Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA • Hacker News Board

Re: Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA

#71

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 7:29 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #68

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The infrastructure isn't that much is the problem , because labor costs are the largest single expense. When you take that off the table as something that can be cut, you're then stuck needing to make up the difference from the things that never cost that much to begin with, which means the cuts you have to make to them to make up the same amount of shortfall are deep. > If they were paying each employee 10x as much…

Labor expenses can still be cut. Just not by screwing up wages. A union doesn't force you to keep the same number of employees forever. And if there's any meaningful shortfall it's literally impossible to get there with infrastructure cuts. Nobody sane would try it, since the target would be negative one thousand percent costs.

They have the inherent incentive to inhibit you from doing layoffs, and the same incentive to stop you from replacing existing workers with different ones since the existing ones get a vote and the prospective replacements don't.

> And if there's any meaningful shortfall it's literally impossible to get there with infrastructure cuts. Nobody sane would try it, since the target would be negative one thousand percent costs.

You can't make up a $35M shortfall exclusively from cutting infrastructure when you're only spending $3.5M on infrastructure, but you also can't make up a $35M shortfall by not cutting anything. And you can make up some of it from cutting infrastructure, so where does the money come from that didn't come from reducing headcount?

Re: Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA

#72

Post by philipov » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 7:32 PM UTC

PorciiVorbesc wrote: post #62

dbingham wrote: post #23

Lots of people asking "Why?". They say so right on their site: There are big changes happening in the technology industry and they are acting pro-actively to ensure the workers have a strong collective voice in the ways the foundation chooses to respond to those changes. "The Wikimedia Foundation and the broader technology and nonprofit sectors are navigating a period of significant change. From rapid advances in art…

Can someone explain why do they need a union when they work for a non-profit? Aren't they mostly volunteers? From my experience in my youth volunteering at animal shelters and environmental protection groups, you never volunteer for a non-profit for the money or the job stability, but you do it for the mission and the satisfaction of being the change you want to be in the world, even if that means living off ramen an…

Nonprofit doesn't mean you don't pay your employees. Nonprofits earn and spend money like any other corporation, including paying permanent fulltime staff. Not everything can be done by volunteers. What they don't do is reward their investors with a cut of earnings above expenses.

Re: Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA

#73

Post by collinmcnulty » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 7:33 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #43

collinmcnulty wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd imagine it must be pretty relaxed/cushy, albeit probably at the lower end of market comp for software jobs in particular. Based on what?

Mission-oriented jobs tend to be below-market. Open source, gaming, SpaceX, etc.

I wouldn’t describe any of those jobs as “cushy”.

Re: Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA

#74

Post by cbeach » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 7:35 PM UTC

cm2012 wrote: post #25

Everyone wants a piece of the wikipedia gravy train. In 2010: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses were about $20m In 2025: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses are about $200m The story of Wikipedia of the last 10 years especially is endlessly higher spending for a very stable number of monthly users (1.5b or so). You can make the case that 80% of this spend is not necessary to what the average users donating to Wik…

> In 2010: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses were about $20m

The numbers are worse than that. FY2009-10 expenses were $10.3M. FY2024-25: $190.9M. 19x increase in fifteen years.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statistics

Salaries alone were $106.9M last year (from the Foundation's own Form 990 FAQ). And it's not as if the money is needed: the Foundation holds $296M in assets, plus a further $169M in a separate endowment.

Wikipedia's own editors held an RfC in 2022 and found "broad, near-unanimous consensus" that the donation banners were misleading - the ones hinting the site might go dark without your £2.

  https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-foundation-donate.html

The spending grew anyway. What do donors clicking those banners imagine they're funding?

Re: Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA

#75

Post by PorciiVorbesc » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 7:45 PM UTC

tux3 wrote: post #5

Waterluvian wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are editors employees in any formal way or are they closer to Reddit moderators? Or editors as in anyone, ie. Reddit posters?

Anyone can edit Wikipedia, editors are not employees. Even the admins are not employees. (As far as I know you only have to sign any kind of formal documents if you have one of the few roles (as a non-employee) where you may have access to sensitive personal data, which is very few people.)

>Anyone can edit Wikipedia

Hasn't been true in a very long time. Plenty of politically charged articles are locked so that only Wikipedia's editors can edit them, and you can guess which side they're taking. It's not a democracy.

Re: Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA

#76

Post by PorciiVorbesc » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 7:46 PM UTC

nostromo wrote: post #57

cm2012 wrote: post #25

Everyone wants a piece of the wikipedia gravy train. In 2010: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses were about $20m In 2025: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses are about $200m The story of Wikipedia of the last 10 years especially is endlessly higher spending for a very stable number of monthly users (1.5b or so). You can make the case that 80% of this spend is not necessary to what the average users donating to Wik…

> very stable number of monthly users Wikipedia has seen their traffic decline with AI eating more and more of their lunch. I imagine it’ll only accelerate from here. Agents are increasingly accessing Wikipedia, but do not make donations. There will be a lot of belt tightening at the foundation in the coming years.

>Agents are increasingly accessing Wikipedia, but do not make donations.

Irrelevant when donations from humans keep growing YoY way outpacing the actual expenses of running wikipedia. Half of people can stop donating tomorrow and they still would have enough money.

Having internet on your PC and your phone on the go didn't kill off the library, people still go there. Similarly, LLMs won't kill online libraries like Wikipedia.

Re: Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA

#77

Post by vjvjvjvjghv » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 7:53 PM UTC

philipov wrote: post #72

PorciiVorbesc wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone explain why do they need a union when they work for a non-profit? Aren't they mostly volunteers? From my experience in my youth volunteering at animal shelters and environmental protection groups, you never volunteer for a non-profit for the money or the job stability, but you do it for the mission and the satisfaction of being the change you want to be in the world, even if that means living off ramen an…

Nonprofit doesn't mean you don't pay your employees. Nonprofits earn and spend money like any other corporation, including paying permanent fulltime staff. Not everything can be done by volunteers. What they don't do is reward their investors with a cut of earnings above expenses.

You can make some serious money working at nonprofits.

Re: Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA

#78

Post by serbuvlad » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 7:59 PM UTC

OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote: post #49

cm2012 wrote: post #25

Everyone wants a piece of the wikipedia gravy train. In 2010: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses were about $20m In 2025: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses are about $200m The story of Wikipedia of the last 10 years especially is endlessly higher spending for a very stable number of monthly users (1.5b or so). You can make the case that 80% of this spend is not necessary to what the average users donating to Wik…

Half of that goes to wages and salary for ~650 staff members. Of the ~114M that goes to wages, 90M goes to people working directly on projects, 15M goes to admin/management, and the other 9M goes to people in fundraising/financials. 9M goes to paying donation processing fees. 3.5M goes towards network infra. ~2M of in-kind services were donated (i.e. doing free work or donating goods) and that shows up as a dedicated…

114M a year buys you only 650 people? Damn. I really should be moving to America at some point :)

Re: Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA

#79

Post by Arubis » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 8:01 PM UTC

bitshiftfaced wrote: post #56

Arubis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the right move. Unionise when things are good enough that labor can take a hit and keep standing, or when they’re so bad that people might actually die. Either way labor has a strong BATNA. Right now a lost of software work is kinda in the middle; it’s not very secure and labor isn’t confident and doesn’t have a lot of great, easy alternatives, but by and large getting food on the table tomorrow isn’t an open…

> or when they’re so bad that people might actually die Care to elaborate? Am I understanding correctly that the implication here is that there is some condition for which a software engineer having a union agreement could prevent that worker from dying?

Yes, certainly: the ability to say “no” to abusive labor conditions without risk of irreversibly losing any source of income while living in a society that treats lack of income as deserving of whatever pains and suffering come with it.

The word “any” is doing a lot of work here—I’m implying a denylist or “social credit score” or other way of persisting punishment against an individual beyond mere job loss.

You’re right that we’re not there right now. We’re in the wide middle and still closer to the “we have lots of bargaining power because we’re in demand” end of the continuum—_directionally_ it does not feel that way, but we don’t have a ton of folks dying of Boolean lung in the code mines. But I’d not rule out the possibility. The range of possible human experiences is vast.

Re: Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA

#80

Post by NoImmatureAdHom » Sat, Sep 05, 2026, 8:02 PM UTC

Grombobulous wrote: post #60

next_xibalba wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And all of that (along with the serious problems in how WMF/Wikipedia operate) is why I no longer donate to WMF. Clearly, they don't need my money. But if they ever want to bring me back into the fold, they need to adopt Larry Sanger's prescriptions. This unionization seems likely to push WMF (IMO) further in the wrong direction.

I think all employees should work for a union. My local art museum has a union. My local school system has a union. The non-profit university I graduated from has a union. Why shouldn't WMF have a union? I really don't understand the bitterness toward them. If you look at their data, their donations are growing faster than their expenses. The people who donate to Wikipedia/WMF want more money to go into the organizat…

My experience is that unions very often make things stupider and less efficient.

I've been forced to give to two of them that were basically just political cosplay by children (well really the $ was taken without consent before it was even in my hands, so it was stolen)

And I've had the displeasure of working in a factory environment that was unionized. Perhaps there was a time when this made sense, but I think those instances are rare now.

See e.g. https://www.voanews.com/a/dockworkers-join-other-unions-in-t...

Dockworkers deliberately making everything worse because they want to keep their employment exactly as it has been.