Tom Geoghegan, mensch and hero

By Kathy G.

Author and labor lawyer Tom Geoghegan

Advocatus, et non latro, et mirando populo

(Epitaph allegedly inscribed on the tomb of St. Ivo of Kremartin (1253-1303). Roughly translated, it reads "A lawyer and not a thief, and therefore a wonder to the people.")

I wanted to be sure to draw your attention to this recent David Sirota column. It's of interest to me for a couple of reasons.

First, there's the ingenious policy idea it proposes. I've written before about the Employee Free Choice Act, a proposed law that would make it easier to organize a union. Instead of having an election under the auspices of the National Labor Relations Board, a union would be certified if a majority of employees sign cards favoring union representation. Proponents of this law say that the current system stacks the deck against the union, and moving to card check would inject more fairness into the system, by giving the employer less of chance to engage in anti-union propaganda, threats, intimidation, and worse. (Although many kinds of anti-union actions by employers are technically illegal, in practice employers often face no or minimal sanctions for breaking the law).

I and other friends of organized labor generally support Employee Free Choice, and if Barack Obama is elected president, this law will almost certainly be passed. Yet when I've spoken about this issue to some of my more thoughtful friends in the labor movement, I've been surprised at how lukewarm their support for this measure is. Basically, my friends concede that yes, this policy may make it a bit easier to organize unions; the problem, however, is that it won't necessarily lead to a collective bargaining agreement. Indeed, approximately 45% of newly formed unions "fail to negotiate a first contract with an employer within two years."   

So what might a better solution be? As Sirota reports, author and labor lawyer Tom Geoghegan has an idea: why not amend the Civil Rights Act to prevent discrimination "on the basis of union membership"? As Sirota notes:

Under current law, if you are fired for union activity, you can only take your grievance to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) - a byzantine agency deliberately made more Kafkaesque by right-wing appointees and budget cuts. Today, the NLRB takes years to rule on labor law violations, often granting victims only their back pay - a tiny cost of doing business.

. . . His proposal says rather than being forced to rely on an unreliable bureaucracy for protection, workers should be empowered to defend themselves.

The six words would do just that. Regardless of whether the NLRB is strengthened or further weakened, persecuted workers would be able to haul union-busting thugs into court. There - unlike at the NLRB - plaintiffs can subpoena company records and win costly punitive damages.

It sounds like a promising idea to me. Time and time again, the NLRB has utterly failed as an institution that is supposed to protect the rights of labor. Card check would do some of the work of getting the NLRB's mitts off the process of organizing a union, but turning joining a union into a civil right does that one better. Employers who want to avoid costly lawsuits and potentially embarrassing revelations in the discovery process would have an incentive to do the right thing. By getting rid of a status quo process that is ridiculously biased toward employers, it would shift the balance of power to one that is more evenly divided between employers and employees. Sure, passing any kind of dramatic new legislation is never easy, given our constitutional system with all its checks and balances and muliple chokepoints that tend to throttle any attempts at change. But would amending the Civil Rights Act really be any more difficult than passing card check?

The other reason Sirota's column is of interest to me is that Geoghegan is my favorite writer about politics, as well as -- oh, what the hell, I might as well come out with it: Tom is a close friend and one of my favorite people in the world. Perhaps that means you'll take what I have to say here with a grain of salt, and if so, so be it. I think the world of the guy and I'll make no bones about that.

However, in my heart of hearts, I do believe that even if he wasn't a friend, he still would be one of my favorite writers and thinkers on the left. Why?  Well, first of all, Tom writes like a dream. Try to imagine a writer who combines the wit, sophistication, and romantic/ironic take of a Stendhal or Laurence Sterne on the one hand, with the American vernacular eloquence and the social conscience of a Mark Twain or Woody Guthrie on the other. I know that's a really weirdass combination of writers to imagine in juxtaposition with one another, but that's about as close as I can come to describing Tom's delightfully idiosyncratic writing.

What else is great about Tom as a writer and thinker? For over 30 years, Tom has been a labor lawyer, and he's never lost sight of the centrality of economic justice to the politics of the left, and of the labor movement as the cornerstone institution on the left. One of the things I admire about Tom is that he became involved in the labor movement not when it was at the height of its power and influence, but when it was on the decline, and when even -- particularly -- younger people on the left looked up on labor as something decidedly retrogade and uncool*.

And as time went on, being a labor lawyer didn't get a whole lot easier. The judges got more conservative, the prevailing case law became more right wing, the climate for organizers became more hostile, and the proportion of American workers in a union declined precipitously. But that hasn't stopped Tom -- like Sisyphus, he keeps pushing that damn boulder up the hill every day, only to see it roll back down every night. The legal and political climate being so hostile to workers and the economic interests of ordinary people these days, Tom ends up getting his ass kicked a fair amount of the time. Yet he soldiers on. No sunshine patriot is Tom -- he's a winter soldier to his core.

Tom started his other career -- the journalistic one -- back in the 70s, when he worked for The New Republic. Unfortunately, Tom's voice has not been heard in that publication for many years. Many of the people he worked with -- from minor annoyances (Michael Kinsley) to hateful concern trolls par excellence (Mickey Kaus) to full-on wingnut horror shows (Fred Barnes, Morton Kondracke) -- have gone on to fame and fortune in the journalism biz. But Tom left that world, choosing instead to spend the bulk of his working life representing steelworkers cheated out of their pensions, or stressed out single mothers being harassed by predatory lenders, or union reformers trying to run a clean election in their corrupt local.

Tom is a prophet without honor of sorts. Would that the left in general and the Democratic Party in particular had listened to Tom about the importance of supporting unions and fighting for the economic interests of working people. If we had, the Dems might have avoided the tragedy of the past eight years.

As Sirota notes, it's a pity that more people aren't familiar with Tom's work:

[Geoghegan's] relative anonymity is a tragicomic commentary on the media and the American Left. The Milton Friedmans are celebrated by pundits and cast in bronze by conservative think tanks, while the Geoghegans are dismissed by the chattering class and ignored by a progressive movement that regularly venerates Hollywood celebrities as its heroes.

In a Daily Kos diary, Sirota elaborated:

So totally obsessed with what the media tells us is important, we neglect the people who we should be building into our nationally famous icons. It's really depressing to see truly talented people like Tom go largely unsupported/unnoticed by our movement, especially when you consider how the conservative movement has been so successful turning completely untalented ideological warriors like Bill Kristol, David Brooks, et al. into luminaries.

Part of the issue with Tom is that for the last couple of decades he's lived in an unglamorous city (Chicago) performing the thankless task of doggedly defending the interests of the people on the losing end of the great changes that have transformed the global economy. But another problem is that a lot of people just don't get his charmingly idiosyncratic writing. He writes about politics, and about policy, but God knows his books and essays don't read like formal scholarly papers or dry think tank reports -- they're far more fluid, inventive, and playful than writing about policy has any right to be. But the problem is, political types often don't appreciate the literary qualities of his writing, and the literary types don't get the politics.

Nevertheless, I believe that there are lots of people out there -- readers and writers in the left blogosphere, in particular -- who would derive great pleasure from his work, if only they were aware of it. His writing has many virtues.To begin with, his stuff is chockful of ingenious policy ideas, such as his proposal for reforming labor law, which I mentioned at the beginning of this post. You'll also find a wealth of searing insights about our politics, society, and legal system.  Not to mention some great jokes and stories.

Various pieces by Tom are available on the web. I'd direct you to some of the classic essays he wrote for The New Republic in the 70s and 80s, but their archives are still screwed up (as they have been for at least a year now) and so his stuff is hard to locate there. Fortunately, though, for the past year or so Tom has written a column for The American Prospect; you can find those Prospect pieces here.

The real gems, however, are the books he's written (four them, plus one pamphlet).  Here are my three favorites:

Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back - Tom's first book, and the one I suggest you start with. It's a rueful, elegiac, funny/sad memoir about being a labor lawyer that also doubles as an eloquent brief in support of the vital importance of the labor movement in American politics and American life. Even my dour University of Chicago labor econ prof, who God knows is no liberal, said he admired it -- he even admitted that it made him laugh out loud. This could make a terrific movie -- I've thought Philip Seymour Hoffman could do a great job as Tom (though Tom's a lot skinnier than he is). And did I mention that the writing is gorgeous? N.B.: if you pick this up, do make sure to get the most recent edition (which is the paperback published in 2004 by The New Press). It has a new 50-page afterword which in itself is worth the price of admission.

And hey, if neither my endorsement nor my econ prof's is good enough for you, take Ezra's word for it. He said of Which Side Are You On? that "Politically speaking, it was the most transformative book I ever read, and it ranks as my favorite nonfiction work to this day," and later called it "the greatest book ever written about anything."

The Secret Lives of Citizens: Pursuing the Promise of American Life - This is Tom's most original work, and it's my personal favorite of all his books. It's another memoir of a sort, only the theme here is about what it means to be a citizen -- and specifically, a citizen of Chicago. In the New York Times Book Review, David Glenn said this book reads like "a melancholy democrat's fever dream, with hundreds of small sad jokes, digressive stories about Chicago ward politics and glimpses of wry, self-possessed former girlfriends" -- and I suppose that's as good a précis as any of this hard-to-describe book. Once again the writing here is wonderful -- lyrical yet never fussy or overwritten.

See You in Court: How the Right Made America a Lawsuit Nation - This is Tom's most recent book, which argues that, contrary to the mythology of the right, it was the actions of conservatives, not liberals, that led to the explosion of lawsuits in this country. Why? It's simple. As Rick Perlstein wrote in his introduction to a Firedoglake Book Salon about for See You in Court, in place of contracts and regulations, the right has given us

tort—suing people for perceived wrongs. That got rid of an efficient, predictable, cheap method for settling disputes. "People scream over something for years that a union business agent used to handle in a single afternoon." Instead, you get slash-and-burn lawsuits, with endless periods of harassing "discovery," in which opposing lawyers endeavor into plaintiff and defendants' hearts. Which rich corporations love. Because they can afford to hire more and more voracious lawyers, and keep the thing going on forever, until ordinary folks simply give up.

Do take a look at the rest of Rick's post, which includes some provocative quotes from the book and gives you a useful summary of its arguments and a good sense of Tom's strengths as a writer. And by all means be sure to read Geoghegan's dark, disturbing and powerful book as well.

I do hope that those of you who aren't familiar with Tom's work check him out -- you'll thank me later. And hats off to David Sirota for being, like Tom, a tireless warrior for the cause of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and for giving me the excuse to write this post, which is something I've been meaning to get around to for a long time.

*Come to think of it, this is one of the things I admire about my friend Sir Charles, who also began his career as a labor lawyer at a time (the 80s) when labor was decidedly at a low ebb.

UPDATE: See this update to this post.

Comments

[Paul W, Chicago]

Although it's worth a try,I really doubt that card check will ever get past the senate. And, as much as I respect both Tom and Waldman, I think there being delusional if they believe that nearly 30 years of repug court-packing can ever bring any sustained justice.

[Stumblng Tumblr]

About your opening quotation: I'm doing this entirely from memory, but I think that in John Aubrey's Brief Lives, he has a story to do with Ben Jonson that involves the following epitaph:

Behold a miracle,
Deny it who can,
Here lies a lawyer
And an honest man.

[eli]

"Which Side are You On" is an inspiration to budding labor lawyers all over the place.... Tom's menschiness is thoroughly portrayed.

btw, as a side note, although everyone focuses on the "card-check" aspect of EFCA, the bill also has a mandatory arbitration provision for first contracts that would radically change the game on getting a first contract, if it became part of the final legislation: http://www.aflcio.org/joinaunion/voiceatwork/efca/upload/EFCA_Summary.pdf

[se]

"But the problem is, political types often don’t appreciate the literary qualities of his writing, and the literary types don’t get the politics."

That's because intellectuals in the broad sense of the term, in the US, are anti-political and political types are anti-intellectual. Poets are angry formalists, observant but removed, and reformers are moralizing pedants, purblind and full of high purpose.

[JustaDog]

A socialist by any other name...

[VA Refinance]

Great post thanks a lot for the info

[sex shop]

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