Thomas Geoghegan's Which Side Are You On?
Mort, Jo-Ann
AN ODE TO THE LABOR MOVEMENT WHICH SIDE ARE You ON? TRYING TO BE FOR LABOR WHEN IT'S FLAT ON ITS BACK, by Thomas Geoghegan. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991. 287 pp. $19.95. What else does a man...
...In a chapter called "Free Trade," Geoghegan somehow treats the subject in a manner that doesn't make our eyes glaze over and, one hopes, will open the eyes of the comfortable, affluent friends whom he addresses in this part of the book—people who he fears are like the French upper class before the revolution, "isolated, [having] lost any feeling of responsibility for the common people, or indeed, for the nation...
...The dream of such a mobilizing strike is probably more important for the labor movement right now than the actual strike...
...Geoghegan is skeptical of the view expressed by his friend Sadlowski, whom he quotes: How will labor come back...
...WINTER • 1992 • 105 standards in all three countries to the lowest common denominator...
...he notes the irony of a way of life that brought with it danger and grueling work even as it provided an entire generation and a nation with a higher standard of living: "I wish there was some way, somehow, that we could fight to bring back the mills, with all the high-wage jobs, and then start fighting with our very next breath to knock them down...
...There is a natural instinct for institutions in trouble to look with suspicion upon outsiders...
...Geoghegan is a Harvard-trained labor lawyer who represented dissident mine workers in the JablonskiBoyle era and went on to represent clients such as the radical steelworker (USWA) leader Ed Sadlowski, dissidents from the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, and just plain steel workers in locals trying to capture their promised pension funds after corporate mergers and shutdowns...
...In the midst of this, Geoghegan takes an absorbing soul-searching journey through "the black sulfurous, White Sox anti-world . . . the South Side [of Chicago] . . . the secret world of organized labor . . . the real counterculture" of our nation...
...Although he describes the ruthless world American capitalists have created, he doesn't give the union movement the tools it needs to fight, like the new anticorporate tactics...
...Yet, sometimes Geoghegan's romanticism gets the better of him...
...And then all of a sudden you're seeing some John L. Lewis again, a leader, but he gets thrown up, he's just riding the thing...
...to do that, unions should combine a historic fervor with innovative tactics...
...And they strike...
...One plant...
...Now, Tom Geoghegan, in a creative ode to the American labor movement, asks the same question about Midwestern auto and steel workers—the men and women who have suffered the costs of economic mismanagement, imports and leveraged buyouts...
...He usefully cites Seymour Martin Lipset's pioneering work on the decline of trade unionism—but, wrongly assuming that Lipset agrees with the values of the Reagan era, Geoghegan blames the messenger for the message...
...As a young lawyer working with Joseph Rauh, Geoghegan found himself in Chicago with Sadlowski's campaign for president of the USWA...
...Then, somebody in Idaho does it, the same thing, independently...
...Taft-Hartley funds, jointly administered by management and labor, set the stage for unions to become asset holders and investors, rather than leaders of the class struggle...
...They would be busboys or dishwashers, and the men who are busboys or dishwashers now would be working in the mills instead...
...it was to be saved only in the Great Depression, by a newly formed Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) dedicated to organizing, and militant leaders like John L. Lewis and Sidney Hillman...
...Mother Theresa has left the miserable poverty of India to feed the newly unemployable of a once-industrial nation...
...Partly, I suspect, because of his experience representing dissident trade unionists, he also tends * The breaking of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Union by Ronald Reagan early in his first presidential term signaled an intense decade of union-busting...
...Provincial labor laws make organizing easier, there is a national ethos of equality, and one of the most vibrant social democratic, labor-based parties in the Western world today...
...He wrongly dismisses the new "corporate campaign" tactics, for instance...
...Of course, union democracy is important, but one can't discount the autocratic styles of Sidney Hillman and John L. Lewis...
...This book points to other causes of labor's downfall, from America's mass culture to its labor laws, which are among the most oppressive and least democratic of any industrialized country...
...And they'll be guys across the street, at a second plant, and they see it, and they think, "Hmm, maybe we can do that...
...Organized labor is at a crossroad...
...It'll start with one plant...
...Geoghegan reminds us that organized labor in the 1920s was "even deader than now...
...This chapter is unfortunately timely because we're in the midst of a debate about free trade on the North American continent, in which both Democrats and Republicans are opportunistically labor-baiting anyone opposed to a scheme that will reduce labor nn•IN...
...The book moves from the promise of a Sadlowski to the "dark age" of today...
...Industrial unionism had collapsed...
...And they do it, and they win...
...Everyone would advance in the queue: the part-time dishwashers would be full-time, the full-time ones would be in mills...
...Geoghegan is right to yearn for some of the fervor of the old CIO days, even if those days weren't as militant as they are remembered...
...Organized labor must see itself as combative again in order to wage the battles out of which new members and power might come...
...Geoghegan visits a soup kitchen on Chicago's West Side, a phenomenon he attributes at least partially to "free trade...
...106 • DISSENT Books to give too much weight to the notion of union democracy as the cutting-edge issue for labor's revival...
...Harnessing the energy of a new generation of East European immigrants—and somewhat dependent on the organizing and political skills of socialist and communist cadre—these men transformed American labor...
...Harvey Swados asked in these pages in 1961, in his essay "The Miners: Men Without Work...
...Labor should welcome the energy and idealism of Tom Geoghegan and others like him will be able to help rebuild a labor movement—a movement that can bring America to rediscover its Whitmanesque heritage over and above its other legacy of individualism...
...Consequently, the labor movement in Canada, even though 40 percent of it is affiliated with American-based unions, is more militant...
...An immediate consequence has been the near collapse of the heavily unionized industrial sector...
...Although I share Geoghegan's skepticism, I do know that when the Daily News unions were on strike, I gave a copy of this portion of Geoghegan's book to a striking newspaper guild member to inspire him to continue the strike and to win it...
...The leaders of the CIO helped establish the New Deal, along with a president who offered himself to posters that urged workers to "register to vote" and "join the CIO...
...What Geoghegan wants is for organized labor to transform America once again...
...Geoghegan sees a country that resents the upward mobility gained by high-wage unionized industrial workers...
...What else does a man do besides keep house .. . and hang around the saloon, after he has been out of work for fourteen months...
...In fact, Lipset's valuable work shows the difference between the United States and Canada— between a nation founded on a Jeffersonian vision of individualism and minimal government and one where even the Tories believe in a sort of "socialist monarchy," as Canadian novelist Robertson Davies puts it...
...Sadlowski, to him, was "a radical in labor's mainstream . . . sixties . . . hip . . . smart . . . the younger son who reminded them of their own fathers...
...Geoghegan became a labor lawyer because it was the closest thing he could find to the French Foreign Legion, after unrequited love forced him away from the environs of Cambridge, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., and into the throes of the 1972 campaign of Mineworkers for Democracy...
...We live in an era when striking workers can be replaced with a ruthlessness unknown since before the New Deal, one in which American workers' living standards are dropping to near third-world levels...
...Now maybe if organized labor had not collapsed," the people eating in the soup kitchens "would not be steelworkers," Geoghegan muses...
...Geoghegan is quite taken with the dissident movements for which he has worked...
...To him, they were real American revolutionaries...
...And the little nuns could go back to India...
...The CIO's tradition and culture were submerged under the AFL's craft union tradition...
...Some labor officials may see this book as a tract against organized labor...
...Organizing efforts flourished until the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which not only made organizing more difficult but also made labor more complacent, establishing a form of collective bargaining and arbitration that took the militancy out of the process...
...This is an unlikely book by an unlikely labor chronicler, which should interest an audience beyond the usual suspects who normally read about labor, as well as anyone who cares about the labor movement already...
...That would be a mistake...
...That's not romanticism, that's a fact...
...In 1955, in the midst of labor's strongest period, the AFL (American Federation of Labor) and CIO merged—actually, it was more of a leveraged buy-out by the AFL of the CIO...
...The decade of PATCO* has come and gone...
...In a strike...
Vol. 39 • January 1992 • No. 1
