In his latest book, Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life, Chicago-based labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegen argues that America's economic and political systems are profoundly broken. Geoghegen says our model should be Europe, particularly Germany, which is much more friendly to its workers yet remains an economic powerhouse. The Prospect spoke to him about Germany's version of social democracy, American workers as lab rats, and what we can do before Democrats lose majority control of Congress.
Why did you choose to write this book now when liberals are at a kind of low point?
Your question presumes that I have more control over the writing side of my life than I really do. This book is a message in a bottle that I've been trying to scrawl out since 1997. ... I wrote it when I thought social democracy was going to disappear from the planet, and in a way, the book is sort of a travelogue/history of this, how should I put it, private Orwellian nightmare of mine that a kind of laissez-faire, Ayn Rand-type Buccaneer capitalist model was going to sweep the world, and social democracy as we know it as an idea would disappear from, perish from the earth.
It looked that way during the late Clinton and early Bush years, and what I was trying to do was to write a book against the grain and argue that, even though it looks bad for social democracy, and particularly the more worker-controlled German version, that in the end, it didn't make sense that social democracy would disappear. It was a more just way of life, and it was also going to be more competitive globally. I mean they were just doing things that just made sense in the long run, both in terms of staying out of enormous amounts of debt and also somehow combining a kind of export-orientated model that actually was designed to be sort of green at home -- low consumer demand and waste -- and elevate developing countries abroad. It just seemed that this couldn't fail in the long run, even though everyone around me and in the business press and American culture just scoffed at it.
Your main point of comparison for the book obviously is Germany; why was it Germany you chose as a point of comparison to liberals and not, say, one or several of the Nordic countries such as Sweden or Denmark?
For one thing, it is bigger, so it's not a kind of city-state project the way Denmark and Norway and Sweden are, even Sweden arguably could be categorized [as that]. European unification is dependent upon and intertwined with German unification.
A strong Germany is, a strong united Germany, is crucial to the emergence of Europe as a political entity. So, I think it's the big enchilada.
I think any rational person would concede that it's the economic powerhouse of Europe.
The other aspect of it is also that Germany ... is socialism. Germany is the most socialist country in Europe in a certain definition of socialism, which is the one I most prefer as a union-side labor lawyer, in terms of worker control. I think, even compared to these relative city-state economies like Sweden and Denmark, it's just remarkable the extent to which German workers are on the board and how that's the ideology of both the right and the left. That's different from Scandinavia.
The way social democracy delivers its dividend as a social democracy is by empowering people and enabling people to have a much more significant role in their lives, and I think that's fascinating. I talk about this at the beginning of the book, the face-off between [German Chancellor Helmut] Kohl and [British Prime Minister John] Major over the social chapter at Maastricht and especially the provision about EU-wide companies having to consult workers about basic decisions affecting the firm. That was just repugnant to the Anglo-American model: The CEO was in charge, the stockholders were in charge, and the German model was dysfunctional, et cetera, et cetera. [Now] I think the U.S. model is losing. You know there's more co-determination that's spreading in Europe, and our corporate model right now is profoundly broken. You've got CEOs not responsible to stockholders or anything else.
You talk a lot about America's tendency toward longer working hours, having higher consumption, less leisure time, fewer public goods, and, as you put it, "contracting out our lives." Why is it that this is the economic dynamic that has arisen in the United States?
It's a constitutional reason, and I use constitutional in a very broad sense to include labor law, which I think is part of the constitution of the country. There is a kind of way that our character is being shaped by our corporate model which really is top-down, authoritarian, and no responsibility or accountability. ...
[CEOs] have an enormous control over people's lives and over our work lives. And the way we react here is pretty much like lab rats; you know, everybody tries to work a little bit longer than the next person in the next cubicle. And that is a model which, in a perverse way, encourages consumption. The more you keep people at their jobs, the more they have to outsource their lives.
Is there any realistic thing we could aim for here in the U.S. to get closer to the European model?
Yes, there is something we could do tomorrow. I think we could raise Social Security here and give people real public pensions to live on; that's the first and biggest thing. The second is that we could move to single-payer, to have the government assume non-wage labor costs. The third is to strengthen the financial sector and to encourage more of an export-orientated sector.
I think the single most important thing that Americans can do right now to move toward a more European structure is to adopt a more European-type constitution, and by that I mean moving more toward majority rule and, as trivial as it sounds, getting rid of the Senate filibuster. Because that would help bring back the labor movement, and it would help to get through the Democratic agenda. And I say this on the eve of the Democrats probably being ousted from majority position in the Congress.
