Condé Nast Workers Form Companywide Union 

Hundreds of workers at the publishing giant Condé Nast, which owns titles like Vogue, Vanity Fair, Bon Appétit and GQ, announced on Tuesday that they had formed a companywide union. The Condé Nast Union is affiliated with the NewsGuild of New York, which also represents editorial employees at The New York Times as well as other publications.

The union will cover more than 500 employees from all of Condé Nast’s brands, except for those from Ars Technica, Pitchfork, Wired and The New Yorker, which unionized separately with the NewsGuild in recent years. In a statement shared through the NewsGuild on Tuesday, the union said it had asked Condé Nast management for voluntary recognition.

“We plan to have productive and thoughtful conversations with them over the coming weeks to learn more,” a Condé Nast spokesman said. The company has voluntarily recognized the four existing unions.

The employees in the newly formed Condé Nast union, including editorial, video and production staff, said in a statement that they were pushing for better pay, increased job security, and a stronger commitment to diversity and equity.

Condé Nast has faced waves of internal turmoil in the past two years over the treatment of employees of color and the low wages of some workers. The Times first reported on the companywide organizing effort in December.

In 2021, tensions over contract negotiation talks for The New Yorker Union led to a vote by employees to authorize a strike and a protest in front of the Greenwich Village townhouse of Anna Wintour, Condé Nast’s global chief content officer and the editor of Vogue. The union reached a deal in June.

In 2020, Ms. Wintour and Roger Lynch, the chief executive, apologized to staff members for racial inequities at the company after a cultural reckoning in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis. Employees complained about racial inequality inside the company, and a top editor at Bon Appétit resigned after the emergence of an old photo of him wearing a racially insensitive costume.

“There is no viable ‘future’ of Condé Nast if women and people of color continue to be used to fill a diversity quota,” Cortni Spearman, a senior social media manager at Glamour and a member of the new Condé Nast Union, said in a statement on Tuesday.