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Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA

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61–70 of 163 posts

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

#61
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…

> 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.

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

#62

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 and beans and couch surfing. Especially given these are cushy jobs done from the PC via the internet without needing to physically get your hands dirty or break your back in poor working conditions, which a lot of other young well intended and ambitious people in the world would like to do, even for free.

Everything I've been reading in the last few years about wikipedia's management, article moderation decisions, political side-taking, and how they spend their donations has been very fish smelling and off-putting. It's like there's a malicious Hydra in the basement, wearing the Wikipedia name I grew up with as a skin suit, to advance their goals and agendas. Very fishy. But it does feel like this is the inevitable faith of a lot of old and famous non-profits over time, as the gray-beard founding staff leave and get replaced by people who don't share the same values and mission, but have their own agendas and wish to co-opt the established name brand and influence that comes with it to push it. IDK if this unionisation push is for good or for bad since I'm not a fly on the wall at the internal meetings to know the internal drama and gossip, but I do remain skeptical about what's going on at the WMF.

Like maybe the union is well intended today, but will it be the same in 10-20 years with that power? What protection are in place they don't misuse it? For a global repository of knowledge like Wikipedia, I'd much prefer the staff be constantly changing with new ambitious innocent blood, rather than have an entrenched gerontocracy protected by a powerful union, since from my historical knowledge I've never seen that end well long term since long reign and absolute power corrupts.

My 0,02$.

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

#63
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…

So 1/40 of Reuters annual revenues, 1/1000 of Facebook annual revenues, is being wasted on ... lobbying governments against internet censorship and cross-subsidising translations into less popular languages?

How dare the most useful human knowledge resource spend the money freely given to it in such a way!

The 'Wikipedia is spending your donations on DEI' conspiracy has run its course I think.

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

#64

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…

The infrastructure isn't that much. If they need to be less ambitious about other projects I'm not going to worry about it. A union isn't going to make them keep every single project. If they were paying each employee 10x as much, and that got locked in, and then they didn't have the money to pay them, there would be bad consequences. But that's not what's going on here.

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

They're presumably paying the market rate either way. The issue is, what happens if they need to reduce the number of employees? Or they have too many front end developers and not enough back end administrators or vice versa, and then need to let some people go and hire others with a different skill set?

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

#65
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…

That is the sort of thinking that allowed tech companies to offer perks like remote work when labor power was higher, only to yank them away once labor was on the downswing.

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

#66
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…

> 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…

> you then also make it so that it can't be workers, what's left?

What was the core reason that readers gave donations? Probably most donors want employees treated well and to ideally keep their jobs, and yet the main thing they probably had in mind was the existence and continuation of the service itself.

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

#67

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…

They are not mostly volunteers. Editors are largely volunteers, but administration and development is very much a financed pursuit.

The nonprofit board can provide some oversight, but bringing workers voices to the table can provide additional perspective.

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

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The infrastructure isn't that much. If they need to be less ambitious about other projects I'm not going to worry about it. A union isn't going to make them keep every single project. If they were paying each employee 10x as much, and that got locked in, and then they didn't have the money to pay them, there would be bad consequences. But that's not what's going on here.

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.

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

#69
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?

Or prevent that worker's work output from killing innocent, uh... Externalities. Folks. Animals. Ecosystems.

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

#70
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…

Heavens forfend that those who work in an industry that preens and postures about innovation and reinventing every facet of life to be better try to build a better union. Oh, so taxis, software tools, the very act of courtship, loans, the concept of socialization can be innovated upon, but not labor unions? How unfortunate.
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