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While media executives orchestrate mega-merger deals this winter, media workers are facing a maelstrom of job cuts and anti-union hostility, with old patterns of inequity surfacing in a wave of corporate consolidation and technological disruption.

Those two faces of corporate media were in the spotlight earlier this month, when red-clad members of the New York NewsGuild stood passing out flyers outside the Paris Theater, which was premiering the “New Yorker at 100” — a documentary paean to the magazine’s history of pioneering journalism. The NewsGuild’s flyers informed the audience that the media empire behind the publication was attacking its unionized staff.

In their announcement of the protest, union co-chair and New Yorker editor Daniel Gross, who was featured in the documentary, said, referring to the publication’s parent company, “Condé Nast’s ham-handed union busting is an embarrassment to the celebrated magazines that it owns.”

Last month, four journalists and prominent activists with Condé Nast’s union, Condé United, were abruptly sacked after they protested a spate of layoffs at another celebrated Condé Nast publication, Teen Vogue. A group of roughly 20 editorial staffers from the union gathered by the human resources department at Condé Nast’s 1 World Trade Center offices to confront the company’s Chief People Officer Stan Duncan with pointed questions about the layoffs. They did not get any answers, but within 24 hours, several of the leaders of the action got fired or suspended without pay, according to the Guild. What the union calls the “Fired Four” — Bon Appetit digital producer Alma Avalle; Wired senior White House reporter Jake Lahut; New Yorker senior fact checker Jasper Lo; and Condé Nast Entertainment videographer Ben Dewey — have now launched a campaign of their own.

The Guild has denounced the company’s treatment of the Fired Four as blatant union busting: Avalle is the vice president of the Guild, and Lo and Dewey had both previously served as vice chairs for their units. And the arc of labor conflict over just a few days — from the gutting of the staff at a major youth publication to the canning of other journalists who challenged the management’s decision — suggests a new level of intolerance for media workers who are vigilant about democracy inside and outside Condé Nast headquarters.

Condé Nast has not responded to a request for comment.

On the surface, such layoffs seem like a regular occurrence in corporate media these days, as many news outlets shed workers to cope with financial turmoil. For Condé Nast, which has in recent years undergone a number of strategic consolidations and plowed money into e-commerce and tech rather than journalism, the absorption of........

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