Quasiprogressivity
Very few people would, I think, describe Arrangement B as “more progressive” than Arrangement A, because Arrangement B clearly screws the poor. The term “progressive” is garlanded with moral connotations about helping the poor, so this would not qualify. However, Arrangement B does include a transfer from the rich to the middle, and it reduces the inequality between the rich and the middle substantially. If your definition of progressive is “redistributes from richer to poorer”, you cannot definitively order one arrangement as more or less progressive than the other.
One might describe a proposal to go from Arrangement A to Arrangement B as “insider-outsider egalitarian”. It is not an irrelevant case. Although historical experience suggests they are mistaken, people who oppose unions frequently argue that they have precisely this effect. A better-off, unionized portion of the workforce, in this story, sees wages increases, at the expense of wealthy owners and managers (who have to pay unionized workers more), but also at the expense of the not-unionized (or not-employed) portion of the workforce, who see wages stagnate and prices rise.
.. But we might have averted a financial collapse with transfers to underwater homeowners, for example, or to be more fair, with helicopter money for everyone. Instead, we let middle-class homeowners collapse into negative equity and, too frequently, foreclosure, even as we provided generous support and regulatory forbearance to ensure that financial institutions and their creditors would be made whole. Most of the fiscal stimulus came not from Obama’s headline $800B program, but via automatic stabilizers that kick-in for the poor and unemployed. We rescue the rich. We congratulate ourselves for paying so much to help the stigmatized, traumatized poor. We tell the middle to suck it. That’s the quasiprogressive way, and it’s at the heart of American political economy.