Forty Years Later, The Union Has Arrived

It’s 2018 and the New Yorker has unionized, hallelujah. It has been a long time coming.

On this historic occasion, a little history is in order. Daniel Menaker, longtime fiction editor at the magazine, wrote this essay in 2015 about the publication’s workers’ first drive to unionize in the 1970s. The essay is as much a chronicle of the push to unionize as a profile of the union’s opponent, editor William Shawn.

Shawn’s arguments about unionizing are passionate, hypocritical, paradoxical, and downright similar to the same arguments heard from management across the US today.

Shawn clearly thought the magazine was an anomaly, a “miracle,” immune from the pressures of the “outside world,” which could simply not be treated like any other job for which one is properly paid. 

Menaker quotes Shawn’s heartfelt and fascinating letters to the staff on the topic in their entirety.

“… if the magazine publicly stands for high principle and privately is unfair to the people who work here — it is a sham. …I do not think that a union could correct it better than we could ourselves, talking with one another.”