<em>Harper's Magazine</em> employees hold fundraiser to forestall layoffs

Noah sez, “A friend of mine who has been working at Harper’s for nine years just passed along this letter asking people to support the publication and the newly unionized staff:”

Dear Friends,

Being dedicated to the survival and well-being of Harper’s Magazine, and hoping to further its 160-year-old tradition of bringing you the very best in journalism, essays, and fiction, we, the members of the Harper’s Union, are asking for your help. In 2010, we lost five of our most experienced editors and now are asked to lose two more, including Ben Metcalf, who was a driving force behind the organizing here.

We have shown numerous means by which Harper’s Magazine might cut costs and increase revenue without laying off its most skilled and experienced editors, and in particular we have urged the magazine’s foundation to raise funds from outside sources. This possibility has been rejected by the labor lawyers representing John R. “Rick” MacArthur, our publisher. They argue that fund-raising takes time, and that there is no time to be wasted in reducing our editorial staff by two union members.

We wish to counter this argument by showing Rick MacArthur how much money can be raised in just a few days via the extraordinarily useful medium of the Internet. Please pledge what you can and pass this on, with the assurance that all funds promised here will be offered, in friendship, to the Harper’s Magazine Foundation. If the pledges we garner are refused by the foundation, your generosity will cost you absolutely nothing; if accepted, they will help to sustain America’s oldest, and finest, monthly.

Thank you, and long live Harper’s Magazine.

SAVE HARPER’S MAGAZINE

(Thanks, Noah!)