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

• Author: Glastris, Paul

Having spent most of the past 20 years defending union workers, Thomas Geoghegan, (*) a Harvard-educated attorney, thinks he knows who has devastated organized labor in America: people like him. Educated, liberal Baby Boomers, the kind he meets at fern bars in his neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago. These people, he feels, abandoned the labor movement in the eighties, if not before, consigning the working class to downward mobility as their own incomes rose.

Sure, others are also responsible: Congress, the Supreme Court, incompetent managers, corrupt union leaders, and the economic policies of Ronald Reagan. But in this ingenious and funny memoir, Geoghegan is hardest on his class and on himself. For he sees in his legal practice and in the laws under which he must operate a major reason for labor's decline. He makes an inspiring case for a rewriting of federal labor law, but appeals to fairness only get you so far. To regain the allegiance of liberals, Geoghegan has to convince them that stronger unions won't weaken an already shaky U.S. economy. Apparently, though, even he doesn't quite believe that.

In part, the tone of self-doubt that runs through this book is artful self-deprecation. Geoghegan strugles not to be the hero of his own autobiography. But he fails. He comes across as decent, honest, and capable, a man who has won some impressive victories for his clients, including a famous pension-rights settlement with the bankrupt Wisconsin Steel.

He also writes in the tradition of frustrated men and women of the Left who make forays into the working class, hoping to shed the guilt they feel about their own privilege. His failed attempts to bridge the class gap are part of his tragicomic schtick. Early in his career, two coal miners try to teach him to spit tobacco across the room into a wastebasket. "I had to get up, walk across, lean over the basket, and drool." Later, when he moves to the South Side of Chicago to work on a dissident steel-worker election, he is giddy at the sight of it all: the brick bungalows, the Croatian restaurants, the corner bars with Old Style Beer signs over the doors, the vast mills--"So much capital just lying on the ground. But the dreariness gets to him. One day, he discovers Hyde Park, with its bookstores and BMWs ("I felt like a sailor seeing land") and moves out.

Striking out

There is an undeniable charm in his self-effacing honesty, and it serves his purpose. Geoghegan is a yuppie Everyman, not...