Stanley Aronowitz is an active trade unionist. He is a member of the negotiations team and executive council of the Professional Staff Congress, the union of faculty and staff at the City University of New York.

He is also involved with the Center for Labor Renewal, a group dedicated to renew labor as a progressive social movement in the United States and internationally.

Aronowitz was a founding editor of Social Text, and is a founder of Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination, where he serves as co-managing editor.

Aronowitz is a member of the board of Left Forum, whose annual conferences in New York attract activists, organizers and intellectuals from around the globe.

He speaks widely on labor, education, social theory and technology and has consulted with unions and social movements on issues of strategy and organization.

He is co-author, with other members of the Fifteenth Street Manifesto Group, of the Manifesto for a Left Turn.

As director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work he has directed research on, among other topics, clerical work in the New York Public Library; the record industry and its relation to "indie" labels; the effects of computer aided design and drafting on engineers and technicians (with Bill DiFazio). The Center also organizes and sponsors conferences on a wide array of issues.

Aronowitz is a founding member of the National Writers Union, UAW.

He ran for Governor of New York State on the Green Party line in 2002.

Aronowitz was an organizer of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam era and was a member of SDS national council in 1967.

He was a member of the editorial board of Studies on the Left (1964-1967).

Aronowitz was vice-chair for organizing of the Metropolitan Council on Housing (1963-65).

In the late 1950s and early 1960s he was vice-chair of the Clinton Hill Neighborhood Council in Newark. During that period he was executive secretary of the New Jersey Young Democrats.