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#union#unions#wikipedia#money#don#workers#wikimedia#wmf#company#more
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Discussion (219 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
The actual, public mission of Wikimedia Foundation:
> The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.
As such, WMF spends a lot money (combined) on a splatter of projects, like funding photographers to go to events like Fifa World Cup and Cannes, and take (CC or public domain) portraits for Wikimedia Commons (https://www.wikiportraits.org); etc.
Fwiw, unions often have support pages where you can donate or buy merch to support. One of my favorite tshirts advocates for a union that was trying to form at a huge retail chain (looking at you Starbucks Workers United). I did a quick search and this[0] appears to be them.
0. https://www.wikiworkersunited.org
No wonder they've upped the guilt tripping this year. Wikipedia has enough money right now to run Wikipedia forever but it keeps wasting it on useless stuff and feeling like it needs more. The WMF cannot fathom how to operate without continuous growing wastes of money, and without donations, Wikipedia would die within two years. We need to starve the beast so it learns to live frugally again.
Jimmy needs his third yacht, dangit!
(Jimmy Wales did cash in on his reputation with some ads for luxury watches and idk what else he does for $).
Salaries at the WMF have absolutely exploded, though they started out very low given the location and the talent base they were competing for. You probably want the WMF to be a somewhat competitive employer, and Silicon Valley salaries are also through the roof across the board. So those $400K executive salaries are (grating my teeth) vaguely justifiable.
A volunteer-run page summarizes salary progression in key roles (up to 2024)
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...
So you can be assured your money isn’t going to the executives’ bank accounts, not directly anyway. However, this is precisely why non-profit organizations tend to get bloated. The executives can’t get away with a million dollar salaries and not other goodies like stock grants. But you can justify staffing up, which benefits the careers of the executives.
Don’t be afraid of destroying things. Wikipedia isn’t unique or precious really. Some extended pressure would really rejuvenate the idea of such site in one way or another.
It is doubtful if anyone is in power to pressure them at this point though. Wmf grown like a tumour on the back of the site.
I've never worked in an industry where unionization was a thing, but my general understanding is that the unions are protectionist dreaming of things that were true before but not today, but they want to keep things as they were. Good luck.
I've benefited from Wikipedia, but I don't romanticize it. Either side of the table can't stop the AI onslaught, they are all out of jobs. Another Wikimedia will rise up from the ashes.
This mindset really baffles me, as a unionized guy with a white collar email job. Don't you, like, want things that your employer doesn't want to give you? Job protection? Better than CoL wage growth? Work from home? Internal job progression? Clear, understandable job factors agreed upon in advance?
The union negotiates for what its members want. There's nothing magical about unions that mean, like, a white collar union is going to be negotiating for all its members to get a new hard hat every year, just because that's what auto worker unions do.
This governance question doesn't go away if another Wikimedia rises from the ashes. You still will still need a board making decisions, and someone needs to pick the members of the board. Right now there are 8 seats selected by "the community," 7 seats selected by the board, and 1 seat selected by the founder.
Now the picture is getting more clear - denying a union is clearly big brother billionaire thinking, e. g. lowering cost while maximizing abuse of workers/employees.
Companies that respect their employees usually don't have to hire law firms to deny said employees from collective bargaining.
Silicon Valley: We're making the world a better place by making the most money no matter the consequences.
casting the first stone, i see
I guess except the game developers but the most realistic threat vector for them is the studio shutting down, so a union wouldn't really help.
You may unfortunately understand this soon, if the products of the tech industry do what they promise to do. But it will be too late.
Power has shifted dramatically in favour of the ownership class in the last couple of years. That's precisely what unions are meant to counterbalance.
If employers have the upper hand at the moment, the union contract will be more evenly distributed perhaps, but isn’t likely to be “better” overall.
That combines to have tech workers, who often have an exceptionalist view of themselves, to conclude that a union would cost them all the union overhead and prevent their exceptional talent from being properly rewarded.
Aside from general job protection stuff, the general answer would be that they can ensure that some of the productivity gains go to employees rather than employers. Let's say the company has been so much more efficient thanks to AI that they earn an extra 100 million in revenue with the same level of spending. So, the union goes into contract negotiations asking for a 50 million increase in salaries per annum, and employees get part of that windfall.
But rest assured that this isn't some new, unique moment in history. The exact same questions could have been raised during the introduction of automation in literally any industry throughout modern history. And yes, unions have, through that same period, acted as a critical bulwark in protecting worker rights.
Honestly, all pretty reasonable demands.
[1] https://wikiworkersunited.org/focus-areas/
Union recognition is then the company accepting that the union exists and then agreeing to meet and engage with it.
Not accepting it, is usually a crappy corporate move in an attempt to not have workers collaborating together.
Lots of research shows that generally places where unions exist have better work conditions and perform better over the long term.
The US has lower union involvement than in many countries.
Do you have any non-partisan sources for this? Genuinely curious. When you say perform better what do you mean specifically? And does better work conditions include better pay or just on-site conditions or something similar?
They earn more and are more productive. Here is one Canadian study but I’m sure you can find more if you’re interested.
I am not saying that you are doing this, but I tend to find that people who think we don't need unions anymore are engaging with the status quo in the same way as people who say we don't need vaccines anymore.
The thing to understand is that labor law in the US was created to "reduce labor strife." Unions existed before they were recognized as legal. What labor law tries to do is make an orderly process with the goal is no strikes and a mutually agreed-on contract.
The company recognizing the union is the first step towards a contract. Basically it's saying "I understand this organization represents these employees and I should negotiate with it."
You mean, like actors? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAG-AFTRA
Or teachers? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Education_Association
Or service employees? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Employees_Internationa...
https://www.propublicaguild.org/updates/propublica-guild-rat...
Sure, the arguably most successful union in the history of the US, the Screen Actors Guild, is only useful because it kept all of those actors from being worked to death, and it has nothing to do with all of the millions of dollars that its members make yearly.
It’s quite common that that also extends to negotiation on salary bands, and it’s also quite common the company then applies the same salary bands to non union employees also, rather than the norm in tech of individual negotiation. Many people think they’re in the group that is negotiating outlier salaries and would lose from this. However, many people with that viewpoint are also wrong about their position in the salary scale.
Sometimes this extends to promotion criteria and some unions push for tenure or seniority based promotions. This may or may not be better than your individual companies specific combination of merit, nepotism, the political clout of your managers and the business criticality of your department.
One thing that happens in the US that is illegal here is some companies agree to becoming a union shop and make joining the union compulsory.
By federal law, if a company has a union, the union must represent ALL non-management workers, even those who do not pay dues.
This is obviously fucked up. But this has been union law at the NLRB for a long time.
The fair response: a union should only legally be responsible for representing its members. But these sorts of terrible union laws are the consequence of attempting to destroy them since their creation.
And for those of you who think unions are terrible (capitalists and ilk), what we had before was 'firebomb the business or the bosses house', and basically waging war between capitalists and labor. Unions and legal representation WAS the compromise.
Labor history has always been a bloody and murderous affair. Go look up the history of the pinkertons.
This is not true. There can be non-union job classes even if the employer has some unionized employees. Even in different geographic areas you can have one location have class X union and another non-union (eg Starbucks).
What you cannot do, is have a unionized location with union Software Engineer I and non-union Software Engineer I. Sometimes employers try to skirt this and have non-union jobs that are too close to union jobs, and then it's lawsuit time.
> [W]e believe a secret-ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board is the appropriate path forward. This process protects individual choice and ensures that any outcome reflects the collective will of those eligible to participate.
> [Jimmy Wales:] One of the problems with the process so far is that it was not secret and we have heard from some staff members that they felt pressured because the organizers would know how they decided. That isn't a great process and it goes against our movement's values quite badly to have people in a situation where they are pressured into something one way or the other.
Counter-argument
> The community response to the WMF statement has mostly been one of dismay, with fears that the Foundation will use the time gap between now and the secret ballot to discourage employees from union involvement, using union busting methods as described humorously in an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
The episode is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk8dUXRpoy8, a transcript is at https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/tv-series/union-busting-last-w...
---
Honestly, I'm on Wikipedia's side: there should be a true secret ballot. It should be soon and I'd be fine seeing the union win. Sure Wikipedia can use threats and propaganda in the meantime (so can Wiki Workers United), but that is less coercive than a public ballot.
The secret balloting process is a second phase activated only if the company alleges that the cards were signed under duress. Wikipedia is saying they believe that people were coerced into signing these cards in order to activate the NLRB process. They have to say that the cards are improper or recognize the union.
Companies argued that some people could be coerced and so the NLRB created a "two step" process in case the company protests the creation of the union. Basically if the company says "we don't think these cards were signed under proper circumstances" the NLRB would come in and hold a secret ballot.
That is basically what's happening here, and "wikipedia's side" is actually them reading a statement written by their lawyers in order to activate the NLRB balloting process.
The real reason why the companies like to invoke the secret ballot process is it takes a long time, and this gives them a lot of time to fight the union, fire the organizers, and "convince" employees to withdraw their support.
Given that they know the company may invoke NLRB's process and require a second anonymous ballot anyway, can organizers not start with an anonymous one?
If the only reason WMF had to request a formal election was to allow secret ballot, they would not be hiring union busting law firms. The point of such firms is to legally and illegally discourage union membership - the penalties for doing so illegally are comically small.
Wow insightful.
The mere existence of The Mythical Man-Month or Peopleware does not prevent this behavior. Turns out it's actually super, super hard to avoid. It's pervasive enough to have several books written about it, and several more angry blogs written about specific companies' failure to achieve the allegedly "easy, obvious" thing that very, very few companies actually succeed at doing!
Makes me wonder if it's not so obvious or so easy... hmm... Nah, probably everyone else is malicious and/or stupid.
I worked in AML tech for a bank earlier in my career. I put up a fight against this misuse of terminology for a while, but eventually just gave up. Just embrace that everything is money laundering to many people and life is easier.
It reminds me of when health fads take off. Everyone "has OCD" or whatnot. I'd talk to people and they've given me a rundown of who they claim they were, but lol, they weren't that person.
Everyone can identify and use words however they want. Once it goes viral the meaning of the word changes. It's difficult to parse who people are nowadays cuz of it.
There's no sense fighting it. Someone will tell you you're wrong, you're out of touch, you just don't get it, or "your vibe isn't right".
Or worse, government giving favorable regulatory decisions to companies that donate to foundations that in turn lobby the government to do things that it has no public support to do?
These are all actual money laundering, and the salaries (and resumes) of the people who are involved reflect this. This is not "I don't like how they are spending money" or "they are incompetent." They're not hiring white shoe union busting law firms because they're dumb, petty, or short-sighted.
No it definitely has not
But I've met literally no one who thought "hmm... if there's this emergent phenomenon across virtually every single large-scale human endeavor... and that phenomenon seems to systematically produce undesirable outcomes... at the cost of billions of dollars or millions of lives... maybe I oughta inspect this phenomenon more closely!"
With “enshittification”, Doctorow meant something specific, where a platform rises to popularity by serving its users, then betrays those users to its business partners to make more money, then finally betrays even those business partners to keep most of the value for themselves.
Anyway I guess Doctorow brought this on himself by choosing a word that’s fun to say but isn’t clear about what it refers to.
But to play devils advocate, a lot of this depends on your views of what WMF should be. Some see WMF as "keep wikimedia sites up and healthy". But the foundation is much broader:
> The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.
As an example, one of the hundreds of projects that WMF funds is the WikiPortraits Photo Service (https://photos.wikiportraits.org). Take this with a huge grain of salt, but Sol found ~$500K of direct grants in the past 3yr; with 50k Creative Commons or public domain portraits taken as a result.
Some people might be shocked at this, and feel scammed that some of their donation to WMF is funding photographer's hotels/flights/compensation to Cannes, Fifa World Cup, etc; instead of servers or infra or 'KOTL employees'.
Others might think it's an incredibly great use of money; at just $10/photo; while contributing novel, high-quality, human-authored, freely licensed content to the world
No individuals should be donating to wikipedia, it is clear that any donation will be spent as rapidly and as wastefully as possible.
I don't know much about this situation, but I know it is possible for unions to basically be a group of drama-oriented bullies that pressure their coworkers to join. A secret ballot seems like the right way to ensure it actually reflects the will of the employee base.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_laundering
lololol
I’m always careful when I see a post about how bad and evil WF is. They come up quite frequently nowadays. WF have powerful enemies, because you can still read things like climate change is real and vaccines are good for you there.
I don’t think WF is perfect, and I do think their shortcomings should be publicly criticised and discussed. But overall, I still think they are an important force for good, and will continue my monthly donations to them.
in 2026? one would think wikipedia people pick up some self-help literature now and then and know how to fake a backbone until you grow one ...
( I have my own share of behaviors that I should have fixed when I was 11 so don't take this the wrong way )
What is this?
Hierarchical pressure? At freaking wikipedia? Fear of getting pressured into eventual compliance? At freaking wikipedia?
How the hell does a foundation select a board like that? And what are they gonna do? Send Napalm, Agent Orange, Sarin Gas?
There are union-busting law firms? What are they gonna do? Infiltrate your meetups?
I'm a bit baffled
This is a statement written by their lawyers to activate the NLRB secret balloting process.
The company is supposed to accept the union cards unless they have reason to believe that the cards were signed under duress (the popular image of "union thugs" with baseball bats intimidating people).
insert unions bad
argue
[1] https://wikiworkersunited.org/focus-areas/
This is just silly. Management are the most accountable people in any organization. This makes no sense.
What's wrong with outsourcing? That's what we do with all our bad ideas. Need to blow leaves from one side of the street to the other? Get a Mexican to do it. This frees up people to have better ideas, like well written articles that don't have a hundred irrelevant links littering the page.
OP is right. Union only makes sense for job that are inherently dangerous where union's primary job should be ensuring safety.
Then again we still don't have universal healthcare and now even more million have lost health insurance due to cost so I guess it's stupid all the way down
People just keep voting against themselves. might be billionaires someday so gotta protect dubious "rights" of the ultra-wealthy just in case
The entire conversation around unions in the USA is a cartoon, basically.
But if people don't know what rights they have lost, or are convinced by studies that talk mostly about growth or the freedom of capital rather than the rights of people, or accept the framing of things like crudely compare the GDP of the poorest US state with EU states or the UK and say, "look, they are worse off than us", they will never understand the basic, useful functions of ordinary, professionalised unions.
I am a freelancer so I don't have access to one, really, but the framing I like best about unions is: imagine what it would be like if the HR department was ever actually on your side. That is what a union can do.
Definition of oligarchy: like a dictatorship, but with more than one dictator.