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The paper's unionized tech employees say management deployed AI tools to track, and evaluate individual performance without notice, and they're filing charges to prove it.
The New York Times is facing a serious internal reckoning over artificial intelligence. The NewsGuild of New York has filed two grievances and an unfair labor practice charge against the paper on behalf of its Tech Guild, a unit of roughly 700 software engineers, designers, and data analysts, alleging that Times management has been using AI tools to monitor and evaluate workers in violation of their collective bargaining agreement, and without ever telling them.
At the center of the dispute are two internal platforms. The first, called DX, was introduced to staff as a broad engineering productivity tool meant to measure the company as a whole. Over recent months, however, workers say its data has been applied to individuals, with specific metrics, like how many pull requests an engineer submitted in a given week, being cited directly in disciplinary conversations.
The second tool, Glean, aggregates internal documentation including wikis, emails, and Google Docs, and workers fear managers can use it to query individual employees' contributions and generate performance assessments, possibly even draft disciplinary notices.
Ben Harnett, a Times software engineer and chair of the Tech Guild's generative AI committee, said the blanket metrics erase the nuance of complex engineering work and create what amounts to an arbitrary quota system. "Our work takes human judgment and skill that can't be accurately assessed by AI analysis and proxy metrics," he said. "It's the equivalent of setting an arbitrary story quota for journalists."
The Times pushed back, with a spokesperson saying the company "disagrees with the characterizations" and would respond through its normal contractual process.
The broader Times Guild, representing some 1,500 editorial and support staff, is separately bargaining a new contract, with AI protections among its top priorities. The standoff reflects a battle playing out in newsrooms across the country, where workers are demanding a voice in how AI is deployed against them.
