The New York Times Tech Guild filed grievances alleging Times management violated their union contract by deploying two AI tools — DX and Glean — to track and evaluate employee performance without bargaining. The NewsGuild of New York unit represents around 700 software engineers, designers, product managers, and data analysts at the Times. The union also filed an unfair labor practice charge earlier this month claiming management refused to provide information about how the company uses AI and its plans for future deployment.
DX is an engineering productivity tool that tracks employee output, generative AI use, and efficiency metrics. The Times originally positioned DX internally as a way to measure the company as a whole, but over recent months the data has become personalized with benchmarks applied to individuals, according to Ben Harnett, a software engineer at the Times and chair of the unit's generative AI committee. DX statistics have been cited in recent disciplinary conversations with staff.
Harnett says the blanket metrics flatten engineering work into an opaque set of numbers that erase nuance and do not correlate to quality of work or actual feature delivery. The union believes the implementation amounts to a de facto quota system.
“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'”— Ben Harnett, Software engineer at the Times and chair of the Tech Guild's generative AI committee
Key facts
- 01The Tech Guild filed grievances alleging Times management violated their collective bargaining agreement by using DX and Glean to track employee performance.
- 02Around 700 software engineers, designers, product managers, and data analysts are represented by the Tech Guild unit.
- 03DX statistics have been cited in recent disciplinary conversations with individual employees, according to the union.
- 04The Times has responded to 80+ other requests for information from the Guild in recent years, a company spokesperson said.
Glean pulls from internal knowledge bases including wikis, GitHub documents, Google Docs, and emails, allowing employees to query the system to find information. The Tech Guild says Glean can also be used to monitor workers because it indexes vast amounts of internal documentation, including draft documents and comments. The union told The Verge that the style and format of recent disciplinary notices suggest they were generated using Glean.
The union argues both tools violate multiple contract provisions including protections around privacy and monitoring, job descriptions, and requirements for notifying employees and bargaining over workplace changes. Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said the company disagrees with the characterizations in the grievances and will respond through its normal contractual process. She added that the Times will respond to the request for information as it has done with 80+ other requests from the Guild in recent years.
“The way that they're using [DX and Glean] we feel really amounts to deploying surveillance and monitoring tech against the workers”— Ben Harnett, Software engineer at the Times and chair of the Tech Guild's generative AI committee
The Times Guild, which represents 1,500 editorial, ad sales, and support staff, also filed an unfair labor practice charge over management's refusal to provide AI-related information. The Times Guild is currently bargaining a new contract that would require a human behind any AI tool, transparent labeling of AI-assisted journalism, and compensation for AI model training deals the company might make.
The dispute at the Times mirrors broader tensions across the media industry. In April, 150 unionized employees at ProPublica walked off the job for 24 hours over AI use and disclosure to audiences. Staff at McClatchy newspapers including the Miami Herald and The Sacramento Bee withheld bylines after the company rolled out a generative AI tool that creates different versions of stories.
Harnett emphasized 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 tracking token use or AI usage frequency create pressure that does not align with quality work, he said.
The Times uses AI tools for some reporting, including parsing millions of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein and scanning satellite images of Gaza to identify where Israel dropped specific bombs. These deployments differ from the DX and Glean systems at the center of the labor dispute, which focus on internal productivity measurement rather than editorial work.
The grievances represent a test case for how unions will challenge AI-driven employee monitoring as the technology spreads through knowledge work. The outcome could set precedent for how publishers and tech companies deploy productivity-tracking AI against unionized staff.
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