How newsrooms should use artificial intelligence — or if they should at all — has been a recurrent debate within the media industry over the last several years. Increasingly, these rules are being hammered out at the bargaining table between unions and publishers. Right now, employees at The New York Times are gearing up for a fight over two AI tools that they say are being used to monitor their performance and productivity without proper negotiation.
Unionized staff with the Tech Guild, a unit of the NewsGuild of New York representing around 700 software engineers, designers, product managers, and data analysts, say Times management has refused to provide the union with information related to how the company has used AI, its plans for AI use in the future, and how it will affect employees’ jobs and workflow. The union filed an unfair labor practice charge earlier this month. It also filed grievances saying Times management violated their collective bargaining agreement when it started using two internal AI tools that track and evaluate employee performance and activity.
The AI tools at the center of the dispute
One of the AI tools, called DX, advertises itself as an engineering productivity platform that lets companies track employees’ output, generative AI use, and efficiency, among other metrics. DX was originally announced internally as a way to improve the developer experience, according to Ben Harnett, a software engineer at the Times and chair of the unit’s generative AI committee. The goal, at least according to Times management, was to measure the company as a whole. Over the last few months, however, the DX data has become more personalized, with benchmarks being applied to individuals, Harnett says.
“Now people in disciplinary situations are suddenly having read back to them, ‘You only did one [pull request] per week, per whatever, and that’s 25 percent below industry standard,’” Harnett says. He fears that the blanket metrics flatten all work that unit members do and erase the nuance of engineering into an opaque set of metrics that can be used against staff in disciplinary or performance review settings. The metrics do not correlate to quality of work or the actual number of features an employee delivers, he adds.
Another tool called Glean takes internal knowledge bases such as wikis, GitHub documents, Google Docs, and emails, and allows employees to query the system to find what they are looking for more easily. But there are concerns among employees that Glean can also be used to monitor workers because it pulls in vast amounts of internal documentation. Harnett says that if he is working on a draft document to describe a feature he is building or leaves a comment in a file that is available in Glean, for example, a manager could query the tool about his individual performance or contributions. The Tech Guild told The Verge that the style and format of recent disciplinary notices sent to staff suggest they were generated using Glean. Harnett also notes that Glean has issues — it generates falsehoods and can lead a user on “wild goose chases.”
Union concerns and legal action
“The way that they’re using [DX and Glean] we feel really amounts to deploying surveillance and monitoring tech against the workers,” Harnett says. The union believes that the use of these tools violates multiple parts of their contract, including protections around privacy and monitoring, job descriptions, and requirements for notifying employees and bargaining with them.
Both the Tech Guild and the Times Guild — which represents 1,500 editorial, ad sales, and support staff at the Times — filed unfair labor practice charges against the Times, saying that the company violated labor law by refusing to respond to their requests for information around AI use at the outlet.
The Times did not respond to specific questions about how it uses DX and Glean, but spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said in an email that the company disagrees with the characterizations made in grievances and that it would respond as part of its “normal contractual process.” “Likewise, we will respond to this Request for Information (RFI) in due course as we’ve done with 80+ other RFIs from the Guild in recent years,” Rhoades Ha said.
Broader implications for AI in the workplace
This dispute over AI monitoring tools is part of a larger conversation about how artificial intelligence is reshaping the workplace, especially in knowledge-intensive industries like journalism and technology. The use of employee monitoring software has been a growing trend across many sectors, but AI-driven tools like DX and Glean add a layer of sophistication that can track not only output but also collaboration patterns, communication styles, and even sentiment. Privacy advocates warn that such tools can create a culture of surveillance that erodes trust between workers and management.
“The issue isn’t just about the tools themselves, but about how they are implemented and what checks and balances are in place,” says Johnna Fisher, a labor lawyer specializing in technology disputes. “When AI systems start being used in performance evaluations or disciplinary processes, there has to be transparency about what data is being collected and how it is being interpreted. Workers deserve the right to see and challenge the data that affects their careers.”
The Times Guild is currently bargaining a new contract, pushing for robust protections against AI, such as requirements that a human is behind any AI tool being used, that any journalism utilizing AI is transparently labeled, and that staff are compensated for AI model training deals the company might make. The Times already deploys AI tools for some reporting — for example, parsing millions of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein or scanning satellite images of Gaza to try to locate where Israel had dropped a specific kind of bomb.
Industry-wide union actions over AI
Journalists across the industry are in the process of negotiating union contracts, and AI is one of the most urgent issues at stake. In April, 150 unionized employees at ProPublica walked off the job for 24 hours; one of the key sticking points with management was how AI would be used and disclosed to audiences. After McClatchy, the company that publishes newspapers like the Miami Herald and The Sacramento Bee, started rolling out a generative AI tool that spits out different versions of stories, some staff withheld their bylines in protest.
The situation at the Times is particularly notable because of the paper’s influence in the industry. As one of the most prestigious news organizations in the world, its use of AI tools and its treatment of tech workers could set precedents for other media companies. “The New York Times is a bellwether,” says Alex Rivera, a media analyst at Cornell University. “If the union there can secure strong protections around AI monitoring and transparent use of these tools, that would send a powerful signal to other publishers and even to other industries.”
Harnett emphasizes that the unit’s position is not that AI should never be used, but that workers should have a say in how it is deployed. Metrics such as how many tokens an employee uses or how often they are using AI to do their jobs create pressure to do more and incentives that do not align with doing quality work. “It’s going to distract [you] from actually doing a good job, which is what we think the company should want,” he says.
The union has also pointed out that the use of these AI tools could disproportionately affect certain groups of workers. For example, developers who work on complex, long-term projects may produce fewer pull requests per week than those handling smaller, faster tasks. The DX metrics do not account for these differences, potentially penalizing engineers who are working on more intricate features. Similarly, the use of Glean to generate disciplinary notices may introduce biases if the AI misinterprets collaboration patterns or language.
The Times has not commented on whether it plans to modify its use of DX or Glean in response to the union’s complaints. The unfair labor practice charges are currently pending before the National Labor Relations Board. In the meantime, the Tech Guild is urging its members to document any instances where they feel the tools have been used unfairly. “We need to build a record of how these tools are being used in practice,” Harnett says. “The more evidence we have, the stronger our case will be.”
The fight over AI at The New York Times is far from over. As the technology continues to evolve, so will the need for clear rules and boundaries to protect workers’ rights. Whether through collective bargaining, legislation, or public pressure, the outcome of this dispute will likely have ripple effects far beyond the newspaper’s newsroom.
Source: The Verge News