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Condé Nast is being accused of engaging in “extreme” union busting and illegal conduct after the media giant fired four union leaders and suspended five others last week, shortly after they confronted management about recent mass layoffs at Teen Vogue.
Last Wednesday, a group of over a dozen editorial staff confronted the company’s head of HR seeking answers about two rounds of mass layoffs earlier in the week. This includes the termination of six employees at Teen Vogue — comprising the editor-in-chief and the majority of the team — and the announcement that the left-leaning outlet would be folded into Vogue.com.
Later that day, four of the employees present were fired, and five other employees were suspended without pay, the union says. Three of the fired members were active in the media company’s union, Condé United; Alma Avalle is the vice president for NewsGuild of New York and digital producer for Bon Appetit, and The New Yorker’s Jasper Lo and Condé Nast Entertainment’s Ben Dewey have both held leadership positions within the union.
The NewsGuild of New York says the firings are a “flagrant breach” of their union contract and an “unprecedented violation of their federally protected rights as union members to participate in a collective action.” The Guild’s president, Susan DeCarava, called it “one of the most extreme attempts at union busting” that the union has seen in recent years.
The union is holding a rally on Wednesday evening in New York City to call for the reinstatement of the “fired four.” Condé United has filed an unfair labor practice charge over the terminations, and is prepared to challenge the terminations.
“We all plan to fight this all the way to the end,” Avalle told Truthout. She says she’s heard from NewsGuild members across numerous major publications expressing solidarity with the “fired four.”
The company claims that the employees were fired for “extreme misconduct,” and accused the workers of “harassment.” Video of the demonstration shows workers trying to question Duncan at his office about the reasoning for the layoffs. Duncan walks away from the workers, declining to answer their questions and telling them to go back to their desks.
Avalle said Wednesday’s march to the boss was a routine union action and, in fact, was less tense than previous actions have been. New Yorker poetry editor Hannah Aizenman, executive committee vice chair for the Guild and union steward for the New Yorker Union, characterized the march as “peaceful.”
The terminations “amount to nothing less than a declaration of war against our union, and we refuse to let them stand,” Aizenman said in an email to Truthout.
The fact that the layoffs and seemingly union-related terminations come amid a right-wing pivot by media bosses feels more than coincidental and is not lost on the union. One of the fired members, Jake Lahut, is not in union leadership, but has done critical coverage of the Trump administration as a reporter for Wired. The gutting of Teen Vogue, meanwhile, seems overtly targeted at silencing a crucial left-wing publication, analysts have noted.
“I think there is a straight line you can draw between … the Jimmy Kimmel near-cancelation, the Stephen Colbert cancelation, and the near-shuttering of Teen Vogue. These things all feel like they’re happening at the same time and for similar issues, you know, and are coming right off of Bari Weiss and the Free Press taking over CBS, this general right-wing shift in media,” said Avalle. “I think it would be naive to say that that’s not a factor in what’s going on here.”
“By firing us, the company is trying to make examples of us — in the same way that by shuttering Teen Vogue, the company is sending a message about what progressive coverage at Condé Nast leads to,” Avalle went on.
At the same time, the Teen Vogue layoffs included the publication’s only transgender staff member, as well as a number of women of color. Avalle — who is trans and an advocate for trans rights — said she wouldn’t say her identity is the primary reason she was fired, but likely offered a “convenient” reason for Condé Nast to terminate her.
“It’s just kind of one fewer liability in that sense, you know, one fewer PR thing to worry about in the future,” she said.
Aizenman said that Wednesday’s rally is crucial to show worker solidarity in the face of an increasingly hostile political climate.
“Tonight’s rally is part of a campaign to demand that our unfairly fired colleagues be reinstated and that the company rescind all illegal retaliatory discipline immediately,” Aizenman said. “In our current anti-labor, anti-journalist climate, we recognize that the stakes of this fight extend beyond our own workplace: there are implications for the entire media industry, and for workers everywhere.”
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