Sociology 441: Stratification

Geoghegan: Which Side Are You On?

Thomas Geoghegan. 1991. Which Side Are You On? Trying To Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back. New York:Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Geoghegan is an easy read. He is funny; he hardly ever uses numbers; and he tells good stories. He is not a sociologist, alas. (Perhaps there is a causal hypothesis here.) He is often quite sarcastic -- don't take his sarcastic observations as the truth! Our job will be to" translate" Geoghegan's arguments into sociologically relevant causal theories and then to use data to evaluate these theories.

Ch. 1 Solidarity

1. What changes in the structure of the labor force help explain the decline in unionization?
2. What is an important cultural difference (i.e., not whether you can spit chewing tobacco!) separates the labor movement from middle-class American culture?

Ch. 5 Always Bring a Crowd

3. What happened to the steel industry in the 1980s? What was its effect on the union? on steelworkers? Where did the steelworkers go?
4. What could steelworkers have done differently to help save the steel industry?
5. How did International Harvester save money in closing Wisconsin Steel?
6. How did the steelworkers get organized to fight back?

Ch. 10: Free Trade

7. What is the evidence that imports killed the steel industry?
8. Why did automation in steel not lead to improvement for steelworkers?
9. How did the middle class and the working class experience the 1980s differently?
10. What is the relationship between the decline of unionization and the growth of soup kitchens? of coffee bars?
11. Why do Americans have little government planning compared to the Japanese and Europeans?
12. How might priorities have been different if working-class folks ran the country instead of yuppies?

Ch. 6 Rank and File

13. How has history changed from the nineteenth century?
14. How did the millwrights local lose control of its own organization?

Ch. 8 Officers and Lawyers

15. What is the disadvantage for workers of arbitration as a method for resolving conflicts? What other alternatives did they use to have?
16. How has the work of union officers, especially the lower-level stewards and business agents, changed in recent years?

Ch. 3 Before the Lean Years

17. What are the similarities between the labor movement of the 1920s and of the 1980s?
18. What events help explain the growth of the labor movement during the Depression?
19. How did two legal changes in the 1930s help the union movement?
20. What changes did Taft-Hartley in 1947 bring to the labor organizing that weakened the movement?
21. What led to the bureaucratization of the union movement?

Ch. 13 To the Medina Temple

22. What was the Carter Administration 1978 labor law reform? What was its fate?
23. What is the difference between New Democrats and Old Democrats?

Ch. 11 Bread and Wine

24. What explains the low strike rate of the 1980s?
25. Why do companies try to provoke strikes?
26. What are the objective and subjective impacts of strikes on union members?
27. How did the UMW win its 1989 coal mine strike in Virginia?

Ch. 12 Citizens

28. How do employers resist unions? Why don't labor laws help?
29. Why is it easier to organize unions in the public sector?
30. When do unions succeed in new organizing?
31. How is union organizing different in Canada?
32. Why is the "appropriate bargaining unit" important in union organizing drives?
33. What advantage do employers have over unions in persuading workers during union-organizing drives?
34. Why should the 1980s have been a boom time for unions?
35. What are three counter-examples to the theory that Americans don't join unions because they are too individualistic?
36. How do non-union workers (such as the Nissan workers in Tennessee) benefit from unions even without joining unions?
37. What is the major non-monetary benefit workers get from unions?