Wikipedia Workers to Seek Union Recognition
cwu.org
cwu.org
This conflation appears to be the fault of the union. Certainly the people who write Wikipedia well know the difference between themselves and the Wikimedia Foundation staff.
Smells like proper job to me!
We closed the same loophole with uber and doordash employees. Wikimedia should employ its editors!!!
No there is not. You don't have to sign anything to make edits to Wikipedia. On the other hand, these people are full employees with work contracts.
I (lawyer) have never encountered a jurisdiction where a contractor could not license their work under the contract with their employer (the person contracting them).
>> Unlike other IP rights, moral rights cannot be sold or given away. Even in the case of a sale, an author retains their moral rights in the work, unless they choose to waive these rights.
https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/canadian-intellectual-prope...
I was thinking about this as they were covering up murals and stadium names for the world cup. Canada doesnt really do that, but canadian stadiums are not generally named after tech companies (ie BC Place got to keep its name).
And if someone produced work for 15 years, and edited 10000 articles... very hard to argue it is not permanent worker!
Wikipedia can easily work as "marketplace of ideas", linking original authors. That is not possible if you have editorial policy, political opinions and work like a corporation or a news paper.
If for example you edit in racist views and leave the attribution of the original author because it’s just a one word change from “the holocaust” to “the alleged holocaust”, then yes you are open to a lawsuit for any harm that results from that malicious edit.
This is especially true with my example as that view would run afoul of criminal statue in many counties.
https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/michael-snow/key-works/flig...
Edit: I also wonder how or if this works in reverse, if someone wrote a fantastic article on numerology or whatever with a screed halfway through, would removing it from the article violate their moral rights? I think any framework where the answer is no is also probably going to be unworkable.
This is generally not true, but more importantly Wikipedia does not ask people to waive their copyright rights, only license it under a creative commons license. Its no different than how open source software works.
> The term "X-Windows" (in the manner of the subsequently released "Microsoft Windows") is not officially endorsed – with X Consortium release manager Matt Landau stating in 1993, "There is no such thing as 'X Windows' or 'X Window', despite the repeated misuse of the forms by the trade rags"[60] – though it has been in common informal use since early in the history of X[61] and has been used deliberately for provocative effect, for example in the Unix-Haters Handbook.[8]
Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
But it is mostly not very murky. Moral rights and commercial rights are distinct in a wide range of jurisdictions. You can generally waive commercial rights, and that is for the most part sufficient for things to e.g. be "functionally" public domain in the ways most people care about.
What moral rights prevent is generally speaking usually things like for someone else to take your work and simply put their name on it, or keeping your name on it but making changes that might do harm to the creator in various ways.
There are nuances between jurisdictions, but it's generally not more difficult than being respectful of the effects (positive or negative) of attribution and integrity of a work.
Note, the cc-by-sa 4.0 license that wikipedia uses requires you to waive any moral rights to the extent possible. In canada if you are the creator of the work, then you can waive all of them, so its really a moot point. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode.en
In general though, moral rights tend to be the sort of thing where they only come into play if you're being an asshole, so it mostly doesn't matter.
The pivotal case in canada involved a mall sculpture of some geese in flight. The mall put red bows on the geese during christmas. No dice. The original artist said that was an unacceptable change. They needed to get the artist permission before making such a change.
Giving up copyright when you write an article for Wikipedia is literally the only way it could possibly work. The biggest issue Wikimedia has is its full time staff, followed by full time editors.
Also here my name is right next to the text, not in wikipedia!
Platform vs publisher...
That's obviously false, if for no other reason than:
> and there is rigorous editorial process, to get my stuff published...
There are people who will see and review your work after the fact, but it's published immediately.
> Also here my name is right next to the text, not in wikipedia!
There's a link at the top of every page to see who wrote what text.
More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights
In proper jobs you get paid, and there is someone telling you what to do. Neither of those things apply to Wikipedia.
There is no NDA. The only exception is if you volunteer to join the group that deals with private data (this is not the same as being an Admin, its the step above. Its a very small group)
Comittees exist but are largely optional. If you want to change things at a meta level or do wide coordination, there is no getting around that. But such stuff is optional. You don't need to join any comittees if you just want to write articles.
Now, if you want to say its exploitative (editors put in the labour and get almost none of the created value), then fair point. I would say its no more or less exploitative than your average open source project.
It seems like there wouldn't be (and shouldn't be) any.
I'm not a lawyer and not in England or Wales! ;-)
Since then accountability sinks have stood out to me. I'm going to side with the Union on this one. And plus, unions are good.
Wait until you see what management does to workers, like fail to pay them on time, give them inhumane working conditions, or fire them arbitrarily.
Sarcasm aside, I've never understood this genre of comment. One second-hand bad experience and you seem opposed to unions for life? Unions are the only way workers can have anything like even footing with management.
Unions, though, spin up these stories of worker protections that haven't worked out in my life. When the unions didn't defend my colleague, I was pretty much gobsmacked. It was such a clear case. But in the end they didn't even give a reason. And they didn't have to because, well, they're a magical union and people like you reflexively love them and imagine that they'll defeat that evil capital. Hah. The scales fell off my eyes. I'm sure you'll experience the same one day.
I suspect its just because naming things concisely is hard.
Indirectly though my union does do stuff
I'm sure Alec Baldwin was happy he was a member of a union to represent him.
Why is it that so many union supporters point to entities like SAG and professional athlete unions in the US when advocating for unions, when they are a massive exception to the norm?
I would join a union like SAG. I have zero interest in being forced to make contributions to a political organization who has a passing interest in my well-being at best and is structured to benefit below-average workers.
If he can't leverage his power when he already represents 100% of the company's employees a union is unlikely to help.
Another larger union, which organises industrial workers, cleaning staff and generally people with less formal education, is almost twice the cost. They do negotiate at least base pay for the industries they represent. Many of the people they represent are often better off having their union do the negotiations. When handling negotiations it's obviously not only about money, but the unions do need to be able to provide at least raise in salary that can cover their dues, and sometimes they can't.
Not sure fighting fire with fire is the solution, a last resort.
The reasons fire is there? A system designed to allow it.
Republican jesus said: It would have been easier if the good Samaritan would have just taken the guys money without helping him.
I have this wild theory that civilization isn't actually about me. It means one can join a union without any direct personal benefits of any kind.
When for example my health insurance helps pay someone for their care I point first at them then at my chest and announce smugly, see? I paid for that!
No one thinks it's funny but that is not important, as long as I think it's funny it's a good joke.
The trial is over, it is now abundantly obvious that if everyone acts in their own self interest everything gets increasingly fucked up for everyone.
If you are hungry the free market gives you an advert for a sandwich you cant afford but would probably kill you slowly if you could.
Imagine retired people still being union members. Crazy right? They could have better spend their time looking at pictures of their children who never visit.
Ill let myself out
For example, look at "bumping rights". If a company needs to eliminate a union position, and this is occupied by someone with say 20 years seniority, that person can "bump" some other union member out of their position who has a lower seniority. So, that person whose role was eliminated can push a person with only 5 years seniority out of their position. And then that person with 5 years seniority can bump a person with only one year seniority out of their position. And the person with 1 year seniority has no one newer than them so they get laid off.
Was it in the best interest of that newish employee to be part of a union? So they can act as a meat shield for someone much further in their career who would theoretically be much more employable in the general market?
In UK to make someone redundant (ie fired not for cause) then the job has to be removed and only the holder of that job can be fired and not any other person.
Of course HR departments and consultants are paid to work around this
At least here in the UK our unions are heavily involved in politics - which is a massive issue. Currently, the leadership of the unions and the people in them are literally opposite sides of the political spectrum.
In Western Europe workers are very protected so unless you are in a low end job or specific public sector job and might gain from collective wage bargaining there is often little actual benefits in being in a union, taking into account that membership isn't free.
We have diverged significantly from my original point...
Just look at Finland. Here, the current government first made it illegal for unions to strike when the government takes action to weaken employment law, and then they significantly weakened employment law.
The only protection left is collective bargaining agreements, which can still uphold some of the old legal protections through contract law.
This was also only possible after decades of work by industry lobby groups to significantly weaken unions by targeting them with tax code changes, splitting up unemployment funds from unions (with the employers then founding their own unemployment fund, so that union membership is drained).
Unions are the only defense that workers have. If there are no unions, the employer can have their pick among desperate job seekers, and give them the lowest wage they can live on.
That's very clearly not true based on the situation in Western Europe, in fact legal rights tend to keep increasing even when union membership is decreasing (e.g. UK, France).
As said, jobs and society as a whole have evolved and noone can be elected in government by promising to take away important protections, what they can be elected on is promising to curb union power but that the unions' fault when they abuse striking action.
My understanding is that workers are extremely well protected in Finland and what's happened is only some restrictions on political and solidarity strikes.
Edit: Unions are not the only defense that workers have. We have democracy with all sides represented and nowadays (in Europe at least) more is done through elections than through unions. That's why I said that society had changed compared to the early days of the labour movement.
You would have to somehow disprove the reality of what has already happened in order to make that statement
It's a really popular ideology - it doesn't have any actual successes but since its followers don't believe facts are true the fact it's a dead end doesn't matter to them.
The major other defense is competition. If there were infinitely many workers then unions would be useless to begin with, because employers would just let them walk out and hire someone else.
Individuals can likewise use the fact that labor is finite to make employers offer more by credibly threatening to work somewhere else. This is trivially shown by all the people who make an above-median wage despite not being in a union.
You do, however, need competition for that, and in turn to not have laws that prop up incumbents and create barriers to entry to new companies (i.e. new prospective employers).
Yes. As sure as the casino fear the competition among players in games on which they unilaterally set the rules.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Labour_Party_(U...
They are therefore naturally detached from unions, and more worryingly, the every day reality of the electorate.
For some of these MPs, losing their seat at a General Election is the first time in their entire lives they've ever lost a job, unlike the general public that have to put up with routine dismissals, via redundancy, company bankruptcy and so on.
Here, I'll do it for you:
No, you are wrong it's the other way around
That sounds good in theory but as soon as you enter the workforce you'll realize that there is a huge range of capabilities thats difficult to capture but obvious to people in the weeds.
You'll also realize that strong workers want to work with other strong workers. Unions don't care where their unions fees come from so they protect all equally. This means they make it difficult to fire. Just look at police unions where they went to great lengths to "protect their own"
There are some benefits but I believe that accrue to the most mediocre or incompetent. Sure it sounds great that it's difficult to fire me and I know my salary for the next twenty years. But this is not what I'm trying to optimize for
That's a very theoretical view. (As most absolutes are.)
Unions and rules around unions can be very different depending on locality, industry and other specifics. The power and benefits a union gives a specific employee may not outweigh the cost they impose on that specific employee.
Furthermore, unions are organizations. They have their own internal power structures that can be corrupted by self-serving individuals or special interests. A blanket "union = good" view can make that invisible to you.
There's also LOTS of anti-union misinformation spreading in the US.
Denying people agency and power in their negotiation by claiming they are "not as good as someone else" is antithetical to the struggle of labor - work deserves to be compensated fairly.
>When I worked at a unionized place I was blocked from an opportunity my employer offered me because it was better than what the standard negotiated terms were
Your union blocked this because your employer was trying to break your unions negotiating power by separating your interests from the collective workforce. If people who are sympathetic to management and accept that they will be compensated greater by acting against the interests of the labor union, the union should block these promotions. If you don't want to protect your coworkers by negotiating with them, then you must be interested in exploiting them by negotiating against them. Labor is a zero sum game.
Labor is not a homogenous block. A huge chunk of workers are lazy as fuck and only do the bare minimum; it's unfair for people who work hard that their compensation should be lowered just so the lazy ones can be paid more. And lowered it must be, because a company only can only afford a certain total amount of spending on wages, so if the shirkers must be paid more than the hard workers must be paid less. It's not exploitation to pay the bare minimum possible to someone who puts in the bare minimum of effort.
If you work in a unionized workplace and have complaints about a coworkers capability, your complaints should first be heard by your union because your union is the arbiter of your labor force, as per the contract you sign with said union.
Guilds were (and in some non-US places still are) a solution to this issue, in which some level of competence must be demonstrated through time spent and qualifications earned to gain acceptance to a guild. Some unions in the US still practice this measure of trial for their members, but they are generally relegated to the skilled trades, and this isn't something that common labor unions do.
The question obviously being, what are you supposed to do if they fail to address it?
Suppose the union leadership brought in a bunch of their own incompetent cronies and is now making a hash of things, but you can't vote them out because those same cronies keep voting them in.
Also, how do you get to pick which union to be in? One can get certified even if you voted against it, or already exist at the company where you want to work.
Be that as it may, for this specific employee the union was a negative. In effect, he is asked to sacrifice for the collective. It's understandable that that's acceptable to the collective, but it's also not hard to see why the sacrifice wouldn't like that.
> The rising tide lifts all boats.
Apparently not ALL boats.
The tide is a local water level; every boat on the water is lifted by the tide. A swell or wave may lift one boat, regardless of tide.
Come on, that's not voluntary in any true sense - especially since the same justification could be made for not having a union in the first place!
Isn't that kind of the point? If you're good at your job and the company knows it, you could threaten to take a job somewhere else if they don't give you a raise. When there is a union, you can't do that, and the leadership uses your negotiating power to demand the things they want, which there is no guarantee has any overlap with what you want. Unions frequently demand things like seniority rules or retirement benefits (because the most senior people and those closest to retirement control the union), and compromise your interests for theirs if you're a new hire.
> Your union blocked this because your employer was trying to break your unions negotiating power by separating your interests from the collective workforce.
The trouble is that your interests are separate from the collective workforce. The company is selling its products for as much as it can. If it's in a competitive industry then its profit margins are thin and most of its revenue is already going to suppliers and employees. For someone else to get a bigger piece, yours has to get smaller. That's the consequence of your own logic:
> If you don't want to protect your coworkers by negotiating with them, then you must be interested in exploiting them by negotiating against them. Labor is a zero sum game.
If the union leadership doesn't want you to get the opportunity then they must be interested in exploiting you by negotiating against you.
> The company became an infamous example of the industrial turmoil that plagued the United Kingdom in the 1970s. Action by unions frequently crippled BL manufacturing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Leyland#1975%E2%80%931...
'work deserves to be compensated fairly' - are you talking about Marx's 'labour theory of value'? Even though Marx himself criticised it?
British Leyland were extremely reluctant to produce clean-sheet designs as well to save on R&D, which hampered their production capacity because production techniques were moving on from things that were complicated to assemble and maintain towards simpler assemblies which took fewer manual operations to put together. The Morris Ital and Austin Metro launched in 1980 fitted with an engine designed by Austin Motors in 1951 with the Ital inheriting a crudely widened (with deleterious effects on the handling) and very anachronistic front suspension assembly designed during World War 2 by Alec Issigonis debuting in 1948 on the Morris Minor while Vauxhall and Ford were selling cars with McPherson struts in the front and a twist beam in the back like you'd see in a modern car. The shop floor workers saw the problems, but they had no agency to correct them. The industrial disputes were a symptom of deeper rot.
> These internal issues, which were never satisfactorily solved, combined with serious industrial relations problems with trade unions, the 1973 oil crisis, the three-day week, high inflation and ineffectual management meant that BL became an unmanageable and financially crippled behemoth
(emphasis, mine).
But it's a thought process that depends on the idea that you're always in control of staying on the better side of the average in whatever metric a company chooses to judge employees. Which is a bold position to stake out without the anti-discrimination and working time safety measures achieved by unions that are at obvious risk of falling away without them.
Many of the freedoms to individually negotiate with an employer about rights and payment are underwritten by safety nets that are negotiated by unions, and everyone thinks themselves better than average until they aren't.
All above average employees I know don't need to worry about staying on the better of average for some arbitrary metric. If the company makes a mistake and fires them, they can quickly get a job elsewhere. It's the people who have no better alternative than their current job who need the protection provided by a union contract, and they have no better alternative because the company made a mistake in the other direction when agreeing to employ them, and the union's job is to bar the employer from correcting that mistake.
And yes, unions successfully fought for improved work conditions 100+ years ago. What have they done to earn their keep during the careers of anyone posting on this site? Why should I as a non-unionized worker today join one? It's certainly not going to improve my total compensation, and the people who did the hard work you mentioned are long gone so it's no benefit to them for me to pay dues into an organization they were affiliated with at some point.
Do you not purchase insurance? Same principle. Collective bargaining and buying power unlocks things even you, a wealthy above average human, might wish to have affordable.
> Why should I as a non-unionized worker today join one?
So they continue to exist and rules don't slide back further.
I mean if you are old and rich enough enough not to care about the next decade of working life then good for you, I guess. But society could very well be ripped apart by the very things that the tech industry is rolling out, and unions are one of the few things that stand in the way of absolutely massive regressions in the way humans who have the temerity to want to eat will have to tolerate being treated.
Personally I want to see them survive, and non-union workers joining them when they can is one of those ways that can happen.
(As an IT freelancer I cannot, meaningfully; I assure you that when my work pattern changes I will)
If that's the best case you can make, they're even more useless to skilled workers than I thought.
Would you like to buy some insurance against aliens destroying the earth as well?
Fearmongering and/or hand wringing about what could get worse in the future doesn't change that reality today.
The big risk to a worker is that they overestimate their skill level, which absolutely does happen, but those people are not in the above average pool I'm talking about in the first place and would in fact benefit from a union.
I'll give an example. I've had managers switched on me, and they've then said my salary has to be reduced because it's higher than the median. The organisation I work for also has a salary policy where every level you advance, your "personal additional percentage" is cut. This eventually reduces everyone to the same, lower level. This is the employer, not the union.
The union, otoh, backed me up when I wanted to keep my existing extra percentage.
The alternative isn't what is in your best interest, but what is in your boss's best interest
Also, if you are in ESOP that might change the equation as well.
As a school board member, I had to deal with the situation of a nationally recognized(awarded) teacher who got paid the same as every other teacher with the same degree and years in district. When asked why we wouldn't pay him what he is worth, the answer was simple, your union won't let us. Not every job type/environment make sense to have a union.
I think there are jobs where those distinctions don't matter as much, but creative jobs and other areas where the ability of an employee to deliver quality is very personal don't seem to work well with unions in my view.
I would have loved to pay that teacher more because he did so much more and had a huge positive influence on his students, but the union would never have allowed that.
Divide and rule is nothing new, and playing on the extra individual effort rewards is a very cheap trick to lower the working condition of everyone, possibly even the one doing the extra efforts. It doesn’t take a Nobel price in economy and a certificate of adhesion to Marxism to fathom this basic power dynamic leveraging on sociological imbalance, does it?
I prefer to be paid 150 than be paid 130 and my colleague 110. It is stupid to have as a goal to earn more than you colleagues. Your goal should be to maximize your own pay.
Baseball players, for example, are represented by the MLBPA. Collectively they get a say in things like setting the rules of the game and negotiating healthcare, but the union isn't taking credit when a player hits a home run.
In a jobs market where there are few employers, maybe unionize, because those employers are essentially a monopsony. Hence, in the UK, the NHS, teaching, and public transport, where the employer is the Government, they're heavily unionized.
First part - the British invented the modern labour union and there are still many, many examples of labour union negotiation every year that are highly visible to us.
Pro unionists will tell you that you are a sucker for being a good worker anyway, there is no reward, but what else would they say? Look at all the people who have independently moved up in a company or hopped jobs for better pay? Probably not.
For (literally) decades no one there would have even thought of forming a union! To get them to not only consider it, but actually go through the effort of actually doing it ... the foundation truly has shit the bed.
So, the people who helped create the valuable dataset are “rent seekers” now? Must be using a different definition of rent seeking than any i’ve heard.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48665062
Indeed, the OP does not mention increased pay at all, but rather "concerns over transparency, trust, and the organisation’s future direction."
You can go ahead and call that rhetoric, but you are also reading in intentions that do not seem to match reports from the ground.
This just seems like standard union rhetoric, like when they talk about quality, or caring about the company’s clients. If the union gets concessions on transparency, and less than a 5% raise for the first year, I’ll do my best to come back to this thread and post a retraction. I don’t think I’ll have to do that.
HN threads close automatically after a few weeks, so I don’t think that you would be able to do that even if you intend to do so.
Based on your own rhetoric, I am not convinced that you would even if you could, but I admit that parsing tone in text is difficult, and I may be mistaken. What comes across as sarcasm and hyperbole to me may be earnest and sincere to you.
In good faith, I must assume that you don’t know that HN threads close automatically, otherwise I must admit the possibility that I’m wrong, and that you do know this, and are exploiting the fact that others may not know this fact as part of your argumentative strategy.
Also, a 5% raise is approximately what inflation is likely to be this year (2.8% in the UK as of may) so if that’s all they get that’s basically a wage freeze.
I guess that does vaguely match the description of rent seeking. But given that the alternative is handing the AI companies the wikipedia data set for free, so they can rent-seek with it - i’m not sure I care about that.
It's CC-BY-SA/GFDL, and the underlying copyright belongs to the editors that wrote it. There is no commercial value in reselling access, and WMF does not have the right to relicense it.
Why is it so hard to keep a public interest tech firm honest?
I’m not delusional, I’m always going to be working class in compared to predatory wealthy people who do not need to work. I’m not a temporarily embarrassed billionaire. I’ll take every guardrail I can get. And so, I support unions, even though I do not need one. It is a decision based on logic and reason from first principles.
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1706
https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Labor-Unions-And-...
That does not say it cannot work, or is never needed though
I would only swim with sharks with a cage in between us to protect me, similarly. Labor regulations and unions protect workers from sharks, and sharks are everywhere (broadly speaking, sociopaths, narcissists, and those with dark triad personalities who ascend to positions of power in entities).
The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day: Narcissism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48639459 - June 2026
Marissa S. Shandell, Courtney E. Elliott, Adam M. Grant, Worship me at the office altar: Why narcissistic leaders resist remote work, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Volume 195, 2026, 104496, ISSN 0749-5978, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2026.104496
> Rigorous evidence shows that forcing people to come in every day backfires. Take it from studies of over 450 companies and over three million employees: Return-to-office mandates fail to increase financial returns. They succeed only in motivating star employees to quit, reducing the satisfaction of those who stay and discouraging new talent from joining. Experiments at tech companies and nonprofits show that letting people work from home part of the week boosts happiness and decreases turnover by a third — without any cost to performance. In many cases, those employees even get more done, because they don’t have to spend time commuting and don’t get distracted by office interruptions.
Khorram-Manesh, A., & Burkle, F. M. (2024). Sociopathic narcissistic leadership: How about their victims? World Medical & Health Policy, 16, 19–36. https://doi.org/10.1002/wmh3.588
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_triad
(the meritocracy does not exist, the hierarchy, status, and power games remain as it always does, and worker livelihoods cannot be left to luck and optional benevolence)
Imagine if Mozilla's bosses were accountable to the developers
Safety nets cost time and resources to build and come at the cost of agility. They shouldn’t be avoided at all costs. But a foundation in an industry where unions aren’t the norm taking that step can correctly be interpreted as a sign management fucked up. Given the foundation’s recent actions, that hypothesis is sustained here.
The tug between management and unions is the balance.
If you consider that safety is something that is impeding, you have never truly worked at scale nor considered what happens when accident happens, safety is to ensure continuous, painless operation, not impede it and is a baseline condition for trust which is essential to move fast.
Most jobs on the planet are non-union. Most jobs historically are non-union. Describing that as “a normal thing” ignores the amount of effort they take to erect and maintain.
> The tug between management and unions is the balance
The fundamental tug is between capital and labour. Management intermediates, normally, capital. (Owner managers are the exception.) Labour can be intermediated by agents and/or unions, though they’re far from “normal.” (More common is owner-management of labour, e.g. in small trades.)
> If you consider that safety is something that is impeding
Straw man.
Linux Foundation are a business league. Many Linux maintainers work for Linux Foundation members.
Developers should consider the likelihood of even modest efficiency gains from AI, along with a naturally cooling job market, cratering labor demand in software. Every shred of cushiness and every dollar above average in your paychecks is because you’re in a high-demand field, but it’s been that way so long that many developers have mistaken that for some sort of inherent specialness. Companies don’t pay people what they’re worth, they pay people what they’ll work for. If the demand for developer labor goes away, people that are as-or-more qualified than you will do your job for a lot less, and your employer will hire them and kick you to the curb. Being an ‘AI engineer’, unless you’ve got an advanced degree in ML or something, is no safety net. If you can make the transition from ‘developer’ to ‘fancy AI orchestrating developer’ in a few months, so can a lot of other people, and they’ll be looking for jobs.
The leverage might already be diminished enough to make unionization impossible in many places, but it’s certainly not going to get any easier. Consider it.
Why do you feel so certain about that?
When you destroy the entry level position, you also destroy the pipeline that creates senior engineers, a shortage of which is used as leverage to increase H1B in America.
It's okay, the same is happening across the board, everywhere. Companies are engineering their own labor shortage 10-20 years from now.
It always starts this way, and ends with over half the people not bothered but still under union protection, and cannot be removed.
Either way, no, if unions don't reduce how much people make and provide stronger worker's rights, protection from corporate abuse, workplace safety, collective bargaining for things like holidays, you can think it doesn't change your take-home at all and pretty undeniably see the benefits. How many weeks of legally mandated paid time off do you get, and how many additional days do you get on top of that as a median worker in the US? :b
For comparison: unions are at best toothless in Singapore, there's no minimum wage, yet we have some of the highest wages in the world.
I cannot think of any standard by which this is true, certainly not by nominal or PPP income for either personal or household income.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
[2]https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
Not looking at households or disposable income here but at hourly wages.
It's not wrong, it's just not very useful. It's typically a more intermediary statistic rather than a final one when doing this type of comparison.
Myopically focusing on wages while ignoring the many other concerns about the distribution of power and legal rights is a common misunderstanding.
Not every American citizen is having incomes like SWE in SV.
https://www.statista.com/chart/32428/inflation-and-wage-grow...
So like, the community was angry management was ignoring them. The response was to create a group to ensure some engineering time was put towards community priorities. Now that group has been fired.
But, we went on strike, got a pay rise, my disciplinaries were found to be baseless, I got a pay rise they hid from us.
Swings and roundabouts, but I have got two people fired -it takes time, and it's done correctly. Or the law gets involved.
I'll take a shitty union over not.
Wikipedia workers in Britain are setting a “global first” by becoming the first body of workers at the online encyclopaedia to seek union recognition.
and
Outside the United States, the United Kingdom is WMF’s largest employment location, and a substantial majority of its UK staff are union members.
Something is inconsistent here. Are they trying to unionize people who edit Wikipedia for free?
First is this, the second paragraph:
> British-based employees at the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) wrote a letter to management today (Wednesday 24thJune) requesting their right to be represented by the United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW) section of the Communication Workers Union (CWU).
That makes it clear that this is regarding the "British-based employees at the Wikimedia Foundation". Yes, the headline does say "Wikipedia": I expect the CWU chose that because many more folks know what Wikipedia is, vs. the Wikimedia foundation.
Second is this:
> Over 1000 Wikimedia volunteers and community members have also signed petitions in support of the workers, who have networked globally under the banner of Wiki Workers United (WWU).
I view terms like "[wikipedia] editors" as terms of art: "Editor" in the Wikipedia context maps to the more-generic "volunteer" in the broader context, which is why the post is referring here to "volunteers and community members".
So, I don't see any inconsistency in the article, but I see how the current post title can make it confusing.
In my opinion, I think it would be appropriate for you to email the HN folks, to ask the title be changed to something like "Wikimedia Foundation Workers to Seek Union Recognition".
Worth asking AI about local lawx...
Where, exactly?
> Union fees are usually exempt from tax
What do you mean? You pay taxes on other membership fees?
Yes, you pay income taxes (and insurances) on all membership fees like gym (about 50%). If you put money into union, and union pays your gym fees, you save tons of money.
But there is tons of legal bs around unions. You need to structure it, like you are promoting socialism, and only reason to go into gym, is to smash capitalism!
Per his tweet: "Well, that’s that—I’ve been blocked by Wikipedia “indefinitely” for unstated reasons, by the “consensus” of a mob. There was no due process, no prosecutor, no dispassionate judge, no jury, no interpretation of law. All my judges were self-selected and hated me."
Link to his June 22nd tweet on the matter: https://x.com/lsanger/status/2069061483422425287
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_no...
To be fair, there's a lot of text in that thread, but that is pretty unavoidable if the accusations have any sort of merit. He also actively participated in it, so he's probably actually read the majority of it.
Sanger has been given a lot more leeway over the years, because of his status as a co-founder, than anyone else would have been given.
the reasons were clearly stated, which he knows because he replied to them in the discussion.
whether you agree with the reasons is one thing, but this tweet is just a lie, and only serves to discredit him.
…what are they?
"There is clear consensus for a community ban of User:Larry Sanger. There is general agreement among participants that he has engaged in off-wiki canvassing and is not here to constructively build the encyclopedia. There is also a significant concern shared by many editors that his actions constitute calls for outing."
the discussion for his ban was public and he actively participated in it. the reasons for the ban are clearly stated in that discussion. he knows the reasons because he argued against them. so, saying they were “unstated reasons” is a lie.
the issue is linked by the sibling comment if you want more context and links to definitions of canvassing, bludgeoning, etc
Between calling it "stealth" and specifically calling out email/IRC/Discord, it makes it pretty clear that it is not referring to public platforms.
Iterpreting it as a ban on any public discussion of Wikipedia by Wikipedia editors, anywhere on the public internet, is a very dishonest move by the people involved in that thread, and you can tell the real reason for it by reading the many comments simply lobbing politically charged accusations against him.
Seeing folks over there policing violations of taboos that are enforced by a very small minority of the English speaking world (around 15-25% of the US for the combined equity-progressives and further left groups) makes me worry about this wonderful site, which has taught me so much over the years :(
shouldn't main way of demanding recognition by a union just be a strike?