In the January 2015 edition of Jacobin Magazine, writer and union staffer Chris Maisano reviewed Thomas Geoghegan’s latest book on the current state of American organized labor, Only One Thing Can Save Us. Maisano’s “Bringing Labor Back” is a critique of Geoghegan’s cautious messianic thesis which promotes the importation of the German co-determination model of labor-management relations in order to revive declining American unions. This model made its debut in the United States last year when autoworkers at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee voted down this new form of labor defense. According to Maisano, Geoghegan’s optimism for co-determination is rooted in a deeper pessimism on the American workers’ ability to in fact pick themselves up in decades rooted in post-war defeat. Maisano, who is critical of Geoghegan, nonetheless points out that existing union policies has contributed to the rightward shift in “public attitudes” against organized labor. Maisano’s review is an intervention…