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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

#111

Post by jordanb »

armchairhacker wrote: post #41

Wikipedia's side > [W]e believe a secret-ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board is the appropriate path forward. This process protects individual choice and ensures that any outcome reflects the collective will of those eligible to participate. > [Jimmy Wales:] One of the problems with the process so far is that it was not secret and we have heard from some staff members that they felt pressu…

Wikipedia has to say that people were being coerced to sign the cards in order to activate the NLRB secret balloting process. The "normal" thing (as expected by the law) is the company recognizes the union once there are enough cards signed.

The secret balloting process is a second phase activated only if the company alleges that the cards were signed under duress. Wikipedia is saying they believe that people were coerced into signing these cards in order to activate the NLRB process. They have to say that the cards are improper or recognize the union.

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

#112

Post by hkt »

llm_nerd wrote: post #89
estearum wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Money laundering has become a default catch all term for "monetary misuse / suboptimal allocation". No it definitely has not

Among the generally misinformed public, which I was clearly referring to, yes, it absolutely has. Everything is money laundering. Do you think I was literally saying the financial definition has changed?

I don't think he thought that, he was probably expressing the view that he doesn't think the representative person's understanding of the term is the same as yours.

I have to confess, I've never heard anyone talk about money laundering in the way you suggest.

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

#114

Post by jordanb »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #63
estearum wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah for the counterargument like... if you were afraid of tipping your hand, maybe you should've done it the correct way (anonymously) the first time?

That's not how it works. You need the signed cards to hold an election. Employers can, seeing a large majority publically willing to sign the cards before they have any solid protections, choose to forgo the election on the basis that a majority of employees were willing to sign. If the only reason WMF had to request a formal election was to allow secret ballot, they would not be hiring union busting law firms. The p…

It's not that the company can forgo the election. The company must allege that the cards are improper in order to activate the NLRB secret balloting process.

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

#115

Post by PunchyHamster »

inigyou wrote: post #70
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #25

Remember that this is what your money funds when you donate to it...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... No wonder they've upped the guilt tripping this year. Wikipedia has enough money right now to run Wikipedia forever but it keeps wasting it on useless stuff and feeling like it needs more. The WMF cannot fathom how to operate without continuous growing wastes of money, and without donations, Wikipedia would die within two years. We need to starve the bea…

Feels like where Mozilla went

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

#116

Post by neilk »

inigyou wrote: post #70
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #25

Remember that this is what your money funds when you donate to it...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... No wonder they've upped the guilt tripping this year. Wikipedia has enough money right now to run Wikipedia forever but it keeps wasting it on useless stuff and feeling like it needs more. The WMF cannot fathom how to operate without continuous growing wastes of money, and without donations, Wikipedia would die within two years. We need to starve the bea…

I don’t know if you’re joking or not but of course Wales doesn’t profit directly from this. And, as a non-profit, compensation of executives is public knowledge. I believe Board members get zero compensation other than reimbursement for travel expenses.

(Jimmy Wales did cash in on his reputation with some ads for luxury watches and idk what else he does for $).

Salaries at the WMF have absolutely exploded, though they started out very low given the location and the talent base they were competing for. You probably want the WMF to be a somewhat competitive employer, and Silicon Valley salaries are also through the roof across the board. So those $400K executive salaries are (grating my teeth) vaguely justifiable.

A volunteer-run page summarizes salary progression in key roles (up to 2024)

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...

So you can be assured your money isn’t going to the executives’ bank accounts, not directly anyway. However, this is precisely why non-profit organizations tend to get bloated. The executives can’t get away with a million dollar salaries and not other goodies like stock grants. But you can justify staffing up, which benefits the careers of the executives.

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

#117

Post by hkt »

Turskarama wrote: post #85
estearum wrote: post #50

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…

People have been told for so long that private companies are more efficient than government that they have started to simply believe it, as if the problems of large scale organisation aren't universal.

Some cracks have emerged in that, at least in the UK. Trains, water companies, etc, all used as solid examples of private sector waste and extractiveness.

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

#118

Post by TSiege »

sassbadger wrote: post #71
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #25

Remember that this is what your money funds when you donate to it...

I have donated to them for many years and will stop now. I will not support any kind of union busting.

Be sure to tell them why you stopped. I’ll be doing the same. Hopefully this pressures them to give up on this

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

#119

Post by llm_nerd »

hkt wrote: post #112
llm_nerd wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among the generally misinformed public, which I was clearly referring to, yes, it absolutely has. Everything is money laundering. Do you think I was literally saying the financial definition has changed?

I don't think he thought that, he was probably expressing the view that he doesn't think the representative person's understanding of the term is the same as yours. I have to confess, I've never heard anyone talk about money laundering in the way you suggest.

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 attention to it way more than you do, and probably have a much better perspective on this. I constantly see people refer to almost all misuse or misallocation of funds as money laundering.

Maybe you just don't know what money laundering actually is? Because the vast majority of the public certainly doesn't.

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

#120

Post by bix6 »

ericmay wrote: post #23
evolve2k wrote: post #16

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…

> Lots of research shows that generally places where unions exist have better work conditions and perform better over the long term. Do you have any non-partisan sources for this? Genuinely curious. When you say perform better what do you mean specifically? And does better work conditions include better pay or just on-site conditions or something similar?

https://www.nber.org/digest/202508/unpacking-union-wage-prem...

They earn more and are more productive. Here is one Canadian study but I’m sure you can find more if you’re interested.

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