I don't think the McAllisters were in union jobs. I think they were pretty high up the tier of management.
People talk about union jobs going away, but don't forget, non-unionized middle management has totally been gutted by outside consultants over the same time period. So the changes in the workforce have hurt the earning power of both the line workers and the middle managers who used to make up the middle class.
It was a response to philosophers who were trying to come up with a robust axiomatic system for explaining math. Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica attempted to formalize everything in math, and Goedel proved it was impossible.
So yes, it's a bit of a circlejerk, but it was a necessary one to break up another circlejerk.