Thomas Geoghegan – författare

How Conservatives have created a litigious society in which Americans have no recourse but to sue one another.

The acclaimed labor lawyer and prizewinning author Thomas Geoghegan asks: where are we better off—America or Europe? In an idiosyncratic, entertaining travelogue that plays on public policy, Geoghegan asks what our lives would be like if we lived them as Europeans. Sneaking out of his workaholic American life, he takes five trips where he tries to understand so-called European socialism firsthand. Though he first tries France (which has become a rhetorical stand-in for the continent as a whole in many Americans' minds), he eventually ventures into Germany to see what some call the "boring" Europe. There he finds the true "other"—an economic model with more bottom-up worker control than that of any other country in the world—and argues that, while we have to take Germany’s problems seriously, we also have to look seriously at how much it has achieved. Social democracy may let us live nicer lives; it also may be the only way to be globally competitive. This wry, timely book helps us understand why the European model, contrary to popular neoliberal wisdom, may thrive well into the twenty-first century without compromising its citizens' ease of living—and be the best example for the United States to follow.Germany is more generous than the U.S.:The average number of paid vacation days in the U.S. is 13, versus Germany’s 35New mothers in the U.S. get three months of unpaid job-protected leave and only if they work for a company of 50 or more employees, while Germany mandates four months’ paid leave and will pay parents 67% of their salary to stay home for up to 14 months to care for a newborn.U.S. life expectancy is 50th in the world, compared to Germany’s 32nd.

An impassioned rebuttle to Howard's The Death of Common Sense', Geoghegan shows how Conservatives' dismantling of the US postwar legal system has opened the floodgates of litigation. Arguing that people sue due to the loss of medical insurance, contracts and unions, and that without these methods of preempting and resolving disputes, American's face injury, bankruptcy, discrimination or injustice - are left with no recourse but to sue.'

Try to imagine your life in a full-blown European social democracy, especially the German version. Free public goods, a bit of worker control, and whopping trade surpluses? Social democracy doesn’t sound too bad. Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? reveals where you might have been happier—or at least had time off to be unhappy properly. It explains why Americans should pay attention to Germany, where ordinary people can work three hundred to four hundred hours a year less than we do and still have one of the most competitive economies in the world.

Is The Labour Party's day over or is this the big moment? Are unions the logical next step beyond the Occupy Movement, or are they just an anachronism from a bygone era? In Only One Thing Can Save Us, acclaimed author Thomas Geoghegan asserts that only a new kind of labour movement can help us switch course toward a future that is fair and prosperous for all people.