Only One Thing Can Save Us: Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement - Softcover

Geoghegan, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1620972034 ISBN 13: 9781620972038

Publisher: The New Press, 2016

Synopsis

Is labor’s day over or is labor the only real answer for our time? 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 the only way to stabilize the economy and save the middle class.

The inequality reshaping the country goes beyond money and income: the places we work have ever more rigid hierarchies. A perceptive, informed, and witty utopian thinker” (Michael Kazin, Bookforum), Geoghegan makes his argument for labor with stories, sometimes humorous but more often chilling, about the problems working people like his own clients from cabdrivers to schoolteachers face, increasingly powerless in our union-free economy. He explains why a new kind of labor movement (and not just more higher education) is the real program the Democrats should push.

Written in the disarming style of a self-deprecating lawyer in a beleaguered field” (Kim Phillips-Fein, The Atlantic), Only One Thing Can Save Us is vintage Geoghegan, bearing unparalleled insights into the real dynamics and human experience of working in America today.

About this title

About the Author:

Thomas Geoghegan is a practicing attorney and the author of several books, including In America’s Court, Which Side Are You On?, See You in Court, and Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?, all published by The New Press. He has written for The Nation, the New York Times, and Harper’s. He lives in Chicago.

Review:

"I doubt any writer has suffered longer over the plight of American unions or described their troubles more vividly than Thomas Geoghegan.”
Bookforum

"A fluid writer, Geoghegan devotes the bulk of his engaging book to that famous question: What is to be done?"
Commonweal Magazine

"Wonderful."
David Bensman, The American Prospect

"History shows that the ideas that grow into legislation need an expansive advocacy to fertilize their bloom which is why Geoghegan's book is so useful."
The New York Times Book Review

A valuable contribution to current debates about the future of the labor movement. The U.S. labor movement can often be an intellectually bereft place, and Geoghegan deserves a lot of credit for the contributions he's made to combatting its debilitating stolidity.”
Jacobin

"Contributes passion and knowledge to the work of rebuilding the backbone of American democracy thriving workers."
Minnesota Educator

About this edition

• Publisher: The New Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1620972034
• ISBN 13: 9781620972038
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272