Creative staffers at The Onion, The A.V. Club and Deadspin are threatening a strike if no new contract deal is reached by their current pact’s expiration date on Jan. 31.

A strike pledge signed by 97 percent of unionized staffers at Onion Inc. was submitted to parent company G/O Media in a bargaining session Thursday. “I stand with my colleagues and I will vote yes in a strike vote, if my bargaining team calls for a strike. Our No-Strike clause in our contract expires on January 31, 2024 at midnight,” the statement read. “We are prepared to strike.” The union, which comprises 34 creative workers at The Onion, Onion Labs, The A.V. Club, Deadspin and The Takeout, is aligned with the Writers Guild of America East.

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G/O Media and the union have been negotiating a second labor contract since Nov. 20, 2023. Issues on the table this time around include wages and raises, benefits and regulation on the use of AI at the company, according to the union.

“This strike pledge reflects the mandate from our members to address several pressing workplace issues, especially the need for fair pay and AI protections,” The Takeout managing editor and union bargaining committee member Marnie Shure said in a statement. “Employees of G/O Media deserve salaries that keep pace with the rising cost of living, and we require assurance that AI-generated content will not jeopardize our employment now or in the future.”

Experiments with AI, in particular, have sparked a firestorm at G/O Media in the past few months. In June, then-G/O Media editorial director Merrill Brown announced that the company was beginning to work on “AI initiatives.” (Brown has since left the company.) That day, two WGA East-aligned unions at G/O Media — both the Onion, Inc. Union and GMG Union — said in a statement that they were “appalled” by the push. “Our newsrooms have spent decades building trust with audiences — introducing computer-generated garbage undermines our ability to do our jobs, erodes trust in us as journalists, damages our brands and threatens our jobs,” the unions continued. Not long after, G/O properties Gizmodo, The A.V. Club, Deadspin and The Takeout published AI-produced stories that upset staffers at those publications, according to reporting in The Washington Post.

Now, the Onion, Inc. union is posing a potential work stoppage as its staffers seek to enshrine AI protections in their latest contract. “The Guild will fight to ensure they get a fair contract that addresses existential issues around successorship and AI, the latter of which is critical given G/O Media has already moved forward with using AI to replace workers and posting factually inaccurate articles,” said WGA East’s vp online media, Sara David, in a statement.