New York Times tech workers challenge internal AI monitoring

Unionized Tech Guild employees at The New York Times say management has withheld information about how AI is being used and how future deployments could affect jobs and workflows. The unit, made up of around 700 software engineers, designers, product and project managers, and data analysts, filed an unfair labor practice charge and grievances over two internal tools that it says are being used to track and evaluate employees.

One tool, DX, was introduced as a way to improve developer experience and measure broader organizational productivity. Union representatives say its data has become more personalized, with individual benchmarks appearing in disciplinary conversations, including claims that an employee completed work at “25 percent below industry standard.” The union argues the metrics flatten engineering work into opaque quotas and do not reflect quality or actual feature delivery.

Employees also raised concerns about Glean, which searches internal resources such as wikis, GitHub documents, Google Docs, and emails. The union says the system could let managers query workers’ contributions and believes recent disciplinary notices resemble Glean-generated output. A Times spokesperson said the company disagrees with the grievances and will respond through its normal contractual process, including to the request for information as it has with “80+ other RFIs.”

The dispute overlaps with bargaining by the Times Guild, which represents 1,500 editorial, ad sales, and support staff and is seeking requirements for human oversight, transparent labeling of journalism using AI, and compensation tied to model training deals. The company already uses AI in some reporting tasks, including parsing millions of documents and scanning satellite imagery.