Fortune postpones CEO conference after employees plan strike

Fortune magazine has postponed its CEO Initiative conference for later this month after its editorial employees, seeking a union contract with the publication, said they would strike for those two days, reports Maxwell Tani of The Daily Beast.

Tani reports, “But ahead of the union’s announcement of the strike, Fortune CEO Alan Murray wrote in a Tuesday email to all employees that he plans to postpone the conference.

“The CEO noted that the picketing would ‘interfere’ with the conference and could involve the unionized staff of the Hyatt hosting location. He further claimed to have been informed that both Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh and Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo were set to boycott the event.

“However, a Department of Labor spokesperson told The Daily Beast, ‘We 100% respect pickets, but the Secretary was never confirmed in the first place for the event due to scheduling conflicts.’ And while Raimondo’s office did not respond to a request for comment, a source familiar with the situation said the commerce secretary was never confirmed to appear.

“Ultimately, Murray announced, CEOI ‘will no longer be held as scheduled and we are looking into alternate dates.’ The conference was the first major in-person event the influential business outlet had planned since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. early last year.”

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Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.