerable classes, struggles in which work is a key aspect. (2) An important role also outside their professional and academic fields: Accornero, Touraine and Milkman are public intellectuals, who intervene both in the political context of their country and internationally. (3) Finally, all of them analyze the historical event of their time, the development of Fordism after the Second World War and its crisis after the 1970s. Starting from those deep simi-larities in their works and in their activity, the essay intends to grasp the differences and the specificity of their contributions, and in particular that of Accornero, to the sociological debate on work, on the working class and on the union.
Keywords: Accornero, Milkman, Touraine, Union, 1970’s, post-fordism, represen-tation