Bluesky

Condé Nast illegally fired me from Bon Appétit for posing questions to a human resources manager. On November 5, I was part of an effort by our union to get answers about layoffs. Two days earlier, Condé announced the near-shuttering of Teen Vogue, which entailed letting go of eight people. My termination and that of three of my coworkers were clearly retaliatory, and if Condé can get away with this—and with President Donald Trump sabotaging the National Labor Relations Board, the company appears to be betting that it can—it will send a message to unions and employers across our industry that the foundations of labor law are collapsing.

Since 1935, United States law has provided a clear set of rights to workers. The National Labor Relations Act—the legal scaffolding for the US labor movement—guarantees workers the right to organize unions and demonstrate in the workplace without retaliation from their bosses. The act also created the National Labor Relations Board to enforce labor law and hold both employers and unions accountable to their obligations under the act.

Only eight days after taking office, President Donald Trump illegally fired Gwynne Wilcox, the chair of the labor board. This left the board without the quorum legally required to meet and deliberate, hampering the agency’s ability to enforce the law.

My union, the NewsGuild of New York, which represents employees at Condé Nast as well as The New York Times, Reuters, and The Nation, is fighting the terminations. But the Trump administration and its anti-worker allies know that labor enforcement has been undermined and that, even under Democratic presidents, the NLRB’s penalties are often not stiff enough to discourage bosses from abuse. This is emboldening employers to ignore their legal obligations and trample on the rights of workers. By firing me and my fellow organizers, my former employer, ostensibly a beacon of the “liberal media,” seems all too happy to align themselves with the Republican Party’s gutting of workers’ rights.

We still don’t know why the company chose to fire us, but we have theories. While Condé would surely say our targeting was not deliberate, it is certainly convenient given the current political climate. As the NewsGuild’s vice president and a former member of our bargaining committee, I recognize that I am a high-profile target within our union. I was also one of frustratingly few trans women on staff at any national publication (the layoffs at Teen Vogue also hit Lex McMenamin, the publication’s only trans or nonbinary employee), a fact that is particularly concerning amid the right-wing push to erase trans people from public life and my history of criticizing the company’s track record with its trans employees. Ben Dewey and Jasper Lo, two other fired employees, had both held office within the Condé Nast and New Yorker unions, respectively. Wired reporter Jake Lahut expressed concerns about the future of adversarial journalism at Condé. He covered the White House and had snagged major scoops about DOGE and Elon Musk’s role in the Trump administration. He was fired too, raising further alarms about what types of journalism Condé is ready to back.

At issue in our case are two essential protections for working people. The first is the guarantee under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act, which ensures that employees have the right to self-organize and engage in “concerted activities” in the workplace—basically, to take part in labor activities and demonstrations as long as the workers are acting together as a union. The second is the “just cause” protection in my union’s contract, which ensures that employees cannot be fired without adequate reason and substantial evidence of wrongdoing. This is in contrast to “at will” employees, who can be let go for nearly any reason or no reason at all. Workers at the New Yorker won just-cause protections in their 2021 union contract, but they weren’t expanded to the rest of the company until the Condé Nast Union threatened to disrupt the Met Gala and won our contract in 2024. Just-cause is the bedrock of NewsGuild contracts, and it should have protected me from the unfair retaliation I faced when our union tried to get answers from the company’s leadership.

My last day at Bon Appétit felt like many other days in my nearly five years at the food magazine. I arrived at the office on Wednesday morning, ready to try out a coffee maker I was reviewing. I handled a few administrative tasks before going to the food magazine’s famed test kitchen. Our food director and I sampled a few of the cups I’d brewed with the device I was testing—one was bland, another was bitter, and one was more promising—and agreed to do more testing with fresher coffee beans the next day. I cleaned our dishes, and he offered me a bowl of pasta, which I ate quickly before heading to a union meeting in the company’s cafeteria over my lunch break.

In the years since Condé Nast workers unionized, I have attended countless meetings in the cafeteria. They’re as routine to me as a Rolex photoshoot might be at GQ. We discussed the second round of layoffs the company had announced that week. Teen Vogue was a particular point of interest. The layoffs there had wiped out the brand’s politics section, which was already down to half of its previous size before the company restructured. Teen Vogue’s politics vertical had covered issues like youth bans for gender-affirming care, young climate advocates like the Sunrise Movement, and, ironically in retrospect, labor organizing.

Less than a week before the layoffs at Teen Vogue, management told our union’s diversity committee that they were trying to avoid attention from the Trump administration. This combined with the media generally shifting to the right to appease the Trump administration (see Stephen Colbert’s cancellation, Jimmy Kimmel’s near-cancellation, and the takeover of CBS by Bari Weiss and The Free Press) made members of our union concerned about the future of journalism at Condé Nast. Like good organizers, we channeled those concerns into questions and prepared to bring those questions to Stan Duncan, the head of human resources.

In union organizing, we call this a “march on the boss,” in which a group of workers approaches a manager, asks a few questions, and then disperses. Sometimes marching employees will deliver a letter or a petition, oftentimes they will be met with a closed door and will leave their questions with an assistant, and, occasionally, they will find the boss and get the information they were seeking. Marches are a common way unions get information when managers are less than transparent. This year, Condé Union members had tried a number of times to meet with Duncan more formally, both in town halls and committee meetings, and he has never attended. So, like many times before, we marched to the executive floor in search of clarity around our working conditions, our job security, and the direction of the company.

When we arrived, after a brief exchange with two HR employees, Duncan left his office and entered the hallway to address us. The conversation that followed was routine and tame, especially compared to past marches—a similar demonstration under the Biden administration was nearly twice the size of November 5’s and ended with a crowd of nearly 50 members booing Duncan over a previous round of proposed layoffs. No employees were threatened with disciplinary action that time. These demonstrations, perhaps to management’s chagrin, have been a norm at the company since our union formed in 2022 and are clearly protected under the law and in our union’s contract, which the company signed in 2024.

That night, I got back to my Brooklyn apartment after a happy hour with some friends at around 8 pm. Then, while choosing an outfit to wear to the office the next day ahead of spending the night at my partner’s house, I got word from my union representative that Condé Nast was trying to fire me and three of my fellow union members. At 10 pm, I received an e-mail from the company confirming the news: I was being terminated for “gross misconduct and policy violations.”

I have not been told which policies I violated or what conduct specifically led to my termination, a requirement under my just-cause protections. My colleagues and I weren’t asked for our side of the story by management until a union grievance meeting nine days after I was fired. This is a complete inversion of our just-cause protections, which guarantee us a thorough investigation before discipline can even begin taking place.

Meanwhile, our case has received an outpouring of support from across the labor movement, politicians, and the legal establishment. A public petition in our support has gathered nearly 4,400 signatures. The Screen Actors Guild, which represents many of the celebrities featured on Condé Nast’s magazine covers, as well as the Writers Guild, and a swath of other unions have demanded my and three colleagues’ reinstatement. New York City Council member Chi Ossé, who filed paperwork to challenge House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries in next year’s primary and was once featured in GQ, did the same at a rally outside of the Condé Nast offices on November 12. At the same rally, New York Attorney General Leticia James ended her speech with a promise and a threat to my former employer: “Condé Nast, I’ll see you in court.”

Our union isn’t standing idly by. Through rallies, teach-ins, and other demonstrations of our growing power inside the office, we are keeping the pressure on Condé Nast to do right by its workers, and our support is only growing. Our petition is still live—you can sign for updates on how to support our campaign from the outside—and we’ve already raised nearly $15,000 to support the Fired Four as we fight back against the company. Condé Nast could right this wrong and reinstate us at any time, but like the Trump administration itself, company management appears to think bosses are above questioning.