Condé United, the union representing most Condé Nast employees, filed a federal labor complaint and multiple grievances against the company after it fired multiple employees who confronted its head of human resources over the layoffs of six unionized staffers at Teen Vogue.
The company also issued three-day suspensions to five other employees who participated in the confrontation, the union said, demanding their reinstatement as well.
The measures come after Condé Nast on Wednesday fired four employees among a group of roughly 20 editorial staffers who stood outside Chief People Officer Stan Duncan’s office at its 1 World Trade Center headquarters and urged him to speak with them about the decision to fold Teen Vogue into Vogue and lay off the staffers.
Condé Nast claimed the employees exhibited “extreme misconduct” in their actions, but videos obtained by TheWrap on Thursday showed Duncan repeatedly refusing to engage with them and urging them to return to their workplace assignments. A Condé Nast spokesperson said on Friday the footage “captures only a portion of the incident” and that “several additional minutes are missing,” but did not respond to TheWrap’s request to provide or elaborate on the missing minutes of footage.
Now the NewsGuild of New York, which oversees the Condé Nast union, has filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board on behalf of the group. The union wrote that Condé Nast terminated the four employees for engaging in “protected concerted activity,” according to a copy of the complaint obtained exclusively by TheWrap. It has also filed multiple grievances against Condé Nast for alleged violations of its contract agreement.
Both the company and the union’s federal complaints are likely to remain in limbo pending the ongoing government shutdown.
A Condé Nast spokesperson did not respond to an immediate request for comment on the federal labor complaint.
In a letter to Duncan on Friday obtained by TheWrap, NewsGuild of New York President Susan DeCarava claimed that senior management at The New Yorker,
WIRED, Bon Appetit and its content operations team did not know the company would lay off the employees.
“Holding power to account is what our journalists do every day,” DeCarava wrote. “That Condé Nast, as a media company, is targeting its own media workers in a ham-fisted attempt to avoid questions about its business practices, is an astonishing decision by management. That our members were asking questions about Condé’s fairly transparent attempt at political appeasement with the closure of an independent Teen Vogue, and that one of the workers illegally fired is a well-regarded White House correspondent, begs the question: What is Condé’s commitment to journalism?”
The two finalized the agreement in May 2024 after more than a year of acrimonious bargaining that included a daylong walkout, a demonstration outside Condé Nast’s headquarters at 1 World Trade Center and a threat to upend the Met Gala.
The agreement seemed to mark a conclusion to years of bitter feuding between the two. But this week’s Teen Vogue layoffs – and the subsequent firings of the staffers — appear to have sparked a new wave of tension, as Condé Nast management seems to have taken a more aggressive approach in curtailing its employees’ demonstrations.
Condé United members on Friday changed their icons on the workplace messaging platform Slack to a shared photo urging the company to rehire the four employees — Jasper Lo, a senior fact checker at The New Yorker; Jake Lahut, a senior politics reporter for WIRED; Alma Avalle, a digital staffer at Bon Appétit; and Ben Dewey, a video staffer with Condé Nast Entertainment — to their positions.
“Reinstate the Fired Four!” the icon read.
“It is disheartening, after working together to reach an agreement our members ratified, for senior Condé management to violate the contract and act with such cowardice in squashing workers’ right to engage in concerted activity,” DeCarava wrote in the letter to Duncan. “Management’s bullying will not stop us from holding Condé accountable for its actions, will not stop our questions, and will not stop our collective action.”
Read the NewsGuild’s letter in full below:
