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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

#41
post #20
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions are not just for bad employers.

Yes nowadays new unions are basically for employers who have a very ideologically liberal workplace - coffee shops, open source, etc

Steel workers, pipe fitters, air-traffic controllers, electricians? There are LUs for each of these popping up all the time. Admittedly they are new chapters for existing large unions but also these jobs have existed for a lot longer, in larger numbers, than "software developer" and barista.

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

#42
post #27
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This is divide-and-conquer rhetoric from someone who doesn’t want labour power. Workers would be much better off if we all stood together no matter how much we were paid or what our conditions were. Edit: oh I see, your bio brags that you’re a scab, that explains it

after having had unions literally put me out of work as a blue collar employee - yes. i've had enough of them.

my family has also been in a long line of tradesworkers, and they have been continually screwed by their bargaining be it with the state trades, with nursing unions.

unions did nothing to save the hundreds of manufacturing jobs that were destroyed and taken away from upstate New York.

massena new york is now an absolute drug-ridden shithole but they still run around celebrating the handful of steelworkers that still somehow kept a job up here out of the hundreds and thousands across industries that got fucked.

so you know what? these white collar union LARP demands are just frustrating to stare at and look at and see how cushy they've had it while my brothers and sisters sit in rot.

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

#43
post #6

Is Wikipedia a bad place to work or something? I'd imagine it must be pretty relaxed/cushy, albeit probably at the lower end of market comp for software jobs in particular. Does the union stipulate the workers cannot be replaced with AI?

> 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.

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

#44
post #42
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is divide-and-conquer rhetoric from someone who doesn’t want labour power. Workers would be much better off if we all stood together no matter how much we were paid or what our conditions were. Edit: oh I see, your bio brags that you’re a scab, that explains it

after having had unions literally put me out of work as a blue collar employee - yes. i've had enough of them. my family has also been in a long line of tradesworkers, and they have been continually screwed by their bargaining be it with the state trades, with nursing unions. unions did nothing to save the hundreds of manufacturing jobs that were destroyed and taken away from upstate New York. massena new york is now…

Sorry to hear that but the alternatives are worse, as should be obvious.

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

#45
post #6

Is Wikipedia a bad place to work or something? I'd imagine it must be pretty relaxed/cushy, albeit probably at the lower end of market comp for software jobs in particular. Does the union stipulate the workers cannot be replaced with AI?

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…

Wikipedia has a pretty fat bag. It's not like the devs were peeing in water bottles at their desk...

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

#46
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 2025: Wikimedia Foundation annual expenses are about $200m

Am I correct in understanding, the $200M annual spend include the salary of those workers. And in case of any mass layoffs incoming, they are forming an union to better bargain?

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

#47
post #42
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is divide-and-conquer rhetoric from someone who doesn’t want labour power. Workers would be much better off if we all stood together no matter how much we were paid or what our conditions were. Edit: oh I see, your bio brags that you’re a scab, that explains it

after having had unions literally put me out of work as a blue collar employee - yes. i've had enough of them. my family has also been in a long line of tradesworkers, and they have been continually screwed by their bargaining be it with the state trades, with nursing unions. unions did nothing to save the hundreds of manufacturing jobs that were destroyed and taken away from upstate New York. massena new york is now…

I'm curious: Why do you arguments against unions not equally apply to employers? Why do you blame the unions and not the companies responsible for it in the first place? Especially when you proudly admit you're partially responsible?

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

#48
post #30

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…

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…

[flagged]

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

#49
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 expense.

Professional Services (accounting, consulting, etc) make up another 15M (same as the total management/admin cost).

General operating expenses (property, taxes, office software, office equipment, etc) make up 8M.

Conference and Travel is 6M.

And then 4.5M is expensed as depreciation and amortization of owned assets.

-------

So to be entirely clear here. WMF projects make up 147M / over three quarters of the total expenses for the year. Fundraising makes up 20M all together (half being essentially fees and the other half is people running fundraising campaigns). And the remaining 21M / 11% is general admin.

11% is quite good for such a large foundation.

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.

https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2024-2025-annu...

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

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

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

#50
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…

Worst is that there is zero interest to deal with sock puppet accounts, state actors or just typical cliques

I saw a pair of an admin and other person (probably sock puppet) that were used for edit wars, the 2nd account was used to ban edits, especially from non registered users.

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