I had no idea this was a thing, and if it wasn’t happening I’d have had to make it up:
You really owe it to yourself to click through to the NewYorkerUnion home page, and take in the photos and statements of the “oppressed” class of New Yorker employees who are demanding justice! I have a hard time seeing any of them walking a picket line in Manhattan on a hot summer day. Most of them look like graduates of Brown or Sarah Lawrence—and all of them easily replaceable. It is hard to pick a favorite, but here are a few nominees:
I’m taking a stand because I refuse to perpetuate a system that allows only rich white kids to shape our culture.
I want my wonderful colleagues to get the fair wages they deserve, and I want to work in a media industry that is more just and egalitarian.
Because we can’t live off prestige.
I am prepared to strike because fair wages are essential to insuring that The New Yorker’s treatment of its staff espouses the same liberal, equitable principles as its content. Having worked at the wage floor ($42,000 a year) for more than two years, I know how difficult life can be on the company’s meagre salaries. Remedying this imbalance is a concrete step that the magazine can take in order to thrive for decades to come.
I think this is my front-runner:
I’m ready to strike because prestige without the pay is élitist.
As Stan Evans said of The New Yorker way back in 1962, “No other journal so elegantly combines the comforts of privilege with the glamor of dissent—that admixture of chic and iconoclasm which in our society marks the received, the anointed, and the superbly upper-middle-class.”
There may not be enough popcorn for this spectacle.
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