Union Days Keynote

Tom Geoghegan said he got a good look at the American public as he campaigned door to door for a congressional seat in Chicago last winter.

"The thing that hit me most is that we are not pushing (for) a redistribution of power to working people," the labor lawyer said during the Union Days keynote address Wednesday.

"Instead, we are focusing on the bailout of education, banking, the health care industry.

The danger is there's going to be no money for anything else," said Geoghegan, who lost his bid to fill the vacancy opened when Rahm Emanuel left the post to become President Barack Obama’s chief of staff.

"What we need is a labor movement that’s pointing the country in the right direction,"

Geoghegan said.

The right direction, he said, would include increasing the level of Social Security from 39 percent to at least 50 percent of a person's income level at retirement.

"People don’t have enough to live on," he said. "It's important to have government provide the economic security people need most."

The government should provide health insurance and pensions, he said. Absorption of those costs by manufacturing contributed to the current economic downturn, he said.

Geoghegan also spoke about the proposed Employee Free Choice Act.

If voted into law by Congress, it "is not enough" to reinvigorate unions, he said.

The act is endorsed by many labor organizations and opposed by many businesses.

A tenet of the proposal is an option which allows workers to support unionization by marking a card, rather than voting through a secret ballot. The act also proposes stiffer penalties for companies that violate federal unionization rules.

The upshot of passing the proposal, known as "EFCA," is increased involvement by the National Labor Relations Board in union matters – "not a good thing," Geoghegan said.

More board involvement would increase the bureaucracy surrounding unionization, said Geoghegan, noting that he supports the act.

After Geoghegan finished his talk, a student asked "If you're an ILR student and you want to help labor … where should the energy go?"

Geoghegan responded that students should consider union work. "Pick out the union that works in the area you care about most."

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