FACTORY?:

Venerable Lefties at Harper's Divided by Union (Gabriel Sherman, 1/18/11, New York)

On July 29, 2010, Metcalf, Rosenstein, and about a dozen Harper’s employees gathered outside MacArthur’s office. They opened the door, and Rosenstein informed MacArthur that the staff was forming a union. MacArthur seemed startled to see the group crowded into the doorway. “He was extremely upset,” Rosenstein told me.

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."

In a follow-up phone call, MacArthur told Rosenstein that he viewed the union as a “power play” by the staff. “He was very hostile,” Rosenstein told me. “He said people had lied and misled him me about the reason they wanted to form a union, and that the staff was angry about Roger Hodge being fired. This was about Ben Metcalf becoming editor and they were against Ellen.”

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.