New York Times faces union backlash over AI tools monitoring employee performance

The AI fight brewing inside The New York Times

How newsrooms should use AI -- 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. Unionized staff with the Tech Guild 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.) The Tech Guild, a NewsGuild of New York unit of around 700 software engineers, designers, product and project managers, and data analysts, 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. One of the AI tools, called DX, advertises itself as an engineering productivity tool 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, says 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, though, 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 is concerned that the blanket metrics flatten all work the 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 don't correlate to quality of work or the actual number of features an employee delivers, Harnett says. "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 told The Verge. DX statistics have been cited in recent disciplinary conversations, the Tech Guild says. Another software called Glean takes internal knowledge bases like wikis, GitHub documents, Google Docs, and emails, and allows employees to query the system to find what they're 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's working on a draft document to describe a feature he's building or leaves a comment in a file that's 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 says that Glean has issues -- namely that it generates falsehoods and can lead a user 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 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 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. The Times Guild is currently bargaining a new contract, pushing for robust protections against AI, like 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 deploys artificial intelligence tools for some reporting, like using it to parse millions of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein or scan satellite images of Gaza to try to find where Israel had dropped a specific kind of bomb. 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. Harnett emphasizes that the unit's position is not that AI shouldn't ever be used, but that workers should have a say in how it's deployed. Metrics like how many tokens an employee uses or how often they're using AI to do their jobs create pressure to do more and incentives that don't 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.

New York Times accused of using AI to spy on unionized employees: 'workers everywhere are under attack'

Unionized New York Times employees have taken legal action against the publication, claiming it uses artificial intelligence to "surveil and monitor" them. Staffers in the New York Times Guild and the separate Times Tech Guild filed two grievances and an unfair labor practice charge against the Gray Lady, claiming the outlet is deploying AI to spy on employees in a "violation of their collective bargaining agreement." "Using AI to surveil our work violates our contract and creates a skewed, inaccurate picture of our members' work," said Benjamin Harnett, chair of the Tech Guild's generative AI committee and a staff software engineer at the Times. "Our work takes human judgment, problem-solving and skill that can't be accurately assessed by AI analysis and proxy metrics. It's the equivalent of setting an arbitrary story quota for journalists," he added. According to the unions, Times management has "continually refused to provide information to the Tech Guild on the company's use of AI, despite being required by federal law to provide information that relates to either bargaining or contract enforcement. " The Times allegedly refused to respond to three requests for information from the guilds. "We disagree with the characterizations made in the grievance and will respond as part of our normal contractual process," a spokeswoman for paper told The Post. "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." The unions said their first request for information was sent nearly two months ago, on March 26, followed by requests on April 22 and a final notice on May 6. They're seeking information on the company's current and past use of AI, as well as planned and contemplated use of the tech and its impact on employees and workflow, the unions said. The blow up comes as the Times Guild, which represents more than 1,500 editorial, ad sales and support staff, is currently bargaining for a new contract. Guild members gathered last week in front of the New York Times Building in Midtown Manhattan, calling for stronger artificial intelligence protections and affordable health care. On behalf of the Times Guild, the NewsGuild of New York filed a separate unfair labor practice charge. "Workers everywhere are under attack from the unethical use of artificial programs by bosses," said NewsGuild of New York President Susan DeCarava. "Sadly, New York Times management has proven themselves to be no different, rejecting both transparency and accountability for how artificial programs are being used against the very workers who help make the company successful."