Anna Wintour’s TikTok sponsored Met Ball is in trouble.
With a week to go before the spring Halloween party. Conde Nast’s unionized employees are threatening to upend the gala as they attempt to negotiate a contract and thwart more layoffs.
Wintour is the editorial director of Conde Nast, and editor in chief of Vogue. She’s also empress of the Met Ball. The evening will be sponsored this year by TikTok, the Chinese company ordered by Congress to divest itself or be banned in the US. I told in February what was going on.
Some Conde Nast publications have unions including The New Yorker and Wired. But the big ones, like Vogue, Vanity Fair, Glamour, etc did not until recently. They still do not have a contract as the company has had had serious rounds of layoffs and face more imminently.
The Conde Nast Union declares on its website:
“While Anna Wintour, Vogue editor in chief, mingles with fellow millionaires at the Met Gala, Condé Nast is refusing to settle a fair contract — and is trying to lay off nearly a hundred Condé Union members:
Tell Anna: Get serious
- Pay Condé Nast workers fair wages
- Stop replacing unit members with freelancers
- Reach a deal with workers now!“
It’s hard to imagine but completely possible Wintour will have her Kardashians and other gross participants walking past Conde Nast protesters next Monday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
That would be an embarrassing “first.”
The Union says: “The unionization of Condé Nast began in earnest in 2018, when editorial employees at The New Yorker began an organizing drive. They announced their union publicly in June of 2018 with nearly 90% of the staff supporting the effort. They were joined in March 2019 by colleagues at Ars Technica and Pitchfork, and in April 2020 by those at WIRED. All four publications were voluntarily recognized by Condé. Now the entire company is unionizing.”
The Met Ball is a notorious money loser, costing more than $5 million to stage even after donations and sponsors are counted in. The confluence of the TikTok scandal and the union issues is going to make for a compelling moment next Monday.
