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Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA

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

#101

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

colechristensen wrote: post #92
OneDeuxTriSeiGo wrote: post #32

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. 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 sy…

Just because a workplace is good currently does not mean it will always be good.

The fist is a fist none the less because the workers have the power if they need to use it. The hope is that they never have to but if changes in management force the workers' hands it is far better to be already organised and ready to correct management than for the workers to have to scramble to organise after the fact.

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

#103

Post by pessimizer »

Lot of people discovering the value in having a union after they've lost all of their leverage.

There's nobody more replaceable than the maintainers of a collaborative encyclopedia. A lot of AI will fail where the rubber meets the road. For wikipedia, the rubber never meets the road.

They were dropping a lot of anti grokopedia (I think that's what it's called) shadow press releases a while back. They gradually disappeared, and I started seeing slop showing up on wikipedia. I'm officially starting the countdown until the talk pages disappear.

edit: first stage is that they go behind a registration wall. This will be justified by AI-written comments.

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

#105

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#106

Post by AndrewKemendo »

aliasxneo wrote: post #96
Arubis wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It looks like a healthy extended family where resources are shared towards a common goal of health and liberty.

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

#107

Post by therouwboat »

NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #81
insom wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that this fundamentally comes from thinking that unions are only there for the worst possible jobs in the worst conditions, or where outright abuse occurs. And also from the (imo incorrect) idea that you should have those bad conditions before organizing. Unions even the balance of power between the executives and labour at an organization. Even if WMF conditions are perfect and there's never any abuse of pow…

Yes, but if you don't allow corporations to lay off people when it makes sense you end up with low salaries, meaningless jobs, and economic stagnation (like Europe). Europe is nice to visit but a giant pain in the ass to do business in. Certainly don't even consider aspiring to anything. If you can manage that, then yeah...France, Spain, and Italy are cheap and have good food and weather :-)

You can fire people when it makes sense, for example if there is not enough work, but you cant lay off half of your workers and demand that the rest work twice as hard.

In my country we don't have minimum pay in law, but union contract defines minimum pay and they also negotiate collective salary increases. So everyone (even non-union workers) gets higher pay because of unions.

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

#108

Post by 20after4 »

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.

Wikimedia foundation actually have a rather large endowment¹ set up from donated funds to help sustain the organization through a hypothetical future downturn. I'm sure it wouldn't sustain the current level of spending but it would theoretically cover minimal operating expenses.

There are a lot of things to criticize about Wikipedia but lack of financial planning probably isn't top of the list.

1. https://wikimediaendowment.org/

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

#109

Post by groundzeros2015 »

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…

6 million dollars in conferences sounds like a lot? Are they holding the conference?

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

#110

Post by groundzeros2015 »

Grombobulous wrote: post #59
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…

Thank you for breaking this down. Every time Wikipedia comes up the exact comment parent to yours is posted in some form. This comment and all its flavors is posted by a contingent of people out there who: 1. Think that Wikimedia is a wasteful, corrupt organization full of greedy employees (I guess that could be true? Doesn't seem that greedy to me given that they've never run an advertisement or enshittified their p…

This completely supports 1. The extremely useful website provides the funding for all the much less useful efforts.

And of course it’s not immoral greedy people. It’s ordinary greedy people who like comfort, security, and doing interesting work.

And yes the admins want more money so they can do more projects and have more people work for them. And that’s also a kind of greed for status and importance that people who work in admin typically have.

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