A Union Man From Harvard: Review

• Published in: The New York times 1991
• Main Authors: Berman, , Paul
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: Berman, Paul; Geoghegan, Thomas
• ISSN: 0362-4331

Don't unions make it harder for the economy to keep up to date? No, or at least they don't have to, Mr. [Thomas Geoghegan] tells us. He notes that in the last 30 years, the organized work force in the United States has sunk from 35 percent of the total work force to 16 or 17 percent today, and in that time the American economy has modernized by going from manufacturing to services. But while Canada's economy has also modernized, Canadians "join unions like crazy" -- mostly because "they can get away with it, i.e., no one will fire them." Union strength in Canada during those same years has risen from 25 percent to a respectable 32 percent, and without ruining the country, either. Canada, Mr. Geoghegan says, is "the free world." Mr. Geoghegan, as he presents himself in his book, is a literary man. Wandering around Chicago makes him think about Dante's hell and David Mamet's dialogue. He is witty and modest, self-conscious to a fault, rueful about women and about the tricks of fate that have led a poetry-quoting Ivy Leaguer like himself into the ranks of Chicago labor. Integrity is his biggest theme. Picking up his book is like sitting next to Holden Caulfield at an airport bar, grown up now and banging his glass whenever the topic of upper-middle-class snobbery gets broached. Sometimes the bar-banging gets out of hand, and Mr. Geoghegan begins to feel a little sorry for himself. He makes hyperbolic comments like, "Lane Kirkland is outside the American consensus in a way that even Abbie Hoffman never was" -- which is partly true, but mostly whine. He goes on: "It seemed everything I touched in my life had been a disaster." His own personality is to marvel at. How can a man identify with the industrial labor movement for his entire career, yet still insist, as he does, on his continued membership in the privileged class that he abandoned years ago? When Mr. Geoghegan uses the word "we," you can never tell whether he means "we of the labor movement" or "we of the snooty elite." This strikes me as strange. On the other hand, it isn't fake. Some people adopt new identities the way they put on a hat, but Mr. Geoghegan is unchangeable. Not even Rich Trumka, the current president of the Mine Workers, could teach him how to spit tobacco.