Some people here think Wikimedia Foundation's mission is to keep Wikipedia up. That's a subset of their mission. I attribute nearly all of the blame to WMF, because their donation ads are quite deceptive.
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.
> WMF spends a lot money (combined) on a splatter of projects
According to [0], they intend to spend $18m on community projects total, out of their total $240m FY26-27 budget[1]. $330k of that go to the WikiPortraits project[2].
Almost half of their expenses still go into "keeping Wikipedia up" (+ it's companion projects). I would hardly call that deceptive.
> Almost half of their expenses still go into "keeping Wikipedia up" (+ it's companion projects)
That's a bit of a stretch. I couldn't find any up to date information, but for 2024-2025 WMF wrote:
"Across the Product & Tech department, we plan on allocating an estimated 50% of our resources to Wiki Experiences, 30% to Signals and Services, 5% to Future Audiences, and the remaining 15% to Product and Engineering Services."[0]
So "keeping Wikipedia up" is a very minor part (15%) of the "Investments in Technology" budget. It receives around 7% (15% of 48%) of the WMF total budget.
That not to say the rest of those "Investments in Technology" is useless. It's just that it's mostly about developing features, like updating the Wikipedia app, or creating functions and Wikipedia Abstract.
The point is when you go to Wikipedia and they are on a funding drive with their very prominent ads for donation requests, they dont mention any of this. They make it sound like wikipedia is very much at risk of dying due to lack of funds when in reality they are looking for more funding for programmes like this, which is where a lot of the mistrust and 'deceptive advertising' opinions come from.
They could, but if their donation ads said for example 'please help us to take more photos of live events' instead of 'we need your help to keep wikipedia alive' then they would not get half the donations they do currently, which is the point.
Honestly, I’ve never donated bc “keeping Wikipedia up” could be a solved problem by now. Not just cheaper processing and bandwidth costs, but p2p hosting, etc. Every time I see that ad, I say to myself “it should not be that expensive”.
Now, if they had said “We need 200k to send CC photographers to the Olympics”, count me in. That sounds bigger and way more interesting!
Genuinely curious - why is photographing FIFA World Cup important? It is a very wildly watched event, extremely popular. Literally every for-profit media is going to cover it.
Wouldn’t that money be spent on lesser known, lesser popular events? Or even projects like photographing the effects of climate change etc - the events that for-profit media is unlikely to cover?
I'm hardly a fan of the WMF, but the headline is clickbait. The WMF has used a law firm called Jones Day for brand and trademark management for over a decade. The firm is one of the largest legal firms in the US and it also does union busting, but a) the WMF does not appear to have engaged them for that, and b) the relationship long predates the current kerfuffle.
> However, it eventually transpired that the Foundation has chosen to be represented by the law firm Littler Mendelson, which has an equally strong reputation for union busting.
Yeah, Littler is one of THE union-busting, anti-worker law firms out there. Their website specifically notes that they specialize in labor law from only the side of representing management.
Not clickbait. You should read it before commenting.
The union busting firm is not Jones Day. It's Littler Mendelson. Which specializes in union busting. It seems clear that Wikimedia hired them for this.
TFA explicitly states they hired Littler Mendelson for the union and links several sources
I make a very small (relatively) salary as a self-employed IT consultant and support provider, but I still take ~$25 each month to split between the organizations and charities I find worthwhile. For a long time, that’s included a $3/mo recurring contribution to Wikipedia (or WMF, really). I have long believed Wikipedia to be a vital source of free information, and a surprisingly effective and enduring community that’s bent towards truth.
I still believe that. But I do not ever want to see my very limited charitable contributions be spent on anti-worker programs, so I’ll be ending my recurring subscription today, and for the moment I will simply add it to the the contributions I donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who voluntarily recognized their worker’s union, as WikiMedia Foundation should.
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.
I don’t know if you’re joking or not but of course Wales doesn’t profit directly from this. And, as a non-profit, compensation of executives is public knowledge. I believe Board members get zero compensation other than reimbursement for travel expenses.
(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)
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.
What would justify Silicon Valley salary for an organization that can be based anywhere in the world? They are not doing advanced R&D, or product dev that would justify big numbers or a very specific set of skills.
Look at their salaries. Most are earning significantly less than what they would have earned in the for-profit sector for the same role in a significantly more stressful job.
Compensation only started catching up in 2021-22 and even then is roughly comparable to what mid-career ICs now earn in the Bay, NYC, and Seattle.
You guys don’t get it apparently but once the thing became corrupted, got a whiff of power and money, there is no chance they are going to be persuaded into anything long term. They may appear to do so short term to appease but money corrupts permanently.
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.
Before LLMs, Wikipedia was the greatest source of misinformation in all of human history. It is at best good for satiating an idle curiosity with some plausible-sounding fun facts to amuse oneself with without care for whether they're really true or not, but so many people rely on it for so much more, and I have little doubt it causes more harm than good. Real encyclopedias with professional standards exist.
They have enough employees to need a union and a board? It's a CRUD PHP site that I could run from a VPS (joking ofc, but not that much off).
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.
>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.
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.
I don’t “understand it” because it’s an antagonist relationship, us vs them. How’s that solved anything ever without violence?
I don’t know what the solution is, we’ve tried a few. Perhaps there are none.
Do you want to keep trying for your union to earn their seat at the table each year proving their worth, or “else”?
There is going to be another meeting where the bosses from each side will sip martinis and introduce their spouses and then they depart the galla in long black limos. It’s been written.
P.S. Your employer, your chosen object of warship, your partner or children, owe you nothing. Gotta find a way to reconcile that.
Wikimedia requires a board. IMO that board should include at least one representative selected by the employees (i.e. a union rep.) It has one seat reserved for the founder.
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.
Yes, so? If you are here you could clone that thing in a weekend, no? You’d be the sole Chairman, CEO, and Supreme Leader for life. Wikipedia needs to be eminent domained, but we can’t agree on things while the US is headed by you know who.
Some years ago, I think a french contributor pointed that out, aka
asking why the wikimedia foundation wants so much money.
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.
I think all these silly little acronyms and abbreviations are the real cancer. I don’t why people feel the need to use it. Poor communication skills in my books.
At the conceptual level, unionising is simply a group of workers gathering into a group and saying we want to negotiate as a group. Usually this is done by workers to improve conditions and to have a better say when they’ve been being ignored or worse, poorly treated.
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.
> Lots of research shows that generally places where unions exist have better work conditions and perform better over the long term.
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?
The non partisan source is the history of the industrial revolution itself.
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.
I think working conditions have changed enough since then to make a request for non-biased studies a reasonable one.
Most debates about unions seem to boil down to “I just know” or anecdotes. I would expect unions to fund research to show that working conditions are better in union shops, but not include the fact that some unionized shops can’t compete in a market with non union shops and might go out of business. (But have great working conditions until the last day)
And vice-versa for pro industry research.
Unions are adversarial, and feel necessary to people that view employment or employers through that lens.
It’s possible that we can still credit unions with the status quo, but 1they have nowhere near the adoption of vaccines to make the analogy a good one.
I’d rather debate “which employers/industries” need unions than debate whether they are objectively good in all circumstances.
Note that government labor regulations are effectively just really one big union (called the government). Where would we be without them?
Smart unions are supposed to take business conditions into account. If the business is losing money, the union would recognize that and pull back a bit, because it needs to be a symbiotic relationship to last, not a parasitic one. However, businesses are rarely willing to share honest financial numbers with their unions.
> Note that government labor regulations are effectively just really one big union (called the government).
That’s not at all what a union is. Why else would federal workers need their own unions? The point of a union is collective bargaining power for labor. Federal workers have little to no bargaining power when budgets are set by Congress. Especially when they can’t strike.
But the government isn't very good at it. The government also represents the owners of the companies, and it did the bare minimum to stop the workers from literally murdering the owners and setting their houses on fire, which used to happen regularly before the government guaranteed minimum worker rights.
> The non partisan source is the history of the industrial revolution itself.
I think that’s less of a factor of unions existing themselves and more so the public realizing the need for stronger labor laws. Though certainly unions were advocating for stronger labor laws (as they should have been).
> 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.
I wouldn’t think that, because that doesn’t make sense. Vaccines are a clear public good. Unions can be but aren’t necessarily. Or should I bring up public unions like police unions?
I don’t have a strong position on unions. I don’t care too much one way or the other. Folks should be able to freely organize, business should be able to freely fire. But I think the OP’s claims need more substance. If you look at “performance” well none of the Mag 7 have unions, all have insanely high pay, and great benefits to boot. Would it be better under a union? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
I have additionally gone down a bit of a rabbit hole on this bit:
> the public realizing the need for stronger labor laws
To a meaningful extent, especially in 19th century Britain, the concept of the general public is the product of labour organisation, not the source of it.
It's a pretty new concept — the idea that the public have any single collective solidarity or consensus, can be consulted, have the ability to read newspapers etc.
A non-trivial part of that comes from the empowerment of labour, from the creation of commercial schools and universal education (which emerges from the social contract that grew as a result of organised labour interacting with the state etc.
Unions were powerful in the education of adults, they created unified leisure time, they furthered the idea of trade schools, they created a path to politics for the underclass, etc.; I don't think there would have been a general public without labour organisation. Just a rarified wealthy upper class.
Again, I am literally not saying that they are. I very clearly say that, in some significant measure, the former is the product of the latter. That is the word I used. Not "the same thing".
Don't do these silly bad faith, straw man characterisations.
Labor laws came about because before there were labor laws, the employees would form an angry mob to burn down the boss's house and shoot his cat, and the boss would flee before he was next.
This is the same reason the government protects unions.
> I think that’s less of a factor of unions existing themselves and more so the public realizing the need for stronger labor laws. Though certainly unions were advocating for stronger labor laws (as they should have been).
> […]
> I wouldn’t think that, because that doesn’t make sense.
I literally did not say that vaccine and vaccine adoption has anything to do with unions. Why would you ever think I did? It's an analogy.
(Though as it goes, I suspect vaccine rollout and universal healthcare does, in fact, owe some of its ability to function to the products of the organised labour movement; national, universal healthcare in the UK literally sprang from the first Labour government)
If you can't understand why I am comparing anti-union with anti-vax, then I think you don't really understand the point I am making about history, or about culture.
> I literally did not say that vaccine and vaccine adoption has anything to do with unions. Why would you ever think I did? It's an analogy.
???
> 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.
> If you can't understand why I am comparing anti-union with anti-vax, then I think you don't really understand the point I am making about history, or about culture.
If you want to remove vaccines and these analogies that's fine but you're clearly doing something you're claiming you are not.
The comparison is the unambiguous gains for society union labour organisation achieved through industrial history, which was a clear public good, and what is lost if there are no longer unions to defend those gains.
Stuff can go backwards and currently in the USA absolutely is going backwards, at a federal, state and commercial level. Unions, even in their flawed American form, are a force pushing back on that.
You still need them. In just the same way that you still need continued vaccination to protect the gains made by vaccination.
I am obviously not bothered if you reject my points; I am disappointed with the way you argue, though.
> The comparison is the unambiguous gains for society union labour organisation achieved through industrial history, which was a clear public good, and what is lost if there are no longer unions to defend those gains.
It's a loose comparison. I think vaccines are a much more clear public good.
> Stuff can go backwards and currently in the USA absolutely is going backwards, at a federal, state and commercial level. Unions, even in their flawed American form, are a force pushing back on that.
It's a logical mistake to think anyone cosies up to a politician because of what they have already done to benefit them. It's much more about what they could be persuaded to do or not do, or worse, might do if they don't reach out.
In short the picture there is not what you suggest. Unions have notable concerns about the current administration, and about trends in state governments which are going backwards.
Thank you. Almost all of the US discourse around unions seems to involve accepting the literally cartoonish framing that the US corporate right managed to force into popular culture.
The fact that union culture in the USA is broken is not a problem with the idea of unions. It's a problem with the USA.
Honestly it's hard to blame folks. The US (and Canada, where I'm from) has seen a 40+ year concerted effort to destroy unions and the propaganda runs deep. There's been a long-running cultural project to depict unions as purely lazy, corrupt, and self-dealing. That same project also involved demonizing social safety nets ("welfare queen") and public projects more broadly using the exact same rhetoric: some people might cheat so we must tear these systems down. It's a language that directs the anger of the aggrieved away from those in power toward those who are powerless, and for nearly a half a century it's been wildly successful.
The conceptual level breaks down in places where an open shop is illegal or disincentivized, which I suspect is the case in California where the Wikimedia Foundation is based. Europe usually has open shops, not closed shops, for example.
No, it doesn't. There is no such thing as an "open shop" in the US, even under right to freeload. Union membership is determined by job classification. If you are working in a unionized environment, and your job title is a union job title, you are in the union. You will be covered by the contract your union bargains with the employer. The only question, then, is whether you pay the dues to cover the costs of union membership. In a right to freeload state, you can choose not to pay the costs.
You both have it mostly backwards. The Taft-Hartley act
mostly bans closed shops and allows states to pass “right to work” laws making payment of any agency fees to unions optional.
In no state are any employees compelled to formally join a union. In an American-style “closed shops” in a non-right-to-work state, if you don’t join the union the bargaining agreement can charge nonmembers an agency fee representing most of the dues they would pay as members. Not to mention pressure tactics to join.
Also especially in the trades in major markets unions control apprenticeship programs and hiring halls and make it virtually impossible for nonmembers to get union work, as well as gatekeeping access to apprenticeship programs in the first place.
Right to freeload laws work as I describe. Although no employees are forced to "join a union" in the sense of signing a piece of paper joining the union, in all cases they are union employees in practice. That is, the union collectively bargains their working conditions, the union supports them via grievance if the employer doesn't follow the contract, and so on. The right to freeload allows for such a person to get by without paying dues - that is, the cost of providing these collective bargaining and legal representation services.
It just struck me how dystopian the phrase "right to work" is. Like, you have the right to go down the coal mine for 16 hours a day and get lung cancer! No right to get paid, though...
"For the conversion of his money into capital, therefore, the owner of money must meet in the market with the free labourer, free in the double sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale, is short of everything necessary for the realisation of his labour-power. "
“Right to work” is in the context of criminal wage theft laws, OSHA, EPA, Black Lung Benefits Act, Federal Employees Compensation Act, minimum wage (not that this affects mine workers), overtime, etc. Mine work in the USA is one of the most heavily regulated jobs there is and mine workers are very well paid. “No right to get paid” indeed. Mine workers don’t get paid when there is no mine work to do.
Is union recognition legally required to, say, organise a strike? Do workers who participate in a strike organised by a non-recognised union expose themselves to getting fired?
When strikes are legal is really complicated and depends on industry.
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."
This reminds me of the German approach to street marches. They are allowed, must be registered with the police, and the police will ensure there are several policemen around for each protestor just in case any of them "try anything". The police form a box around the protest, restricting it from going anywhere not approved and restricting people from seeing the signs; they also blare their sirens so that the chants can't be heard outside the box. The cost of all this is, of course, billed to the protest organiser.
So as you can see, they have incredible free speech! They allow just anyone to carry out a street march!
As someone living in Germany, what you're saying is not true. It is correct that protests have to be registered, that's the case for pretty much all developed countries. It is also correct that the organizers are responsible to cover costs. But the police doesn't restrict people from seeing signs, doesn't blare their sirens. They mostly stay on the side while handling the traffic, and intervene if the protest becomes chaotic. In the vast majority of protests they do literally nothing other than being present.
Compared to the US where multiple protesters have been killed on video by ICE this year Germany is a dream of free speech
There is no evidence of unions performing better for digital services at all. Unions do make sense when physical labor and danger is involved because the demands of leadership contradict realities of human physiology like getting tired, leading to injury or death.
> Unions do make sense when physical labor and danger is involved because the demands of leadership contradict realities of human physiology like getting tired, leading to injury or death.
> Unions do make sense when physical labor and danger is involved because the demands of leadership contradict realities of human physiology like getting tired, leading to injury or death.
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.
“No evidence” or “I haven’t looked for evidence”? Unions do more than just keeping people from dying in mining accidents — for example, I read this yesterday with what sure looks to be concrete benefits for the workers:
This isn’t impressive. 13% over 4 years? In any case this can’t be evaluated without knowing what was initially offered pre union and what they initially asked for.
Can you show the research you did before declaring there is no evidence of better performance? For example, how does the ProPublica contract compare to the industry trend?
Luckily, desk workers can never get tired or experience physical or psychological stress, or be subjected to unreasonable demands from leadership; these are just laws of nature.
At the very minimum, the company acknowledges the union and negotiates with the union for working conditions for union members.
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.
> At the very minimum, the company acknowledges the union and negotiates with the union for working conditions for union members.
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.
>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 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.
The problem there is that if it doesn't represent everyone, the company will simply give better conditions to nonmembers to pressure members to quit their membership. You do still have a way to change the union even if it's involuntarily representing you: just join it and then vote to disband it.
“Union recognition” means the employer acknowledges that the union is the bargaining representative for a subset of employees within the organization. This comes with additional legal duties on the part of the employer, such as exclusively bargaining with the union and not attempting to negotiate directly with individuals the union represents.
> [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
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.
Wikipedia has to say that people were being coerced to sign the cards in order to activate the NLRB secret balloting process. The "normal" thing (as expected by the law) is the company recognizes the union once there are enough cards signed.
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.
I read Jimmy's statement and it comes across as exactly the kind of leadership you would want in this situation, whether you are a pro-union employee or not. An employer has a legitimate interest in making sure their employees are not intimidated into some action they don't want to do. At the same time, he is willing to recognize and welcome the union if that's what the vote reflects.
Yeah for the counterargument like... if you were afraid of tipping your hand, maybe you should've done it the correct way (anonymously) the first time?
They are doing it the correct way. In order to get union recognition you need to get enough people in the company to sign union cards. This is the normal way to create a 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?
No. There's basically a chicken and egg problem. It is not illegal to discuss unions in the workplace or to pledge support for a union. But the "union" has no standing to do anything other than talk to people.
So to get a union you first need people to talk to their colleagues, and if the people they're talking to seem agreeable, get them to sign a card saying that they would like to be in a union. Once they have enough of these cards that have been signed by people who have spoken with union representatives and pledged their support for a union, they can go to the company and use the cards as proof that the union has broad support.
The idea that people are compelled to sign union cards is a bit of a fiction. Signing a union card is an act of bravery because it paints a target on your back especially if the union drive fails. It's documentary evidence that you're a troublemaker.
In fact, Wikimedia has already fired a team that had several members heading the unionization effort. [1]
This is classic union busting behavior. Of course they won't say the reason they let the team go was because of unionization efforts because that's illegal. But they certainly will point to vague reasons.
This sort of firing decision is also a key part of why the union started in the first place [2]. Apparently Wikimedia has a bad habit of just letting people go, playing favoritism, and breaking promises to employees.
I'm sure the company pressure is far, far more salient in 99.9% of cases than the unionization pressure, but I think for any collective agreement like this we oughta shoot to eliminate as many sources of coercion as possible. I can definitely imagine certain industries where it would definitely paint a target on your back to oppose unionization.
Seems like the solution is to just allow ad-hoc anonymous votes upfront?
Yes, but then the company complains that something it doesn't like is being organized in its property (the workplace) using its resources (employee time, space and electricity for the vote collection/tabulation etc). Plus the people trying to organize the secret ballot are easy to identify.
It's considered perfctly normal for owners of a company to delegate their power and responsibilities to managers, but whenever employees try to delegate things ao tunion 9/10 times the owners scream and cry and allege dark conspiracies.
We just went through institution of a union at my employer for one type of employee. The organizers did exactly this, and as an observer/affected party it was a little coercive. But you know it has to be, because people always prefer the status quo. It takes a lot of work to unionize and it ultimately never felt forced because we all wanted it. But man, the pressure to sign and put your name down was high, and BECAUSE there were no protections, definitely unnerving.
2) the company alleges that the cards were signed under duress and people didn't actually want to sign. This is a necessary step in order to invoke the NLRB process
3) this puts everything on hold for the months it typically takes for the NLRB to act, allowing the company time to engage in anti-union activities.
That's not how it works. You need the signed cards to hold an election. Employers can, seeing a large majority publically willing to sign the cards before they have any solid protections, choose to forgo the election on the basis that a majority of employees were willing to sign.
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.
It's not that the company can forgo the election. The company must allege that the cards are improper in order to activate the NLRB secret balloting process.
Some do, but if you hire a union busting law firm the first thing they have you do is read a statement alleging impropriety with the union cards, in order to initiate the NLRB process.
Companies aren't required to present any evidence other than "we have reason to believe" so it's pretty much a ritual at this point.
Yes, but it's uncommon enough that doing so is called "voluntary recognition" of the union, acknowledging that the expected process is to file the cards and then do the NLRB election.
As a strong supporter of unions, that's the end of my donations. I've probably donated fewer than a dozen times, but definitely more than five or six. I felt reasonably good about it and went on with my day, no hesitation about supporting them. That's done.
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.
It’s like saying ”I support worker’s rights.” There is in general a huge power imbalance between the employer and the employee, and a union does a bit to rectify that.
Yeah, if we had a country that was run by Unions, rather than Corporations so that abuses of power by those that ran the Unions was a big deal, I'd have a different opinion. But right now, I'm pretty happy to blindly back Unions, because they've been completely gutted.
I mean, I would say both, “I support governments,” and, “I support companies.” They are unique social institutions that provide value to their members. The former provides a monopoly on violence which (in my view) is superior to an anarchic world of all against all. And the latter are a legally sanctioned vehicle for accomplishing goals, particularly commercial objectives, that allows for business relations to continue after the death or exit of the founder. This allows for long term contracts and capital investments, whose benefits are pretty obvious.
There are certainly examples of both social structures being wielded to bad ends, but I don’t see anything unreasonable about supporting them in general. Same presumably would go for unions.
One can support both billionaires and unions. Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the USA while roughly 2/3rds of their workforce is unionized
I stopped supporting a long time ago when one the top contributors was removed because he had a tiff with a woman who was dating one of the executives. I don't remember the exact details. But that showed me what the organization really prioritized.
I do find it interesting how pretty much none of Wikipedia's organisational controversies and institutional deterioration (a lot of which have been going on for ~20 years) really made it out to the general public.
Tech worker here.. well, IT. One example from here (not in the US):
The union took care of getting travel hours compensated, and removing the non-paid forced weekend travels, and lots of other stuff which would be impossible for an individual to negotiate. That was a huge issue and took a long time. And lots of other things which individuals have no chance of doing.
What’s a union going to do if (doing a lot of work there) AI significantly reduces the demand for software engineers or tech workers generally?
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.
>What’s a union going to do if (doing a lot of work there) AI significantly reduces the demand for software engineers or tech workers generally?
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.
In a world where AI heavily disrupts software, a union striking over economics (to get an extra $50M paid out to union members every year) would immediately notice all the replacement tech workers (who were out of work due to AI disruption) streaming in to do the work.
It's really hard for me to imagine the conjunction of significant disruption from AI and effective union bargaining.
I said contract negotiations, you said strike. Even in this example, and there is an army of scabs outside the door, if a strike and its associated costs would cost the employer 75 million, it would be rational to give the union its 50.
Anyway, I agree with you that simultaneous productivity gains and deskilling as a result of AI efficiency, if it comes to pass, would work against labor power. The claim is that unions would hold no purpose under such an arrangement. I'd say if anything they'd be more important. The question is, would an employee rather have union protections if this comes to pass, or not?
Understanding the dynamics and likely limits of what those “union protections” would be critical to answering your last question.
Contract negotiations are back-stopped by strikes. If a union is asking for an extra $50M per year for their members, they’d better have a credible threat of a strike to back that.
I think most every employer would much rather fade a $75M strike expense than agree to the $50M every year expense. It breaks even in only 18 months on a cash basis, plus gives them additional union-undermining value in a very public display.
Isn't Wikimedia a non profit? Who exactly are the employers on the other side negotiating with the union here? They're higher on the hierarchical structure, but they're not actually stakeholders the same as there are in private for-profit companies.
Some of the largest unions in the world are for teachers, police, and government employees. I’m not sure why you would think a for-profit company is uniquely subject to its staff unionizing?
I have similar questions about public service unions as well. The reason why it makes sense to me for private for-profit companies is because stakeholders have a profit incentive to exploit workers. If non-profit tech workers are especially vulnerable to exploitation, then I guess it makes sense too, but I'm having trouble finding evidence for that.
If employers have the upper hand, you're fucked anyway. Hire 10% to keep the other 90% down. A union gets you solidarity so no one is having to weather the storm alone.
You need to think long and hard about the fact capital reflexively does everything possible to resist or bust unions when these are the same people trying to pound into you that you're supposed to give more for the bottom line, and raises can't do anything but keep up with inflation this year. If they go for the law firm, the money is absolutely there, they just don't want to spend it on you. Heaven forbid.
Look I'm not going to teach you about the entire history of labor relations and the role of unions.
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.
The Wikimedia board consists of 7 seat selected by the board, 8 seat from the broader wikimedia community, and 1 founder seat. As part of the broader wikimedia community I think there should be at least one board seat selected by the employees of Wikimedia. So never mind why the workers want a union, as someone who has donated money to Wikimedia, I want the nonprofit to have a workers' union as part of its governance structure (because Wikimedia is itself a union/collective/cooperative.)
I am normally the first to complain that people in hacker news are biased against WMF in a way that seems forced and weird (oh no ! they’re sponsoring some cool open culture stuff in addition to running the website ! they pay for more than literally just web server hosting !)
Sigh. For me Wikipedia is synonymous with petty bickering and fiefdoms and politics. Why I am not surprised by this? It's like student unions only worse
I have never understood why it's okay and not wildly illegal for anyone to interfere with unions at any level in the USA
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
> I have never understood why it's okay and not wildly illegal for anyone to interfere with unions at any level in the USA
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.
Good. Most tech unions are worthless and only accelerate outsourcing. Unions can be good though, like in construction where the work is inherently dangerous.
I have never worked a place where management was even remotely held accountable for their decisions, their corruption, their abuse of power or their fecklessness.
How are unions worthless? First they can prevent unsustainable growth. Wikipedia doesn't need to grow, second they prevent exploitation of the worker, why should some random person treat wikipedia as their personal lottery wikipedia wasn't a new, or good, or well executed idea. It's a basic service that helps collate information.
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.
This comment is pretty representative of why tech unions are worthless. Form a union to stop growth, and you pay your hard earned salary into such an organization with these goals?
Read WP:CANCER, there's a good argument. Wikipedia keeps spending its donations on useless stuff and therefore needs more and more donations each year. If it just stuck to running Wikipedia and a few side things, it would already be funded for 1000 years.
> we have heard from some staff members that they felt pressured because the organizers would know how they decided
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).
I hate unions. I hate lawyers. I hate any consolidation of power in general, so I hate all sides here. And I've never had the "I want a refund" feeling on donating to (what I thought was) a charity, that I now think deeply misrepresented itself when it asked for money.
My understanding from trying to read the post is that WF isn’t happy with the process because the vote isn’t closed. It doesn’t sound completely unreasonable to me. And then they are attacked because they are working with a law firm, since a decade or so, with things that has nothing to do with union recognition thing. Apparently that law firm is known as a ”union buster”, but there’s no evidence that the law firm has been involved in the negotiations around the union. To me the argument that WF is evil and hostile to unions is weak.
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.
The linked article doesn't even come close to suggesting money laundering. It really just argues that Wikimedia is similar to virtually every other successful organization on earth and that its bloat grows with its resources.
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.
Money laundering has become a default catch all term for "monetary misuse / suboptimal allocation". At least among the general public.
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.
Words in general don't really mean much anymore, online anyway.
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".
I gave up when they changed the definition of literally to mean both literally and not literally, resulting in the word having zero purpose at all anymore as it is impossible to know the intention of the person saying it.
What is government giving money to foundations that donate to other foundations that in turn lobby the government but money laundering?
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.
I don't think he thought that, he was probably expressing the view that he doesn't think the representative person's understanding of the term is the same as yours.
I have to confess, I've never heard anyone talk about money laundering in the way you suggest.
The root of this thread literally uses it in the way I observed. So...never? It's literally right there! I see similar uses everywhere (speaking specifically of the general public, not financial industry professionals), calling every misallocation, misspend, or even simple fraud money laundering. Reddit, HN, Facebook, LinkedIn...everything is money laundering.
Again, I'm kind of an expert in AML, so I probably pay attention to it way more than you do, and probably have a much better perspective on this. I constantly see people refer to almost all misuse or misallocation of funds as money laundering.
Maybe you just don't know what money laundering actually is? Because the vast majority of the public certainly doesn't.
It's very very common. Look at the social media comments on any video that relates to fraud, grift, scams, or even a poorly run business. People say any use of money they don't like is "money laundering".
I think this does extend to fraud, grift, scams, and other illegal behavior. I have never seen "money laundering" extended to just "being bad at business."
On posts about companies spending so much money on AI (datacenter buildouts, tokkenmaxxing, etc.) comments wonder why they are doing this and replies say "money laundering", "definitely money laundering", etc. I'll post an example if I come across another one.
You guys do realize that part of money laundering is making it look like you're just bad at business, yeah? "Oops we accidentally overpaid some incompetent guys for this data center" is a smokescreen for "I am taking your data center money and giving it to my cousin"
Are you accusing Wikipedia of actual money laundering?
If you are accusing them of being bad at business or bloat (which is all that's alleged in the article you linked to), then the answer is NO. So you should just say NO.
If you are accusing Wikipedia of actual money laundering, that is concealing the source of illegally gotten money, then the answer is YES.
Please reply YES or NO so we can have a single conversation about the claim being made.
From a strict "anti-money laundering" standpoint (how the bank thinks), money laundering is taking money that is suspected as being proceeds of criminal activity ("dirty" money) and making it indistinguishable from "clean" money. "Being bad at business" in a way that matches the definition of nepotism is not money laundering. There is a necessary component that the money is "dirty" and needs to be "cleaned", hence it is "laundered".
People are really not curious enough about bureaucracy. We complain literally our entire lives about "bureaucracy" and all the bad outcomes it produces.
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!"
People have been told for so long that private companies are more efficient than government that they have started to simply believe it, as if the problems of large scale organisation aren't universal.
Some cracks have emerged in that, at least in the UK. Trains, water companies, etc, all used as solid examples of private sector waste and extractiveness.
Most people attribute that entirely to greed or monopoly rather than to it being a result of scale.
IMO its all three.
More importantly politicians and the civil service still believe that the private sector is automatically efficient and that bigger is better. Not a UK only problem either.
"Bureaucracy" has been an entire field of study for more than a century at that point. But WMF is not bureaucracy any more than the FIFA is bureaucracy. It is curruption; That of the stated ideals of the origin: non profit, decentralisation and democracy.
Enshitification doesn’t just happen, it’s a choice to sacrifice quality and integrity for short term profit. There are plenty of large products and companies that haven’t gone this way.
Another word whose usefulness has been degraded to just mean “bad behavior by an organization”.
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.
Doctorow approved the generic use. He said he never meant for "enshittification" to only ever refer to the platform lock-in pattern. It refers to any way that things get worse on purpose.
Which as your article points out, is as easy to solve as reading The Mythical Man-Month. That's why it's an Iron Law. It's easy to remove!
Also, as you point out, it's actually the same as money laundering, which is an actual crime. So as it goes, every large organization is committing massive scale organized crime (to their own detriment, oddly enough), but they can stop doing so by just reading The Mythical Man-Month.
You started the thread accusing a non-profit of actual organized crime, and then linking to (someone else's?) words, implying they endorse your claim, when it doesn't.
Not a time to flex the guidelines amigo. Maybe a time to clarify what you meant when you accused a bunch of people of a crime?
I don't think of non profit bloat as enshittification. Enshittification is gradual reduction in quality of a user facing service over time that used to be trusted. Here it's just a matter of (arguably) inefficient spending as fundraising had increased but I don't think there's any rollback in services.
I could not find any indication that the purpose of this ever-increasing spending (while alarming) is money laundering in the essay you linked. Can you provide any other source to back up this claim? Money laundering is illegal, while spending money in of itself is definitely not.
I'm generally critical of WMF and think (1) they waste significant amount of resources on mis-managed projects, and (2) are not very honest or transparent in donation communications.
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
Yes, that is a good example. I used to be cynical about these uses of money until I met a 70-year-old volunteer who regularly attends international cycling championships to take pictures of the cyclists. She is totally devoted to documenting the sport and is not by any stretch of the imagination getting rich doing that or living in luxury. So I've changed my mind: her being able to do that is a good thing for her, for Wikipedia and for the sportspeople involved in these championships. YMMV.
That $500K over three years represents 0.08% of the foundation’s budget in that time period. The question is, what are they spending the other 99.92%? There is a significant small chunk spent on crucial infrastructure, but it’s mostly a slush fund for board pet projects.
Fair compensation is a legitimate reason for unions.
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.
Some people here think Wikimedia Foundation's mission is to keep Wikipedia up. That's a subset of their mission. I attribute nearly all of the blame to WMF, because their donation ads are quite deceptive.
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.
> WMF spends a lot money (combined) on a splatter of projects
According to [0], they intend to spend $18m on community projects total, out of their total $240m FY26-27 budget[1]. $330k of that go to the WikiPortraits project[2].
Almost half of their expenses still go into "keeping Wikipedia up" (+ it's companion projects). I would hardly call that deceptive.
[0]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Regions#Wikimedia_Com...
[1]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...
[2]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Co...
> Almost half of their expenses still go into "keeping Wikipedia up" (+ it's companion projects)
That's a bit of a stretch. I couldn't find any up to date information, but for 2024-2025 WMF wrote: "Across the Product & Tech department, we plan on allocating an estimated 50% of our resources to Wiki Experiences, 30% to Signals and Services, 5% to Future Audiences, and the remaining 15% to Product and Engineering Services."[0]
So "keeping Wikipedia up" is a very minor part (15%) of the "Investments in Technology" budget. It receives around 7% (15% of 48%) of the WMF total budget.
That not to say the rest of those "Investments in Technology" is useless. It's just that it's mostly about developing features, like updating the Wikipedia app, or creating functions and Wikipedia Abstract.
[0]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...
You can find the Wikimedia expenses breakdown from the 2024/2025 Auditors' Report here:
https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wiki...
That is why I always say: Don't donate to wikipedia, donate to archive.org
>That is why I always say: Don't donate to wikipedia, donate to archive.org
Just learned from a 2 sec llm query that archive.org archives Wikipedia, neat!
Wiki should still receive donations but archive should receive more as a valid backup mechanism (in case the prior goes dark for example).
That's pretty cool and worthy endeavor. Having public domain pictures of cultural events seems like a worthy cause IMO.
The point is when you go to Wikipedia and they are on a funding drive with their very prominent ads for donation requests, they dont mention any of this. They make it sound like wikipedia is very much at risk of dying due to lack of funds when in reality they are looking for more funding for programmes like this, which is where a lot of the mistrust and 'deceptive advertising' opinions come from.
They could tell us which programs.
They could, but if their donation ads said for example 'please help us to take more photos of live events' instead of 'we need your help to keep wikipedia alive' then they would not get half the donations they do currently, which is the point.
I agree, that you can lie to people to make more money. That's called fraud.
Honestly, I’ve never donated bc “keeping Wikipedia up” could be a solved problem by now. Not just cheaper processing and bandwidth costs, but p2p hosting, etc. Every time I see that ad, I say to myself “it should not be that expensive”.
Now, if they had said “We need 200k to send CC photographers to the Olympics”, count me in. That sounds bigger and way more interesting!
I don't even use Wikipedia anymore, I use the free online P2P encyclopedia. It's called
Genuinely curious - why is photographing FIFA World Cup important? It is a very wildly watched event, extremely popular. Literally every for-profit media is going to cover it.
Wouldn’t that money be spent on lesser known, lesser popular events? Or even projects like photographing the effects of climate change etc - the events that for-profit media is unlikely to cover?
I guess maybe the reasoning is that because it's a watched event it's useful to have libre/public domain photos of it?
So donating to Wikipedia actually funds commercial events? wtf.
Of all the controversial stuff that WMF does, "funding photographers to take royalty free photos for use on wikipedia" seems fairly low down the list.
What's at the top of the list?
Union busting as per TFA is a candidate for sure.
I'm hardly a fan of the WMF, but the headline is clickbait. The WMF has used a law firm called Jones Day for brand and trademark management for over a decade. The firm is one of the largest legal firms in the US and it also does union busting, but a) the WMF does not appear to have engaged them for that, and b) the relationship long predates the current kerfuffle.
> However, it eventually transpired that the Foundation has chosen to be represented by the law firm Littler Mendelson, which has an equally strong reputation for union busting.
Yeah, Littler is one of THE union-busting, anti-worker law firms out there. Their website specifically notes that they specialize in labor law from only the side of representing management.
I didn't expect it to be that prominent. First text on there says that they represent employers in big header letters.
Not clickbait. You should read it before commenting.
The union busting firm is not Jones Day. It's Littler Mendelson. Which specializes in union busting. It seems clear that Wikimedia hired them for this.
TFA explicitly states they hired Littler Mendelson for the union and links several sources
They actively campaigned and defended Trump in 2016 2020 AND 2024
Who you associate with is absolutely up for discussion. And the WMF is OK with hiring staunch Trump defenders.
I make a very small (relatively) salary as a self-employed IT consultant and support provider, but I still take ~$25 each month to split between the organizations and charities I find worthwhile. For a long time, that’s included a $3/mo recurring contribution to Wikipedia (or WMF, really). I have long believed Wikipedia to be a vital source of free information, and a surprisingly effective and enduring community that’s bent towards truth.
I still believe that. But I do not ever want to see my very limited charitable contributions be spent on anti-worker programs, so I’ll be ending my recurring subscription today, and for the moment I will simply add it to the the contributions I donate to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who voluntarily recognized their worker’s union, as WikiMedia Foundation should.
Remember that this is what your money funds when you donate to it...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
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!
Seems it'd be far more reasonable to direct the excess funds into an endowment of sorts instead of spending it on other areas.
If they did that they'd already have a big enough endowment to fund all of Wikimedia for life.
Well, Wikimedia does have an Endowment, currently valued at $169 million. See Form 990:
https://wikimediaendowment.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/20...
This is in addition to assets of around $300 million held by the Wikimedia Foundation. Form 990:
https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundat...
For expenses breakdown see the most recent audited accounts:
https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wiki...
I don’t know if you’re joking or not but of course Wales doesn’t profit directly from this. And, as a non-profit, compensation of executives is public knowledge. I believe Board members get zero compensation other than reimbursement for travel expenses.
(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.
What would justify Silicon Valley salary for an organization that can be based anywhere in the world? They are not doing advanced R&D, or product dev that would justify big numbers or a very specific set of skills.
The same as any other organization - they would not be able to attract or afford the right talent.
Also, these are not Silicon Valley numbers. Similar roles as those listed would pay 1.5-2x in the private sector here in the Bay.
Even Wikipedia Foundation's European salaries [0] are well above market rate in the geos listed (Italy, Germany) [1][2].
> They are not doing advanced R&D, or product dev that would justify big numbers or a very specific set of skills
Wikimedia's assets are some of the most heavily visited sites globally and are often a target for attacks (both nation state and independently led).
It takes a nontrivial amount of effort to maintain a platform like Wikimedia's.
[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/companies/wikimedia-foundation/salari...
[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/italy
[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/germany
What's up with the continually revolving CTO chair? (under Executive)
Look at their salaries. Most are earning significantly less than what they would have earned in the for-profit sector for the same role in a significantly more stressful job.
Compensation only started catching up in 2021-22 and even then is roughly comparable to what mid-career ICs now earn in the Bay, NYC, and Seattle.
Feels like where Mozilla went
Great analogy.
I have donated to them for many years and will stop now. I will not support any kind of union busting.
Be sure to tell them why you stopped. I’ll be doing the same. Hopefully this pressures them to give up on this
You guys don’t get it apparently but once the thing became corrupted, got a whiff of power and money, there is no chance they are going to be persuaded into anything long term. They may appear to do so short term to appease but money corrupts permanently.
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.
> Don’t be afraid of destroying things. Wikipedia isn’t unique or precious really.
Surely you’re joking?
I hope they mean the project is precious but the formal organisation that funds the project isn't. Like Firefox and Mozilla.
Before LLMs, Wikipedia was the greatest source of misinformation in all of human history. It is at best good for satiating an idle curiosity with some plausible-sounding fun facts to amuse oneself with without care for whether they're really true or not, but so many people rely on it for so much more, and I have little doubt it causes more harm than good. Real encyclopedias with professional standards exist.
That’s very correct. Wikipedia has been an unending source of failing exams among my students.
What do you teach?
Never too late to read WP:CANCER also.
They have enough employees to need a union and a board? It's a CRUD PHP site that I could run from a VPS (joking ofc, but not that much off).
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.
>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.
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.
I don’t “understand it” because it’s an antagonist relationship, us vs them. How’s that solved anything ever without violence?
I don’t know what the solution is, we’ve tried a few. Perhaps there are none.
Do you want to keep trying for your union to earn their seat at the table each year proving their worth, or “else”?
There is going to be another meeting where the bosses from each side will sip martinis and introduce their spouses and then they depart the galla in long black limos. It’s been written.
P.S. Your employer, your chosen object of warship, your partner or children, owe you nothing. Gotta find a way to reconcile that.
Wikimedia requires a board. IMO that board should include at least one representative selected by the employees (i.e. a union rep.) It has one seat reserved for the founder.
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.
Yes, so? If you are here you could clone that thing in a weekend, no? You’d be the sole Chairman, CEO, and Supreme Leader for life. Wikipedia needs to be eminent domained, but we can’t agree on things while the US is headed by you know who.
Some years ago, I think a french contributor pointed that out, aka asking why the wikimedia foundation wants so much money.
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.
I would be very surprised is WMF employee conditions would meet anyone’s definition of abuse. If anything, these sound like patronage jobs.
SV is a cancer. Even its charities are like this.
In contrast, proud of EFF voluntarily recognizing its union and agreeing to a good contract for workers: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-and-ifpte-local-20-at...
Wall Street: We're making the most money no matter the consequences.
Silicon Valley: We're making the world a better place by making the most money no matter the consequences.
Well yes, SV is abbreviation for sievert which measures health risk of radiation
That would be Sv, not SV.
“SV”?
I think all these silly little acronyms and abbreviations are the real cancer. I don’t why people feel the need to use it. Poor communication skills in my books.
SV is so SV-centric that people in SV can only call SV "SV" and assume everyone outside SV knows what they are talking about.
We're on the newsite of a Silicon Valley venture capital fund.
You're on HN, the SV site for SV brained SV people.
TMDA (too many damn acronyms)?
> I don’t why people
casting the first stone, i see
Silicon Valey
Selfish Vanity
Maybe silicon valley
Can someone explain what "union recognition" means, concretely?
At the conceptual level, unionising is simply a group of workers gathering into a group and saying we want to negotiate as a group. Usually this is done by workers to improve conditions and to have a better say when they’ve been being ignored or worse, poorly treated.
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.
> Lots of research shows that generally places where unions exist have better work conditions and perform better over the long term.
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?
https://www.nber.org/digest/202508/unpacking-union-wage-prem...
They earn more and are more productive. Here is one Canadian study but I’m sure you can find more if you’re interested.
Thanks for sharing. I’ll take a look!
The non partisan source is the history of the industrial revolution itself.
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.
I think working conditions have changed enough since then to make a request for non-biased studies a reasonable one. Most debates about unions seem to boil down to “I just know” or anecdotes. I would expect unions to fund research to show that working conditions are better in union shops, but not include the fact that some unionized shops can’t compete in a market with non union shops and might go out of business. (But have great working conditions until the last day) And vice-versa for pro industry research. Unions are adversarial, and feel necessary to people that view employment or employers through that lens. It’s possible that we can still credit unions with the status quo, but 1they have nowhere near the adoption of vaccines to make the analogy a good one. I’d rather debate “which employers/industries” need unions than debate whether they are objectively good in all circumstances.
Note that government labor regulations are effectively just really one big union (called the government). Where would we be without them?
Smart unions are supposed to take business conditions into account. If the business is losing money, the union would recognize that and pull back a bit, because it needs to be a symbiotic relationship to last, not a parasitic one. However, businesses are rarely willing to share honest financial numbers with their unions.
> Note that government labor regulations are effectively just really one big union (called the government).
That’s not at all what a union is. Why else would federal workers need their own unions? The point of a union is collective bargaining power for labor. Federal workers have little to no bargaining power when budgets are set by Congress. Especially when they can’t strike.
I can't parse this comment in relation to the context.
This is what I was arguing against:
> Note that government labor regulations are effectively just really one big union (called the government).
They’re pointing out that calling the federal government “a big union” is inaccurate, and reasons why.
It's accurate. The constitution of the United States explicitly describes it as a union in the preamble.
Don’t be dense, we’re discussing labor unions, not all possible interpretations of the word “union”
> The constitution of the United States explicitly describes it as a union in the preamble.
No, there's no relation.
> Note that government labor regulations are effectively just really one big union (called the government). Where would we be without them?
Playing devil's advocate:
- Having government functionally like one big union make individual union obsolete.
--
But the government isn't very good at it. The government also represents the owners of the companies, and it did the bare minimum to stop the workers from literally murdering the owners and setting their houses on fire, which used to happen regularly before the government guaranteed minimum worker rights.
> Where would we be without them?
Where will you be without them, you mean. The current trajectory of the US government is the opposite of strengthening the rights of labour.
> The non partisan source is the history of the industrial revolution itself.
I think that’s less of a factor of unions existing themselves and more so the public realizing the need for stronger labor laws. Though certainly unions were advocating for stronger labor laws (as they should have been).
> 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.
I wouldn’t think that, because that doesn’t make sense. Vaccines are a clear public good. Unions can be but aren’t necessarily. Or should I bring up public unions like police unions?
I don’t have a strong position on unions. I don’t care too much one way or the other. Folks should be able to freely organize, business should be able to freely fire. But I think the OP’s claims need more substance. If you look at “performance” well none of the Mag 7 have unions, all have insanely high pay, and great benefits to boot. Would it be better under a union? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
I have additionally gone down a bit of a rabbit hole on this bit:
> the public realizing the need for stronger labor laws
To a meaningful extent, especially in 19th century Britain, the concept of the general public is the product of labour organisation, not the source of it.
It's a pretty new concept — the idea that the public have any single collective solidarity or consensus, can be consulted, have the ability to read newspapers etc.
A non-trivial part of that comes from the empowerment of labour, from the creation of commercial schools and universal education (which emerges from the social contract that grew as a result of organised labour interacting with the state etc.
Unions were powerful in the education of adults, they created unified leisure time, they furthered the idea of trade schools, they created a path to politics for the underclass, etc.; I don't think there would have been a general public without labour organisation. Just a rarified wealthy upper class.
I reject the notion that the public is the same thing as a union in the manner you are describing.
Again, I am literally not saying that they are. I very clearly say that, in some significant measure, the former is the product of the latter. That is the word I used. Not "the same thing".
Don't do these silly bad faith, straw man characterisations.
> Don't do these silly bad faith, straw man characterisations.
I reject the association literally or otherwise.
none of the Mag 7 have unions
They all recognise unions and have unionised employees in countries where unions are the default, with the exception of Tesla.
Not really. At least not in the way that matters.
Labor laws came about because before there were labor laws, the employees would form an angry mob to burn down the boss's house and shoot his cat, and the boss would flee before he was next.
This is the same reason the government protects unions.
> I think that’s less of a factor of unions existing themselves and more so the public realizing the need for stronger labor laws. Though certainly unions were advocating for stronger labor laws (as they should have been).
> […]
> I wouldn’t think that, because that doesn’t make sense.
Then you don't really know history.
I know history better than you do, generally speaking.
You cherry-picked the wrong comment. Vaccines and vaccine adoption has nothing to do with unions nor are they even remotely comparable.
I literally did not say that vaccine and vaccine adoption has anything to do with unions. Why would you ever think I did? It's an analogy.
(Though as it goes, I suspect vaccine rollout and universal healthcare does, in fact, owe some of its ability to function to the products of the organised labour movement; national, universal healthcare in the UK literally sprang from the first Labour government)
If you can't understand why I am comparing anti-union with anti-vax, then I think you don't really understand the point I am making about history, or about culture.
> I literally did not say that vaccine and vaccine adoption has anything to do with unions. Why would you ever think I did? It's an analogy.
???
> 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.
> If you can't understand why I am comparing anti-union with anti-vax, then I think you don't really understand the point I am making about history, or about culture.
If you want to remove vaccines and these analogies that's fine but you're clearly doing something you're claiming you are not.
It's an analogy. In that sentence I'm not saying that one has to do with the other.
I am talking there about the relationship of people arguing against a concept with the status quo for that respective concept.
The way those arguments are made is similarly ignorant of history, is the simple point.
It's not that difficult. Really. Other people grasped it.
It's not a good analogy though. Unions aren't a clear public good.
> The way those arguments are made is similarly ignorant of history, is the simple point.
Yes and that point is rejected by me.
The comparison is the unambiguous gains for society union labour organisation achieved through industrial history, which was a clear public good, and what is lost if there are no longer unions to defend those gains.
Stuff can go backwards and currently in the USA absolutely is going backwards, at a federal, state and commercial level. Unions, even in their flawed American form, are a force pushing back on that.
You still need them. In just the same way that you still need continued vaccination to protect the gains made by vaccination.
I am obviously not bothered if you reject my points; I am disappointed with the way you argue, though.
> The comparison is the unambiguous gains for society union labour organisation achieved through industrial history, which was a clear public good, and what is lost if there are no longer unions to defend those gains.
It's a loose comparison. I think vaccines are a much more clear public good.
> Stuff can go backwards and currently in the USA absolutely is going backwards, at a federal, state and commercial level. Unions, even in their flawed American form, are a force pushing back on that.
Ok... https://apnews.com/article/trump-chavezderemer-labor-secreta...
> You still need them. In just the same way that you still need continued vaccination to protect the gains made by vaccination.
I'm not sure we need them. I don't need one. But I do need vaccines and society at large to be vaccinated.
It's a logical mistake to think anyone cosies up to a politician because of what they have already done to benefit them. It's much more about what they could be persuaded to do or not do, or worse, might do if they don't reach out.
In short the picture there is not what you suggest. Unions have notable concerns about the current administration, and about trends in state governments which are going backwards.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/may/01/us-surge-efforts...
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-workers-rights-wa...
https://cwa-union.org/trumps-anti-worker-record
https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2025/12/twists-and-turns-t...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/19/how-unions-p...
https://betterinaunion.org/project-2025
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/excl...
We have gone a long way since industrial revolution.
e.g.
Child labor now outlawed.
There is a minimum wage. (You can argue it is still way to low, but going from zero to some is a huge change)
Some OSHA rules mandate employer provide safety equipment.
> Child labor now outlawed.
For now. Many US states are currently trying to roll back these laws though, aren't they?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/22/child-labor-...
https://www.justiceatwork.com/how-are-child-labor-laws-chang...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/why-several-states-are-pus...
Literally demonstrating the point in dofm's second paragraph right here...
Thank you. Almost all of the US discourse around unions seems to involve accepting the literally cartoonish framing that the US corporate right managed to force into popular culture.
The fact that union culture in the USA is broken is not a problem with the idea of unions. It's a problem with the USA.
Honestly it's hard to blame folks. The US (and Canada, where I'm from) has seen a 40+ year concerted effort to destroy unions and the propaganda runs deep. There's been a long-running cultural project to depict unions as purely lazy, corrupt, and self-dealing. That same project also involved demonizing social safety nets ("welfare queen") and public projects more broadly using the exact same rhetoric: some people might cheat so we must tear these systems down. It's a language that directs the anger of the aggrieved away from those in power toward those who are powerless, and for nearly a half a century it's been wildly successful.
What you described is the result of the government acting as one big, but very conservative, union.
The conceptual level breaks down in places where an open shop is illegal or disincentivized, which I suspect is the case in California where the Wikimedia Foundation is based. Europe usually has open shops, not closed shops, for example.
No, it doesn't. There is no such thing as an "open shop" in the US, even under right to freeload. Union membership is determined by job classification. If you are working in a unionized environment, and your job title is a union job title, you are in the union. You will be covered by the contract your union bargains with the employer. The only question, then, is whether you pay the dues to cover the costs of union membership. In a right to freeload state, you can choose not to pay the costs.
You both have it mostly backwards. The Taft-Hartley act mostly bans closed shops and allows states to pass “right to work” laws making payment of any agency fees to unions optional.
In no state are any employees compelled to formally join a union. In an American-style “closed shops” in a non-right-to-work state, if you don’t join the union the bargaining agreement can charge nonmembers an agency fee representing most of the dues they would pay as members. Not to mention pressure tactics to join.
Also especially in the trades in major markets unions control apprenticeship programs and hiring halls and make it virtually impossible for nonmembers to get union work, as well as gatekeeping access to apprenticeship programs in the first place.
Right to freeload laws work as I describe. Although no employees are forced to "join a union" in the sense of signing a piece of paper joining the union, in all cases they are union employees in practice. That is, the union collectively bargains their working conditions, the union supports them via grievance if the employer doesn't follow the contract, and so on. The right to freeload allows for such a person to get by without paying dues - that is, the cost of providing these collective bargaining and legal representation services.
It just struck me how dystopian the phrase "right to work" is. Like, you have the right to go down the coal mine for 16 hours a day and get lung cancer! No right to get paid, though...
Workers must be doubly free.
"For the conversion of his money into capital, therefore, the owner of money must meet in the market with the free labourer, free in the double sense, that as a free man he can dispose of his labour-power as his own commodity, and that on the other hand he has no other commodity for sale, is short of everything necessary for the realisation of his labour-power. "
“Right to work” is in the context of criminal wage theft laws, OSHA, EPA, Black Lung Benefits Act, Federal Employees Compensation Act, minimum wage (not that this affects mine workers), overtime, etc. Mine work in the USA is one of the most heavily regulated jobs there is and mine workers are very well paid. “No right to get paid” indeed. Mine workers don’t get paid when there is no mine work to do.
Is union recognition legally required to, say, organise a strike? Do workers who participate in a strike organised by a non-recognised union expose themselves to getting fired?
When strikes are legal is really complicated and depends on industry.
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."
This reminds me of the German approach to street marches. They are allowed, must be registered with the police, and the police will ensure there are several policemen around for each protestor just in case any of them "try anything". The police form a box around the protest, restricting it from going anywhere not approved and restricting people from seeing the signs; they also blare their sirens so that the chants can't be heard outside the box. The cost of all this is, of course, billed to the protest organiser.
So as you can see, they have incredible free speech! They allow just anyone to carry out a street march!
As someone living in Germany, what you're saying is not true. It is correct that protests have to be registered, that's the case for pretty much all developed countries. It is also correct that the organizers are responsible to cover costs. But the police doesn't restrict people from seeing signs, doesn't blare their sirens. They mostly stay on the side while handling the traffic, and intervene if the protest becomes chaotic. In the vast majority of protests they do literally nothing other than being present.
Compared to the US where multiple protesters have been killed on video by ICE this year Germany is a dream of free speech
That doesn't match what I saw.
There is no evidence of unions performing better for digital services at all. Unions do make sense when physical labor and danger is involved because the demands of leadership contradict realities of human physiology like getting tired, leading to injury or death.
> Unions do make sense when physical labor and danger is involved because the demands of leadership contradict realities of human physiology like getting tired, leading to injury or death.
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...
> Unions do make sense when physical labor and danger is involved because the demands of leadership contradict realities of human physiology like getting tired, leading to injury or death.
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.
“No evidence” or “I haven’t looked for evidence”? Unions do more than just keeping people from dying in mining accidents — for example, I read this yesterday with what sure looks to be concrete benefits for the workers:
https://www.propublicaguild.org/updates/propublica-guild-rat...
This isn’t impressive. 13% over 4 years? In any case this can’t be evaluated without knowing what was initially offered pre union and what they initially asked for.
Can you show the research you did before declaring there is no evidence of better performance? For example, how does the ProPublica contract compare to the industry trend?
Luckily, desk workers can never get tired or experience physical or psychological stress, or be subjected to unreasonable demands from leadership; these are just laws of nature.
At the very minimum, the company acknowledges the union and negotiates with the union for working conditions for union members.
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.
> At the very minimum, the company acknowledges the union and negotiates with the union for working conditions for union members.
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.
>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 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.
The problem there is that if it doesn't represent everyone, the company will simply give better conditions to nonmembers to pressure members to quit their membership. You do still have a way to change the union even if it's involuntarily representing you: just join it and then vote to disband it.
“Union recognition” means the employer acknowledges that the union is the bargaining representative for a subset of employees within the organization. This comes with additional legal duties on the part of the employer, such as exclusively bargaining with the union and not attempting to negotiate directly with individuals the union represents.
Wikipedia's side
> [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.
Wikipedia has to say that people were being coerced to sign the cards in order to activate the NLRB secret balloting process. The "normal" thing (as expected by the law) is the company recognizes the union once there are enough cards signed.
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.
Has any company ever not alleged duress?
I read Jimmy's statement and it comes across as exactly the kind of leadership you would want in this situation, whether you are a pro-union employee or not. An employer has a legitimate interest in making sure their employees are not intimidated into some action they don't want to do. At the same time, he is willing to recognize and welcome the union if that's what the vote reflects.
Yeah for the counterargument like... if you were afraid of tipping your hand, maybe you should've done it the correct way (anonymously) the first time?
They are doing it the correct way. In order to get union recognition you need to get enough people in the company to sign union cards. This is the normal way to create a 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.
Interesting! Wasn't aware of this.
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?
No. There's basically a chicken and egg problem. It is not illegal to discuss unions in the workplace or to pledge support for a union. But the "union" has no standing to do anything other than talk to people.
So to get a union you first need people to talk to their colleagues, and if the people they're talking to seem agreeable, get them to sign a card saying that they would like to be in a union. Once they have enough of these cards that have been signed by people who have spoken with union representatives and pledged their support for a union, they can go to the company and use the cards as proof that the union has broad support.
The idea that people are compelled to sign union cards is a bit of a fiction. Signing a union card is an act of bravery because it paints a target on your back especially if the union drive fails. It's documentary evidence that you're a troublemaker.
In fact, Wikimedia has already fired a team that had several members heading the unionization effort. [1]
This is classic union busting behavior. Of course they won't say the reason they let the team go was because of unionization efforts because that's illegal. But they certainly will point to vague reasons.
This sort of firing decision is also a key part of why the union started in the first place [2]. Apparently Wikimedia has a bad habit of just letting people go, playing favoritism, and breaking promises to employees.
[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Unionization-at-Wikimedia-Commu...
[2] https://wikiworkersunited.org/focus-areas/
I'm sure the company pressure is far, far more salient in 99.9% of cases than the unionization pressure, but I think for any collective agreement like this we oughta shoot to eliminate as many sources of coercion as possible. I can definitely imagine certain industries where it would definitely paint a target on your back to oppose unionization.
Seems like the solution is to just allow ad-hoc anonymous votes upfront?
I appreciate you walking me through this though!
Yes, but then the company complains that something it doesn't like is being organized in its property (the workplace) using its resources (employee time, space and electricity for the vote collection/tabulation etc). Plus the people trying to organize the secret ballot are easy to identify.
It's considered perfctly normal for owners of a company to delegate their power and responsibilities to managers, but whenever employees try to delegate things ao tunion 9/10 times the owners scream and cry and allege dark conspiracies.
We just went through institution of a union at my employer for one type of employee. The organizers did exactly this, and as an observer/affected party it was a little coercive. But you know it has to be, because people always prefer the status quo. It takes a lot of work to unionize and it ultimately never felt forced because we all wanted it. But man, the pressure to sign and put your name down was high, and BECAUSE there were no protections, definitely unnerving.
No, you need the signed cards to take to the NLRB and get an anonymous election.
The process actually ends up working like this:
1) you sign the cards
2) the company alleges that the cards were signed under duress and people didn't actually want to sign. This is a necessary step in order to invoke the NLRB process
3) this puts everything on hold for the months it typically takes for the NLRB to act, allowing the company time to engage in anti-union activities.
That's not how it works. You need the signed cards to hold an election. Employers can, seeing a large majority publically willing to sign the cards before they have any solid protections, choose to forgo the election on the basis that a majority of employees were willing to sign.
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.
It's not that the company can forgo the election. The company must allege that the cards are improper in order to activate the NLRB secret balloting process.
Has any company ever not alleged it?
Some do, but if you hire a union busting law firm the first thing they have you do is read a statement alleging impropriety with the union cards, in order to initiate the NLRB process.
Companies aren't required to present any evidence other than "we have reason to believe" so it's pretty much a ritual at this point.
Yes, but it's uncommon enough that doing so is called "voluntary recognition" of the union, acknowledging that the expected process is to file the cards and then do the NLRB election.
As a strong supporter of unions, that's the end of my donations. I've probably donated fewer than a dozen times, but definitely more than five or six. I felt reasonably good about it and went on with my day, no hesitation about supporting them. That's done.
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
Curious why you support unions in general? It’s kind of like saying “I support governments” or “I support companies”.
It’s like saying ”I support worker’s rights.” There is in general a huge power imbalance between the employer and the employee, and a union does a bit to rectify that.
Yeah, if we had a country that was run by Unions, rather than Corporations so that abuses of power by those that ran the Unions was a big deal, I'd have a different opinion. But right now, I'm pretty happy to blindly back Unions, because they've been completely gutted.
If the the government was spending a ton of effort to suppress business and trade, I would also be glad to say "I support companies."
I mean, I would say both, “I support governments,” and, “I support companies.” They are unique social institutions that provide value to their members. The former provides a monopoly on violence which (in my view) is superior to an anarchic world of all against all. And the latter are a legally sanctioned vehicle for accomplishing goals, particularly commercial objectives, that allows for business relations to continue after the death or exit of the founder. This allows for long term contracts and capital investments, whose benefits are pretty obvious.
There are certainly examples of both social structures being wielded to bad ends, but I don’t see anything unreasonable about supporting them in general. Same presumably would go for unions.
It's a bit like saying "I support billionaires" but the opposite.
One can support both billionaires and unions. Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the USA while roughly 2/3rds of their workforce is unionized
Not to mention the heaps of economic research showing that there are quite a lot of benefits to the existence of billionaires.
Then quadrillionaires must be even better, right? Why don't we print ten quadrillion dollars and distribute them to ten people?
What research? Sounds like a bunch of hot air to me.
I stopped supporting a long time ago when one the top contributors was removed because he had a tiff with a woman who was dating one of the executives. I don't remember the exact details. But that showed me what the organization really prioritized.
I do find it interesting how pretty much none of Wikipedia's organisational controversies and institutional deterioration (a lot of which have been going on for ~20 years) really made it out to the general public.
I understand why factory workers or store clerks might want a union but I'd never understand why tech workers should.
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.
Tech worker here.. well, IT. One example from here (not in the US): The union took care of getting travel hours compensated, and removing the non-paid forced weekend travels, and lots of other stuff which would be impossible for an individual to negotiate. That was a huge issue and took a long time. And lots of other things which individuals have no chance of doing.
> I'd never understand why tech workers should.
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.
I can only assume you aren't paying attention to, and aren't personally experiencing, the impact of AI on the industry.
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.
What’s a union going to do if (doing a lot of work there) AI significantly reduces the demand for software engineers or tech workers generally?
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.
>What’s a union going to do if (doing a lot of work there) AI significantly reduces the demand for software engineers or tech workers generally?
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.
In a world where AI heavily disrupts software, a union striking over economics (to get an extra $50M paid out to union members every year) would immediately notice all the replacement tech workers (who were out of work due to AI disruption) streaming in to do the work.
It's really hard for me to imagine the conjunction of significant disruption from AI and effective union bargaining.
I said contract negotiations, you said strike. Even in this example, and there is an army of scabs outside the door, if a strike and its associated costs would cost the employer 75 million, it would be rational to give the union its 50.
Anyway, I agree with you that simultaneous productivity gains and deskilling as a result of AI efficiency, if it comes to pass, would work against labor power. The claim is that unions would hold no purpose under such an arrangement. I'd say if anything they'd be more important. The question is, would an employee rather have union protections if this comes to pass, or not?
Understanding the dynamics and likely limits of what those “union protections” would be critical to answering your last question.
Contract negotiations are back-stopped by strikes. If a union is asking for an extra $50M per year for their members, they’d better have a credible threat of a strike to back that.
I think most every employer would much rather fade a $75M strike expense than agree to the $50M every year expense. It breaks even in only 18 months on a cash basis, plus gives them additional union-undermining value in a very public display.
That same problem exists for factory workers, plumbers, machinists, etc and yet unions and strikes still work.
Isn't Wikimedia a non profit? Who exactly are the employers on the other side negotiating with the union here? They're higher on the hierarchical structure, but they're not actually stakeholders the same as there are in private for-profit companies.
Some of the largest unions in the world are for teachers, police, and government employees. I’m not sure why you would think a for-profit company is uniquely subject to its staff unionizing?
I have similar questions about public service unions as well. The reason why it makes sense to me for private for-profit companies is because stakeholders have a profit incentive to exploit workers. If non-profit tech workers are especially vulnerable to exploitation, then I guess it makes sense too, but I'm having trouble finding evidence for that.
The union is negotiating with management, i.e. those with hiring and firing authority who direct the work of others. Same as a for profit.
Uh, non-profits absolutely may have unionized employees:
https://npeu.org/
I... wonder if you don't know what a non-profit corporation is or how they work?
longshoremens' unions made sure that the dock workers didnt lose jobs through the change over to containers.
handling a reduction in work is one of the things a union is for
If employers have the upper hand, you're fucked anyway. Hire 10% to keep the other 90% down. A union gets you solidarity so no one is having to weather the storm alone.
You need to think long and hard about the fact capital reflexively does everything possible to resist or bust unions when these are the same people trying to pound into you that you're supposed to give more for the bottom line, and raises can't do anything but keep up with inflation this year. If they go for the law firm, the money is absolutely there, they just don't want to spend it on you. Heaven forbid.
Look I'm not going to teach you about the entire history of labor relations and the role of unions.
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.
For exactly the same reason as factory workers or store clerks: to even out the power imbalance against the owners.
You can read the reasons here. [1]
Honestly, all pretty reasonable demands.
[1] https://wikiworkersunited.org/focus-areas/
The Wikimedia board consists of 7 seat selected by the board, 8 seat from the broader wikimedia community, and 1 founder seat. As part of the broader wikimedia community I think there should be at least one board seat selected by the employees of Wikimedia. So never mind why the workers want a union, as someone who has donated money to Wikimedia, I want the nonprofit to have a workers' union as part of its governance structure (because Wikimedia is itself a union/collective/cooperative.)
To stop uncompensated overtime and on-call? I’d like that very much.
That's the last donation I give them.
I am normally the first to complain that people in hacker news are biased against WMF in a way that seems forced and weird (oh no ! they’re sponsoring some cool open culture stuff in addition to running the website ! they pay for more than literally just web server hosting !)
But this is obscene. I’ve cancelled my donation.
Sigh. For me Wikipedia is synonymous with petty bickering and fiefdoms and politics. Why I am not surprised by this? It's like student unions only worse
Which Side Are You On?
It may be due time to disentangle the Wikimedia Foundation from Wikipedia.
I have never understood why it's okay and not wildly illegal for anyone to interfere with unions at any level in the USA
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
> I have never understood why it's okay and not wildly illegal for anyone to interfere with unions at any level in the USA
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.
Because the USA is an oligarchy of the ultra-wealthy. Next question?
Definition of oligarchy: like a dictatorship, but with more than one dictator.
Good. Most tech unions are worthless and only accelerate outsourcing. Unions can be good though, like in construction where the work is inherently dangerous.
Here's the union's demands. [1] Which of them do you find particularly unreasonable?
[1] https://wikiworkersunited.org/focus-areas/
> Hold management accountable to promises made to staff
This is just silly. Management are the most accountable people in any organization. This makes no sense.
They are held accountable, but are they held accountable to the staff? If so, how-so?
In my experience, management rarely has any sort of reverse checks in place. The closest is employee manager feedback. Which this demand
> Guarantee ability to safely express dissent
Makes me think that staff has been trained not to share true feelings on such feedback.
Only to the board of directors.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahha. Tell another joke
I have never worked a place where management was even remotely held accountable for their decisions, their corruption, their abuse of power or their fecklessness.
Unions now; unions tomorrow; unions forever.
LMAO. Management? Accountable? Golden parachutes say hi
How are unions worthless? First they can prevent unsustainable growth. Wikipedia doesn't need to grow, second they prevent exploitation of the worker, why should some random person treat wikipedia as their personal lottery wikipedia wasn't a new, or good, or well executed idea. It's a basic service that helps collate information.
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.
This comment is pretty representative of why tech unions are worthless. Form a union to stop growth, and you pay your hard earned salary into such an organization with these goals?
Read WP:CANCER, there's a good argument. Wikipedia keeps spending its donations on useless stuff and therefore needs more and more donations each year. If it just stuck to running Wikipedia and a few side things, it would already be funded for 1000 years.
yes, yes, blame the victims. It's always the fault of the pedestrian for being in the road.
Go read why they want to unionize
Why don't you enlighten us.
> we have heard from some staff members that they felt pressured because the organizers would know how they decided
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
> we have heard from some staff members that they felt pressured because the organizers would know how they decided
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).
Thanks for the reminder, JB.
I hate unions. I hate lawyers. I hate any consolidation of power in general, so I hate all sides here. And I've never had the "I want a refund" feeling on donating to (what I thought was) a charity, that I now think deeply misrepresented itself when it asked for money.
My understanding from trying to read the post is that WF isn’t happy with the process because the vote isn’t closed. It doesn’t sound completely unreasonable to me. And then they are attacked because they are working with a law firm, since a decade or so, with things that has nothing to do with union recognition thing. Apparently that law firm is known as a ”union buster”, but there’s no evidence that the law firm has been involved in the negotiations around the union. To me the argument that WF is evil and hostile to unions is weak.
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.
So WMF and Wiki was pro union for all of their information and reporting but Anti union when it is for themselves.
Wikipedia is a money laundering outfit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER
The linked article doesn't even come close to suggesting money laundering. It really just argues that Wikimedia is similar to virtually every other successful organization on earth and that its bloat grows with its resources.
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.
Money laundering has become a default catch all term for "monetary misuse / suboptimal allocation". At least among the general public.
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.
Words in general don't really mean much anymore, online anyway.
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".
I gave up when they changed the definition of literally to mean both literally and not literally, resulting in the word having zero purpose at all anymore as it is impossible to know the intention of the person saying it.
What is government giving money to foundations that donate to other foundations that in turn lobby the government but money laundering?
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.
Post evidence of your claims please. The linked post above does not even allege this, never mind provide evidence of it.
Otherwise it seems like you're just describing abstract forms of malfeasance which is very uninteresting.
> Money laundering has become a default catch all term for "monetary misuse / suboptimal allocation".
No it definitely has not
Among the generally misinformed public, which I was clearly referring to, yes, it absolutely has. Everything is money laundering.
Do you think I was literally saying the financial definition has changed?
I don't think he thought that, he was probably expressing the view that he doesn't think the representative person's understanding of the term is the same as yours.
I have to confess, I've never heard anyone talk about money laundering in the way you suggest.
The root of this thread literally uses it in the way I observed. So...never? It's literally right there! I see similar uses everywhere (speaking specifically of the general public, not financial industry professionals), calling every misallocation, misspend, or even simple fraud money laundering. Reddit, HN, Facebook, LinkedIn...everything is money laundering.
Again, I'm kind of an expert in AML, so I probably pay attention to it way more than you do, and probably have a much better perspective on this. I constantly see people refer to almost all misuse or misallocation of funds as money laundering.
Maybe you just don't know what money laundering actually is? Because the vast majority of the public certainly doesn't.
Personally (n = 1), this thread was the first time I've seen the term "money laundering" used hyperbolically like this.
It's very very common. Look at the social media comments on any video that relates to fraud, grift, scams, or even a poorly run business. People say any use of money they don't like is "money laundering".
I think this does extend to fraud, grift, scams, and other illegal behavior. I have never seen "money laundering" extended to just "being bad at business."
On posts about companies spending so much money on AI (datacenter buildouts, tokkenmaxxing, etc.) comments wonder why they are doing this and replies say "money laundering", "definitely money laundering", etc. I'll post an example if I come across another one.
You guys do realize that part of money laundering is making it look like you're just bad at business, yeah? "Oops we accidentally overpaid some incompetent guys for this data center" is a smokescreen for "I am taking your data center money and giving it to my cousin"
How about you just state clearly yes/no:
Are you accusing Wikipedia of actual money laundering?
If you are accusing them of being bad at business or bloat (which is all that's alleged in the article you linked to), then the answer is NO. So you should just say NO.
If you are accusing Wikipedia of actual money laundering, that is concealing the source of illegally gotten money, then the answer is YES.
Please reply YES or NO so we can have a single conversation about the claim being made.
From a strict "anti-money laundering" standpoint (how the bank thinks), money laundering is taking money that is suspected as being proceeds of criminal activity ("dirty" money) and making it indistinguishable from "clean" money. "Being bad at business" in a way that matches the definition of nepotism is not money laundering. There is a necessary component that the money is "dirty" and needs to be "cleaned", hence it is "laundered".
Unfortunately the official definition of 'literally' now means both exact and exaggeration, so it is impossible to know what you are saying here /s
It is interesting how "enshittification" just happens because of scale.
People are really not curious enough about bureaucracy. We complain literally our entire lives about "bureaucracy" and all the bad outcomes it produces.
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!"
People have been told for so long that private companies are more efficient than government that they have started to simply believe it, as if the problems of large scale organisation aren't universal.
Some cracks have emerged in that, at least in the UK. Trains, water companies, etc, all used as solid examples of private sector waste and extractiveness.
Most people attribute that entirely to greed or monopoly rather than to it being a result of scale.
IMO its all three.
More importantly politicians and the civil service still believe that the private sector is automatically efficient and that bigger is better. Not a UK only problem either.
"Bureaucracy" has been an entire field of study for more than a century at that point. But WMF is not bureaucracy any more than the FIFA is bureaucracy. It is curruption; That of the stated ideals of the origin: non profit, decentralisation and democracy.
Maybe so, but the linked article doesn't even allege, much less prove that.
Enshitification doesn’t just happen, it’s a choice to sacrifice quality and integrity for short term profit. There are plenty of large products and companies that haven’t gone this way.
Another word whose usefulness has been degraded to just mean “bad behavior by an organization”.
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.
Doctorow approved the generic use. He said he never meant for "enshittification" to only ever refer to the platform lock-in pattern. It refers to any way that things get worse on purpose.
If that's really the case, people should stop using the term as though it has explanatory power.
This is called the Iron Law of Bureaucracy
Which as your article points out, is as easy to solve as reading The Mythical Man-Month. That's why it's an Iron Law. It's easy to remove!
Also, as you point out, it's actually the same as money laundering, which is an actual crime. So as it goes, every large organization is committing massive scale organized crime (to their own detriment, oddly enough), but they can stop doing so by just reading The Mythical Man-Month.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
You started the thread accusing a non-profit of actual organized crime, and then linking to (someone else's?) words, implying they endorse your claim, when it doesn't.
Not a time to flex the guidelines amigo. Maybe a time to clarify what you meant when you accused a bunch of people of a crime?
Yes. everyone kinda sucks in their own ways. Mostly not enough to matter in their lives, but in large groups, the suck adds up.
I don't think of non profit bloat as enshittification. Enshittification is gradual reduction in quality of a user facing service over time that used to be trusted. Here it's just a matter of (arguably) inefficient spending as fundraising had increased but I don't think there's any rollback in services.
I could not find any indication that the purpose of this ever-increasing spending (while alarming) is money laundering in the essay you linked. Can you provide any other source to back up this claim? Money laundering is illegal, while spending money in of itself is definitely not.
I'm generally critical of WMF and think (1) they waste significant amount of resources on mis-managed projects, and (2) are not very honest or transparent in donation communications.
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
Yes, that is a good example. I used to be cynical about these uses of money until I met a 70-year-old volunteer who regularly attends international cycling championships to take pictures of the cyclists. She is totally devoted to documenting the sport and is not by any stretch of the imagination getting rich doing that or living in luxury. So I've changed my mind: her being able to do that is a good thing for her, for Wikipedia and for the sportspeople involved in these championships. YMMV.
That $500K over three years represents 0.08% of the foundation’s budget in that time period. The question is, what are they spending the other 99.92%? There is a significant small chunk spent on crucial infrastructure, but it’s mostly a slush fund for board pet projects.
The expenses tracking revenue does rather paint a picture.
No individuals should be donating to wikipedia, it is clear that any donation will be spent as rapidly and as wastefully as possible.
This makes it look like the goal of the union is to get into the piggy bank, rather than reverse some kind of hellish work environment.
Fair compensation is a legitimate reason for unions.
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.
Money laundering - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_laundering
>It might even be a lawsuit that forces the WMF to pay out a judgement that is larger than the reserve.
lololol
Wikipedia was almost illegal in the UK due to age verification, but the government granted it a special exception.