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Comment by hungryhobbit | Hacker News Reader

Man, it's sad how far the wiki foundation has fallen.

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.

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Unionization shouldn't be seen as an emergency measure. Even if I would hypothetically accept union as a last resort, which I don't, safety nets should be built not only when you are speeding towards the ground, and often lack the resources, but much before that, when you are safe.

> safety nets should be built not only when you are speeding towards the ground, and often lack the resources, but much before that, when you are safe

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.

Unions are a normal thing to happen to guarantee a check of balances, we are used to systems they have their feedback loop, if you have a one sided relationship you cannot have balance because one side will always try to push in their direction.

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.

> Unions are a normal thing to happen

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.

Or it can be seen as a sign of an industry that's maturing

Unions are a solution to a power imbalance, not a sign of maturity, neither when maturity is defined as "having attained a final or desired state" or as "having achieved a low but stable growth rate".

My perspective until now was that the Wikimedia foundation was already supposed to be a union-like organization. Would it make sense for Linux maintainers to form a union within the Linux foundation? The vibes feel similar to me.

You thought WikiMedia Foundation were like a union how?

Linux Foundation are a business league. Many Linux maintainers work for Linux Foundation members.

There are so many reasons being in a union is beneficial.

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.

Wikipedia has a lot of money, along with a valuable dataset (for AI); it was only a matter of time until rent-seeker(s) would come along and try to get it. As we saw with OpenAI, it is difficult to keep a non-profit dedicated to its public benefit mission when it has something of tantalizing value.

> it was only a matter of time until rent-seeker(s) would come along and try to get it.

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.

Foundation didn't create the dataset, just the framework for volunteers to do the work.

Yes, and? Could the dataset have been created without the framework?

The employees of the Wikipedia foundation did not create the dataset, though they definitely contributed to the infrastructure behind it. Sam Altman (and the OpenAI employees) contributed even more to OpenAI's continuing success (and that of their industry). Both groups are still rent-seekers, as they are attempting to profit off a market position which was developed under different auspices.

Did you see the subthread that the motivation behind this union does not seem to be collective bargaining over compensation, but in response to management's decision over personnel issues:

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.

>” 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.

In good faith I feel obligated to point out the following, so that those who may read this thread in the future don’t interpret any lack of a response on your part as an confirmation of your claims:

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.

Oddly enough, employers will often give wage increases more easily than other concessions. I’ve seen at least two union negotiation go that way - employees seeking better working conditions are given a hard no on something they are asking for like advance notice of scheduling changes but offered a wage increase in exchange.

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.

Oh, i don’t think I realized you were calling wikimedia rent seekers - not just the employees.

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.

> a valuable dataset

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.

The dataset is valuable in the same sense that water is valuable. It doesn't fetch a high price, because everyone can get it for free.

It's bleak it seems like wikimedia is controlled by the same ghouls who are running Mozilla.

Why is it so hard to keep a public interest tech firm honest?

Power, status, and control attract the same personalities, regardless of entity type.

It happens that these are also the types that are attracted to union leadership positions

Humans are imperfect, systems require continual improvement. I’ll take a suboptimal union over no union any day, especially in the economic human factory farm that is the US. Companies, governments, and unions are all just people. Sometimes we win, sometimes we learn, we try to win more than we learn.

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's fair, I have witnessed unions that took companies to the ground, were a center of corruption and created class favoritism between old and new workers.

That does not say it cannot work, or is never needed though

Some additional context: I have seen colleagues fired for illegal reasons, discriminated against, egregiously, as well as managed out through no fault of their own. I have seen terrible politics at upper management levels, which eventually rolls down to workers doing somewhere between acceptable and good work. Unions are, in my professional experience of ~25 years, the least worst option versus no union. I understand some have a different lived experience, or think they can do better on their own. I argue and support what the data and my lived experience tells me I should.

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)

As a union member you have a say over that.

Imagine if Mozilla's bosses were accountable to the developers

> For (literally) decades no one there would have even thought of forming a union!

Why do you feel so certain about that?

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