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Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia

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Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia

#41

Post by thaumasiotes »

Wikipedianon wrote: post #34

Some English Wikipedia (enwiki) editors are striking. They are predominantly non-technical that are forced to maintain their own shadow IT-style infrastructure that Wikimedia (nonprofit owners of Wikipedia) doesn't provide. It is very difficult to be a productive editor without custom tooling at this point. The reason why is because the laid off team maintained the Community Wishlist, the main way for editors to feat…

>> Why is Wikipedia losing contributors

Perhaps because their message to new contributors is a consistent "stop trying to make corrections, and go away"?

Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia

#42

Post by mikebenfield »

dyauspitr wrote: post #38
roenxi wrote: post #29

Maybe I'm behind the times, but isn't Big Tech known as one of the best employers on the planet? I thought most of the tech workers were in the industry because the work is light, the conditions pretty relaxed compared to most jobs and the pay was high. Especially for an industry where anyone anywhere can just get involved and become a great coder.

I don’t know where you’re getting the work is light part. It’s long hours and incredibly stressful work. You’ll probably never hit this level of stress in years of trades work.

Having worked at two big tech companies, I’d say one was the most laid-back, stress free environment I’ve ever worked in, and the other was pretty middle of the road.

Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia

#43

Post by eikenberry »

roenxi wrote: post #29

Maybe I'm behind the times, but isn't Big Tech known as one of the best employers on the planet? I thought most of the tech workers were in the industry because the work is light, the conditions pretty relaxed compared to most jobs and the pay was high. Especially for an industry where anyone anywhere can just get involved and become a great coder.

You are behind the times... Big Tech lost that luster more than a decade ago when they turned into your standard cookie-cutter enterprise types.

Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia

#44

Post by skywhopper »

legitster wrote: post #36
hiddencost wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the countrary, nonprofits need unions more than for profits. They exploit their workers more. They have fewer resources and exploit their mission to get more work from their workers.

If I'm donating money to fight cancer, and the majority of the money goes to administrative staff, that's inherently a flawed charity. It's exactly what led to the downfall of the Susan G Komen foundation. There's also a death spiral problem. If donations drop and administrative costs stay the same, that charity's ratings only get worse. There's a reason most examples of successful non-profit unions all rely on stead…

What do you think the core purpose of the Wikipedia Foundation is? Do you think the engineers who write the code and operate the site are “administrative staff”?

Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia

#45

Post by bawolff »

To give context, it seems like what happened is WMF did two separate things:

- Fired one of the original developers of MediaWiki (the open source project that powers wikipedia) - Brooke. This person was at one point in contention to basically be BDFL of MediaWiki. She is somewhat less publicly prominent now compared to back in the day, but to a lot of oldhands this is shocking.

- Laid off community tech team. This is a team that basically did development work by popular demand (literally people voted to decide on what they would work on). In many ways the existence of this team was a band-aid on the problem that many Wikipedians felt WMF was not being responsive to their needs or working on things that were important. The team was extremely popular, and disbanding it felt like a middle finger to many. In particular to many people (including me) it seems extremely cold to lay people off during a reorg instead of reassigning them.

On top of that both were involved with unionization activities, which further fueled concerns that this might be some sort of retalitory step.

The onwiki discussions are at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(WMF)#W...

Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia

#46

Post by s1artibartfast »

dyauspitr wrote: post #38
roenxi wrote: post #29

Maybe I'm behind the times, but isn't Big Tech known as one of the best employers on the planet? I thought most of the tech workers were in the industry because the work is light, the conditions pretty relaxed compared to most jobs and the pay was high. Especially for an industry where anyone anywhere can just get involved and become a great coder.

I don’t know where you’re getting the work is light part. It’s long hours and incredibly stressful work. You’ll probably never hit this level of stress in years of trades work.

It is obviously a range. Most of my personal firends work a couple hours a day and get pampered.

Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia

#48

Post by slg »

roenxi wrote: post #29

Maybe I'm behind the times, but isn't Big Tech known as one of the best employers on the planet? I thought most of the tech workers were in the industry because the work is light, the conditions pretty relaxed compared to most jobs and the pay was high. Especially for an industry where anyone anywhere can just get involved and become a great coder.

Whether the average Big Tech job is better than the average job overall has no real relationship to whether Big Tech workers are being exploited. I think we can simply look at the number of billionaires that Big Tech has created as evidence that even those workers making relatively high salaries are being underpaid compared to the value they are actually creating.

Re: Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia

#49

Post by eaglelamp »

bawolff wrote: post #33
anigbrowl wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it sound like they're demanding multi-mmilion $ bonuses. FTA: The union’s demands are embarrassingly modest This is what Wiki Workers United is asking for. Transparency and accountability from leadership toward both staff and movement communities. Real staff input on annual planning before decisions are finalized. An end to inconsistent hiring, firing, and promotion practices. The ability to safely dissent.…

In what world is Bernadette Meehan a "wall street finance guy"?

From Wikipedia:

>After graduation, she worked on Wall Street, first at JPMorgan Chase and then Lehman Brothers. She later joined the United States Foreign Service.

Looks pretty wall street to me.

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