Lefty union-loving magazine owner hoist by own petard

For those who have never had the pleasure of reading Harper's magazine, it can best be summed up by likening it to a weak-tea version of the New Yorker. It is a literary magazine for the scones-and-crumpet set, and for people who find The Atlantic too gauche. In short, it is a magazine for leftists who fancy themselves both intellectuals and possessed of a certain exquisite taste, and nowhere is this more evident than in its owner, John MacArthur.

MacArthur is something of a Luddite, disdaining much modern technology, and it is this aversion to technology that has hurt Harper's in recent years. Where other periodicals have moved to the web to stay viable, MacArthur has stubbornly kept the Internet at arm's length. The result is a torrent of red ink at the magazine, and MacArthur has attempted to stem the bleeding by laying off staff. Which leads to the hilarity!

MacArthur has on many occasions given loving tongue-baths to unions, at one point calling the UAW "the country’s best and traditionally most honest mass labor organization". So you'd think that having his own staff organize under the auspices of the UAW (an auto-worker union organizing a magzine? WTF?) would just send him into a lefty spasm of delight. Well...not so much, as it turns out.

MacArthur is finding, as so many business owners have before him, that the interests of the union mainly involve protecting their own jobs rather than the viability of the company they work for. And so now the poor liberal champion of unionization now finds himself cast in the role of corporate robber-baron, a capitalist thug crushing his poor working-class minions beneath his hobnailed boot. I wonder what the chances are that MacArthur will publish an angry denunciation of the same union he so lavishly praised not so long ago.

It's all liberal solidarity until your own employees turn on you, isn't it, Mr. MacArthur?

posted by Monty at 09:43 AM

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