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dannyw 1 days ago [-]
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.
hobofan 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
Wikimedia has enough cash in the bank, to fund wikipedia forever from interest alone.
At this point, 100% of all new funds raised in the name of Wikipedia are actually being diverted to other projects. It’s incredibly deceptive, borderline fraudulent.
kosh2 23 hours ago [-]
That is why I always say: Don't donate to wikipedia, donate to archive.org
x______________ 23 hours ago [-]
>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).
Sabinus 17 hours ago [-]
Donate to both but archive.org has a higher priority.
shimman 1 days ago [-]
That's pretty cool and worthy endeavor. Having public domain pictures of cultural events seems like a worthy cause IMO.
alt227 1 days ago [-]
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.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
They could tell us which programs.
alt227 1 days ago [-]
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.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
I agree, that you can lie to people to make more money. That's called fraud.
Sabinus 17 hours ago [-]
I wonder how well they would go if you could target your donation. Humble bundle did this and I appreciated it.
joshspankit 1 days ago [-]
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!
Maintaining a shitty PHP website isn't that expensive either.
ReactiveJelly 1 days ago [-]
I don't even use Wikipedia anymore, I use the free online P2P encyclopedia. It's called
akudha 1 days ago [-]
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?
Kayvanian 11 hours ago [-]
Speaking as a WikiPortraits organizer: Wikipedia primarily uses free media, and the for-profit event coverage is of course usually not releasing their photos under free licenses. Our photos are released under Creative Commons for use by Wikipedia and, well, anyone, and big events like the World Cup are where we can capture a lot of the most notable people at scale.
That being said, we're not just covering the big fancy events. We've done hundreds of events from indigenous festivals to minor league sports to science conferences. We've also donated equipment to wiki communities in Kenya, Ghana, and Benin to photograph their local events and culture, which are very undercovered on-wiki. The big events are what gets a lot of visibility and make the headlines but we do a lot more than that.
The for-profit media don’t release photos under freely available licenses. So we’re looking at those images being under copyright for ~100 years.
Licenses do matter, just like open source.
scarab92 12 hours ago [-]
If it’s really that important to people, they should be able to raise donations for that program in particular.
Raising funding for Wikipedia, then diverting 90% of the funds for pet projects is dishonest at best, and most likely fraudulent.
The other problem, is that the projects wikimedia foundation has historically funded have a notable political bias, to the point where it has been accused of being a pseudo-PAC.
krackers 24 hours ago [-]
I guess maybe the reasoning is that because it's a watched event it's useful to have libre/public domain photos of it?
jenny8lee 5 hours ago [-]
WikiPortraits organizer here. To give a sense of scope of project, at this point more than 1 out of every 50 pageviews on Wikipedia globally is illustrated with a WikiPortraits photo (and maybe more, we are still trying to digest what the surge from World Cup traffic means). Since our project started in January 2024, WikiPortraits photos have been viewed 5.8 billion times (https://sightglass.toolforge.org/results/iAi_KYlZs8ZXW9Xc/wi...). Of those, the ones I’m most proud of is finding a volunteer in Rome to take openly licensed pictures of the new Pope Leo XIV in May 2025 (Since all the commercial agencies and news outlets photos of Habemus Papum moment were not openly licensed, we did not have a “Pope as Pope” photo for Wikipedia, only older meh photos of him as a Bishop in Peru).
Those new Pope photos, which were featured on the front page of many language Wikipedias, were viewed 50+ million times in their first month (nice feeling for a first time photographer!)
WikiPortraits photos are CC-BY-SA, which means other (mostly smaller) media outlets can use with attribution (though we’ve seen them mangle that in all sorts of ways, but they are trying). These are generally orgs that cannot afford Getty or other agencies, though we have seen a WikiPortraits photo pop up at CNN Brasil. Fan Instagram accounts also like us.
Even with the grants, WikiPortraits photographers are all volunteers. It’s what they do in their leisure time. (A number are professional photographers but they are donating their time to this project, or theg donate older photos they took on assignment where they control the rights).
The main FIFA World Cup photographer is a Brooklyn high school teacher by day (also a comedian by night). His World Cup photos have been viewed 500 million times (“what I did l on my summer break”). Wikiphotography, like much of wiki, depends on a base of supercontributors.
Where does the funding go to make educational open content?
WikiPortraits pays for lodging, buying better equipment to lend folks (eg longer lenses so photos are not as grainy), a LOT of parking fee reimbursements, a meal if someone has been shooting for a long day. We also pay honoraria for experienced wiki folks to create Wikidata items or Commons categories behind photogs where necessary (Taking photos fun! Metadata not so fun).
But WikiPortraits travel is generally a mix of people getting there themselves, using airline miles, and external donations (eg not funding from WMF. Some limited exceptions, but we’ve tried to keep that line pretty clear). We used American Airlines miles to get the World Cup photographer to Seattle for that Round of 16 game of US vs Belgium.
Wiki ethos vibe.
It’s easy to emphasize glamorous World Cup coverage (which gave us huge stats!). But a lot of the events photographed are things like AAAS and other academic conference, local book festivals, politicians at an event in Adelaide, Indian artists at a fair in Santa Fe. Volunteers grinding away to fill out wiki coverage in areas they are passionate about.
What’s nice is at a time when new editor registrations are declining precipitously (LLMs?), photography has brought in a lot of new volunteers to the Wikiverse. Also it’s a noticeably different population. We are half female vs 15% female for wiki overall, and a lot more diverse, especially in the US (where Black Wikipedians are only .5-1.5% of the Wiki volunteer community). Photography is a fairly immediate high-impact, low-friction way to improve Wikipedia.
LLMs may be able generate a text article. But they don’t (currently) have the ability to rally a community of photographers to go live events and take openly licensed photos for the world.
Also what we appreciate, methodically covering events helps us find coverage gaps on wiki. We just covered a rodeo in Sheridan, Wyoming. The rodeo, despite being around since 1930s, did not have an article. Also more surprising, no article (or Wikidata item) for Indian Relay, a popular Native American horse racing sport where riders go bareback from horse to horse. It’s amazing to watch. Highly recommend. I spent a lot of creating wikidata items and articles for the teams, lead riders and tournaments just so we could match our photos to wiki. Contemporary art, as we discovered with the 2026 Venice Biennale, also has huge gaps of on wiki coverage.
I’m willing to bet that dollar for dollar WikiPortraits may be some of the most effective community grants WMF has given in terms of on-wiki impact. One reason: you can take a single photo and it’s used in 200 wikis.
Remember the WMF doesn’t get involved in editorial content. So the community grants help spur organized efforts like ours to help improve on-wiki content.
We are looking for more volunteers! (Also if you have excess airline miles/hotel points you want to contribute for a good cause).
jasonvorhe 1 days ago [-]
So donating to Wikipedia actually funds commercial events? wtf.
gruez 1 days ago [-]
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.
rho_soul_kg_m3 1 days ago [-]
What's at the top of the list?
dlubarov 18 hours ago [-]
One of WMF's more controversial expenditures was its $4.5 million "Knowledge Equity Fund", a grant program that tries to fight racial inequity. The recipients don't have to participate in Wikipedia or anything.
They may be noble causes, but it's not how many Wikipedia donors expected their funds to be used, after seeing the donation banners begging for funds to keep Wikipedia running.
As stupid as that was, they at least put a stop to it. It hasn't been a thing for several years now.
runarberg 24 hours ago [-]
Union busting as per TFA is a candidate for sure.
decimalenough 1 days ago [-]
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.
sassbadger 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
psunavy03 1 days ago [-]
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.
jq-r 8 hours ago [-]
I've seen them in action in my previous company. They've butchered it, the best talent left, and the company is the shell of itself. And all because workers disagreed with a "RTO" mandate and wanted to continue working remote. The company was remote first since day one, but the new CEO wouldn't have it so he hired those abominable lawyers.
traverseda 1 days ago [-]
I didn't expect it to be that prominent. First text on there says that they represent employers in big header letters.
culi 1 days ago [-]
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
nekusar 1 days ago [-]
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.
nativeit 1 days ago [-]
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.
tgsovlerkhgsel 1 days ago [-]
Remember that this is what your money funds when you donate to it...
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!
ymolodtsov 1 days ago [-]
Seems it'd be far more reasonable to direct the excess funds into an endowment of sorts instead of spending it on other areas.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
If they did that they'd already have a big enough endowment to fund all of Wikimedia for life.
akolbe 1 days ago [-]
Well, Wikimedia does have an Endowment, currently valued at $169 million. See Form 990:
$169 million is not too big for an endowment, especially considering how much they had been raising AND spending in the years prior.
Long-term it'd be best for Wikipedia if it was self-funded through this, like Harvard, for instance.
neilk 1 days ago [-]
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.
mahkeiro 1 days ago [-]
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.
6 hours ago [-]
alephnerd 1 days ago [-]
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.
What's up with the continually revolving CTO chair? (under Executive)
alephnerd 1 days ago [-]
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.
ethbr1 20 hours ago [-]
Salary aside, I'd still have assumed Wikimedia would be able to find a CTO who wouldn't jump ship the next year.
Either they're really bad at picking, or the job is really bad.
alephnerd 20 hours ago [-]
> Either they're really bad at picking, or the job is really bad
Def the latter in the sense that it is a very high stress job with weak compensation and high risk of being targeted.
PunchyHamster 1 days ago [-]
Feels like where Mozilla went
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Great analogy.
sassbadger 1 days ago [-]
I have donated to them for many years and will stop now. I will not support any kind of union busting.
TSiege 1 days ago [-]
Be sure to tell them why you stopped. I’ll be doing the same. Hopefully this pressures them to give up on this
juleiie 1 days ago [-]
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.
nearlyepic 1 days ago [-]
> Don’t be afraid of destroying things. Wikipedia isn’t unique or precious really.
Surely you’re joking?
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
I hope they mean the project is precious but the formal organisation that funds the project isn't. Like Firefox and Mozilla.
applfanboysbgon 1 days ago [-]
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.
Pay08 21 hours ago [-]
What truly grinds my gears about Wikipedia isn't the amount of false information but the amount of uncorroborated info. The amount of times I've read an article that made large, sweeping claims about something and then not have any citations, often not even a "citation needed" box should be frankly unacceptable.
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.
cool_dude85 1 days ago [-]
>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.
stasomatic 1 days ago [-]
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.
Hi there, thanks. I scanned through them. Bots, scraping, was there something that's interesting, no sarcasm?
lukeschlather 1 days ago [-]
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.
stasomatic 1 days ago [-]
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.
matteoraso 22 hours ago [-]
You're unfamiliar with the scale of Wikimedia. Besides Wikipedia, they also host multiple other projects, like Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. Besides that, a huge portion of their budget goes towards grants to organizations that help distribute information for free on the internet. This absolutely isn't a "CRUD PHP site".
stasomatic 22 hours ago [-]
Well, that’s what the output looks like. Like a barebones phpMyAdmin query result from 20 plus years ago.
1 days ago [-]
shevy-java 1 days ago [-]
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.
Jumpstylish 1 days ago [-]
I would be very surprised is WMF employee conditions would meet anyone’s definition of abuse. If anything, these sound like patronage jobs.
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.
1 days ago [-]
out_of_protocol 1 days ago [-]
Well yes, SV is abbreviation for sievert which measures health risk of radiation
cinntaile 1 days ago [-]
That would be Sv, not SV.
Stitch4223 1 days ago [-]
“SV”?
tchalla 1 days ago [-]
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.
rexreed 1 days ago [-]
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.
oblio 1 days ago [-]
We're on the newsite of a Silicon Valley venture capital fund.
sph 21 hours ago [-]
Which is published on the Internet, bringing people from all over the world.
throwaway613746 1 days ago [-]
You're on HN, the SV site for SV brained SV people.
water-data-dude 1 days ago [-]
TMDA (too many damn acronyms)?
trial3 1 days ago [-]
> I don’t why people
casting the first stone, i see
hobofan 1 days ago [-]
Silicon Valey
1 days ago [-]
Jumpstylish 1 days ago [-]
Selfish Vanity
tyromaniac 1 days ago [-]
Maybe silicon valley
hamper653 1 days ago [-]
Can someone explain what "union recognition" means, concretely?
evolve2k 1 days ago [-]
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.
ericmay 1 days ago [-]
> 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?
They earn more and are more productive. Here is one Canadian study but I’m sure you can find more if you’re interested.
ericmay 1 days ago [-]
Thanks for sharing. I’ll take a look!
dofm 1 days ago [-]
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.
j16sdiz 1 days ago [-]
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.
dofm 1 days ago [-]
> Child labor now outlawed.
For now. Many US states are currently trying to roll back these laws though, aren't they?
Teens want summer jobs again and you act like they’re sending 8 year olds back to the coal breakers.
unknownfuture 1 days ago [-]
Literally demonstrating the point in dofm's second paragraph right here...
dofm 1 days ago [-]
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.
unknownfuture 1 days ago [-]
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.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
What you described is the result of the government acting as one big, but very conservative, union.
TheTaytay 1 days ago [-]
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.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
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.
mcmcmc 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
I can't parse this comment in relation to the context.
mcmcmc 1 days ago [-]
This is what I was arguing against:
> Note that government labor regulations are effectively just really one big union (called the government).
senordevnyc 1 days ago [-]
They’re pointing out that calling the federal government “a big union” is inaccurate, and reasons why.
lukeschlather 1 days ago [-]
It's accurate. The constitution of the United States explicitly describes it as a union in the preamble.
mcmcmc 22 hours ago [-]
Don’t be dense, we’re discussing labor unions, not all possible interpretations of the word “union”
ericmay 1 days ago [-]
> The constitution of the United States explicitly describes it as a union in the preamble.
No, there's no relation.
j16sdiz 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
--
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
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.
dofm 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
1 days ago [-]
ericmay 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
dofm 1 days ago [-]
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.
ericmay 1 days ago [-]
I reject the notion that the public is the same thing as a union in the manner you are describing.
dofm 1 days ago [-]
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.
ericmay 1 days ago [-]
> Don't do these silly bad faith, straw man characterisations.
I reject the association literally or otherwise.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
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.
robin_reala 1 days ago [-]
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.
ericmay 1 days ago [-]
Not really. At least not in the way that matters.
robin_reala 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe you could explain what matters and what doesn’t?
dofm 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
ericmay 1 days ago [-]
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.
dofm 1 days ago [-]
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.
ericmay 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
dofm 1 days ago [-]
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.
ericmay 1 days ago [-]
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.
dofm 1 days ago [-]
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.
ericmay 24 hours ago [-]
> 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.
> 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.
dofm 23 hours ago [-]
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.
It doesn't matter what the media publishes, it matters what blue-collar former democrats vote and they vote Trump. You are claiming that unions are what push the country forward, you claim the current state is the country is regressing, and yet union members voted for Trump. And they did so despite Trump's anti-worker record.
Your view doesn't match reality.
dofm 19 hours ago [-]
> You are claiming that unions are what push the country forward
Again, no, you are rather mischaracterising what I said. I have certainly argued that unions did in the past push the USA forward in terms of labour rights and worker protections — you only have to read about the history of the AFL-CIO to know that this is true. You have most of your few workers rights because of collective action (and as a country you have lost job security you could have had by falling for Reaganite cartooned claptrap about unions).
But at this point it is not about forward progress, particularly; workers need unions to push back against regressions more than anything else. Those regressions are happening. That is what I have said.
> you claim the current state is the country is regressing
You think it is not?
> Your view doesn't match reality.
Or… Trump misled and lied to underinformed voters? Again? Pretty sure I could find you links from 2024 where he promised not to get the USA into wars and promised to keep prices down. But what's the point?
Also some of those links I shared were union pages, and one of them is a White House document literally announcing the elimination of collective bargaining power for federal workers, so, no, it is not just the media.
My view, I think, matches the reality of 2026 pretty well. You have an anti-union government which is committed to rolling back union power and has already done so. I can't change how blue-collar voters acted against their own interests when tempted with populist baubles (which is a time-honoured tradition), but their dubious vote doesn't particularly validate your argument or invalidate mine, does it?
You can think what you like, though.
ericmay 4 hours ago [-]
> Again, no, you are rather mischaracterising what I said.
Ok then let's characterize it better. Are unions today a force for pushing the country forward?
> you could have had by falling for Reaganite cartooned claptrap about unions
I'm not arguing against unions. Just to be clear.
> Or… Trump misled and lied to underinformed voters? Again?
There's a saying I think. Have you heard it? A very famous person once said it:
"Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me...you can't get fooled again."
I think voters, regardless of political party, know pretty well what they're voting for. That includes Trump voters. I don't think he lied to them, he said in many ways exactly what he would do if elected to office and he has tried to in many ways to fulfill those campaign promises. It's just that while some policies are arguably harming workers, those workers or those who voted for Trump (which was a majority of the country by the way) cared about other issues (immigration, COVID policies, whatever) than they do the issues you think they should care about.
> Also some of those links I shared were union pages, and one of them is a White House document literally announcing the elimination of collective bargaining power for federal workers, so, no, it is not just the media.
Well there are two problems with this. The first is that union leadership statements are not the same thing as union members voting. The second is that of course unionized federal workers would be against the federal government dissolving their unionized workforce. Other unions don't face quite the same level of existential crises or dissolution by fiat.
Politically, if you wanted to pin me down more accurately I'm against all populists. MAGA, Socialists, Communists, or otherwise. I really don't have a problem with unions, I just think the points you are making are incorrect.
zetanor 1 days ago [-]
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.
cool_dude85 1 days ago [-]
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.
wildfireday2 1 days ago [-]
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.
cool_dude85 1 days ago [-]
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.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
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...
wildfireday2 1 days ago [-]
“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.
hamper653 23 hours ago [-]
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. "
hamper653 1 days ago [-]
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?
jordanb 1 days ago [-]
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."
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
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!
dgellow 1 days ago [-]
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
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
That doesn't match what I saw.
dgellow 22 hours ago [-]
Do you often go to protests in Germany? Or do you mean something you saw online?
inigyou 20 hours ago [-]
I saw a German street protest in real life
amazingamazing 1 days ago [-]
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.
dgellow 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
acdha 1 days ago [-]
“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.
acdha 1 days ago [-]
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?
cholantesh 1 days ago [-]
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.
matchbok3 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
hamper653 1 days ago [-]
> Wikimedia Foundation is asking for an election to ensure everyone actually wants this.
Why? Does recognition entail that every worker is compelled to join the union?
jacobgkau 1 days ago [-]
My dad worked for the United States Postal Service for decades. He never joined the union, but he was still legally required to pay union dues, and the union was still legally required to represent him. So at least in some cases, yes, starting a union does affect all employees and practically requires them to "join" even if there's an option to not join on paper.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Wouldn't it be better to join so that you can have a vote in the union operations, including to disband it?
kelvinjps10 1 days ago [-]
Is not what happened?
WWU announced on 28 July that they would file for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board. The announcement also accused the Wikimedia Foundation of being disingenuous in their public communications:
Also on the communication by wales he says he wasn’t happy with the election because people knew who voted for, but he didn’t deny there was some kinda of election?
nekusar 1 days ago [-]
> This is incorrect. Voluntary recognition, which is what this article is about, means that an election is not done. Wikimedia Foundation is asking for an election to ensure everyone actually wants this.
Misinformation.
Voluntary recognition just means that there isn't a 120 hard fight against union elections to decide if there CAN BE a union.
Dark Horse comics just voluntarily acknowledged their union. After that is union elections, to decide who the union elected is.
matchbok3 1 days ago [-]
Handwavy. Voluntary recognition is just that, voluntary. Opposing is not inherently evil so I'm not sure what this whole thing is even about.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1 days ago [-]
> I'm not sure what this whole thing is even about
The choice to voluntarily recognize the union would remove an obstacle for its creation. Deciding not to, in that context, can be seen as choosing to leave the obstacle in place. That, in turn, can be seen as intended to prevent the union from forming. The union is primarily a means of increasing bargaining power for its members. Therefore, this decision by WMF can be seen as intentionally weakening their employees' bargaining power.
Macha 1 days ago [-]
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.
nekusar 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
cool_dude85 1 days ago [-]
>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.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
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.
derektank 1 days ago [-]
“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.
1 days ago [-]
matchbok3 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
fn-mote 1 days ago [-]
1. Mention some concrete facts. Or at least assert some claim.
2. Given the very low rate of unionization in the USA, I think the issue you need to be most concerned about is no-benefit gig work instead of a huge wave of unionization.
Waterluvian 1 days ago [-]
If you are capable of adding any substance to your various comments, you need to do so. Otherwise you’re just strengthening the view of the opposite as your comments read like someone is desparate to manipulate public opinion.
alsetmusic 1 days ago [-]
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.
Curious why you support unions in general? It’s kind of like saying “I support governments” or “I support companies”.
Ma8ee 1 days ago [-]
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.
dualvariable 1 days ago [-]
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.
derektank 1 days ago [-]
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.
AngryData 24 hours ago [-]
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."
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
It's a bit like saying "I support billionaires" but the opposite.
derektank 1 days ago [-]
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
Pay08 1 days ago [-]
Not to mention the heaps of economic research showing that there are quite a lot of benefits to the existence of billionaires.
AngryData 24 hours ago [-]
What research? Sounds like a bunch of hot air to me.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Then quadrillionaires must be even better, right? Why don't we print ten quadrillion dollars and distribute them to ten people?
Pay08 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
whatsupdog 1 days ago [-]
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.
Pay08 1 days ago [-]
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.
Gander5739 8 hours ago [-]
Probably because most people don't care.
ymolodtsov 1 days ago [-]
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.
Tor3 1 days ago [-]
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.
dofm 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
unknownfuture 1 days ago [-]
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.
sokoloff 1 days ago [-]
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.
cool_dude85 1 days ago [-]
>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.
sokoloff 1 days ago [-]
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.
cool_dude85 1 days ago [-]
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?
sokoloff 1 days ago [-]
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.
AngryData 1 days ago [-]
That same problem exists for factory workers, plumbers, machinists, etc and yet unions and strikes still work.
bitshiftfaced 1 days ago [-]
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.
nativeit 1 days ago [-]
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?
bitshiftfaced 1 days ago [-]
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.
cool_dude85 1 days ago [-]
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.
unknownfuture 1 days ago [-]
Uh, non-profits absolutely may have unionized employees:
I... wonder if you don't know what a non-profit corporation is or how they work?
8note 1 days ago [-]
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
salawat 1 days ago [-]
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.
unknownfuture 1 days ago [-]
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.
ymolodtsov 9 hours ago [-]
If a union would force companies to keep positions that no longer require a human I wouldn't agree with it anyway.
1 days ago [-]
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
For exactly the same reason as factory workers or store clerks: to even out the power imbalance against the owners.
Have you ever been in a union? A union shop is the only place I have ever experienced a true inversion of the power dynamic between myself and my boss even in small part and it is liberating. It was the only time my boss has ever had to bend to my will outside of their willingness to do so in order to retain me. The only power you have over your boss’s behavior outside of a union is in your willingness to become employed.
Tech workers historically have had it made in terms of compensation and work environment. Additionally good tech workers have historically had more leverage over their employer than an average worker. So it makes sense that many would be reticent to mess with a good thing. But here we are at the dawn of a new era. Nobody has any idea what tech employment will look like in ten or twenty years.
I would happily be in a union in tech. Maybe I wouldn’t if i was making 300k in the Bay Area but I am not.
lukeschlather 1 days ago [-]
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.)
4lx87 23 hours ago [-]
To stop uncompensated overtime and on-call? I’d like that very much.
ymolodtsov 8 hours ago [-]
So change the job if you don't want it.
spencerflem 1 days ago [-]
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.
1 days ago [-]
armchairhacker 1 days ago [-]
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
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.
jordanb 1 days ago [-]
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.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Has any company ever not alleged duress?
bawolff 18 hours ago [-]
> One of the problems with the process so far is that it was not secret
As far as i can tell, this is a straight up lie. Union organizers might know, but legally they are required to keep who signs a union card secret.
If voluntary recognition happened, as far as i understand, part of the process would be for a neutral third party to verify the signed statements. So if someone was pressured, the verification person would call them up and ask if they really meant to sign, and they could just say no. [Ianal, this is just what the pro union people are saying on wikipedia]
doginasuit 1 days ago [-]
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.
spopejoy 2 hours ago [-]
> Honestly, I'm on Wikipedia's side: there should be a true secret ballot.
Mission accomplished for Jimmy Wales then, "aw shucks I like unions but there's this one thing about a process that has worked for literally every other organization effort. Wouldn't want those volunteer organizers intimidating workers!"
C.f. Dario Amodei: "I LOVE open weight models, they just need to pass this little safety test, who doesn't want safety?"
estearum 1 days ago [-]
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?
jordanb 1 days ago [-]
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.
estearum 1 days ago [-]
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?
jordanb 1 days ago [-]
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.
cogman10 1 days ago [-]
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.
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.
estearum 1 days ago [-]
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!
anigbrowl 1 days ago [-]
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.
cool_dude85 1 days ago [-]
No, you need the signed cards to take to the NLRB and get an anonymous election.
jordanb 1 days ago [-]
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.
cool_dude85 1 days ago [-]
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.
jordanb 1 days ago [-]
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.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Has any company ever not alleged it?
jordanb 1 days ago [-]
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.
cool_dude85 1 days ago [-]
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.
1 days ago [-]
ksec 1 days ago [-]
So WMF and Wiki was pro union for all of their information and reporting but Anti union when it is for themselves.
spopejoy 2 hours ago [-]
Being in management is a kind of brain virus that is infectious no matter what kind of organization is being managed.
Humans just don't do hierarchy well
drcongo 23 hours ago [-]
That's the last donation I give them.
mattlondon 1 days ago [-]
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
amazingamazing 1 days ago [-]
Good. Most tech unions are worthless and only accelerate outsourcing. Unions can be good though, like in construction where the work is inherently dangerous.
cogman10 1 days ago [-]
Here's the union's demands. [1] Which of them do you find particularly unreasonable?
> 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.
cogman10 1 days ago [-]
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.
rimbo789 1 days ago [-]
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.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Only to the board of directors.
miltonlost 1 days ago [-]
LMAO. Management? Accountable? Golden parachutes say hi
casey2 1 days ago [-]
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.
amazingamazing 1 days ago [-]
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?
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
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.
cyanydeez 1 days ago [-]
yes, yes, blame the victims. It's always the fault of the pedestrian for being in the road.
amazingamazing 1 days ago [-]
Go read why they want to unionize
spopejoy 2 hours ago [-]
Hmm someone responded to you with their demands, asking which demand you find unreasonable, no response? Does your prompt forbid actually reading responses?
sassbadger 1 days ago [-]
Why don't you enlighten us.
CrimsonRain 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
cholantesh 1 days ago [-]
So paid overtime, vacation, parental and sick leave, and 40 hour work weeks are, in fact, shameless excesses that have made office work worse?
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Capitalists have the same option. Don't like the union? Resign.
Telaneo 1 days ago [-]
Which Side Are You On?
shevy-java 1 days ago [-]
It may be due time to disentangle the Wikimedia Foundation from Wikipedia.
ck2 1 days ago [-]
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
dofm 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
bawolff 18 hours ago [-]
Note, this is also about the UK union not just the USA one.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Because the USA is an oligarchy of the ultra-wealthy. Next question?
Definition of oligarchy: like a dictatorship, but with more than one dictator.
I am inclined to assume that you are paid to oppose unions online.
Also your recent comment history consists entirely of angry contrarianism.
fn-mote 1 days ago [-]
GP posting account is 4 months old, 40 karma. Recently became active.
Check comment history. Does not seem to engage in productive dialogue.
matchbok3 1 days ago [-]
Imagine seeing a comment you disagree with and find the urge to dig into someone's history and try to tar and feather them. Do better.
matchbok3 1 days ago [-]
Insane? Please stay on topic and avoid personal attacks. Disagreement is not insane.
Believe it or not, not everyone who disagrees with you is some paid shill. Like... really? Hilarious. Grow up.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1 days ago [-]
> Believe it or not, not everyone who disagrees with you is some paid shill.
Whether it's true or not, making dubious arguments from a relatively new online account is actually indistinguishable from trolling. Your replies are not helping the matter.
sam_lowry_ 1 days ago [-]
Can you provide your view of the events, then?
FeepingCreature 1 days ago [-]
Note that I know nothing about the topic but the article, but the article says:
> [W]e believe a secret-ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board is the appropriate path forward.
Honestly, that was the point where I stopped reading and hid this story.
They used a non-secret election! Fuck them tbh. Jimmy Wales is entirely right here.
tgsovlerkhgsel 1 days ago [-]
They followed the process for forming a union in the US.
The claim that the Foundation totally supports the right to unionize but wants to hold a secret election would be a lot more credible if this happened before the workers had a supermajority (!) of signatures collected.
> They followed the process for forming a union in the US.
They followed a process. Secret ballots are also an established process. From your own link:
> Since the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) became law in 1935, card check has been an alternative to the National Labor Relations Board's (NLRB) election process.
My understanding is that a secret ballot election is actually the more common scenario.
> The claim that the Foundation totally supports the right to unionize but wants to hold a secret election would be a lot more credible if this happened before the workers had a supermajority (!) of signatures collected.
Do you really envision a situation where a supermajority of signatures were collected from fully non-coerced and well-informed employees, but some union-busting magic is going to cause them to lose a secret ballot election?
tgsovlerkhgsel 1 days ago [-]
I envision a scenario where the foundation just tries to drag out the process as long as possible because that's the best they can do in the situation they're in.
I envision this because I've seen the same strategy used elsewhere myself (in the unionization context) and delaying to wear down opponents is a common strategy (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay,_Deny,_Defend)
> They followed a process.
Both of the processes require collecting signatures in the same way, the difference is what happens afterwards and when. Even for the election they would have to collect signatures, so claiming that collecting the signatures was somehow "wrong" for not being a secret vote suggests either a lack of understanding or intentionally trying to muddy the waters.
1 days ago [-]
themaninthedark 1 days ago [-]
See, what you are missing is the games that would be played if they did a secret election.
"Can you prove that only employees voted in this?" "Can you prove there was no ballot stuffing? "
I am not generally pro-union, I believe it has it's place but have also seen downsides but I have seen these games played out before.
literalAardvark 1 days ago [-]
Read the post.
It's all fear mongering around a very balanced response from the WMF.
Could they engage in union-busting? Sure. Did they? No.
waisbrot 1 days ago [-]
The article appeared to state both the facts and the assumptions being made off of them pretty clearly.
matchbok3 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
InsideOutSanta 1 days ago [-]
You need to be more specific than that if you want to convince people. As far as I can tell, the title is factually correct; if it's not, I'd like to hear your argument.
cowsandmilk 1 days ago [-]
Both halves of the title are true statements.
WarmWash 1 days ago [-]
Unfortunately you can construct just about any narrative using true statements. Omission of facts is usually the damning trait of dishonesty.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
estearum 1 days ago [-]
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.
llm_nerd 1 days ago [-]
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.
chneu 1 days ago [-]
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".
alt227 1 days ago [-]
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.
pessimizer 1 days ago [-]
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.
estearum 1 days ago [-]
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.
estearum 1 days ago [-]
> Money laundering has become a default catch all term for "monetary misuse / suboptimal allocation".
No it definitely has not
llm_nerd 1 days ago [-]
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?
hkt 1 days ago [-]
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.
llm_nerd 1 days ago [-]
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.
ameliaquining 1 days ago [-]
Personally (n = 1), this thread was the first time I've seen the term "money laundering" used hyperbolically like this.
xnx 1 days ago [-]
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".
estearum 1 days ago [-]
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."
xnx 1 days ago [-]
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.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
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"
estearum 1 days ago [-]
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.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 1 days ago [-]
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".
alt227 1 days ago [-]
Unfortunately the official definition of 'literally' now means both exact and exaggeration, so it is impossible to know what you are saying here /s
cyanydeez 1 days ago [-]
It is interesting how "enshittification" just happens because of scale.
estearum 1 days ago [-]
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!"
Turskarama 1 days ago [-]
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.
hkt 1 days ago [-]
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.
graemep 1 days ago [-]
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.
rixed 1 days ago [-]
"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.
estearum 1 days ago [-]
Maybe so, but the linked article doesn't even allege, much less prove that.
neilk 1 days ago [-]
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.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
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.
ameliaquining 1 days ago [-]
If that's really the case, people should stop using the term as though it has explanatory power.
1 days ago [-]
Gigachad 1 days ago [-]
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.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
This is called the Iron Law of Bureaucracy
estearum 1 days ago [-]
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.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
estearum 1 days ago [-]
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?
tekla 1 days ago [-]
Yes. everyone kinda sucks in their own ways. Mostly not enough to matter in their lives, but in large groups, the suck adds up.
glenstein 1 days ago [-]
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.
jmusall 1 days ago [-]
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.
dannyw 1 days ago [-]
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
Kayvanian 10 hours ago [-]
WikiPortraits organizer here. That funding figure is through the end of 2027. I'd estimate ~$550k total from the WMF over 4 years (accounting for additional rapid grants and funding from affiliates). So looking at an overall average of ~$135k per year out of a ~$200 million budget to (so far in 2.5 years) engage 150+ photographers who have uploaded 90k+ photos from hundreds of events. Good downstream impact as well (developing better tools for Commons, bringing on more longterm contributors to both Commons and Wikipedia, etc.).
Also want to highlight that WikiPortraits is not just covering the fancy events like FIFA and Cannes, but many more smaller and undercovered events as well (indigenous festivals, science conferences, literature festivals, and so on). World Cup coverage in particular was relatively very cheap for how high-visibility the photos are on Wikipedia (majority of matches were covered locally); we've put more towards getting wiki photographers in Benin, Ghana, and Kenya support to cover their local culture and events.
For the amount of direct impact we have on Wikipedia and Commons, I'll go to bat to say that it's a good use of money compared to a good number of other projects that have received more funding over the years (ofc I have a conflict of interest here, but still). But I do get the larger point, that this sort of project is not necessarily what people expect when they donate to Wikimedia (and Cannes and FIFA of course stand out in the list of events being covered and are what people will focus on). And I've also been critical of the WMF's approach to donation comms for this reason.
akolbe 1 days ago [-]
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.
wildfireday2 1 days ago [-]
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.
eterm 1 days ago [-]
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.
WarmWash 1 days ago [-]
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.
doginasuit 1 days ago [-]
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.
And now the union is an organization whose sole purpose is to ensure that management cannot do anything with it (as any significant reduction of expenses means significant reduction of workforce).
casey2 1 days ago [-]
>It might even be a lawsuit that forces the WMF to pay out a judgement that is larger than the reserve.
lololol
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Wikipedia was almost illegal in the UK due to age verification, but the government granted it a special exception.
Matl 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
ocd 1 days ago [-]
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.
spopejoy 2 hours ago [-]
Workers unhappy with their treatment looking to organize makes you hate them?
joaquieneCnix 1 days ago [-]
> 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
spopejoy 2 hours ago [-]
> There are union-busting law firms? What are they gonna do? Infiltrate your meetups?
Infiltration is just one tactic that a law firm that blares their union-busting credentials on their home page can certainly advise your c-suite on. Worker intimidation, employing informants, exploiting regulation loopholes ...
> 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).
joaquieneCnix 1 days ago [-]
Thanks for the reminder, JB.
Ma8ee 1 days ago [-]
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.
spopejoy 2 hours ago [-]
You're right that WF is attacked and operates as a public resource which makes it a target. But that means they also need to be held accountable by sympathetic forces because a fortress mentality can easily emerge.
Unions have few friends in power, so we can assume this is not a false flag by WFs enemies. Nobody is forcing Jimmy Wales to put his name to a union-busting sentiment. Let's examine it:
> I want a process where staff are safe to deliberate in the privacy of their own minds and make the decision based on all the available evidence that makes the most sense to them. So I don't think insisting on a proper vote is process for the sake of process and I say that with my own estimate that the staff will vote to support unionization. I think we'll be in a better place if it's really clear - a clean and clear choice with no chance of pressure.
If he really believes they will vote for unionization then why would he insinuate that there will be some nefarious "pressure" applied by volunteer organizers? Blocking an outcome he claims to expect because he wants workers to be "safe": remember, workers are organizing precisely because they don't feel "safe" with management.
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.
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...
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_...
https://foundation.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wiki...
At this point, 100% of all new funds raised in the name of Wikipedia are actually being diverted to other projects. It’s incredibly deceptive, borderline fraudulent.
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).
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!
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?
That being said, we're not just covering the big fancy events. We've done hundreds of events from indigenous festivals to minor league sports to science conferences. We've also donated equipment to wiki communities in Kenya, Ghana, and Benin to photograph their local events and culture, which are very undercovered on-wiki. The big events are what gets a lot of visibility and make the headlines but we do a lot more than that.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:WikiPortraits_by...
Licenses do matter, just like open source.
Raising funding for Wikipedia, then diverting 90% of the funds for pet projects is dishonest at best, and most likely fraudulent.
The other problem, is that the projects wikimedia foundation has historically funded have a notable political bias, to the point where it has been accused of being a pseudo-PAC.
Those new Pope photos, which were featured on the front page of many language Wikipedias, were viewed 50+ million times in their first month (nice feeling for a first time photographer!)
WikiPortraits photos are CC-BY-SA, which means other (mostly smaller) media outlets can use with attribution (though we’ve seen them mangle that in all sorts of ways, but they are trying). These are generally orgs that cannot afford Getty or other agencies, though we have seen a WikiPortraits photo pop up at CNN Brasil. Fan Instagram accounts also like us.
I personally think it makes the wiki experience more pleasant to have better photos. Here are some before/after: https://commons.gallery/@quirky/beforeafter
Even with the grants, WikiPortraits photographers are all volunteers. It’s what they do in their leisure time. (A number are professional photographers but they are donating their time to this project, or theg donate older photos they took on assignment where they control the rights).
The main FIFA World Cup photographer is a Brooklyn high school teacher by day (also a comedian by night). His World Cup photos have been viewed 500 million times (“what I did l on my summer break”). Wikiphotography, like much of wiki, depends on a base of supercontributors.
Where does the funding go to make educational open content?
WikiPortraits pays for lodging, buying better equipment to lend folks (eg longer lenses so photos are not as grainy), a LOT of parking fee reimbursements, a meal if someone has been shooting for a long day. We also pay honoraria for experienced wiki folks to create Wikidata items or Commons categories behind photogs where necessary (Taking photos fun! Metadata not so fun).
But WikiPortraits travel is generally a mix of people getting there themselves, using airline miles, and external donations (eg not funding from WMF. Some limited exceptions, but we’ve tried to keep that line pretty clear). We used American Airlines miles to get the World Cup photographer to Seattle for that Round of 16 game of US vs Belgium. Wiki ethos vibe.
It’s easy to emphasize glamorous World Cup coverage (which gave us huge stats!). But a lot of the events photographed are things like AAAS and other academic conference, local book festivals, politicians at an event in Adelaide, Indian artists at a fair in Santa Fe. Volunteers grinding away to fill out wiki coverage in areas they are passionate about.
What’s nice is at a time when new editor registrations are declining precipitously (LLMs?), photography has brought in a lot of new volunteers to the Wikiverse. Also it’s a noticeably different population. We are half female vs 15% female for wiki overall, and a lot more diverse, especially in the US (where Black Wikipedians are only .5-1.5% of the Wiki volunteer community). Photography is a fairly immediate high-impact, low-friction way to improve Wikipedia.
LLMs may be able generate a text article. But they don’t (currently) have the ability to rally a community of photographers to go live events and take openly licensed photos for the world.
Also what we appreciate, methodically covering events helps us find coverage gaps on wiki. We just covered a rodeo in Sheridan, Wyoming. The rodeo, despite being around since 1930s, did not have an article. Also more surprising, no article (or Wikidata item) for Indian Relay, a popular Native American horse racing sport where riders go bareback from horse to horse. It’s amazing to watch. Highly recommend. I spent a lot of creating wikidata items and articles for the teams, lead riders and tournaments just so we could match our photos to wiki. Contemporary art, as we discovered with the 2026 Venice Biennale, also has huge gaps of on wiki coverage.
I’m willing to bet that dollar for dollar WikiPortraits may be some of the most effective community grants WMF has given in terms of on-wiki impact. One reason: you can take a single photo and it’s used in 200 wikis.
Remember the WMF doesn’t get involved in editorial content. So the community grants help spur organized efforts like ours to help improve on-wiki content.
We are looking for more volunteers! (Also if you have excess airline miles/hotel points you want to contribute for a good cause).
They may be noble causes, but it's not how many Wikipedia donors expected their funds to be used, after seeing the donation banners begging for funds to keep Wikipedia running.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund
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
Who you associate with is absolutely up for discussion. And the WMF is OK with hiring staunch Trump defenders.
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.
Jimmy needs his third yacht, dangit!
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...
Long-term it'd be best for Wikipedia if it was self-funded through this, like Harvard, for instance.
(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.
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
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.
Either they're really bad at picking, or the job is really bad.
Def the latter in the sense that it is a very high stress job with weak compensation and high risk of being targeted.
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.
Surely you’re joking?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
I've never worked in an industry where unionization was a thing, but my general understanding is that the unions are protectionist dreaming of things that were true before but not today, but they want to keep things as they were. Good luck.
I've benefited from Wikipedia, but I don't romanticize it. Either side of the table can't stop the AI onslaught, they are all out of jobs. Another Wikimedia will rise up from the ashes.
This mindset really baffles me, as a unionized guy with a white collar email job. Don't you, like, want things that your employer doesn't want to give you? Job protection? Better than CoL wage growth? Work from home? Internal job progression? Clear, understandable job factors agreed upon in advance?
The union negotiates for what its members want. There's nothing magical about unions that mean, like, a white collar union is going to be negotiating for all its members to get a new hard hat every year, just because that's what auto worker unions do.
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.
This governance question doesn't go away if another Wikimedia rises from the ashes. You still will still need a board making decisions, and someone needs to pick the members of the board. Right now there are 8 seats selected by "the community," 7 seats selected by the board, and 1 seat selected by the founder.
Now the picture is getting more clear - denying a union is clearly big brother billionaire thinking, e. g. lowering cost while maximizing abuse of workers/employees.
Silicon Valley: We're making the world a better place by making the most money no matter the consequences.
casting the first stone, i see
Union recognition is then the company accepting that the union exists and then agreeing to meet and engage with it.
Not accepting it, is usually a crappy corporate move in an attempt to not have workers collaborating together.
Lots of research shows that generally places where unions exist have better work conditions and perform better over the long term.
The US has lower union involvement than in many countries.
Do you have any non-partisan sources for this? Genuinely curious. When you say perform better what do you mean specifically? And does better work conditions include better pay or just on-site conditions or something similar?
They earn more and are more productive. Here is one Canadian study but I’m sure you can find more if you’re interested.
I am not saying that you are doing this, but I tend to find that people who think we don't need unions anymore are engaging with the status quo in the same way as people who say we don't need vaccines anymore.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> Note that government labor regulations are effectively just really one big union (called the government).
No, there's no relation.
Playing devil's advocate:
- Having government functionally like one big union make individual union obsolete.
--
Where will you be without them, you mean. The current trajectory of the US government is the opposite of strengthening the rights of labour.
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.
> 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.
Don't do these silly bad faith, straw man characterisations.
I reject the association literally or otherwise.
This is the same reason the government protects unions.
They all recognise unions and have unionised employees in countries where unions are the default, with the exception of Tesla.
> […]
> I wouldn’t think that, because that doesn’t make sense.
Then you don't really know history.
You cherry-picked the wrong comment. Vaccines and vaccine adoption has nothing to do with unions nor are they even remotely comparable.
(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.
???
> 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.
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.
> The way those arguments are made is similarly ignorant of history, is the simple point.
Yes and that point is rejected by me.
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.
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.
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...
Your view doesn't match reality.
Again, no, you are rather mischaracterising what I said. I have certainly argued that unions did in the past push the USA forward in terms of labour rights and worker protections — you only have to read about the history of the AFL-CIO to know that this is true. You have most of your few workers rights because of collective action (and as a country you have lost job security you could have had by falling for Reaganite cartooned claptrap about unions).
But at this point it is not about forward progress, particularly; workers need unions to push back against regressions more than anything else. Those regressions are happening. That is what I have said.
> you claim the current state is the country is regressing
You think it is not?
> Your view doesn't match reality.
Or… Trump misled and lied to underinformed voters? Again? Pretty sure I could find you links from 2024 where he promised not to get the USA into wars and promised to keep prices down. But what's the point?
Also some of those links I shared were union pages, and one of them is a White House document literally announcing the elimination of collective bargaining power for federal workers, so, no, it is not just the media.
Here's another:
https://mnaflcio.org/news/trump-champion-workers-his-anti-un...
My view, I think, matches the reality of 2026 pretty well. You have an anti-union government which is committed to rolling back union power and has already done so. I can't change how blue-collar voters acted against their own interests when tempted with populist baubles (which is a time-honoured tradition), but their dubious vote doesn't particularly validate your argument or invalidate mine, does it?
You can think what you like, though.
Ok then let's characterize it better. Are unions today a force for pushing the country forward?
> you could have had by falling for Reaganite cartooned claptrap about unions
I'm not arguing against unions. Just to be clear.
> Or… Trump misled and lied to underinformed voters? Again?
There's a saying I think. Have you heard it? A very famous person once said it:
"Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me...you can't get fooled again."
I think voters, regardless of political party, know pretty well what they're voting for. That includes Trump voters. I don't think he lied to them, he said in many ways exactly what he would do if elected to office and he has tried to in many ways to fulfill those campaign promises. It's just that while some policies are arguably harming workers, those workers or those who voted for Trump (which was a majority of the country by the way) cared about other issues (immigration, COVID policies, whatever) than they do the issues you think they should care about.
> Also some of those links I shared were union pages, and one of them is a White House document literally announcing the elimination of collective bargaining power for federal workers, so, no, it is not just the media.
Well there are two problems with this. The first is that union leadership statements are not the same thing as union members voting. The second is that of course unionized federal workers would be against the federal government dissolving their unionized workforce. Other unions don't face quite the same level of existential crises or dissolution by fiat.
> https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/17/key-facts...
> when tempted with populist baubles
Right, like the DSA ;) ?
Politically, if you wanted to pin me down more accurately I'm against all populists. MAGA, Socialists, Communists, or otherwise. I really don't have a problem with unions, I just think the points you are making are incorrect.
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.
"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. "
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."
So as you can see, they have incredible free speech! They allow just anyone to carry out a street march!
Compared to the US where multiple protesters have been killed on video by ICE this year Germany is a dream of free speech
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...
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.
https://www.propublicaguild.org/updates/propublica-guild-rat...
Why? Does recognition entail that every worker is compelled to join the union?
Also on the communication by wales he says he wasn’t happy with the election because people knew who voted for, but he didn’t deny there was some kinda of election?
Misinformation.
Voluntary recognition just means that there isn't a 120 hard fight against union elections to decide if there CAN BE a union.
Dark Horse comics just voluntarily acknowledged their union. After that is union elections, to decide who the union elected is.
The choice to voluntarily recognize the union would remove an obstacle for its creation. Deciding not to, in that context, can be seen as choosing to leave the obstacle in place. That, in turn, can be seen as intended to prevent the union from forming. The union is primarily a means of increasing bargaining power for its members. Therefore, this decision by WMF can be seen as intentionally weakening their employees' bargaining power.
It’s quite common that that also extends to negotiation on salary bands, and it’s also quite common the company then applies the same salary bands to non union employees also, rather than the norm in tech of individual negotiation. Many people think they’re in the group that is negotiating outlier salaries and would lose from this. However, many people with that viewpoint are also wrong about their position in the salary scale.
Sometimes this extends to promotion criteria and some unions push for tenure or seniority based promotions. This may or may not be better than your individual companies specific combination of merit, nepotism, the political clout of your managers and the business criticality of your department.
One thing that happens in the US that is illegal here is some companies agree to becoming a union shop and make joining the union compulsory.
By federal law, if a company has a union, the union must represent ALL non-management workers, even those who do not pay dues.
This is obviously fucked up. But this has been union law at the NLRB for a long time.
The fair response: a union should only legally be responsible for representing its members. But these sorts of terrible union laws are the consequence of attempting to destroy them since their creation.
And for those of you who think unions are terrible (capitalists and ilk), what we had before was 'firebomb the business or the bosses house', and basically waging war between capitalists and labor. Unions and legal representation WAS the compromise.
Labor history has always been a bloody and murderous affair. Go look up the history of the pinkertons.
This is not true. There can be non-union job classes even if the employer has some unionized employees. Even in different geographic areas you can have one location have class X union and another non-union (eg Starbucks).
What you cannot do, is have a unionized location with union Software Engineer I and non-union Software Engineer I. Sometimes employers try to skirt this and have non-union jobs that are too close to union jobs, and then it's lawsuit time.
2. Given the very low rate of unionization in the USA, I think the issue you need to be most concerned about is no-benefit gig work instead of a huge wave of unionization.
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
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.
I guess except the game developers but the most realistic threat vector for them is the studio shutting down, so a union wouldn't really help.
You may unfortunately understand this soon, if the products of the tech industry do what they promise to do. But it will be too late.
Power has shifted dramatically in favour of the ownership class in the last couple of years. That's precisely what unions are meant to counterbalance.
If employers have the upper hand at the moment, the union contract will be more evenly distributed perhaps, but isn’t likely to be “better” overall.
That combines to have tech workers, who often have an exceptionalist view of themselves, to conclude that a union would cost them all the union overhead and prevent their exceptional talent from being properly rewarded.
Aside from general job protection stuff, the general answer would be that they can ensure that some of the productivity gains go to employees rather than employers. Let's say the company has been so much more efficient thanks to AI that they earn an extra 100 million in revenue with the same level of spending. So, the union goes into contract negotiations asking for a 50 million increase in salaries per annum, and employees get part of that windfall.
It's really hard for me to imagine the conjunction of significant disruption from AI and effective union bargaining.
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?
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.
https://npeu.org/
I... wonder if you don't know what a non-profit corporation is or how they work?
handling a reduction in work is one of the things a union is for
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.
But rest assured that this isn't some new, unique moment in history. The exact same questions could have been raised during the introduction of automation in literally any industry throughout modern history. And yes, unions have, through that same period, acted as a critical bulwark in protecting worker rights.
Honestly, all pretty reasonable demands.
[1] https://wikiworkersunited.org/focus-areas/
Tech workers historically have had it made in terms of compensation and work environment. Additionally good tech workers have historically had more leverage over their employer than an average worker. So it makes sense that many would be reticent to mess with a good thing. But here we are at the dawn of a new era. Nobody has any idea what tech employment will look like in ten or twenty years.
I would happily be in a union in tech. Maybe I wouldn’t if i was making 300k in the Bay Area but I am not.
But this is obscene. I’ve cancelled my donation.
> [W]e believe a secret-ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board is the appropriate path forward. This process protects individual choice and ensures that any outcome reflects the collective will of those eligible to participate.
> [Jimmy Wales:] One of the problems with the process so far is that it was not secret and we have heard from some staff members that they felt pressured because the organizers would know how they decided. That isn't a great process and it goes against our movement's values quite badly to have people in a situation where they are pressured into something one way or the other.
Counter-argument
> The community response to the WMF statement has mostly been one of dismay, with fears that the Foundation will use the time gap between now and the secret ballot to discourage employees from union involvement, using union busting methods as described humorously in an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
The episode is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk8dUXRpoy8, a transcript is at https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/tv-series/union-busting-last-w...
---
Honestly, I'm on Wikipedia's side: there should be a true secret ballot. It should be soon and I'd be fine seeing the union win. Sure Wikipedia can use threats and propaganda in the meantime (so can Wiki Workers United), but that is less coercive than a public ballot.
The secret balloting process is a second phase activated only if the company alleges that the cards were signed under duress. Wikipedia is saying they believe that people were coerced into signing these cards in order to activate the NLRB process. They have to say that the cards are improper or recognize the union.
As far as i can tell, this is a straight up lie. Union organizers might know, but legally they are required to keep who signs a union card secret.
If voluntary recognition happened, as far as i understand, part of the process would be for a neutral third party to verify the signed statements. So if someone was pressured, the verification person would call them up and ask if they really meant to sign, and they could just say no. [Ianal, this is just what the pro union people are saying on wikipedia]
Mission accomplished for Jimmy Wales then, "aw shucks I like unions but there's this one thing about a process that has worked for literally every other organization effort. Wouldn't want those volunteer organizers intimidating workers!"
C.f. Dario Amodei: "I LOVE open weight models, they just need to pass this little safety test, who doesn't want safety?"
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?
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.
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/
Seems like the solution is to just allow ad-hoc anonymous votes upfront?
I appreciate you walking me through this though!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Humans just don't do hierarchy well
[1] https://wikiworkersunited.org/focus-areas/
This is just silly. Management are the most accountable people in any organization. This makes no sense.
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.
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.
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.
Then again we still don't have universal healthcare and now even more million have lost health insurance due to cost so I guess it's stupid all the way down
People just keep voting against themselves. might be billionaires someday so gotta protect dubious "rights" of the ultra-wealthy just in case
The entire conversation around unions in the USA is a cartoon, basically.
But if people don't know what rights they have lost, or are convinced by studies that talk mostly about growth or the freedom of capital rather than the rights of people, or accept the framing of things like crudely compare the GDP of the poorest US state with EU states or the UK and say, "look, they are worse off than us", they will never understand the basic, useful functions of ordinary, professionalised unions.
I am a freelancer so I don't have access to one, really, but the framing I like best about unions is: imagine what it would be like if the HR department was ever actually on your side. That is what a union can do.
Definition of oligarchy: like a dictatorship, but with more than one dictator.
I am inclined to assume that you are paid to oppose unions online.
Also your recent comment history consists entirely of angry contrarianism.
Check comment history. Does not seem to engage in productive dialogue.
Believe it or not, not everyone who disagrees with you is some paid shill. Like... really? Hilarious. Grow up.
Whether it's true or not, making dubious arguments from a relatively new online account is actually indistinguishable from trolling. Your replies are not helping the matter.
> [W]e believe a secret-ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board is the appropriate path forward.
Honestly, that was the point where I stopped reading and hid this story.
They used a non-secret election! Fuck them tbh. Jimmy Wales is entirely right here.
The claim that the Foundation totally supports the right to unionize but wants to hold a secret election would be a lot more credible if this happened before the workers had a supermajority (!) of signatures collected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_check
They followed a process. Secret ballots are also an established process. From your own link:
> Since the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) became law in 1935, card check has been an alternative to the National Labor Relations Board's (NLRB) election process.
My understanding is that a secret ballot election is actually the more common scenario.
> The claim that the Foundation totally supports the right to unionize but wants to hold a secret election would be a lot more credible if this happened before the workers had a supermajority (!) of signatures collected.
Do you really envision a situation where a supermajority of signatures were collected from fully non-coerced and well-informed employees, but some union-busting magic is going to cause them to lose a secret ballot election?
I envision this because I've seen the same strategy used elsewhere myself (in the unionization context) and delaying to wear down opponents is a common strategy (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay,_Deny,_Defend)
> They followed a process.
Both of the processes require collecting signatures in the same way, the difference is what happens afterwards and when. Even for the election they would have to collect signatures, so claiming that collecting the signatures was somehow "wrong" for not being a secret vote suggests either a lack of understanding or intentionally trying to muddy the waters.
"Can you prove that only employees voted in this?" "Can you prove there was no ballot stuffing? "
I am not generally pro-union, I believe it has it's place but have also seen downsides but I have seen these games played out before.
It's all fear mongering around a very balanced response from the WMF.
Could they engage in union-busting? Sure. Did they? No.
Wow insightful.
The mere existence of The Mythical Man-Month or Peopleware does not prevent this behavior. Turns out it's actually super, super hard to avoid. It's pervasive enough to have several books written about it, and several more angry blogs written about specific companies' failure to achieve the allegedly "easy, obvious" thing that very, very few companies actually succeed at doing!
Makes me wonder if it's not so obvious or so easy... hmm... Nah, probably everyone else is malicious and/or stupid.
I worked in AML tech for a bank earlier in my career. I put up a fight against this misuse of terminology for a while, but eventually just gave up. Just embrace that everything is money laundering to many people and life is easier.
It reminds me of when health fads take off. Everyone "has OCD" or whatnot. I'd talk to people and they've given me a rundown of who they claim they were, but lol, they weren't that person.
Everyone can identify and use words however they want. Once it goes viral the meaning of the word changes. It's difficult to parse who people are nowadays cuz of it.
There's no sense fighting it. Someone will tell you you're wrong, you're out of touch, you just don't get it, or "your vibe isn't right".
Or worse, government giving favorable regulatory decisions to companies that donate to foundations that in turn lobby the government to do things that it has no public support to do?
These are all actual money laundering, and the salaries (and resumes) of the people who are involved reflect this. This is not "I don't like how they are spending money" or "they are incompetent." They're not hiring white shoe union busting law firms because they're dumb, petty, or short-sighted.
Otherwise it seems like you're just describing abstract forms of malfeasance which is very uninteresting.
No it definitely has not
Do you think I was literally saying the financial definition has changed?
I have to confess, I've never heard anyone talk about money laundering in the way you suggest.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
Also want to highlight that WikiPortraits is not just covering the fancy events like FIFA and Cannes, but many more smaller and undercovered events as well (indigenous festivals, science conferences, literature festivals, and so on). World Cup coverage in particular was relatively very cheap for how high-visibility the photos are on Wikipedia (majority of matches were covered locally); we've put more towards getting wiki photographers in Benin, Ghana, and Kenya support to cover their local culture and events.
For the amount of direct impact we have on Wikipedia and Commons, I'll go to bat to say that it's a good use of money compared to a good number of other projects that have received more funding over the years (ofc I have a conflict of interest here, but still). But I do get the larger point, that this sort of project is not necessarily what people expect when they donate to Wikimedia (and Cannes and FIFA of course stand out in the list of events being covered and are what people will focus on). And I've also been critical of the WMF's approach to donation comms for this reason.
No individuals should be donating to wikipedia, it is clear that any donation will be spent as rapidly and as wastefully as possible.
I don't know much about this situation, but I know it is possible for unions to basically be a group of drama-oriented bullies that pressure their coworkers to join. A secret ballot seems like the right way to ensure it actually reflects the will of the employee base.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_laundering
lololol
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
Infiltration is just one tactic that a law firm that blares their union-busting credentials on their home page can certainly advise your c-suite on. Worker intimidation, employing informants, exploiting regulation loopholes ...
Just ask wikipedia! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_busting#Labor_attorneys_...
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’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.
Unions have few friends in power, so we can assume this is not a false flag by WFs enemies. Nobody is forcing Jimmy Wales to put his name to a union-busting sentiment. Let's examine it:
> I want a process where staff are safe to deliberate in the privacy of their own minds and make the decision based on all the available evidence that makes the most sense to them. So I don't think insisting on a proper vote is process for the sake of process and I say that with my own estimate that the staff will vote to support unionization. I think we'll be in a better place if it's really clear - a clean and clear choice with no chance of pressure.
If he really believes they will vote for unionization then why would he insinuate that there will be some nefarious "pressure" applied by volunteer organizers? Blocking an outcome he claims to expect because he wants workers to be "safe": remember, workers are organizing precisely because they don't feel "safe" with management.