Thomas Geoghegan

Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back, Revised Edition

Which Side Are You On?

Try to imagine your life in a full-blown European social democracy, especially the German version. Free public goods, a bit of worker control, and whopping trade surpluses? Social democracy doesn’t sound too bad. Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? reveals where you might have been happier—or at least had time off to be unhappy properly. It explains why Americans should pay attention to Germany, where ordinary people can work three hundred to four hundred hours a year less than we do and still have one of the most competitive economies in the world.

How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?

A labor lawyer and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist argues that, even as organized labor seems to be crumbling in the United States, a revived—but different—labor movement is now more relevant than ever in America's increasingly unequal society. 12,500 first printing.

Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement

Only One Thing Can Save Us

What happens after a champion racehorse retires? Quite a lot as it turns out! His days of taking home the gold are long gone, but Bertie still has many stories to tell. Join him as he looks back on a weird and wonderful journey as a showjumper and champion racer. As you’ll see inside, it hasn’t all been plain sailing. From battles with a blacksmith and an unruly jockey, to rival racers and the challenging showjumping course itself, ‘Old’ Bertie’s is a life well lived. In accordance with the wishes of Tom's family, 10% of all profits from this book will be donated to the British Thoroughbred Retraining Centre in Lancaster to support the welfare of retired racehorses just like Bertie.

Old Bertie

Is labor’s day over or is labor the only real answer for our time? In this new book, National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan argues that even as organized labor seems to be crumbling, a revived—but different—labor movement is now more relevant than ever in our increasingly unequal society. The inequality reshaping the country goes beyond money and income: the workplace is more authoritarian than ever, and we have even less of a say over our conditions at work. He tells us stories, sometimes humorous but more often chilling, about problems working people like his own clients—cabdrivers, cashiers, even Chicago public school teachers—now face in our largely union-free economy. He then explains why a new kind of labor movement (and not just more higher education) will be crucial for saving what is left of the middle class; pushing Keynes’s original, sometimes forgotten ideas for getting the rich to invest and reduce our balance of trade; and promoting John Dewey’s "democratic way of life"—one that would start in the schools and continue in our places of work. A "public policy" book that is compulsively readable, Only One Thing Can Save Us is vintage Geoghegan, blending acerbic and witty commentary with unparalleled insight into the real dynamics (and human experience) of working in America today.

In 2008 Thomas Geoghegan--then an established labor lawyer and prolific writer--embarked on a campaign to represent Chicago's Fifth District in the U.S. House, in a special election called when the sitting congressman, Rahm Emanuel, stepped down to serve as newly elected President Barack Obama's chief of staff. For ninety wintry days leading up to the election Geoghegan, a political neophyte at 60, knocked on doors and shook hands at train stations and made fundraising calls--and lost. But out of this humbling experience came something new: another book. Taking its title from Walt Whitman, The History of Democracy Is Yet to Be Written: How We Have to Learn to Govern All Over Again, combines tales from the campaign trail with an incisive vision of how we might rebuild our tattered democracy. In a polarized country, where 100 million citizens don't vote, and those who do are otherwise rarely politically engaged, he makes an impassioned and witty case for the possibility of a truly representative democracy, one built on the ideals of the House, the true chamber of the people, and inspired by the poet who gives the book its name. "A whole agenda for the Democratic party could come just out of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, " he writes. "If we treated working people with the reverence that Whitman had for them, if we see them in the workplace as Whitman did, we might never have had a Trump."

Thomas Geoghegan

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