Unionized technology employees at The New York Times allege that the company is in breach of their contract by utilizing artificial intelligence tools to monitor staff performance.
The question of how — or whether — newsrooms should incorporate AI has been a recurring and significant debate within the media industry for several years. Increasingly, the parameters for AI integration are being established through collective bargaining between unions and publishers. Currently, employees at The New York Times are preparing for a notable confrontation over this issue.
The Tech Guild, representing unionized staff, claims that Times management has declined to provide the union with crucial information regarding the company's past and planned future use of AI, as well as its potential impact on employees' roles and workflows. Earlier this month, the union filed an unfair labor practice charge in response. The Tech Guild, a unit of the NewsGuild of New York comprising approximately 700 software engineers, designers, product and project managers, and data analysts, also filed grievances asserting that Times management violated their collective bargaining agreement by deploying two internal AI tools designed to track and evaluate employee performance and activity.
One of these AI tools, named DX, is advertised as an engineering productivity tool that enables companies to monitor various metrics, including employees' output, generative AI usage, and efficiency. Ben Harnett, a software engineer at the Times and chair of the unit’s generative AI committee, stated that DX was initially announced internally as a means to improve the developer experience. The objective, according to Times management, was to assess the company's overall performance. However, Harnett reports that over the past few months, the data collected by DX has become more personalized, with benchmarks now being applied to individual employees.
"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 explained. He expressed concern that these broad metrics oversimplify the diverse work performed by unit members, reducing the nuanced nature of engineering to an opaque set of figures that can be used against staff in disciplinary or performance review contexts. Harnett emphasized that these metrics do not correlate with the quality of work or the actual number of features an employee delivers.
"All this [data] reasonably could be expected to … help us understand how we’re doing, but not the way that they’re using it and implementing it, which we think is amounting to a de facto quota," Harnett informed The Verge. The Tech Guild confirms that DX statistics have been cited in recent disciplinary conversations.
"We feel really [this] amounts to deploying surveillance and monitoring tech against the workers."
Another software, Glean, aggregates internal knowledge bases such as wikis, GitHub documents, Google Docs, and emails, allowing employees to query the system for easier information retrieval. However, employees harbor concerns that Glean could also be used to monitor them due to its access to vast amounts of internal documentation. Harnett illustrated this by noting that if he were to draft a document describing a feature he is building or leave a comment in a file accessible within Glean, a manager could potentially query the tool about his individual performance or contributions. The Tech Guild informed The Verge that the distinctive style and format of recent disciplinary notices issued to staff suggest they were generated using Glean. Harnett also highlighted issues with Glean, specifically its tendency to generate falsehoods and lead users on "wild goose chases."
"The way that they’re using [DX and Glean] we feel really amounts to deploying surveillance and monitoring tech against the workers," Harnett reiterated. The union believes that the deployment of these tools violates multiple provisions of their contract, including protections related to privacy and monitoring, job descriptions, and requirements for employee notification and collective bargaining.
Both the Tech Guild and the Times Guild, which represents 1,500 editorial, ad sales, and support staff at the Times, have filed unfair labor practice charges against the company. They assert that the Times violated labor law by refusing to respond to their requests for information regarding the publication's use of AI.
The Times did not directly address specific questions about its use of DX and Glean. However, spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha stated in an email that the company disagrees with the characterizations made in the grievances and 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 added.
The Times Guild is currently negotiating a new contract, advocating for robust protections against AI. These demands include requirements for human oversight of any AI tool utilized, transparent labeling of all journalism incorporating AI, and fair compensation for staff involved in any AI model training deals the company might pursue. The Times itself employs artificial intelligence tools for certain reporting tasks, such as parsing millions of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein or scanning satellite images of Gaza to identify where Israel had deployed a specific type of bomb.
Across the journalism industry, AI stands as one of the most pressing issues at stake in ongoing union contract negotiations. In April, 150 unionized employees at ProPublica staged a 24-hour walkout, with the use and disclosure of AI to audiences being a primary point of contention with management. Similarly, after McClatchy, the company that publishes newspapers like the Miami Herald and The Sacramento Bee, began rolling out a generative AI tool capable of producing varied versions of stories, some staff members chose to withhold their bylines in protest.
Harnett emphasized that the unit’s position is not that AI should be entirely prohibited, but rather that workers must have a voice in how it is deployed. He argued that metrics such as the number of tokens an employee uses or their frequency of AI tool usage for tasks create undue pressure to increase output, fostering incentives that may not align with the delivery of high-quality work.
"It’s going to distract [you] from actually doing a good job, which is what we think the company should want," he concluded.
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