A Lost Love for Labor

...When they rose to extol themselves and, occasionally, one another, they never so much as mentioned the Zeitgeist that was their mother...

...economy to other countries, especially Japan, to buy their friendship as allies against the Soviet Union...

...When Congress was considering legislation compelling employers to notify workers in advance of plant closings, the author had a conversation with his friend, Ann, a "radical" who said: "The plant-closing thing is so great...

...The unions also are victims of present labor law, partly as written, but mainly as interpreted by the labor boards and courts...

...Others include: the movement of the economy from Rust Belt to Sun Belt, shifting the battle turf from geographic areas where labor was strong to areas where it is weak...

...Geoghegan isnotopposedto unions...

...When the Great Depression befell America at the end of that decade, unions were left standing in the industrial wasteland as a shivering shadow of their former selves...

...They are fighting for it like crazy, and they are opposing all those weakening amendments that the Republicans are trying to tack on to the bill...

...If unions did a better PR job with their members and the public, he implies, deindustrialization would have been halted...

...Instead, this labor lawyer answered: "Why don't they endorse it...

...the redistribution of income from the bottom 80 per cent of the nation to the top 20 per cent (mainly the top 10 and top 1 per cent), resulting in an imbalance between production and consumption that retards economic growth and ultimately brings on recessions and depressions...

...Arrayed against labor, however, were American manufacturers, contracting out work to the Third World...

...they don't even cry out in pain...

...In 1971 Richard M. Nixon decided it was necessary to "cool the economy" in order to check inflation...

...To which Geoghegan should have replied: "They do endorse it...

...Bored and bewitched by his mission, he has written this apologia pro vita sua to explain himself to himself— and to any peeping Tom eager to peer into the torn psyche of a '60s sort of radical who, disgusted with the conservatism and corruption of the '80s, yearns for the liberalism of the '30s that he never expects to see...

...He would like them to be reincarnated in the image of the '30s, and is despondent because he knows there will be no Second Coming of John L. Lewis...

...It's exciting...

...Lewis' thunderous prose sounded like the loud and hollow noise issuing from that proverbial empty barrel...

...Strikers were given fines and were imprisoned...

...Today employers discharge union-minded workers with impunity—not because the law per se allows such practice, but because the labor boards and courts allow such firings by their interpretations and by their long, drawn-out adjudication process...

...There are fewer workers employed in American manufacture today (15 per cent) than in 1970 (23 per cent...

...American retailers, who could buy cheap over there and sell dear over here...

...some people might call themselves liberals...

...If "justice delayed is justice denied," then they deny it despite the language of the law...

...and most important the White House, goaded by the State Department and the Pentagon to give away huge chunks of the U.S...

...This shrinking sector of the U.S...

...It's grass roots...

...An employer could fire an activist—or any other employee—at will...

...But when a union fights to hold on to an industry it is also fighting to hold on to jobs, to purchasing power —in other words, to protect a sector of the economy...

...Why don't doctors go to the funerals of their patients...

...and a flood of immigrants, legal and illegal, whom many employers have exploited to undercut established standards...

...For the nonce, the Zeitgeist is raining on the Labor Day Parade...

...Geoghegan is keenly aware of the "deindustrialization" of America...

...they don't fight...

...Geoghegan does the dig into self with painful pleasure, both in substance and in style...

...The author concedes that the decline of American labor cannot be attributed exclusively to current leadership...

...That would cut back consumption...

...They put it at the top of their legislative agenda...

...The Zeitgeist of the '30s listened— and wept...

...Then came the War years (1916-1918) and the unions practically doubled their membership...

...The key fact is that in the war to halt deindustrialization organized labor in America has been the strongest, often the sole, soldier fighting for regulation of imports—only to be marked as a "special interest" selfishly pursuing its parochial purposes...

...Rather, he maintains that they are no longer functioning: They can't organize...

...Labor's self-interest in such cases is identical with the national interest...

...His eyewitness description of what happened at Wisconsin Steel is a gripping and gruesome account of the human wreckage left in the wake of aplant closing...

...A view of the past and a vision of the future are shut out by what is visible at present...

...Organized labor opposed the idea...

...What was the G-plan...

...The reason...

...It is uninhibited by formalities or facts...

...The Zeitgeist wore a union label...

...Deindustrialization, though, is not the lone factor that has been working against unionization in recent years...

...Company goons were deputized as sheriffs to mow down strikers...

...His suggestion is not without merit...

...we might still have an organized labor...

...America's economy, stimulated by the War of 1812 and speedy urbanization, was booming...

...The author does not hesitate to take poetic license and even fantasize to make a point...

...As it has contracted, so have the unions representing workers in manufacturing...

...If his plan had been accepted, "the Democrats might still be in the White House...

...In this respect, alas, Geoghegan is fairly typical of the now-mindedness of the generations that have come to maturity in the post-World War II decades...

...These vital historic dimensions are absent from Geoghegan's introspective narrative...

...economy (manufacturing), the years from Nixon to George Bush have been uninterrupted recession, bordering on depression...

...Geoghegan's simple, and simplistic, proposal that protection of the union activist against firing would turn everything around is one example of this deus ex machina mentality...

...As a result, he tells us, "After 1979, everything was lost...

...In the early 19th century, for example, the courts ruled that unions were illegal—a conspiracy...

...Once the War was over and Wilson was out, labor was hit with the recession of 1921, the occasion for employers to launch their "open shop" campaign...

...By 1828 they formed city federations, organized Workie Parties, played a significant role in the election of Andrew Jackson as President, and won an epic battle for universal free public school education...

...So why doesn't labor endorse it...

...Part of that now-mindedness is the search for the quick fix...

...is captivating reading—full of charm, wit and vivid vignettes...

...After the Civil War, with Northern capitalists in the saddle, the economy expanded explosively and, where workers were concerned, ruthlessly...

...They had a kind of friend in the White House, too, Woodrow Wilson...

...He wants one simple little change in the law that would, as in Canada, truly make it illegal for an employer to discharge a worker for joining a union...

...Geoghegan is enraged by what he sees as labor's opposition to "any kind of economic planning...

...bankers who wanted debt-ridden borrowing nations to accumulate more dollars to service their debts...

...Reviewed by Gus Tyler Assistant President, International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union Thomas Geoghegan, a Chicago labor lawyer, is a passionate defender of doomed dissidents...

...His occasional references to the past are bits of romantic fluff—like the hagiographie descriptions of a John L. Lewis who exists, as depicted, only in the author's wishful imagination...

...Its glaring faults notwithstanding, Which Side Are You On...

...It is true, of course, that when a union tries to protect jobs in some industry it is trying to protect the base of its existence...

...Buthe feels the unions are largely to blame...

...History says that although laws on labor-management relations do indeed affect the status and strength of unions, there are more profound factors at work...

...Nevertheless, unions grew rapidly...

...Neither cops nor courts, firing nor blacklisting could keep the labor movement from growing...

...economy was, in the post-Roosevelt years, the mass base of the American labor movement...

...Had labor backed the scheme, according to him, it would have taken the first step toward economic planning, income redistribution and the rebirth of liberalism...

...Some of his one-time members seceded to form the Progressive Miners of America and other independent unions...

...The social scene is portrayed here in a fast and furious sequence of up-close snapshots, full of action, anger and angst...

...If unions could have persuaded America—including Congress and the President—that our free trade policy was suicidal, many a job would have been saved...

...In a way Geoghegan is right...

...History, an understanding of the flow of forces over long periods, is missing...

...Labor was in demand and Old Hickory was in the White House...

...The pattern repeats: In good times unions have done well...

...He started the country on a slow but steady slide downward to the recessions of 1974-75, 1981-82, and of July 1990 to...

...He wonders out loud why he stands by the "dumb stupid mastodon of a thing" that creeps off every winter to "Bal Harbour to die...

...in bad times they have done poorly...

...The style is that of one who kisses the Blarney Stone and turns the Via Dolorosa into a Via de la Rosa by the lilt he imparts to his sad story...

...In lieu of price controls on oil, the government should impose a stiff tax to bring oil up to the high OPEC price...

...But because the AFL-CIO failed to follow the author's lead, both unions and the Democratic Party have been destroyed...

...Things went smoothly until 1837, when a depression sent the unions into a dive and eventually put Tippecanoe into the Oval Office...

...Then Uncle Sam could take the big revenue from this tax and redistribute it to consumers on an "equal per capita basis...

...they can't improve the lot of their dues payers...

...Those who wanted unions went underground, meeting in secret places, identifying one another by hand signals and shibboleths to outwit the Pinkertons and the police...

...This sophisticated soul feels the American labor movement is dying...

...Still, the notion that the revision he seeks would, ipso facto, mean a new labor movement is dubious...

...That elementary clause, he believes, would turn things around...

...The substance is akin to Dante's Divine Comedy run in reverse, with the innocent suffering laughably for the sins of the guilty...

...As labor moved into the 20th century, though, it suffered two sharp setbacks, the depressions of 1897 and 1907...

...Union leaders who could not sign up two workers in lOyears werenowsigningup2,000 a day...

...For amajor sector of theU.S...

...But it is not the only one...

...Yet for all the uninhibited power of the boss to fire and to fire upon workers, unions grew—first under the aegis of the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor and later of the American Federation of Labor...

...Now the Zeitgeist wore a Whig pin...

...Labor is too dumb, in more than one sense of the word, to get its story across, even to itself...

...He knows he is on the side of the worker —the plain prole, the "rank-and-filer...

...The moment is not just a tick in time, it is everything...

...Next came Franklin D. Roosevelt, the New Deal and industrial recovery...

...In addition, there have been Republican Presidents in power for 18 of the last 22 years, and they have used their appointive powers and their "bully pulpit" on behalf of their traditional corporate companions...

...They are bureaucratic, autocratic, idiotic, and arthritic...

...Even the mighty John L. Lewis could do nothing to hold on to his miners or to get anything for those he had...

...Way down deep, he knows why...

...In 1979, Geoghegan, then employed by the Department of Energy in Washington, came up with an idea that was rejected...

...a reallocation of the labor force from the formerly dominant goods-producing sector, where unions were entrenched, to the newly dominant service sector, where unions have been feeble...

...The workers he represents are, as often as not, suing unions for violation of their rights or their imagined rights...