From the Chicago Dispatcher, February 2009
Geoghegan for Congress
As voters in Illinois' 5th Congressional District prepare to start the search to replace their former Congressman and current White House Chief of Staf Rahm Emanuel, labor attorney Thomas Geoghegan has added his name to the list of potential candidates. Geoghegan, a Democrat, has expressed a sincere desire to assist Chicago cabdrivers in their attempts at forming a legally recognized union. Now he sits with the Chicago Dispatcher to discuss his background, thoughts on America's middle class and how his election could affect Chicago's cabdrivers.
By: Jonathan Bullington
Chicago Dispatcher: Where did you grow up?
Tom Geoghegan: Cincinnati, Ohio - one of six sons, no girls. I went to Harvard and graduated from Harvard College in '71 and Harvard Law School in '75.
CD: What made you decide to pursue law as a career?
TG: My uncle worked for Robert Kennedy in the Justice Department in the 1960s, so I saw first hand what lawyers could do in the civil rights movement and it really…just mesmerized me. I describe this in a book I wrote called “Secret Lives of Citizens”: when I was in the eighth grade I went down to see my uncle with the grade school bus, and I went to his home and we waited and waited and he still didn't come back. It was Saturday night. Finally my aunt drove me down at midnight to the Justice Department and there was my uncle, at midnight, at the Justice department, phoning marshals in Alabama about the school bombing, you know the kids who were killed in the Birmingham church bombing. So, for a child to be standing there in the Department of Justice watching these older men, who were probably all of about 30, in shirt sleeves running around and trying to get federal marshals down to Birmingham so that African-American children wouldn't be murdered - it was just a stunning effect on me and I probably got in my mind then that I should go to law school and do something like what my uncle was doing and these other young men were doing at midnight in the Justice Department in 1963.
CD: What was Harvard Law like?
TG: First, it's a really big law school: impersonal, competitive, exciting in some ways, scary in others. But I was lucky when I was there because I had distractions that kept me from taking the place too seriously. I took it seriously, don't get me wrong, but I had an offer to go work at the “New Republic” magazine and I took it between my first and second year of law school. So I was able to get a break from the place for about 12 months right in the middle of it and write and realize that the world did not revolve around Harvard Law School.
CD: On your Web site, it says you shunned government service and wealthy law firms and “plunged downward” into union politics. I imagine that might have been a difficult decision to make. What led you to make it?
TG: Perhaps I should say it was a difficult decision and perhaps it was, it's hard to remember now, but I remember being very excited about it and - remember why I went to Harvard Law School in the first place. I went because I saw what Robert Kennedy and these lawyers did in the 60s and I began to sense that working people in this country needed a civil rights movement themselves to get a decent share of the economic bounty of this wonderful country. That middle-class lifestyle, which I took for granted growing up, is something that you have to fight to keep. A middle-class society demands, not just a complacent commitment to the status quo, but its own type of vigilance and activism. It takes activism to keep a middle-class world and there hasn't been enough activism to keep that world in place. We look around and we see the huge inequality that is growing in this country and the great play “Waiting for Lefty” is meant not only for taxi drivers, but for all of us. All of us have to keep some degree of democracy in the private sector economy. Without that element of democracy, without that element of people being able to participate in the decisions as to their wages and hours and working conditions and pension benefits and health benefits - without a certain degree of participation in that you can end up in a society where there are elegant food stores for the well to do and everybody else is never going to get beyond the level of the downscale Wal-Mart.
CD: You've represented everyone from nurses to steelworkers and the elderly. What were some of your more memorable or rewarding victories?
TG: Without question the fight in the 1980s to get pension and health and supplemental benefits for steelworkers caught up in the shut down of the mills in the Southside of Chicago, and especially a big case against International Harvester, which I think not only got benefits for people at Wisconsin Steel but helped push other steel companies to treat workers a little better than they might have during this shut down period. It was a hard battle and, personally, it was a - for a young lawyer with no big staff - it was a real test.
CD: How long was that case?
TG: 1983 to 1991. There was a series of cases. The first case went to '87 and then there was a second related case that sprung out of that that went to 1991.
The work I did representing Teamsters who were seeking a rank and file election process in the Teamsters Union - the election of Ron Carey. I was representing rank and file Teamster groups that were seeking direct elections of the top officers in connection with a government or Justice Dept. racketeering suit against the international union. I was able, with a lot of help from other people, but I was able to put forward our proposed solution to the problem of organized crime influence in the Teamsters and our solution was to make the Teamsters a more democratic union by putting in place direct elections. That was a big battle.
The battle that I lost but I'm really proud that I brought was a suit - the first suit, the first public nuisance suit - a case that I think would be especially of interest to taxi drivers. It was the first public nuisance case filed against the handgun industry for distributing handguns to minors in the Chicago area, and trying to hold them liable for this climate of murder and violence in the streets and in the public schools. We won at every level. We lost in the Illinois Supreme Court but in other states, which took our case and did a copycat version, they won even at the highest court and it could have really changed the way guns are distributed in the country.
CD: How so?
TG: Because we were trying to get an injunction that prohibited these manufacturers from distributing the guns carelessly at gun shows and mass purchases. So we were saying, if you want to get off the hook for damages, here's what you have to agree to. We weren't trying to make money out of this case. We were trying to change the structure of the distribution of guns. But the Congress, then dominated by Republicans in the Bush era, I think this happened in 2003, passes a law that pre-empted all these suits from going forward. And that law is on the books today. You can't bring these suits. The Republican Congress stepped in to protect handgun manufacturers from any regulation through a court suit.
CD: I imagine this is something you can work to change with the current makeup of Congress, if you were to join their ranks?
TG: I will tell you, I've got a personal reason for going to Congress to get that law overturned. That was my suit that they zapped and one thing you can be sure I'd be doing if I were a member of Congress would be undoing the law that stopped the suit against the handgun manufacturers from succeeding. And I want to say this isn't a money thing. I thought of this as a public service to my country and we weren't seeking big damages, what we were seeking was an injunction. And I want to go to Congress and undo that. I am well motivated, let me tell you, because I spent a lot of years on that case.
CD: When did you come to Chicago?
TG: 1976, and then I left in '77 for two years and then I came back in '79, and I've been here ever since.
CD: What brought you here?
TG: I came as a young lawyer to work for a guy named Ed Sadlowski who was running for president of the Steelworkers. I had been at the United Mine Workers in Washington and my friends came out to Chicago to help Sadlowski and they encouraged me to join them and be one of his lawyers during the election process, and I saw my first election. It was quite something.
CD: How so?
TG: Well, it was a nationwide election, and there was a huge effort to try to get observers at polls. It wasn't a nationwide election, it was a North America election, it was in Puerto Rico and all through Canada, up through the Yukon and in Alaska. Trying to get observers in place, going through the process of planning to protect the integrity of the election, was an enormous amount of work - and very exciting.
CD: What made you decide to run for Rahm Emanuel's vacated seat?
TG: The meltdown and then the bailout, in that order. You know, what do I do as a lawyer? I represent working people and try to get back bits and pieces of pension and health benefits in plant closings and layoffs. Well, after the meltdown, it became more and more clear that this practice that I've been doing for 30 years is problematic if people don't even have pensions anymore for me to rescue, and if they don't have health insurance that's really going to protect them from bankruptcy anymore. So I felt that as a lawyer fighting for these benefits in court for all these years, it now made sense for me to bring that law practice to Congress and fight for people's benefits at this high level of government and get the government to come in and take over paying people decent pensions - all people whether their nurses, cabdrivers, Teamsters or steelworkers - and not require people to figure out someway on their own to scrounge around and scratch up enough money to supplement their social security. We should increase social security payouts to the levels that exist in other countries, routinely two-thirds of working income. People can live off that.
And to take over health benefits; I also think that by doing that, and not having private employers pay, you avoid debacles like GM and Chrysler. And I've seen so many companies go belly-up, that's part of my practice, so I think that I know something about what's wrong with this economy and why we're bleeding middle-class jobs and the answer is for the government to step in and start taking over these benefits and provide economic security directly to people and lower labor costs to the private sector employers that are competing globally so that we do something about our trade deficit.
CD: If elected to Congress, what kind of help could you give to taxi drivers, both in Chicago and nationwide?
TG: Well I'm a labor lawyer and I would like to see the labor laws change so that cabdrivers can organize. And I think that one way of doing that is that, in the labor laws, to create a broader definition of whom an employer is. One of the things that I have confronted over and over in my practice are vary narrow legalistic definitions of who is an employer and who isn't. In fact it's, as every cabdriver knows, an employer is a flexible concept - it's a murky concept - because in the case of a cabdriver in Chicago, the city of Chicago is clearly an employer, but it can wiggle out of this narrow legal definition. Well, I know a little bit about legal definitions of employers, that's what I do for a living, trying to work with those definitions to benefit working people and that's what I would do if I went to Congress. I have a particular interest in that because I've been representing cabdrivers informally in efforts to try to organize. But cabdrivers deserve economic security directly from the government in taking over social security and increasing it, not just maintaining it, and health insurance and other things.
CD: How would your involvement in efforts to unionize Chicago’s cabdrivers change if elected?
TG: Well my personal involvement would change but we still have a firm of lawyers. The relationship is with our law firm, not with me personally. We have a group of very progressive lawyers in our firm who are interested in the case and I would see no reason why that relationship interest wouldn't continue.
CD: What can cabdrivers do to support your campaign, other than voting for you?
TG: They can e-mail, talk to their friends. First, people can make donations. Even little donations help. But the big thing that people can do is to talk to friends who live in the fifth district and ask those friends to e-mail or write ten of their friends and tell them that there is one candidate in the race who really is a union-side labor lawyer and he's out to represent working people and knows what it's like from the street level, the problems that working people face. This is not something I've just come to. I've been doing this for 30 years, trying to figure out ways to get benefits down from CEO boardrooms to middle class people in the city.
