For Love of Labor : WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?: Trying to Be for Labor When It’s Flat on Its Back <i> By Thomas Geoghegan</i> ; <i> (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $19.95; 287 pp.) </i>

Some of the most interesting folks in the labor movement are the many committed men and women--college-trained, young, reform-minded--who serve on union staffs and as lawyers and consultants. They are people of huge contradictions. Many never worked in a mine, mill or factory. Yet they are dedicated to the labor movement and to bettering the lives of working-class people. They are part of the movement but outside it; they help give the movement what little soul it has, but they generally have no opportunity to rise to top office. They love the movement for the gains it has brought the working class but despise it for its timidity, its flaccidity, its rules, like those in the church or the mob, that stress loyalty to the institution and the institution’s leaders above commitment and truth. They are some of the best people in the movement, yet almost no one knows such people exist.

Thomas Geoghegan, a Chicago attorney and writer, is one of this band of brothers and sisters. And in his book, “Which Side Are You On?,” Geoghegan tells in a charming, honest way of his odyssey through the movement--an activist helping to bring democracy to the mineworkers’ union in the early 1970s; a supporter of an insurgent in the steelworkers’ union in the mid-1970s; more recently an attorney for dissidents in the carpenters’ union, the steelworkers, the Teamsters and taking other causes and cases involving working-class people betrayed by their bosses or their unions.

Like most labor people in his position, Geoghegan is often confused and depressed. He wonders what he is doing, these many years now, working for the labor movement, dead and getting deader. The labor movement, Geoghegan writes, “was a cause, back in the thirties. Now it is a dumb, stupid mastodon of a thing.”

Geoghegan earns $60,000 a year, far more than most working-class people, and this makes him feel guilty. Yet he lives near Lincoln Park, an upscale neighborhood, on the Chicago North Side, jogs, eats pasta and listens to public radio. He writes, “I could pass as a management lawyer.”

He also writes: “Business agents, arbitration. I never mention it at parties. It sounds goonish even to me. I am embarrassed. My mother says, ‘Just tell people you work for the poor. It makes it all simpler.’ ”

He says, “I do not know what I am.”

Geoghegan entered the labor movement by accident. He graduated from Harvard Law School (Geoghegan’s book refers to Harvard or Cambridge 16 times, which I, a graduate of CentralMichigan University, find 15 times too many), a son of suburbia and the middle class. Then, he says, a woman spurned his love, and, in November, 1972, to deaden his despondency, he drove at the urging of a friend to the old anthracite coal-mining area of northeast Pennsylvania to work for Miners for Democracy, campaigning to unseat the despot running the miners’ union, Tony Boyle.

The reformers won, in one of the stunning victories for union dissidents in this century, and Arnold Miller, a well-meaning but weak man, assumed the presidency. Geoghegan joined the union staff as an attorney. This was eye-opening for Geoghegan, for he came to realize how detested he and other reformers are by the fat cats, the union presidents and the highly paid union lawyers who run the American labor movement.

He also came to realize that workers (he cringes, rightfully, when people use the word) can confound even the best of their leaders. Miners, for example, were often marching out on wildcat strikes and otherwise mucking up what their leaders had agreed to.

Geoghegan then joined the insurgent campaign of Ed Sadlowski, who challenged a union hack, Lloyd McBride, for the presidency of the steelworkers union. Sadlowski lost.

A decade-and-a-half later, Geoghegan is still practicing labor law. In these down days of labor, when labor sometimes seems to resemble the Rotary Club, Geoghegan seems to long for those zesty times of the 1930s:

“I would see myself being dispatched on delicate missions to Steel and Rubber. I would come back late at night to Washington by train. Then take a cab to the Hotel Carlton, and dance on the rooftop with girls from Vassar, and probably, back then, they’d all be Communists.”

Geoghegan makes an excellent point about the early New Deal: It was about democracy and redistribution of power, not government regulation. He also blames much of labor’s troubles on laws that, over the last half-century, have limited unions’ right to organize.

But, I think, Geoghegan excessively blames repressive laws, like the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which made unions responsible for contracts with employers and helped make union lawyers so powerful, for labor’s troubles today. He also, I think, places excessive blame for labor’s trouble on labor’s embrace of the state.

The bloated men who run the labor movement, well described by Geoghegan, would exist whatever laws are on the books, however much labor came to depend on Government and politics. For most labor leaders, the union is a job, a way out of the shop, and this has always been the case. They are, for the most part, no more committed to reform, or democracy, than most business leaders.

It is, I think, a law of human behavior: you end up, unless you have uncommon fortitude, acting like your enemy.

Geoghegan has produced a wry, important work. There are compelling sections on the South Side of Chicago and its shuttered steel mills. He writes knowingly of the importance of the CIO; why the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959 has not brought democracy to unions; how the National Labor Relations Board retards unionism, the relationship between the decline of labor and the decline of the Democratic Party. He describes perfectly a money-grubbing porkchopper in the steelworkers’ union on the south side of Chicago, Phil Cyprian, and deftly needles the current mineworkers’ president, and Geoghegan’s one-time colleague, Rich Trumka, for his posturing and clever ambition. His discussion of the Teamsters union is one of the best explanations I have read on what is wrong with that corrupt, despotic, violent institution.

I know this: what he says is the way it is.

I understand Geoghegan’s confusion and that of others in the labor movement. Being a labor lawyer is somewhat like being a labor journalist. Your colleagues are off covering the White House or the State Department, hyping some trend and getting on Page One. You are camping out in some mountain motel or a bare room with three locks on the door above a sleazy bar writing about coal miners or laid-off steelworkers and hoping your piece isn’t held or dumped inside.

Yet, despite his confusion over who he is, why he is doing what he does, he seems destined to remain a labor lawyer in Chicago--one, by accomplishment and reputation, of uncommon gifts and dedication.

“This is my post,” Geoghegan writes toward the end of his memoir, “being a labor lawyer in the Midwest.”

And why not? As a friend once said to him, “Somebody’s got to do it. We can’t all live on the coasts.” BOOKMARK: For an excerpt from “Which Side Are You On?,” see the Opinion section, Page 3.