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

"Of all these books, this one might be the best reading experience. It’s a rollicking ride, a sometimes profane journey through the underworld of organized labor in the 1980s. Not that the author, Geoghegan, is profane, but he reproduces profanities uttered by others. It’s a lament for a dying subculture. In the 1980s, organized labor was ‘the real counterculture’; it was almost a kind of ‘outlaw culture’, as Geoghegan calls it. Geoghegan writes, at the beginning of his book, about the overwhelming presence of individualism as a social ideal during the Reagan era — expressed in slogans like ‘Whoever dies with the most toys wins.’ The idea that these paunchy, middle-aged men would stand around singing Solidarity Forever appeared absurd to many Americans at the time. Organized labor was basically caught in a death spiral, but, even so, it was still alive as a kind of underground culture. Who would think these middle-aged working class men would be the real counter-culture rather than hip young people? But Geoghegan has got a strong case to make that they were. It’s a movement that was raging against the dying of the light. It’s important to remember the losers, just in the way EP Thompson wrote about the importance of resisting ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ in The Making of the English Working Class . And Geoghegan really is writing about the losers of the era, who saw their legacy and their dreams and hopes for security ground down. It’s a marvellous read and to someone like me, who didn’t grow up knowing anything about organized labor, it was quite educational. Yes, there’s a great deal of humor in it, even through it’s a very wry, sorrowful kind of humor."