Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be For Labor When It's Flat on Its Back. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Sept, 1991 by Paul Glastris

Having spent most of the past 20 years defending union workers, Thomas Geoghegan, (*) a Harvard-educated attorney, thinks he knows who has devastated organized labor in America: people like him. Educated, liberal Baby Boomers, the kind he meets at fern bars in his neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago. These people, he feels, abandoned the labor movement in the eighties, if not before, consigning the working class to downward mobility as their own incomes rose.

Sure, others are also responsible: Congress, the Supreme Court, incompetent managers, corrupt union leaders, and the economic policies of Ronald Reagan. But in this ingenious and funny memoir, Geoghegan is hardest on his class and on himself. For he sees in his legal practice and in the laws under which he must operate a major reason for labor's decline. He makes an inspiring case for a rewriting of federal labor law, but appeals to fairness only get you so far. To regain the allegiance of liberals, Geoghegan has to convince them that stronger unions won't weaken an already shaky U.S. economy. Apparently, though, even he doesn't quite believe that.

In part, the tone of self-doubt that runs through this book is artful self-deprecation. Geoghegan strugles not to be the hero of his own autobiography. But he fails. He comes across as decent, honest, and capable, a man who has won some impressive victories for his clients, including a famous pension-rights settlement with the bankrupt Wisconsin Steel.

He also writes in the tradition of frustrated men and women of the Left who make forays into the working class, hoping to shed the guilt they feel about their own privilege. His failed attempts to bridge the class gap are part of his tragicomic schtick. Early in his career, two coal miners try to teach him to spit tobacco across the room into a wastebasket. "I had to get up, walk across, lean over the basket, and drool." Later, when he moves to the South Side of Chicago to work on a dissident steel-worker election, he is giddy at the sight of it all: the brick bungalows, the Croatian restaurants, the corner bars with Old Style Beer signs over the doors, the vast mills--"So much capital just lying on the ground. But the dreariness gets to him. One day, he discovers Hyde Park, with its bookstores and BMWs ("I felt like a sailor seeing land") and moves out.

Striking out

There is an undeniable charm in his self-effacing honesty, and it serves his purpose. Geoghegan is a yuppie Everyman, not a saint. It is easy to empathize with him and, by extension, with his cause.

Yet after a while, you wish he would give his class-consciousness a rest. Awareness of class barriers is a fine thing, but too much of it can itself become a barrier. He wants us to empathize with his clients, yet too often they recede behind his own guilty reactions to them, as when he describes the dark art of interviewing potential trial witnesses:

It was like an audition, really, as sick as that sounds. Their stories were numbing, all the same:

"I lost my pension."

"I lost my car."

"I lost my wife."

And I would think silently, "Next."

Geoghegan uses his legal practice as a metaphor for the larger post-industrial transformation that has penalized honest, virile product-shufflers. That he is shifty, effete paper-shufflers. That he is shuffling papers to help the blue-collar cause doesn't quell his feelings of inadequacy. Current labor laws, he says, make his job sisyphean.

In Geoghegan's vie of labor history, unions saw their heyday after Congress passed the NorrislaGuardia Act in the early thirties. The act took labor cases out of federal court jurisdiction. Unions could finally flex their economic muscle through strikes, free from the threat of court injunctions. But over the years Washington reversed itself. First came the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which outlawed the mass strikes that labor leaders like John L. Lewis had used so effectively. Then in the sixties, liberal Supreme Court justices began "implying" no-strike provisions in all kinds of contracts, and enforcing them.

Geoghegan saw this firsthand. As a staff attorney for the United Mine Workers during the wildcat strikes in the seventies, he found himself pleading with the court not to impose fines while simultaneously begging the strikers to go back to work. Without the power to strike at will, labor's clout wilted. There were 443 strikes nationwide in 1972, he reports, but only 43 in 1989, "about the same as the number of prison riots."

The liberal justices had good intentions. They meant to force labor and management to settle disputes in a "civilized" way, through arbitration. But the effect has been merely to shift the balance of power to corporations, which have deeper pockets than most unions. "The big issue in labor management today is not who can survive a strike, but who can survive, without blinking, the arbitrator's bill." And because grievances take years to get through the clogged system, companies have learned, says Geoghegan, that they can violate the Wagner Act by firing employees who try to organize. By the time the company has been brought to task and forced to pay a nominal fine, the organizing drive is usually long over.