Union Days
Labor lawyer Tom Geoghegan, keynote speaker April 15 for Union Days 2009, will discuss the Employee Free Choice Act, the need for labor law reform and "strategies for reinventing labor in a post-meltdown world."
Other Union Days events at ILR include the April 14 opening of a photo exhibit "unseenamerica New York State: Pictures of Working Lives Taken by Working Hands," and two April 16 events, the Social Justice Career Fair and a debate on the Employee Free Choice Act by lawyers Nancy Schiffer and Arch Stokes.
"New Politics, New Policies: Prospects for Labor in the Obama Administration" is the theme of the 2009 Union Days.
Geoghegan, author of books such as "See You in Court: How the Right Made America a Lawsuit Nation" and "Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back," has represented nurses, teachers, mineworkers, machinists and other union members in disputes with employers.
Among his highest profile cases are Lumpkin, et al. v. International Harvester, filed on behalf of 2,500 steelworkers, who won back their lost pensions.
Geoghegan was a Democratic candidate in Chicago's 5th Congressional District special primary election March 3 to fill the seat vacated by Rahm Emanuel, who became President Barack Obama's chief of staff.
Journalist Amy Goodman spoke with Geoghegan earlier this year on the radio show "Democracy Now!"
In the following excerpt from the interview, Geoghegan commented on labor in America:
"… Many economic historians, see history as nothing but a turf war between three groups: the manufacturers, workers and the bondholders, or the financial sector," he said.
"So where does labor fit in all of this? People lost the ability to get wage increases and got the ability, an incredible ability, really unknown in previous times, to get credit cards with which they had high rates of interest," Geoghegan said.
"So, unable to get wage increases, people—or unable to get union cards, really, people got credit cards and began running up these great debts, which addicted the country to high rates of return in the financial sector, so that people were kind of spending their way out of the real economy, pushing more and more money, by the fact that they were going into debt, into this virtual financial sector economy," he said.
A transcript of the complete interview is available at: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/24/thomas_geoghegan_on_infinite_debt_how.
In the April issue of Harper's Magazine, an essay by Geoghegan addresses some of the same themes he discussed with Goodman.
The collapse of anti-usary laws and employer cancellations of pensions contributed to the rising the indebtedness of Americans, he wrote in "Infinite Debt: How unlimited interest rates destroyed the economy."
"… Over the past 40 years, employers have found ways to cancel any earned right, of any kind, at any time. I'd say that with a competent lawyer, any lawyer can cancel any promise at any time ..." Geoghegan said in the essay.
Geoghegan's Union Days talk begins at 4:30 p.m. April 15 in Ives 105. The public is invited to attend.
The reception for "unseenamerica" is from 4:30 to 6 p.m. April 14 in the ILR Conference Center second-floor lobby.
The Social Justice Career Fair will be held from 1 to 4 p.m. April 16 in the Ives Hall lobbies.
The debate between Schiffer, AFL-CIO associate general counsel, and Stokes, partner in the law firm Shea, Stokes, Roberts & Wagner, begins at 4:30 p.m. April 16 in Ives 105. The public is invited to attend.