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Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm

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Re: Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 crap…

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.

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.

Re: Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 at…

Personally (n = 1), this thread was the first time I've seen the term "money laundering" used hyperbolically like this.

It's very very common. Look at the social media comments on any video that relates to fraud, grift, scams, or even a poorly run business. People say any use of money they don't like is "money laundering".

Re: Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think all these silly little acronyms and abbreviations are the real cancer. I don’t why people feel the need to use it. Poor communication skills in my books.

SV is so SV-centric that people in SV can only call SV "SV" and assume everyone outside SV knows what they are talking about.

We're on the newsite of a Silicon Valley venture capital fund.

Re: Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting! Wasn't aware of this. Given that they know the company may invoke NLRB's process and require a second anonymous ballot anyway, can organizers not start with an anonymous one?

No. There's basically a chicken and egg problem. It is not illegal to discuss unions in the workplace or to pledge support for a union. But the "union" has no standing to do anything other than talk to people. So to get a union you first need people to talk to their colleagues, and if the people they're talking to seem agreeable, get them to sign a card saying that they would like to be in a union. Once they have eno…

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!

Re: Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm

#187
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally (n = 1), this thread was the first time I've seen the term "money laundering" used hyperbolically like this.

It's very very common. Look at the social media comments on any video that relates to fraud, grift, scams, or even a poorly run business. People say any use of money they don't like is "money laundering".

I think this does extend to fraud, grift, scams, and other illegal behavior. I have never seen "money laundering" extended to just "being bad at business."

Re: Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm

#188
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 millio…

"Bureaucracy" has been an entire field of study for more than a century at that point. But WMF is not bureaucracy any more than the FIFA is bureaucracy. It is curruption; That of the stated ideals of the origin: non profit, decentralisation and democracy.

Maybe so, but the linked article doesn't even allege, much less prove that.

Re: Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm

#189
post #99
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 him…

Doctorow approved the generic use. He said he never meant for "enshittification" to only ever refer to the platform lock-in pattern. It refers to any way that things get worse on purpose.

If that's really the case, people should stop using the term as though it has explanatory power.

Re: Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-Mon…

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

You started the thread accusing a non-profit of actual organized crime, and then linking to (someone else's?) words, implying they endorse your claim, when it doesn't.

Not a time to flex the guidelines amigo. Maybe a time to clarify what you meant when you accused a bunch of people of a crime?

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