Al Zone Media.
Welcome, Zinking Happen Here a podcast telling you to rage against the dying of the light. I am your host, Bia long and many episodes ago, significantly more tearfully, I talked about how, you know, watching the trans voices in media get fired and disappear felt like watching the stars disappear in the sky. And today I am here to say, do you not go gently into that good night?
Fuck him?
Rage against the dying of the lights, and with me to rage against the dying of the light and talk about some absolute bullshit. Is Alma a Vie who is a former staffer at Bonappetite, and we will be getting into why that's now technically former and the VP of the New S Guild of New York.
Alma, welcome to the show.
Amy, lovely to be here.
I wish it was under better circumstances.
I feel like everyone I talked to I go, I wish you were under me circumstances.
But you know, yeah, circumstances across the border kind of trash right now.
Yeah, they're they're really bad. The circumstances they do be they do, they do be shit.
So these specifically bad circumstances are one conte Nast has just obliterated teen Vogue, which had been one of the few actually very good progressive outlets, also one of the few outlets that would publish trans people regularly, and it's just gone now. And Alma and three of her coullies were fired for very productive union activity, being like, hey, what.
The fuck in we kinder terms of that. I can say this because it's not my ass of the line, but yeah, do you want to talk a bit about what happened?
Yeah, totally. I mean to give the company it's caveat. Technically, teen Vogue still exists. It has just been moved under the broader organization of Vogue. They've now said that it's coverage areas will include professional development as well as well.
There are a couple of other things that they highlighted, but certainly the things that they did not highlight include, say, you know, scathing coverage of the Trump administration, or coverage of trans youth and trans healthcare bands for teenagers, coverage of like young celebrities of color, and so on. But yeah, anyway, I guess to just go back to the start of
the timeline. Last Monday, we at the News Guild and you know, at the Conde Nast Union, which is the union that represents basically every worker or every journalist and video maker at Conde Nast except for those in the New Yorker, they are in like a separate bargaining unit that we see as like you know, linked sibling units or at the linked sibling unions. We do most of our organizing together, and our contracts are nearly identical. But
anyway we yeah, I know, right, union siblings. It's adorable.
Yeah, we try to stay close.
But anyway, we got word last Monday that about two thirds of the staff of teen Vogue were being laid off, including a friend of mine and I think former guests on your show, actually Lex mcmahamon, who was the politics editor at teen Vogue, as well as a few of the culture editors based like if they were covering I mean being a little glib here, but like if they were covering say like trans writes, trans youth, like progressive
culture and nearly any way shape or form. Yep, they were either laid off or the remaining workers were folded into the larger organization of Vogue. And I think they're still figuring out exactly where they fit into that organization and what like youth coverage looks like going forward. So that happened last Monday, which was obviously a massive loss.
I sat in on a lot of the like the wine Garten meetings, going over the exit packages for those employees, a lot of like really sad and cheerful meetings that day.
We should point out this is being recorded on Monday, the tenth. Last Monday's is Monday, November third. Not sure when this is going to come out, but yet just to make the time link clear here, Yes, absolutely November third.
Yeah, that was Monday, November third. Yeah, thank you for the correction. And then two days later at the company, we got a notification that there was another round of layoffs, this one hitting I believe folks on the video teams and then people on the like copy in fact checking section of the com company as well.
This was super disruptive.
Usually, you know, at a company like Conde Nast, well, the union doesn't have like explicit protections for this, and in fact, like the company has the right to perform layoffs if they need to for business reasons. Usually when a round of layoffs goes through, there's like a period of peace that comes after that, you know, like there
will be you know, a reduction in force. We'll figure out, Okay, how are we going to keep doing our jobs now that we have fewer staffers, and then if the company needs to reduce the staff again, that will happen like a few months, maybe a year in the future.
Two rounds of layoffs in the same.
Week had people really really scared and really stressed out, because, I mean, for one, there's like just the sense of, like, oh God, a lot of my coworkers are gone, how am I going to be able to keep doing my job? We lost at my magazine, bon Apetite. We lost our social media director, the person who was basically running our
social accounts. We'd gotten notification from the company that editors were going to be doing their own posting from then on, which is just not not how things I've ever worked before, not really a thing that they're like, you know, my colleagues are brilliant, and many of them are brilliant like users of social media, but like not really a part of our jobs historically. So we're all pretty confused how we were supposed to, you know, actually keep running our magazine.
Most of our magazines are already running on pretty reduced staffs in the first place.
Yeah.
Yeah, So anyway between that and the kind of obvious political connection that one could draw, or at least like that, a lot of our members were afraid of, you know, teen Vogue being this like pretty famously radical or at the very least like pretty famously progressive publication doing some like really really hard hitting journalism.
Yeah, there's a really clear.
Line you can draw between like all of the Colbert and Jimmy Kibble, but also like the CBS stuff with Barry Weiss, like this kind of broader right wing shift in media. You can draw I think a direct line between all of that and like the shuttering or near
shuttering of teen Vogue. So we did a thing that we basically always do when we're facing an issue like this, whether it's a big reduction in force or just some decision from the upper levels of the management that have all of the workers being like, wait, what the fuck did you just do? We had a rally in the cafeteria to go over some of the questions that we
all have for management. We created a list of questions that we wanted to ask and then and I cannot stress how like routine this is for us as a union.
We went from the cafeteria, which is on the thirty fifth floor of the World Trade Center, down to the executive floor, which is directly below it on the thirty fourth floor of the World Trade Center, and we walked over to the executive offices and said, we have some questions for Stan Duncan, who is the head of the people team at CONDE, and asked basically one of the people in charge of either making these decisions of you know,
staffing in reduction, and then of enforcing those decisions as well. We went down to speak with Stan Duncan ask him some of our questions. Two other HR employees came out in medicine the hallway. We said we'd like to speak to Stan. We were happy to ask them our questions, but they said they wouldn't be particularly good at answering them, or they might not have good answers for us. But Stan,
they said, was in a meeting at the time. It just so happened that either Stan's meeting ended right then, or maybe he heard people talking in the hallway and decided to come check it out, or maybe there wasn't a meeting, but For whatever reason, Stan happened to come out into the hallway at that time, and so we started trying to ask him our questions. Some of those questions included, like, was the closing of teen Vogue inherently political? But also how are we going to be able to
do our jobs going forward? How are we supposed to keep running these magazines if you're going to keep cutting our jobs? And then also how are we supposed to keep doing our jobs if we are constantly living in fear of losing them? You know, Stan does not answer any of these questions. Of course, yeah, no, naturally, he tells us we're not allowed to congregate in the hallway. This is not true, of course, we what well, yeah,
we I mean, one, this is our workplace. We I think are allowed to have conversations in the hallway of our workplace too. I mean, if he was saying that we weren't allowed to, say, take part in union activities in the workplace, we have a right under Section seven of the NLRA that says we can do that. We also have like contract provisions that say the company will not infringe upon our right to organize and demonstrate in
the workplace. So that just wasn't true, and in fact, the union before everything else happened, already filed a grievance about denying our Section seven rights to organize in the workplace. God yeah, So anyway, stand tries to get us to go back to our desks. He walks across the floor, tells us to follow him. We follow him and keep asking questions. He says that we have to go back and do our jobs. We say, we will happily do
our jobs if you could just answer our questions. He tells us that we have to go back to our workplaces. We remind him this is our workplace, and anyway, we end up asking him those questions. We follow him back and forth along the hallway. He goes back into his office, closes the door. We all go back to our desks
for the rest of the day. I finish up my work and I go home, and then I get notification from the News Guild at seven that the company has no tofied them that they are terminating me and three of my colleagues.
Jesus Christ.
No severance, no ongoing insurance coverage. My insurance expires at the end of the month, no notice, no investigation, effective immediately. So as of last Wednesday, I am no longer an employee of Conde Nast. I'd been working there for five years. I helped start the Conde Nast union. In the time since I joined there, I was one of the most
tenured members of my magazine. Actually, people don't generally stick around there for a long time, but at twenty seven years old, I was a long hauler MIA and Yeah. In the time since then, our union has filed a second grievance. There was the first one over telling us we couldn't congregate. There's now a second one over the retaliatory firings of me and my three colleagues. The company has since put five other people I believe on an unpaid leave in an attempt to discipline more people who
took part in the demonstration. Kind Of hard to see rhyme or reason in the people that they decided to discipline. So I was speaking quite a bit during the demonstration, as was one of the other people who was terminated. One person asked one question that was a Jake la Hood at Wired. He asked a question towards the beginning, which was, what is your definition of congregate? When they told us we can't congregate in the whole way, which
I think is a perfectly valid question. And then one person who was terminated actually as far as I know, didn't speak at all during the demonstration. He was, however, the vice president of the New Yorker Union or the vice chair of the New Yorker Union, and an organizer
that the company was like very well aware of. And then as for the people who were placed on disciplinary leaves, I mean, I believe some of them actually spoke significantly more than some of the people who were terminated during the demonstration, but were certainly, like historically at the very least,
less visible and less vocal union organizers. So the trend that we're seeing is that the people who spoke up were either people who had been historically very active in the union or in Jake's case, somebody who is doing really really impressive coverage of the Trump administration and like a really really hard hitting journalism against like Doge and like the general efforts of the right right now to you know, I mean, listeners of this podcast know everything that's going on there.
Yep.
I'm gonna say this, and I'm going to adopt the preferred language of these professionals, which is to say that, and this is the preferred language of management, is that some people are calling this both a return of resegregation and an obvious anti union political purge because it is a bunch of trans people and a bunch of fam white people who have been eliminated from teen Vogue. You know, this is something that you were talking about earlier, about
drawing the connection between this and CBS. I'm like, yeah, what did Barry Wise do when she got into CBS? She fired like every norm white person who worked there, right, because their overt political plan is resegregation. And you know, in order to do resegregation, you fire all of the people who are non white, you get rid of any trans people, and you get woman.
Admittedly it at.
CBS, it is not like they had like a giant like like, you know, it wasn't like like I had of trans politics in the first place. I mean they had some like you know, there's people there who are like cool, but like it wasn't like you know, it's it wasn't like teen Vogue, which genuinely had way more transcoverage than like any other outlet.
No, totally, Like I can.
I emphasize enough like the extent to which this is the most normal union activity in the entire world, into which this is the most protected.
Category in the entire world.
And you know, obviously a bunch of the bosses and a bunch of like the corporations that are doing this shit like don't think the NLRA should exist, and like is like a legally valid thing, but it's still enforced right now and so well mostly but like like for this, yeah, still in force.
So they did unbelievably hideously illegal.
Retaliatory firings that are illegal in like so many different ways. It's baffling, Like it's like you need like a second laund degree to fight every single ball they just broke totally.
I mean, the thing that I would point out too is like, like you said, this is an extremely common type of union action, like across the entire labor moved everyone. Everyone marches on the boss. We also specifically like as a union, we've marched on the boss like tons of different times. We've marched on stand multiple times in the past.
There was one demonstration where we all marched on stand during contract bargaining actually last year where we had significantly more people and I will say being much more confrontational. I remember like a large crowd booing him in front of the entire executive floor, and I would say, and I would say, like two to three times as many people present watching in a much more like loud and
activated and energetic forum. But we've had marches on other executives, We've had marches on editors in chief in the past. And I mean one of the reasons that, like, when I got the news that I was being terminated, I like basically went into shock, felt extremely tame compared to
past union actions that we've done. Yeah, and also, no one has ever been disciplined for par taking part in any action like this in the past, like let alone terminated, Like as far as I know, no one's ever been called into a meeting and said like, you shouldn't have done that, and we're keeping an eye on you. So this is like a massive escalation on the company side in terms of retaliation. And I mean that's also what we've heard kind of across the board at the News Guild.
You know, I've been in close conversations with our president and with other like organizers at the Guild who have said and this is you know, our local union that organizes a bunch of different publications in New York City and kind of in the surrounding area. This is one of the most egregious examples of retaliation that just about anybody I've talked to you has seen in our union's history.
And there's like pretty I think valid concern that like if a company like Conde and Asked is able to get away with this, like other companies within our union are going to follow suit and like take this as their queue, which is both scary but also has been energizing for a lot of people. We've seen, like a lot of folks really excited to like show up and join our fight and get involved in any way that they can.
Hell.
Yeah.
The other thing that I would point out, based on what you were saying is so Kanye Nest has a queer publication them dot Us, which I think is one of the all time URLs for a queer publication. You possibly have very funny So between them and teen Vogue, you had a lot of the company's like trans staffers. They kind of function as like sister publications. They like sit next to each other, they work closely together outside
of them. As far as I know, I was the only trans woman implied on editorial like Kanye Nest and I am certainly the only trans woman in our union, including at them, actually them, All of the transoman employees there,
to my understanding, are not part of the unit. They are in management positions, which, yeah, your representation, but also means that like I was obviously in this like very lonely position, but also this very like visible and like clearly very vulnerable position where it's like incredibly easy to single somebody like me out. I would also say, during our contract fight, we had a lot of back and forth between like me and company management about their coverage
under the healthcare plan. Namely, they excluded facial feminization surgery, which meant that, like, if you were an employee of Conde Nast and you wanted facial feminization surgery, you were either out of luck or had to find a way to raise about fifty thousand dollars based on a lot of estimates that I've seen.
If you're really lucky and good and you're going to go to Thailand, you can maybe get it for thirty k.
Yeah, right, no exactly, which immediately the timeline stuff is cool, but.
Totally I mean it's like all the opportunity.
It's a lot of lucking Bundy, like it totally so much shit.
It sucks so badly, even more if you want to recover in your own home and your own Yeah. Actually, and we weren't able to resolve that in the contract. I got FFS this year, and to do it, I had to go on like a New York State marketplace plan. Oh no, Jesus Christ, I had both plans active at the same time. But I have to get like secondary insurance that just seven hundred dollars a month in order to get out the best covered god. Yeah, and that
still ended up being significantly cheaper. Yep, yeah, I mean and frankly, like Conde Nasked never covered it. Who did cover it was like lots of my union colleagues who jumped in and like created to go fundme for me and like helped to raise like all of the money that I needed to get surgery. And very very thankful
for that. But anyway, point being like, the company does not exactly have the best track record when it comes to and like I feel very qualified to say this as like the trans woman in the Conde Nast union, the company does not exactly have the best track record in terms of like how they have treated us and me specifically around trans issues. So being like again kind of singled out in this way and then being hit with like this significant a piece of retaliation, it just
feels really telling and also I mean really disappointing. Frankly, like I've I've been at Conde for or I.
Keep using the present tense.
I'd been at Conde for five years, and you know, I liked my job.
I was good at my job.
I hope that they will reverse course and turn this around, but anyway, it's disappointing. It's disappointing that like that that doesn't really seem to mean anything when the rapper hits their own.
Yeah. I think there's two ways you can look at it.
One is it's like, oh, yeah, of course, of course the one trans woman in this bargaining. Yet it was like the VP of the union because like, yeah, transferms do be organizing, do we do do this?
And that the truth.
But then the second thing, and you were talking about this, like yeah, the magazines are already understaffed and they're just destroying them, you know, And this is the thing that I can say which is like, this is something we saw from Jeff Bezos, right when when Jeff Bezos sort of like took control of the Washington Post and then gradually sort of purged their staff, and like, you know, has this whole thing now about how, oh we're supposed
to be pro free market and pro individual liberties, which does not include trans writes. You know, if you look at what happened to the Washington Post's subscriber account, it's like nothing, It's like the paper is dying. It's effectively just like it's not like an actual functional, like profit making thing anymore. Like it's it's just the sort of
propaganda vanity outlet of a billionaire. And that's you know, that's probably what's going to happen to CBS, is that it's going to just get sort of annihilate, stripped down, because these people don't want a functioning media. They don't give a shit if these things actually work, because what what they're trying to do right now is accumulate raw, accumulate just raw power and attempt to do raw sort of narrative and media control in order to stay in power.
And it's not working because everyone still hates them, even though they bought all the newspapers. Everyone is like, these people suck, like but this is that we run into with union stuff all the time, which is like, yeah, there are a lot of bosses who would rather their own company be nonfunctional, you know, their workers have any
voice in it. And especially now in this political moment in which oh, hey, look the fascists are trying to seize control of the media, that becomes increasingly more and more an option of just fuck it, will just like get handouts from like the tech fascists forever, and in exchange for that, will publish whatever propaganda garbage they want to spit out.
Yeah, I mean, I would also say, like, I'm not sure get about across the entire company. Although I believe it was one of the better traffic stories that Conde Nast all year, but one of the most certainly one of the most like trafficked teen Vogue stories in this past year, was like out of their politics section. It was the Vivian Wilson Elon Musk's Transdoughter cover story, really really good, an amazing piece of journalism and also a piece like super viral, and I'm sure made a ton
of money for the company. Yeah, and so one would think, you know, looking at like the trends of the past, that if that was going to inform anything, like the company would actually say, like more politics coverage, like more progressive coverage out of teen Vogue, and like.
I remember, I don't have the exact numbers on me because I'm a hack and of fraud. But if it wasn't a hack and a fraud, I would have the exact numbers from the coverage of like the increase in both revenue generation and in like readership that teen Vogue underwent once they started doing politic stuff onto the first
show administration. And now you're getting rid of that for what are clearly business reasons and are clearly, very very clearly not related to the fact that there is a bunch of a bunch of political pressure from a bunch of fascists to run the government.
Now.
Yeah, I mean, obviously we don't have like perfect insight into what's going on behind closed doors at Conde Nast,
but I can't say that. We had a diversity committee meeting with our joint union management diversity committee a week before all of this went down, and they told us that they were you know, paraphrasing here, but management said that they are actively trying to avoid the attention and the eyre of the Trump administration, which at the time definitely raised some eyebrows and I think led to the big response last week of like.
Mm hmmm, oh.
By actively avoid the attention of the Trump administration, you meant just like get rid of the parts of the company that are like, yeah, hostile towards it, and I mean kind of too, like the good business of progressive coverage. I've covered a lot of beats in my time of bon Epetite, but there was a period where I was covering like the Starbucks Workers United fight pretty closely, a lot of articles about that in my back pocket.
Those generally did really well.
Actually, one of the first times I faced like big right wing backlash online was covering the like Dylan mulvaney bud light protests, which I used as an opportunity to write about the like the cores light boycotts of like the West Coast queer worker movement and like kind of the birth of the like gay labor movement. One of my best trafficks of all time stories I wrote about the like why the watermelon symbol became like such a big kind of like rally and cry and like Palestine
and organizing over the past few years. Again massive traffic winner for the company. But every time, you know, we get into these meetings with management or every time we like hear about the direction that the company is shifting or the coverage is shifting, it always seems away from those kind of hot button issues that like there's clearly an appetite for stories about and instead towards well whatever it's towards, you know.
Yeah, and you know, and you can look at this like there's been a whole bunch of there was a story recently about doctor Oz like pivoting his whole thing into doing like a right wing like media grift, and nobody's watching it. Like the average episode of it could happened here absolutely annihilates like just like like orders of magnitude better than like no, I think it was doctor phil Yeah it was doctor Phil.
Who does that?
Look they're like the same guy, Like, wow, that's not that that's slightly unfair to doctor os. Well, yeah, doctor Philip did this, like did the right wing pivot, And like nobody's listening to the show. It's like, no one this is like one of the most famous people in the United States getting annihilated by like Mia and the trendy crew, like.
It could happen here, like.
Oh wow, you know, and yeah, like there is this like massive demand for this stuff as like people increasing me realize that, oh yeah, wait, hold on, we're getting every single person like in the country is like almost individually getting screwed over by the Trump administration. He's like individually micro targeting every single part of his base and pissing them off. Like there was a whole farmer soy thing, right, and like he's like, I guess tend this negotiates we
being sales now. But like, you know, you can look at like so he was fighting this whole war with his entire farming base and then he immediately turned around from there and went to fight the cattle ranchers. It's like there's so much appetite for any critique of this because it's so obviously just like malignant and narcissistically violent, and all of these companies that are like you know, like like this has always been the problem with the free presses that like the US does don't have a
free press. The US is a capitalist press, and so you know, you can just buy them or apply enough political pressure and they will fall in line.
And that's like what they're doing here.
So what you're saying is we need a left wing Joe Rogan.
I'm gonna become the joker.
Now, of course.
I mean I'll also say, like I became an organizer in the News Guild for a lot of reasons, right, Like Bonapatia was my first job out of college, and I was really involved covering the dining workers organizing at my undergrad school, so that was like definitely my introduction there.
But at the same time, like when I got into the workplace, I kind of real that media unions are maybe one of the only things that will keep the media, at least as currently exists, alive until we can come up with like some other model that is like more sustainable, because I mean, like I look at a company like Conde Nast and you have this like very well compensated, very like large cast of managers and middle managers yep, and then you have this like massive body of people
actually producing the magazines, actually making like doing the work of the journalism and the culture reporting and the video making and so on. And so on, And you know, one of those groups is constantly subject to layoffs, one of those groups is constantly being made to say work over time and maybe being told not to build for as much over time as they're being made to work. And one of those groups is being extremely well compensated and has seemingly incredible job security.
Yeah, like all all of the resources are being sucked out by a combination of like these venture capitalist dipses at the top and then all of these fucking like middle miror management bureaucrats like who do not right.
And the thing that slows that down is like workers having a say in the media, you know, like the people who actually can produce the work, like being able to say and these are the circumstances under which the
work is going to be produced. I mean, I think it's no surprise that, like if you look at a publication like hell Gate or like Defector or like Aftermath and four or four, and all of these like worker co ops that are popping up kind of across the media ecosystem, like their worker owns, and they have this very kind of flat like payment structure where everybody is making around the same amount, like everybody has a say in the way that the workplace functions, and like these
appear at least to me to be some of the most like stable media like organizations that are out there right now. And all that tells me is that like workplace democracy, I mean in like the truest sense of the word, you know, like workplace democracy as it is earned by like worker organizations, union's, worker co ops, whatever they might be, is the thing that's going to keep the media afloat. Like that is the model that is
like sustainable in the long run. So I think that's one of the reasons that having like a strong and active Conde Nasty union, though management probably wouldn't agree, at least explicitly, it's like one of the things that can keep Conde Nast alive for as long as possible. Like you know, again, they would probably loath to admit this, but like an organization like the Conde Nast union can only exist as long as an organization like Conde Nast exists, their fates are kind of tied to one another.
Well, okay, this is we're doing the incredibly esoteric via meta union three.
There's two versions of looking at this one.
Okay, this is the version where yeah, the Kandy NASA union is structurally dependent on the existence of Conde Nast, and this means that the power of the union is based on its ability to bring people.
Back to work.
However, come up, there is a second one you could theoretically have. You could theoretically have the Conde Nass union without Conde Nast, where we have CNT and it we've taken it over, we're running it now. We are just now the union. And you know, and the thing, the thing I will say about that, and this is always this has always been the advantage of co ops is that, like you are immediately from the ground up, you're going to have a kind of efficiency advantage because there is
not an entire middle layer. Like because obviously, like there are like producers who do a bunch of work, like my boss Sophie.
Like if we didn't have Sophie, none of this.
Would work, right, Yeah, there's also a bunch of other people who have the same title who do nothing. And that's not even true. If they did nothing, it would be better. They interfere with everything constantly and get pay an exhordinary large amount of money to make everything work worse, and you don't have to have that entire bureaucratic layer,
like the layer of middle management. And this has always been the massive just efficiency advantage that you have when workers running their own shit is that you don't have to have those people and the coordination that needs to be done. Okay, you have people doing the coordination. You don't have fifteen layers of dipshits whose job it is to run around making your job harder. This has been me talking about the organizational advantages of anarchy.
It's great, Sorry, now you're fine. I mean, I will is like it's an interesting thing about Conde Nast and like a lot of I think these media conglomerates, it is like, you know, other than like when I am a member of the Conde Nasty union, and like I don't really interact with people who work elsewhere at Conde Nast, Like yeah, I interact with the people at my magazine and like the people at Bon Appetite and I like generally get along great. I have a really, really awesome
relationship with my manager. I have a lot of admiration for him and.
What he does.
I think he's like the same way that you talk about Sophie. I think he's like really great at his job. I like have a good relationship with our editor in chief. I have a lot of respect for her as well. We have a really really solid system going where we are like able to make this food magazine every month and be able to keep this website online and able to make content that we're all like, you know, recipes
and stories that we're all really really proud of. And then at the same time we were kind of subject to this like kind of bigger whatever media machine that's like kind of moving around ahead or above us, and also moving around like again with just like so little transparency. Like yeah, going back to the action on Wednesday the fifth, we have tried to have meetings with Stan, Like the executive that we talked to in the hallway, the executive
that we marched on. We have tried to have meetings with him so many times in so many different ways. We have emailed him questions, not gotten responses. We have invited him to like town halls, not gotten responses. We invited him to meet with our diversity committee and labor relations got mad at us fore seeing him.
On the email.
God.
Historically, like that kind of level of the company has been extremely averse to interacting with its workers to like answering basic questions, which is why, like when you look at you know, there's a video out there of the interaction, Like this is why we have to march on our bosses like this, because there's literally no other way to get a single answer out of them, because they kind of I mean they exist on this other floor of the company altogether, Like so, I don't know, it's it's
very frustrating. It's frustrating to like kind of exist in this like dual system of like, well, we have a magazine that we are operating like very effectively on our own, and yet there's this entire thing above it that is making these decisions about how it ought to function and like what it ought to be doing.
Yeah, and who don't know what it does because totally they're not there, Like they have absolutely no idea how your production actually functions.
I would be surprised if the man who fired me knew what my job was.
Yeah, no, absolutely not.
All the old critiques of like the Soviet system, we're like, oh, there's just this out of touch bureaucraft three hundred miles away making production decisions.
Blah blah, blah blah blah. It's like, oh, yeah, no, that's.
Actually just like how your job works is some suit in like another building is like, oh, your jobs are all replaceable. Oh you can you can do this with like twenty percent less staff. Oh I don't even know what you do, but we're firing you because we hate you specifically.
Like it's just a terrible way for the world to run.
Yeah, totally.
And I mean we have like these models of like what successful workplaces can look like, you know, like places with militant unions that like actually work, like actually give workers to say and what their conditions should be and what their conditions are, places that have gotten rid of the boss altogether, and like you know again those worker co ops that I listed, Like, there are these functional models of what the future of media can look like. And this is the thing that I say all the time.
It is like the reason that I'm excited about being a member of the News Guild, the reason I got involved in organizing in the first place, is like I think there is a future of media, Like I think there is a way that like, you know, people like you and people like me, like people who write and tell stories and like are interested in like talking to
people and getting their stories out there. I think there are sustainable ways that we can do that, And I think the people who know how to do like the sustainable future of this thing are the people who are making the product in the first place. Yeah, Like we are the ones with vision, Like we are the ones who know how to make something that can continue to exist sustainably, something that can like even under the capitalists like framework, Like something that can make money, something that
can be profitable. A lot of the great journalists I know are like actually very interested in and very very good at making work that like generates quite a bit of revenue. And I don't think that's a particularly bad thing. Like they know how to do this in a way that is sustainable, in a way that keeps readers excited and engaged in like willing to like pitch in in
their own ways. The problem is that the people who seem to have that know how, the people who make the thing and the people who know how to keep making the thing, and the people who are making the decisions like aren't the same people.
Yeah.
And the way that you fix that divide, like is by demanding a seat at the table is by demanding the people who are making those decisions actually do listen to you, and then demanding that they actually follow through on the obligation or the things that they say they're going to do. One of the really frustrating things about my termination is like they're saying that I was like too aggressive and was harassing the chief people officer. Again, there's a video I think is extremely exonerating.
Also, oh wow, the trends woman's being too aggressive? Wow?
Wow crazy one day they're going to develop a second joke.
Wow anything now? No, I know.
Actually one thing some like Chud on the internet who was like trying to make fun of me, is that I was wearing a wig out like to stay for the record, I don't wear a wig.
This is my hair. I grew it myself. It's took a while, thank you. I agree.
Although one of my friends told me that I have turf bangs the other day, which I really actually it was the day that I got fired, come to think of it, because before they knew to be fair. But no, I know, sorry, what was I saying before that?
I The last time I got owned that hard was what Bob called me a talking head.
So you know it happens. Sometimes you get absolutely obliterated.
But I love that band.
It's good bad.
But if the company like actually believed that I was, you know, being too aggressive or like committing I think the words that they used are like gross misconduct, Like I know, we have just caused protections in our contract that include like an explicit procedure that you're supposed to go through for gross miss conduct. Like if the the company was following the contract, if they felt the obligation to do so, what should have happened is they shouldn't
have let me finished the rest of my work day. Instead, I should have been escorted out of the building by security. I should have been placed on a leave. There should have been an investigation with like time for me and the union to comment, and then a decision should have came out. And the entire time that should have been happening, I should have been paid. And like if that sounds greedy, okay, the company agreed to it, like they didn't have to
sign the contract, but they did. But this is another like concerning trend that we're seeing right now with like you know, the gutted NLRB and like the kind of yeah, you know, shirking of NLRA like responsibilities from companies is like companies are like straight up gas lighting workers not things that are in the contracts that they agreed to.
They are like pointing to the contract and saying that it says things that it doesn't say, or that it doesn't say things that are like right there for you and clearing English right before your eyes. Actually, another time that we tried to talk to Stan this year was so we're based out of New York, predominantly we have remote workers across the country. Although we were told just about everybody at the comp I need to start coming
into the New York offices four days a week. There's a section of our contract that says that under a declared state of emergency, workers can stay home. Well, this summer in New York, listeners may remember, we had a really massive, like terrible heat wave, like temperatures up in the one hundreds every day, like going into the subway stations, and that week I remember feeling like I was baking.
During the declared state of emergency, which again the contract says workers do not have to come into the office. The company said, we don't care, you have to come into the office paraphrasing those aren't there exact words, but they're not too far off. And again we said, okay, but the contract says under a declared state of emergency, we don't have to come into the office. And they said you have to come into the office four days
a week, no exceptions. And it is maddening. I mean, no, that's life threatening, Like, oh, I mean yeah, absolutely, And I will say, like, you know, I've been at the company five years. That makes me a bit of a long hauler. Like we have people who have been at the company for like fifteen twenty years. Like there are people who are like near retirement age standing on a subway platform. Again, it's New York City. People aren't really
in air conditioned cars driving to work. Like there are people for whom, like at all ages standing on a subway platform in that kind of heat is a really life threatening and like really dangerous thing to demand people do.
Yeah, which is like one of the things that.
We were thinking about when we like fought for that contract language and like one of the things that we were thinking about when we were like nearly ready, like in fact that we were ready to go on strike. Yeah, and like disrupt the net Gala in May of twenty twenty four. Like, that is one of the things that we were thinking about when we drafted that, and one of the things we were really excited that the company
agreed to give us when we won our contract. And so for them to immediately just say, oh, just kidding, well, oh well, now if we file a grievance, it might take like months directify, well, just kidding, those rights that we gave you, they don't exist anymore. Sorry. And again it is like clear, easy to understand language that they are somehow willing to just say, like the contract doesn't say what it says.
It's interesting because I mean, you know, there's like the one here in like companies have always like not followed contracts. It's always been like, Okay, if you want your contract to do what it says it does, you have to force.
Them to do it.
But on the other hand, like the thing that it reminds me of is like one of the things happened with the Trump administration. Whenever talking about them pissing off their bases, there's been a bunch of unions that they've just unilaterally been this is said, this is national security. We don't recognize your contract anymore. So for example, like the the funny version of is they did this at a prison guard union, which is hilarious.
It's like, yeah, I don't know you guys. You guys shat in your own bed.
Now you have to lie in it, Like I don't know what to tell you, but like yeah, but like you know, the national government has been doing this to a bunch of unions. Is they've just been going totally, we know that we don't have to follow this contract anymore. It's national security and that's the future that all of these people want and that they're like, you know, this
is part of what they're fighting for. This is part of that fight, is that they want to fight where contract union contracts don't exist and they could just do whatever they want to anyone.
I mean, there's also like a clear line you can draw from say like like the Reagan era and the like air traffic controller unions strike break, and then like the way that from like the federal government unions, and like the way that the federal government treats its unions that like basically the rest of the American labor movement and rather the management side responses to the American labor movement generally flow.
Yeah, yeah, is there anything else that you want to make sure that people know.
Well, I mean, in the coming days and weeks, the union is planning a lot to fight back against the company. Oh yeah, that said. One of the things that we know most about media organizations generally is that they are very concerned about public pressure and they are very concerned about public image. This is like APR obsessed industry for
better and for worse. So we are hoping that like readers and you know, fans and followers will keep the pressure up against Conde Nast to show like employers like them that like, we will not stand for this. We have an Action Network petition up right now that we are going to keep collecting signatures for that we hope to deliver to management soon depending on once it comes out. I mean, we'll be collecting signatures regardless, and that is also one of the best ways signing on to that.
We'll get you out dates for other ways that you can, you know, support us from the outside. But otherwise, I mean, we've got a lot of fighting to do, We've got a lot of organizing to do. I certainly don't think my days at Conde Naster over, I expect that, like however long it takes for the law of shakeout, like I hope to be reinstated, as do the other like
three terminated employees. I also am certain that like we will be able to win justice for ourselves and the other people who were like illegally retaliatorally disciplined following the action. And I also think that this is nowhere near the
last action that Conde Nast upper management should expect. If anything like this is just showing us that if we want our contract to be enforced, if we want the rights that they said that they would give us, we are going to have to keep holding them to account and we are going to have to keep fighting for them.
Trying to figure out whether or not I can get away with saying you have sown the wind and now the whirlwind.
Oh god, you have so own the bond appetite, and now you will get the I can't finish that.
You've sewed the butt appetite. Now you'll get teen votes to.
You have sewn the bond and now you'll get the appetite. That doesn't mean anything, that's on anything.
You know, Look, it's a struggling time for the whole industry. Yeah, and if people want to find you, do you want to be found a n B? If people want to find you, where can they find your work?
Yeah, totally.
I plan to keep writing and doing journalism for the however long I can allowed to keep doing that. So I'm on basically every website as at Goodbye Almah, including the Evil ones sadly. I also I co edit a literary magazine with my friend Joyce. That's called Picnic Magazine. It's very cool. It's all work by trans contributors. We are predominantly a print first publication. You can find us
at picnicmag on Instagram. We're also on Blue Sky. I should have prepared our at but I'm sure I can send that to you afterwards.
Yeah, well we'll put it in that, We'll put it in the station.
And yeah, we are available in a few bookstores in big cities across the country. We also have a you can download our PDF and a pay what you want kind of way. We have a second issue coming soon. Although it turns out making a magazine with just two trans women and it's really difficult, So yeah.
Check that out. It's all fiction.
Criticism and poetry by trans contributors and yeah, follow me at Goodbye Alma Online.
Yeah yeah.
If you want actual news that's fit to print, you're going to have to fight for it.
Amen to that says there.
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