Which Side Are You On?

Which Side Are You On? Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back

By Thomas Geoghegan

The New Press, 2004

355 pages, $37 (pb)

REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/33291

An unhappy love affair drove Thomas Geoghegan to his unexpected career as a labour lawyer. "She'll be sorry if I'm murdered by miners" was the bitter thinking of a despondent Geoghegan — a "student moderate" in the 1960s who was persuaded by a more radical friend to go to Pennsylvania as a volunteer observer for Miners for Democracy in the 1972 United Mine Workers (UMW) election. This was after the murder by the incumbent UMW president of his rank-and-file rival, yet it wasn't the danger from armed miners that was to excite Geoghegan — it was the unleashing of union democracy after a rank-and-file election victory.

The rank-and-file win meant proper compensation for miners crippled by emphysema and Black Lung. It meant elected delegates who "swarmed out of the hills, met in Pittsburgh, and rewrote the constitution, so that now it read like the Declaration of the Rights of Man". Geoghegan, as he recounts in his book of union tales, joined the revitalised UMW staff as a lawyer, handling the flood of lawsuits from employers that bobbed up in the wake of an illegal, wildcat strike-wave (strikes are illegal outside of a narrow contract bargaining window) that sought to redress the years of neglect and concessions under the "ancien regime" of corrupt, incompetent leadership.

The only other union that had direct rank-and-file elections of union officials, the steelworkers, promised more of the same in 1976. Geoghegan joined a militant, rank-and-file election challenge to a torpid, heavily bureaucratised leadership. Passions ran high in Chicago. Many careers, and bloated salaries, were on the line. A militant was shot dead and others were assaulted. Goons put frighteners on potential rank-and-file observers. Despite the intimidation, however, in the end it took brazen theft (with suspicious returns like 49-0, 62-0, 38-0 from polling places where the militants had no observers) to ensure the challenge was lost.

Corruption, and its attendant thuggery, infested the other iconic unions. Geoghegan represented dissident teamsters who were beaten up by the goons employed by a crooked, mobbed-up leadership who were "on the take" from trucking bosses. In one election (not for a top official, but for just a shop steward) in Gary, Indiana, the incumbent's bodyguards consisted of armed off-duty cops as well as armed goons. The cops stole the ballot box at gun point and initiated a car chase through the city, before the dissidents were defrauded of their votes.

"The best part of being a labor lawyer", writes Geoghegan, "is siding with the rebels" against the stale union bureaucrats who do not enforce contracts, who don't fight sackings, who bungle grievances, who do not return phone calls from members but who do continue to draw their salaries of a quarter of a million dollars or more.

However, it isn't all quite so dramatic. Filling the strike vacuum is the world of "arbitrations" — the torturous legal process for challenging unfair dismissals. Messy, cleaning-up jobs also abound for the union lawyer. When 70,000 steelworkers lost their jobs in Chicago alone during the 1980s, Geoghegan ran a class action for 2500 former employees of Wisconsin Steel who were robbed of millions in pension benefits, severance pay and health insurance through a shifty transfer of pension fund liability to one dummy corporation after another.

Led by a black, 65-year-old steelworker, the "de-industrialised" steelworkers "all somehow became a union again, or became a union for the first time". Starting from scratch, they had to learn how to picket, which they then did with a vengeance "in front of banks, businesses, federal buildings". Lest it look like they may be threatening a judge, Geoghegan told them, "'OK, picket wherever you like but don't picket the court.' So, of course, they picketed there, too". For seven long years, however, the suit lingered on before the curse was lifted from Geoghegan as an out-of-court settlement finished off the men of Wisconsin Steel who were still on the sinking steel industry ship.

Surveying the "labor wreckage of the eighties", Geoghegan is downcast. There were few strikes, even by the mine workers (except for eastern Kentucky where "a few scattered miners, up in the hills" still fought on "like Japanese soldiers who didn't know the war was over"). Scabs galore lay in wait for strikers whose industrial action signs their own fast-track ticket to unemployment at the hands of "permanent replacement workers".

For employers, dumping the union (and its baggage — like corporate pension fund liabilities) is now a science, with union-busting seminars dishing out the "theory" (sack the pro-union activists), the cops and private security forces rippling the muscle, and the law ensuring that freshly organised recruits do not replace the fallen. The 1935 Wagner Act allegedly makes it illegal to fire workers for supporting a union, but is now a dead letter. Employers readily sack those of their employees running an organising drive and face no legal sanction for their law-breaking, except, possibly, a tiny fine of US$2000, three or four years later, "long after the drive is over and the union in ashes".

Some brighter spots pepper Geoghegan's grim night, but even their lustre is dimmed. The teamsters were cleaned up with a successful rank-and-file challenge in 1991 and this wind of change was felt in the peak union body, the AFL-CIO ("who would dream", asks a surprised and jubilant Geoghegan, "that one day the AFL-CIO, which beat up kids for protesting the war in Vietnam, would come out against our invasion of Iraq?"). But the teamster reformers later fell in a narrow loss to a cashed-up "old guard", and now Geoghegan is back suing teamsters again).

Despite 180,000 striking teamsters beating the fanatically anti-union United Postal Services over pensions, almost all strikes "end in disaster" or victories are won at a heavy cost of unionists losing their jobs. Low-paid, mostly immigrant, service workers — cleaners, waiters, kitchen-hands, janitors — are taking a shine to unions, but even so, union membership is down to just 8% of the private sector work force (and 13% of the total work force). Organised labor now gives off "an almost animal sense of weakness", says Geoghegan, who talks to his union colleagues "not about socialism, or even solidarity, but survival".

Whenever Geoghegan seems about ready to give in to optimism, the darks clouds of negativism roll in. Some of his gloomy misgivings are the result of his own class demons haunting him. He is aware that, with a personal income double the median family income, he can never "chew tobacco like a real mine worker". He is not sure he even wants to be a labour lawyer, and wishes instead he worked in New York, with its "iced decaffeinated cappuccinos", rather than doing arbitrations, cleaning up the mess of deindustrialisation and failed strikes in Chicago, and fighting wearying battles in the bureaucracy of the absurd for 30 nurses in Illinois who want the right to vote whether to join a union.

Geoghegan's commitment to the labour movement has a jaded air of resignation about it and the predominant tone of his book is one of elegiac sadness for a once-great union movement. But for all that, Geoghegan hangs in there, knowing that democratic trade unions are vital to a society that answers to the community of common men and women, workers and their families, and not to the market and its selfish shareholder desires. The labour movement and its "subversive idea of solidarity" are essential to counter non-union US and its destructive philosophy of individualism, says Geoghegan.

Geoghegan's writing is direct and haunting, literary and down to earth. The stories he tells from his 30 years a-lawyering for the workers are colourful and engaging in an entirely unlawyer-like way. His portraits of rank-and-file unionists are shrewdly non-romantic but deeply sympathetic, and, despite all his self-doubt and recidivist pessimism, are an act of class solidarity, love and hope.