The largest news union in the United States has added more than 10,000 workers from 246 workplaces since Jon Schleuss became president of the NewsGuild-CWA—an organizing surge he says the union has not seen since its founding in 1933, during the Great Depression. The driver, he argues, is artificial intelligence and the executives pushing it.

"You see CEOs that make millions of dollars and don't increase your pay and want to lay you off and speak in this weird, AI-written code-speak," Schleuss said. "It tends to tick people off when the price of groceries is just through the roof."

What triggered the latest confrontation?

USA Today Co., formerly Gannett and the country's largest newspaper chain, announced a partnership with Palantir in August. Palantir's clients include Nvidia, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Britain's National Health Service. The deal aims to monetize USA Today's audience and content, part of a broader automation push that includes push-button videos, AI-written summaries, and full articles.

NewsGuild members at USA Today papers have demanded an end to the Palantir deal, citing reader trust and a conflict of interest for reporters covering ICE. Last month, after a reader-facing chatbot rolled out across USA Today websites, guild journalists at two Ohio papers pulled their bylines. Among the bot's hallucinations: it misidentified the reporter covering a murder case as the suspect.

What does the union want in contracts?

CEO Mike Reed told Fast Company in September that the company will not replace journalists with AI: "I think the Guild plants this, as well as outside cynics, that we're going to replace journalists with AI. That couldn't be further from the truth." Unlike Ziff Davis, IGN, The New Republic, Time, and CalMatters, however, USA Today has not put that promise in a contract.

Schleuss says the union holds 95 contracts with AI language, but Gannett—where the guild represents 46 bargaining units—has refused to agree to any of it. Journalists at The Columbus Dispatch, who unionized this year, are still bargaining for a first contract.

The guild's five standard demands:

• No layoffs because of AI
• No salary reductions because of AI
• A labor-management committee to resolve issues in real time
• No impersonation of journalists or training on their work without permission
• Mandatory labeling of AI-generated content

The New Republic's December 2024 contract is a model, Schleuss says: generative AI may serve as a complementary tool but not a primary one, and its use shall not result in layoffs, unfilled vacancies, or reduced compensation. The American Independent went further, banning AI-produced published material outright.

How bad is the underlying jobs picture?

The Local Journalist Index estimates the U.S. has lost roughly 80% of its local journalists since 2000—from about 40 per 100,000 residents in 2002 to 7.8 today. McClatchy laid off 30% of the guild's represented membership there in September, gutting accountability reporting, Schleuss said. Layoffs continue even where contracts contain AI protections.

Where does the union see AI as legitimate?

Schleuss credits purpose-built tools: The New York Times' Manosphere Report transcribing hundreds of hours of right-wing podcasts; analysis of millions of released Jeffrey Epstein records; transcription of interviews; and his own past work at the Los Angeles Times, where a machine-learning system parsed a century of recipe archives more than ten years ago. The guild just published its own archive—1,300 PDFs dating to 1933—where document search could help.

At USA Today, the results are weaker. A tool called Espresso turns press releases into one-sided stories, and Streamer produces short videos with AI text and voiceover that journalists say are worse than a decade-old internal tool.

What happens next?

The guild won an arbitration against Politico after the company rolled out a report-builder tool without the 60 calendar days' contractual notice; the tool, asked whether abortion was legal in the U.S., answered yes, citing Roe v. Wade and missing the Supreme Court's overturning of it—broken by Politico's own journalists. Politico shut it down.

In New York, the FAIR News Act sits on Governor Kathy Hochul's desk. It would require labeling of wholly AI-generated news content; publishers call it a First Amendment violation. Polling shows 52% of Americans are more concerned about AI than excited by it, Schleuss noted, and no news company has yet agreed to compensate journalists for AI use of their work—even as The New York Times licenses content to Amazon and news firms, in his words, accept "peanuts" while "bargaining in the dark."

Without journalists, Schleuss said, we don't have democracies.