Some members of the staff, mostly young, invited the Guild to unionize the office. The Guild was a mean, bumbling union, which had already incurred a number of failures for its membership in long, nasty, costly, and ineffective strikes at newspapers, including The New York Times. While many on The New Yorker staff—the men in makeup, for example, and the secretaries—were underpaid in comparison with their counterparts at other magazines, these were not the people who had invited the union to come in. The invitation came from people whose jobs were amorphous and undefined
