The Scoop
Condé Nast abruptly fired four staffers who were among a group of more than a dozen employees who confronted the company’s head of human resources on Wednesday, an unsubtle message to its employee union that the publisher was taking a harder line in its dealings with employees.
According to two people familiar with the situation, the company told the four staffers, including a senior fact checker at The New Yorker, a politics reporter for WIRED, a digital staffer at Bon Appétit, and a video staffer, that they were being fired for violating company policies.
On Monday, Condé Nast announced that it was folding Teen Vogue into its sister magazine Vogue, and laying off several staffers and its editor in chief. While the publication was one of the smaller outlets in the company’s portfolio, some fans and supporters were quick to criticize the move; the company’s union saying it was “clearly designed to blunt the award-winning magazine’s insightful journalism at a time when it is needed the most.”
On Wednesday, more than a dozen employees gathered outside the office of Stan Duncan, Condé Nast’s head of human resources, demanding to speak with him about the Teen Vogue decision, and other recent cuts at the company. Duncan told staff that they could not be congregating outside his office, and asked them to return to work. When he tried to leave, one employee asked Duncan if he was running away from the unionized employees.
A member of the union implied that the decision to fold Teen Vogue into its parent magazine would impact the company’s political coverage; one of the fired employees asked Duncan what he planned on doing to stand up to the Trump administration.
“We’d like you to move forward,” Duncan said.
“We’d like you to answer our questions,” one employee who was later fired said.
In response, Condé Nast filed a charge with the National Labor Relations Board against the NewsGuild of New York citing the organization’s “repeated and egregious disregard of our collective bargaining agreement.”
“Extreme misconduct is unacceptable in any professional setting. This includes aggressive, disruptive, and threatening behavior of any kind,” a spokesperson said in a statement to Semafor. “We have a responsibility to provide a workplace where every employee feels respected and able to do their job without harassment or intimidation. We also cannot ignore behavior that crosses the line into targeted harassment and disruption of business operations. We remain committed to working constructively with the union and all of our employees.”
A representative for the NewsGuild, the union that organizes Condé Nast employees, said it would have a statement later on Thursday addressing the move.
Max’s view
Condé’s decision to take a hard line with unionized staff comes amid a broader post-pandemic attempt by bosses to claw back power they feel was ceded to employees during the internal upheavals within white collar workplaces following the #MeToo movement, the 2020 racial reckoning, and flexible COVID-era work arrangements. The confluence of pro-employee cultural forces and shaky economics in the media business inspired many employees to form unions or deploy more aggressive union tactics.
But years of challenging media economics and changing cultural sentiments have emboldened bosses to adopt a more confrontational approach with employees. X, once a powerful social media platform on which staff could gin up support against company management, has waned in importance. And many journalists have simply become desensitized to frequent cuts and layoffs, which have become a normal part of the modern media business.