Amusing

The leftist publisher of Harper's magazine spends years extolling the virtues of unions in general (and the United Auto Workers in particular), then gets all bent out of shape when his staff signs up to join that very same UAW:

"[John "Rick"] MacArthur contested the entire staff's right to unionize, arguing that editors and assistant editors who make up about half of the editorial team were management and thus did not qualify. Staffers couldn’t help but chuckle at the irony: The staunch defender of unions, who in a 2009 Harper's piece called the UAW 'the country’s best and traditionally most honest mass labor organization,' was now on the other side of the table as the 'worst kind of factory owner,' as one staffer put it to me." 

Poetic justice indeed.

"MacArthur recently told me in an e-mail: 'I was taken by surprise and I thought it was rude that they didn't schedule a meeting to discuss it.'"

We hate to have to break this obvious news to Mr. MacArthur, but disgruntled workers don't usually "schedule meetings" with management to announce to them their upcoming plans to certify union representation.

This incident sounds uncannily like what apparently happened some years ago when the writing staff working on liberal activist (and similar champion of unions) Michael Moore's The Awful Truth television show similarly tried to obtain union representation:

"When two of the show’s young writers, who had been given the title Associate Producer, took steps to join the Writers Guild (the powerful union for movie and TV writers), Moore took them aside. 'I’m getting a lot of heat from the union to call you guys writers and pay you under the union rules,' Eric Zicklin recounted Moore’s words for MacFarquhar. 'I don’t have the budget for that,' Moore threatened them, 'But if they keep coming down on me that’ll mean I’ll only be able to afford one of you and the other one’s gotta go.'"

How quickly these hard-line socialist media barons' warm and fuzzy feelings regarding unions change once it's their own money that's threatening to be siphoned out of their deep pockets in order to finance those lucrative union benefits, pension plans and other perks.