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Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA

wikiworkersunited.org

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

#91

Post by PorciiVorbesc »

uqers wrote: post #87
PorciiVorbesc wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Could you give an example of an article that was protected for reasons other than preventing vandalism? I've seen other people bring this up, but never with evidence.

Someone's opinion is always gonna be someone else's vandalism.

I could bring an example, but then what protection do I have from the HN mob flag-bombing it?

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

#92

Post by colechristensen »

OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote: post #32
colechristensen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right? If your logo[1] is going to be a fist raised in defiance you'd better at least have something you're trying to fight about. And if you're going to brag about succeeding in your vote at least give an idea about WHY you want a union in the first place. There are unionization attempts I understand like Amazon warehouse workers and unionization attempts that I don't like the Minneapolis small coffee chain workers…

> Right? If your logo[1] is going to be a fist raised in defiance you'd better at least have something you're trying to fight about. And if you're going to brag about succeeding in your vote at least give an idea about WHY you want a union in the first place. The raised fist is union iconography. It is commonplace among all kinds of trade union, union, and other labor orgs. And this is one of the things that's really…

>The raised fist is union iconography. It is commonplace among all kinds of trade union, union, and other labor orgs.

>And this is one of the things that's really annoying about trying to explain the appeal of unionising. You don't need to have a bad workplace first to have a union.

Some reflection is in order. If you're annoyed about constantly having to explain what you REALLY mean, perhaps your message and your symbolism need reconciliation.

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

#93

Post by Waterluvian »

PorciiVorbesc wrote: post #91
uqers wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you give an example of an article that was protected for reasons other than preventing vandalism? I've seen other people bring this up, but never with evidence.

Someone's opinion is always gonna be someone else's vandalism. I could bring an example, but then what protection do I have from the HN mob flag-bombing it?

You're entitled to no protection, nor are we entitled to you providing an example. But if you don't want to provide an example, your claim immediately turns to dust. This is just the fundamental core of rationalism.

The sky is green. I won't be taking any questions.

(actually the sky really was green a few days ago, related to tornado weather!)

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

#94

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

parineum wrote: post #83
serbuvlad wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If anyone wanted to do the math, that's an average of 175k per person

It's 175k per person including all benefits. Which is probably like 140-150k per year before the myriad of employer-paid payroll taxes and before the employer-side pay for insurance plans.

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

#95

Post by PorciiVorbesc »

Waterluvian wrote: post #93
PorciiVorbesc wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone's opinion is always gonna be someone else's vandalism. I could bring an example, but then what protection do I have from the HN mob flag-bombing it?

You're entitled to no protection, nor are we entitled to you providing an example. But if you don't want to provide an example, your claim immediately turns to dust. This is just the fundamental core of rationalism. The sky is green. I won't be taking any questions. (actually the sky really was green a few days ago, related to tornado weather!)

> But if you don't want to provide an example, your claim immediately turns to dust.

That's not how it works in reality. If people disagree with the example it's dust anyway, except now you also wasted your time.

My opinion is irrelevant here since if people have made up their minds that WIkipedia is not biased and takes sides, then no example will suffice and they simple ask for an example just to have a target to shoot at.

I've been on this rodeo before. There's no guarantee of a good faith argument when politics are involved. I have no guarantee I'm not dealing with people arguing in bad faith trying to bait for a flame war, so I'd rather not even start to save time and sanity.

If you think it's dust, then so be it, I don't mind, I don't lose anything from this, nor do I gain anything from trying to convince you I'm right. I have my opinion, you have yours and we can leave it at that.

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

#96

Post by aliasxneo »

Arubis wrote: post #79
bitshiftfaced wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ri…

> living in a society that treats lack of income as deserving of whatever pains and suffering

What does the opposite society look like? Universal income?

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

#97

Post by codersfocus »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #77
philipov wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See OpenAI

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

#98

Post by NoImmatureAdHom »

Grombobulous wrote: post #89
NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would submit the idea that a lot of union reforms that have been made to laws in the US have been specifically designed to make unions less attractive and less incentivized toward positive outcomes.

Sounds plausible!

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

#99

Post by PorciiVorbesc »

cortesoft wrote: post #82
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It makes sense for the employees to want to lock in their share of the bag. That's the problem, isn't it? Suppose that e.g. Wikipedia traffic is down year over year because of AI summaries and then they get fewer donations. Now something needs to be cut. It's a non-profit so "investor profit" can't be that thing. If you then also make it so that it can't be workers, what's left? It's mostly either spending down sav…

One option would have been to stay small. Keep the yearly spend down where it was in 2010, don't hire too many more people, and save all the donation money they brought in. Build that fund in the good years to pay for salaries in the lean years.

>One option would have been to stay small. Keep the yearly spend down where it was in 2010

And what are the realistic chances of that actually sticking long term?

Same chance as corporations and governments keeping spending, corruption and cronyism under control long term. So, virtually zero.

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

#100

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #61
OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> And if you want to nail down into it that 75% for projects is going towards a lot of engineering work to support long standing gripes with wikipedia's tooling and infra. I do not believe it's possible to spend that much money on those things in an effective way.

You can see the breakdowns of what goes where in the links I included.

Half goes directly to engineering and support for infra. ~17% goes to equity projects. ~10% goes to safety & integrity. And the remaining 23% goes to "effectiveness" goaled projects.

The projects in the equity category are focused on supporting various smaller language Wikipedia communities get established and cross-translate articles.

The safety and integrity projects put a lot of work into protecting volunteers well being, general moderation stuff, legal compliance, etc.

The effectiveness category is a little weirder but it's mostly various "experimental" projects that attempt to address longstanding issues across the WMF without forcing them under a particular sub-org's budget potentially taking away funding from essential services.

NGL They could cut back across the board in various ways and save some money but if they have the money (and they do), I don't see anything outright wasteful that they are spending on. Everything seems pretty clearly like hedged bets to make things gradually better for the future.

And notably these are expenses. There's a gap between expenses and revenue and all that extra revenue gets invested into the endowment, etc to gradually support more and more of their operating expenses with time.

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