ONE STEP FORWARD, ONE STEP BACK

Vox Lays Off 39 People Just Over a Month After New Union Contract

Vox Media CEO Jim Baker said the company was responding to an increasingly volatile economy.

Vox Media announced on Wednesday that it will lay off nearly 40 people across its editorial, recruiting, and sales teams. The move, which amounts to less than two percent of Vox’s staff of 2,000, was made in response to the increasingly volatile economy, its CEO Jim Baker wrote in a memo to staff, Axios first reported. “The current economic conditions are impacting companies like ours in multiple ways, with supply chain issues reducing marketing and advertising budgets across industries and economic pressures changing the ways that consumers spend,” Baker said. “Our aim is to get ahead of greater uncertainty by making difficult but important decisions to pare back on initiatives that are lower priority or have lower staffing needs in the current climate.” The cuts came more than a month after the company’s union ratified a three-year contract that, among other items, boosted its minimum salary and expanded its severance package.