Digest 09/14/2022

Following their successful union drive, Condé union members and leaders said they will prioritize plans to completely abolish the permalancer system.

PERMALANCERS GAINING TRACTION DURING CONDÉ UNION DRIVE

Every Single Condé Publication is now Unionized

After five long months of organizing, the Condé Nast Union — which spans 500 members across 11 publications — has reached its card count and has thus been officially recognized by the global media company. The union will cover staffers and permalancers across all of Condé’s brands who have worked at the company for over a year, which means hundreds if not thousands of employees may receive stronger benefits and protections. 

The card check happened on Friday, when nearly 80 percent of eligible employees submitted union cards. A neutral third party selected by the union and Condé combed through the hundreds of cards and ensured their authenticity. A Condé spokesperson provided the following statement to Study Hall via email, “After productive conversations with the NewsGuild [the local union that Condé organized under] over the past few months, we have agreed to voluntarily recognize four new editorial and business units. We’re looking forward to working together on our collective bargaining agreements following successful contracts with The New Yorker, Ars Technica and Pitchfork unions and the pending contract with WIRED.”

Anticipating the forthcoming bargaining process, Condé union members and leaders said they will prioritize plans to completely abolish the permalancer system that has created divisions among the media company’s full-time staff and contract workers. Perhaps most notably, as permalance gigs have become increasingly common in digital media, union recognition means increased protections for Condé’s 100 freelance and permalance workers. Permalancers often work full-time but are paid through contracting agencies, so they don’t receive the same benefits or stability granted to full-time staff. 

“It’s a two-tier system and it’s not fair,” said Michael Petronzio, an organizing committee member who has been a permalancer with Condé for more than two years. Petronzio added that unstable working conditions have been a drain on his mental health. “It’s not a good way to live and I don’t think it’s a productive way to work either,” he said. “We [permalancers] also have a lot less basic benefits than our staff coworkers have. We don’t get paid on federal holidays. We don’t get [paid time off]. Our company tends to close for the holidays completely. So that’s a large amount of pay that [I don’t receive], but my coworkers do the same work as me.” 

With recognition, the company will not be able to make decisions about permalancers’ contract renewals without bargaining over them, which union leaders say should afford these workers more job security when bargaining begins. Union leaders hope to convert those permalance workers who wish to be on staff to employee status with contract ratification. 

“It’s just securing collective bargaining rights for what you would think as traditional bargaining unit members, but really thinking about the most vulnerable, the most exploited workers within this ecosystem and fighting for them as well,” Nastaran Mohit, organizing director of the NewsGuild of New York, told Study Hall. “We will be fighting for the complete elimination of this two-tier subcontracting model that Condé Nast has relied on for so long.”

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DRAWING FROM RECENT UNION PLAYBOOKS

Condé’s union win comes during a wave of media workers unionizing in recent years. Union leaders and members looked to the successful organizing model of the media-savvy New Yorker Union, the first of Condé’s publications to successfully unionize with nearly 90 percent of the magazine’s staff supporting the effort. After two years of bargaining, The New Yorker won its historic contract in 2021 (with support from Bernie Sanders, of course) ensuring wage increases, a salary floor of $55,000, and work-life balance protections among others.

“The hope is that we [as a voluntarily recognized union] will be really well set up because we have the example of our peers from The New Yorker, Ars Technica, and Pitchfork who have already unionized and secured their contract terms, and who just have given us this amazing, strong template to build off of,” Christina Chaey, an organizer and former Senior Food Editor at Bon Appétit, who was involved in union efforts from the very beginning, told Study Hall. “Since we know that those conditions and terms have been approved, that’s a really, really optimistic grade for us.” 

The Condé union went public in March 2022 when they sent a letter to management asking for voluntary recognition, but had started organizing behind the scenes as early as 2020. The pandemic and the summer of racial reckonings in the U.S. had begun when Condé Nast laid off 100 employees in May of that year. At Bon Appétit, conversations about unionizing began among staffers after controversial social media posts from executives and employees resurfaced. 

The debacle at Bon Appétit became a motivator for staffers to take these conversations more globally. Nico Avalle, a Digital Operations Associate at Bon Appétit, joined the union last September and noted how quickly the efforts expanded across publications. “It went from just Bon Appétit to much more phone banking,” she said. “In the leadup to going public, it was hours upon hours of phone banking. I was calling people who are fact checkers at magazines and brands that I don’t work with on any given day. Unionizing built bridges between these brands that didn’t exist before.”

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IS THIS A PIVOTAL MOMENT?

Though I am now a freelancer, as a former full-time fact checker for New York Magazine, I participated in the union drive in 2018 until I left the magazine in June 2021. That experience taught me just how much work (for already overworked people) goes into every aspect of organizing from conducting surveys, to attending weekly meetings, to producing the art for social media graphics. But the work is also bonding and invigorating, because you are talking to and collaborating with coworkers you never would have spoken to before, and realizing your gripes are not just your own.

If workers at a global media shop as massive as Condé are able to organize, it could be a signal that media workers industry-wide, finding solidarity, are no longer feeling imperiled, and are ready to codify substantial changes to working standards. Look no further than recent protests at The New York Times, where union members are rejecting corporate lunch boxes and working from home as the Times demands workers return to the office. The demonstration was part of a larger effort to negotiate a contract that includes higher wages and more flexible working conditions. At the same time, it could be Condé leadership demonstrating their own savvy, recognizing that it’s best to get ahead of forthcoming change in the industry than resist it.

“We know that by organizing, we can improve working conditions, and really set new standards for the industry,” Mohit said. “Condé Nast is a huge media organization and we know that the unionization of the entire company is going to lead to new standards being set across the industry. Our goal is not just about Condé Nast.”

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

— Reporter Katie Baker departs BuzzFeed and joins The New York Times as a “as a correspondent covering the social and cultural conflicts that divide the U.S.”

— Sam Raskin, formerly a reporter at the New York Post and a POLITICO alum, will join Slingshot Strategies as senior vice president for communications. 

EVERYTHING ELSE

— The state of California announced it will fund $25 million in local reporting fellowships through the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. The state-funded program hopes to launch in spring of next year, and “aims to support and strengthen local reporting in underserved and historically underrepresented areas across the state.” 

— Patreon laid off its entire 5-member security team, along with 80 other employees. The company said the layoffs “will have no impact on our ability to continue providing a secure and safe platform.” Whoops. 

— The Insider union on Tuesday conducted its own internal campaign to get their contract demands in front of management, according to AdWeek media reporter Mark Stenberg. The union sent out staffer testimonials to editorial and management every 5 minutes from 9AM until 5:10PM.

— Last week, The Nation and the National Writers Union reached an agreement that they say will protect freelance workers’ rights. Under the agreement, Nation freelancers can expect to receive timely pay and communication, partial payments for commissioned articles that are not published, and a set rate minimum for duties that include writing and reporting, fact checking, and photography, among others.