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Title: Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back, Revised Edition
ISBN: 1565848861
Author:
Thomas Geoghegan
Publicate Date: 2004-07-26
Publish: 2004-07-26
List Price: $16.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $3.46
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $3.47
Amazon Merchant Price: $15.25
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| Customer Review: |
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1: The decline of unions was not inevitable, and it can be reversed
You know how some people say, "I don't believe in religion, but I believe in God"? Thomas Geoghegan doesn't necessarily believe in labor unions, but he believes in labor. Or maybe: he doesn't believe ultimate salvation is to be found in unions, but that there's no alternative to them for now, and that without them we're ... well, we're in the state we're in today, where workers are powerless and can be left unemployed and uninsured at any moment. A world without unions is a world where we're scared.
This is just not the world we ought to be living in. There is a better way and a better world, of course. We know that we can't get to this world on our own. On our own, we are isolated from the rest of those who are suffering. We are powerless so long as we are isolated.
It's virtually an axiom, then, that some form of collective resistance to limitlessly powerful corporations is necessary. We simply cannot do it on our own. It does not follow, however, that labor unions are the ideal form of that resistance. It also doesn't follow that government is the ideal form. But in their highly imperfect way, says Thomas Geoghegan, labor unions are far better than a world without them. He backs this up with story upon story about corporations absolutely crushing workers in the absence of any labor-union resistance.
Geoghegan himself is a labor lawyer who's been fighting the fight alongside labor unions for a quarter century or more. He's also often worked against them: he's sued the Teamsters repeatedly, in essence fighting for more union democracy. He's trying to get the unions that the employees deserve.
He's not had much luck fighting against them. For a short time, Geoghegan's heart leapt for joy when Ron Carey was at the Teamsters' helm, but the Carey era ended quickly enough and James P. Hoffa (son of Jimmy Hoffa) took over.
As for fighting alongside them, that hasn't worked very well either. Unions are down to 10% or so of the working population. Not coincidentally (as any reader of Paul Krugman knows well), the Democratic party is in a shambles and has been for at least thirty years. The Democrats need the unions.
What makes this book so agonizing is Geoghegan's insistence that a few little changes would bring democracy to the unions, unions to the workers, and the Democratic party to power. One such change is a card-check system like the one Canada uses. Consequently, Canadian union membership has been consistently in the 30% range for at least a decade. When we dream of the better world that Canadians seem to inhabit, it's well to consider how they got there.
The fact that just over the border is a country not much different than ours, but whose policies could hardly be more different, gives the lie to the notion that unions have disappeared in the U.S. because of changing workplaces. Yes, we're now a service economy rather than an industrial economy. But so is Canada. Geoghegan dispenses with any number of commonplaces like this one.
In general, he spends the most time dismantling the idea that unions' disappearance is in some sense "natural." It's not. It has a lot to do with Republicans and with conservative courts. It has to do with Taft-Hartley. It has to do with one law after another that smashed unions into the ground. There was nothing natural about it.
This book doesn't give much in the way of solutions, but I'm not even sure that's its point. Merely getting people -- especially Democrats -- to recognize a problem is plenty. Getting them to recognize a human-created problem is better still. Along the way, Geoghegan is impossibly funny, chatty, and self-deprecating. While I can't quite call this book a "joy" -- it's too maddening for that -- I do submit that it's indispensible and should be on every American's bookshelf.
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2: Correct in Every Way...
How can you be "for labor" these days?
Some realities:
1. Union membership as a percentage of the workforce continues its four-decade decline.
2. The public reputation of unions has never recovered from the corruption scandals of the 1950s.
3. Michael Moore has done everything he can to revitalize unions, to no avail. He won a Golden Globe; if HE can't do it...
4. The very recent splintering of the AFL-CIO could be the beginning of the end.
5. We've become too isolated and self-centered as a society for this stuff to work here in the foreseeable future.
That said, T.G. personifies the idealistic young lawyer who really wants to help. I was that person once, too. I perceived union leaders as thuggish, power-centric, retrograde, defensive and whatever the exact opposite of visionary is. Leadership makes or breaks human endeavor; I interpreted this to mean that unions were hopeless.
PS - I would like to know whether this book trades on E-Bay; the irony would be irresistable.
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3: Recommended
This is an outstanding book, full of heart and voice. I've begun using it in my Business Reporting class at Boston University.
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4: Forget the politics -- this is great writing
Never mind that Geohogan was dead wrong about the future of organized labor or that his pre-Clinton paleoliberalism is dated and painfully overwrought or even that he would have deep and abiding personal contempt for a conservative like me. This guy can flat-out write like a dream.Without a doubt, every anecdote in this book is exaggerated and twisted for rhetorical effect. But what a memoir it is, alternately melancholy and funny, by a great storyteller who has the self-awareness to mock his own martyr complex. A classic of style over substance.
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5: Which Side Are You On?
This is an excellent book about labor unions which sides with labor from a fresh perspective. Pro free trade, the author is not just peddling the same old protectionist line. From the first line of the book, you realize this author knows what he's talking about and speaks for no one but himself. Also a good book for anyone interested in the fortunes of the Democratic party.
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