Benjamin Harnett stared at the disciplinary notice. The numbers didn’t add up. One pull request per week. Twenty-five percent below some industry benchmark. The message was clear: his output fell short. Harnett, a staff software engineer at The New York Times and chair of the Tech Guild’s generative AI committee, saw the fingerprints of two internal tools. DX tracked productivity metrics. Glean pulled from documents, emails and code comments. Together they painted a picture of his work that felt both incomplete and punitive. That frustration boiled over last week. On May 27, 2026, the NewsGuild of New York filed two contract grievances and an unfair labor practice charge on behalf of the Tech Guild. The accusations cut to the heart of how companies can deploy artificial intelligence against the very employees who build it. The union claims The Times used AI programs to surveil and monitor performance of unionized tech workers without notice. It failed to share critical information despite repeated requests.…