Wikimedia Foundation Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Form Union with CWA
wikiworkersunited.org
wikiworkersunited.org
"The Wikimedia Foundation and the broader technology and nonprofit sectors are navigating a period of significant change. From rapid advances in artificial intelligence to evolving organizational priorities and external pressures, and changing patterns of readership and discovery, the decisions being made today will shape our workplace for years to come. Our union members believe this is the right moment to establish a lasting, legally recognized voice in those conversations. Rather than waiting until difficult decisions are made, we are organizing now to help build a stronger Foundation that can meet future challenges through collaboration, transparency, and shared stewardship."
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 question.
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?
The word “any” is doing a lot of work here—I’m implying a denylist or “social credit score” or other way of persisting punishment against an individual beyond mere job loss.
You’re right that we’re not there right now. We’re in the wide middle and still closer to the “we have lots of bargaining power because we’re in demand” end of the continuum—_directionally_ it does not feel that way, but we don’t have a ton of folks dying of Boolean lung in the code mines. But I’d not rule out the possibility. The range of possible human experiences is vast.
What does the opposite society look like? Universal income?
Step one would be to help them get into a situation where that wasn’t true
You’re correct. A society filled with people with this view can’t work
In the Europe, like several rich western countries, we mostly replaced the extended family with the government welfare state, for better but mostly for worse.
So current young workers are contributing to a failing state ponzi pension system that will leave them in poverty by the time they retire in several decades, and they will also lack the care of the extended family unit that was the norm decades ago thanks to collapsed birth rates. Double whammy.
The median cortical volume fails beyond dunbars number, so some kind of compensation is needed
Instead let’s break away from opposites and into pieces. What would be _different_ in a society that doesn’t judge harshly the less fortunate?
I’d suggest that would include ensuring that nobody starves or sleeps on the street for want of work.
Universal income protects only basic needs and it does so in part. Even if you have income, you need to have housing, clean water, food that isn't poisened and some form of healthy environment to live a good life: income doesn't guarantee it.
On the other end of the income spectrum is the unlimited amassing of wealth. After some point, wealth turns into power. For example, Musk is able to buy twitter influencing public opinion, and Starlink can make or break the battlefield.
If we are talking only about income, I think we would need both a minimum (universal) income and a maximum (a cap on wealth). If we do not, then we will eventually lose democracy.
https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-workers-vote-on-whethe...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49143414
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikitech-l@lists...
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$.
The nonprofit board can provide some oversight, but bringing workers voices to the table can provide additional perspective.
No. Common misconception. It's a business and career like any other.
> experience in my youth volunteering at animal shelters and environmental protection groups
Just not applicable, here.
Then why should we treat Wikipedia any differently than we treat Meta, OpenAI, Google, Apple etc? When they're just in the business of making money and the "mission" can always just be another facade similar to OpenAI?
>Just not applicable, here.
Explain please.
I'm not sure we should. Should we? How so?
> Explain please.
Explain the difference between youth volunteer-work and vocational career-work?
All it would need to do is object to any in person hearing
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 Wikipedia think of as "wikipedia".
It makes sense for the employees to want to lock in their share of the bag.
Related:
"We now have evidence of how at least $7.7 billion for homelessness was spent on salaries. They created a jobs program that grows at the expense of the actual homeless who need help instead of helping the homeless."
Also - you have no evidence for '95% of NGO's and their ilk'.
This is not Twitter.
So they get around centuries old restrictions on governments, get taxed like charities and donate heavily to political campaigns. That set of properties can and should draw significant criticism. When you act like they are charities, it just makes you seem naive. If they were charities, they would call themselves charities.
They are entities that have a civic purpose, not for profit.
Yes, they can in some cases support political causes, that is normal.
You seem to have a narrow view of what 'community' is aka something is either a 'charity' or 'government' - the world is more complicated than that.
" That set of properties can and should draw significant criticism. " - no, the properties of fine.
They can be scrutinized like any organizaition: charity, private company, ngo, government, etc.
America Medial Association, AARP (retired people) are NGOs, they advocate for their causes, that's perfectly reasonable and normal.
They are not 'for profit' obviously, and they're not strictly charities.
People can group together and organize as they please. Donations to NGOs are not tax deductible.
2) We have different regulations for different types of institutions
3) NGOs specifically exist to get around those regulations
4) A lobbying group (AARP) should have specific rules around how it can function. Lumping them with a professional standards organization makes it impossible to have reasonable anti-corruption laws. That's why NGOs exist, to make it impossible to enforce corruption laws. There is literally no other reason for it to exist as a category. We already have categories for lobbying groups and professional groups and charities.
If they had a true civic purpose, they would call themselves charities. The specific reason they don't is because an audit of their spending wouldn't meet the standards of a charity. Remember, charities can take government money. They just can't do it in exchange for a service. NGOs can. That's not about civic purpose. Its about different administrative standards. Standards that allow abuse. That's the entire point of them using the term NGO instead of charity.
NGOs are not charities, they exist for a different reason.
The American Medical Association is 'civic purpose'.
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?
Discussions of unionization have been ongoing for many years, they only gained momentum recently due to the some recent events that, AFAIK, have very little to do with overall job security or any threat from economic forces or AI eating Wikipedia's lunch.
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.
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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_...
Clearly, they don't need my money. But if they ever want to bring me back into the fold, they need to adopt Larry Sanger's prescriptions. This unionization seems likely to push WMF (IMO) further in the wrong direction.
I really don't understand the bitterness toward them. If you look at their data, their donations are growing faster than their expenses.
The people who donate to Wikipedia/WMF want more money to go into the organization. That's the whole point of the donation. What else do you want them to do with the money exactly?
I've been forced to give to two of them that were basically just political cosplay by children (well really the $ was taken without consent before it was even in my hands, so it was stolen)
And I've had the displeasure of working in a factory environment that was unionized. Perhaps there was a time when this made sense, but I think those instances are rare now.
See e.g. https://www.voanews.com/a/dockworkers-join-other-unions-in-t...
Dockworkers deliberately making everything worse because they want to keep their employment exactly as it has been.
I'm not sure it touches on the exact concept I said, though. I've read about it somewhere else that I can't find right now.
The PreK teacher at the local public school has been there over 10 years at the same school and has a masters degree. Union, of course.
I’m sure the public school system is more expensive overall. You get what you pay for.
Or how about Hollywood writers? The Writers Guild of America writers are responsible for most of the most successful movies and TV of the past decade or two (maybe longer). WGA writers are treated better than just about any other screenwriters around the world.
This comment and all its flavors is posted by a contingent of people out there who:
1. Think that Wikimedia is a wasteful, corrupt organization full of greedy employees (I guess that could be true? Doesn't seem that greedy to me given that they've never run an advertisement or enshittified their product)
2. Think that Wikimedia should operate more similarly to a for-profit organization with investors (e.g., it should start downsizing and stop investing in its platform because it stopped growing in MAUs)
3. Think that Wikimedia is being financially irresponsible and will run out of money (even though their own data shows that donations have grown faster than expenses)
I think we can just accept that Wikipedia gets a lot of donations and has the luxury of hiring people. And they really don't have that many employees given their traffic.
I don't get upset that my local art museum can buy better art when they get more donations even though the same number of people visit the museum every year. The people who donate to Wikipedia want more money to go into Wikipedia.
And of course it’s not immoral greedy people. It’s ordinary greedy people who like comfort, security, and doing interesting work.
And yes the admins want more money so they can do more projects and have more people work for them. And that’s also a kind of greed for status and importance that people who work in admin typically have.
I do not believe it's possible to spend that much money on those things in an effective way.
Half goes directly to engineering and support for infra. ~17% goes to equity projects. ~10% goes to safety & integrity. And the remaining 23% goes to "effectiveness" goaled projects.
The projects in the equity category are focused on supporting various smaller language Wikipedia communities get established and cross-translate articles.
The safety and integrity projects put a lot of work into protecting volunteers well being, general moderation stuff, legal compliance, etc.
The effectiveness category is a little weirder but it's mostly various "experimental" projects that attempt to address longstanding issues across the WMF without forcing them under a particular sub-org's budget potentially taking away funding from essential services.
NGL They could cut back across the board in various ways and save some money but if they have the money (and they do), I don't see anything outright wasteful that they are spending on. Everything seems pretty clearly like hedged bets to make things gradually better for the future.
And notably these are expenses. There's a gap between expenses and revenue and all that extra revenue gets invested into the endowment, etc to gradually support more and more of their operating expenses with time.
Disclaimer: I work for the wmf
Long term it's far cheaper and gets you more, higher quality images than trying to hunt down images and negotiate license terms on each one.
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.
Do you live in the same universe where elon musk was work 1 trillion?
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 savings (which isn't long-term sustainable) or sacrificing things that ought not to be, like infrastructure or servicing technical debt. So now you've put off a given percentage of layoffs for a few years until that catches up to you and sinks the whole foundation.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
You can't make up a $35M shortfall exclusively from cutting infrastructure when you're only spending $3.5M on infrastructure, but you also can't make up a $35M shortfall by not cutting anything. And you can make up some of it from cutting infrastructure, so where does the money come from that didn't come from reducing headcount?
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.
And what are the realistic chances of that actually sticking long term?
Same chance as corporations and governments keeping spending, corruption and cronyism under control long term. So, virtually zero.
There are a lot of things to criticize about Wikipedia but lack of financial planning probably isn't top of the list.
Non-profits get corrupted through spending on well-connected vendors.
Wikipedia has seen their traffic decline with AI eating more and more of their lunch. I imagine it’ll only accelerate from here.
Agents are increasingly accessing Wikipedia, but do not make donations.
There will be a lot of belt tightening at the foundation in the coming years.
Irrelevant when donations from humans keep growing YoY way outpacing the actual expenses of running wikipedia. Half of people can stop donating tomorrow and they still would have enough money.
Having internet on your PC and your phone on the go didn't kill off the library, people still go there. Similarly, LLMs won't kill online libraries like Wikipedia.
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.
The numbers are worse than that. FY2009-10 expenses were $10.3M. FY2024-25: $190.9M. 19x increase in fifteen years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statistics
Wikipedia's own editors held an RfC in 2022 and found "broad, near-unanimous consensus" that the donation banners were misleading - the ones hinting the site might go dark without your £2.
https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/wikipedia-wikimedia-foundation-donate.html
They seem to say they'll accept the outcome and pledge to engage in good-faith. Which is the only correct response, really, so time will tell if these words are more than generic PR.
(As far as I know you only have to sign any kind of formal documents if you have one of the few roles (as a non-employee) where you may have access to sensitive personal data, which is very few people.)
Hasn't been true in a very long time. Plenty of politically charged articles are locked so that only Wikipedia's editors can edit them, and you can guess which side they're taking. It's not a democracy.
I could bring an example, but then what protection do I have from the HN mob flag-bombing it?
The sky is green. I won't be taking any questions.
(actually the sky really was green a few days ago, related to tornado weather!)
That's not how it works in reality. If people disagree with the example it's dust anyway, except now you also wasted your time.
My opinion is irrelevant here since if people have made up their minds that WIkipedia is not biased and takes sides, then no example will suffice and they simple ask for an example just to have a target to shoot at.
I've been on this rodeo before. There's no guarantee of a good faith argument when politics are involved. I have no guarantee I'm not dealing with people arguing in bad faith trying to bait for a flame war, so I'd rather not even start to save time and sanity.
If you think it's dust, then so be it, I don't mind, I don't lose anything from this, nor do I gain anything from trying to convince you I'm right. I have my opinion, you have yours and we can leave it at that.
Anyone can be a Wikipedia editor, assuming you haven't done something egregious and gotten a lifetime ban.
It takes no time at all to set up an editor account and you don't even have to divulge your real identity to do so. The Wikimedia Foundation appears to go to great lengths to defend their editors and has gone to court to defend their editors' rights to pseudo-anonymity.
Note: I am a former employee of Wikimedia and everything I saw while I worked there supports that the vast majority of staff, including management, care a great deal about protecting editors, promoting free knowledge, and making the project as open and inclusive as possible.
Firstly, not all articles are open to editing by gen-pop. See: Extended confirmed protection on many.
Secondly, some pages that are hot on the political side can then become subject to broader Wikipedia contentious topics / discretionary sanctions rules, so even eligible editors who qualified for extended confirmed protection edits, must fall in line with the approved narrative or risk sanctions and have their edits reverted to what the WMF staff admins and Arbitration Committee or ArbCom decide who gets to have the objectively correct viewpoint in certain cases and who doesn't.
>The Wikimedia Foundation appears to go to great lengths to defend their editors and has gone to court to defend their editors' rights to pseudo-anonymity.
OK, but why are you bringing this up? I never claimed otherwise. All I said wikipedia is very selective with who gets to edit some topics and what its admins and arbcom consider as "valid sources" and which not, leading to entrenched biases on political topics. Wikipedia defending editors is a good thing but an offtopic derailment addition to what I was originally talking about which had nothing to do with this.
Mostly as disclosure that I worked there. Not trying to make a point about anything at all. Just offering my observations as a former employee.
It’s similar to the way traditional media outlets that pride themselves on not being partisan in what they say, simply exert their bias via what they either don’t cover or inconvenient context/facts they leave out. The writing itself is seemingly neutral, except for the part where if they included the stories or details that run counter to their belief system, their readers might come to a problematic conclusion.
I am well aware of the existing Wiki slant, it’s certainly not perfect especially on highly political articles. But an imperfect attempt at NPOV seems better than no attempt at all.
Unions are a great idea, but some modern unions have been corrupted, focusing less on worker solidarity and improving conditions/pay and more on unrelated “omnicause” topics that are destructive to both the workers and the company. Emphasis on some, which is why I said it may be fine. It’s really hard to tell in advance.
Executives have always been a potential source of problems, nothing new there.
The issue of leadership corruption in unions is well-known and definitely does _not_ lead to the kind of PC tyranny you're worried about here.
To be clear, what I'm objecting to is the "harrrumph I'll support worker's unions IFF they hew exactly to my non-working-condition-oriented values and demands." How about just supporting the workers?
Public service unions (teachers, police, corrections) are of course highly political and often get involved in things way beyond work conditions and pay.
In the current political environment it’s not a stretch to imagine a union attempting to change Wiki policy to achieve political goals. Wikipedia is a public good and I would highly oppose this.
I’m more pro-union than most, I support having a union rep on the board as in German companies, but I think this should come with both designated powers and limits. The union gets a vote on the direction of the company, but they don’t get to dictate it, which would effectively be a seizure of the company. When it comes to work conditions and pay, they get a much stronger vote, strong enough to force fair compromises. That’s the union deal.
Co-ops are a better model for workers who want to join a company where they have full democratic control.
These are examples of workers leveraging their collective strength to do something that putatively a majority of workers support (modulo corruption/bad leadership of course). Shall I now give you the endless scroll of management doing all of the above and worse? Yes, union workers have a modicum of power to impact company operation, but it's not built-in to the concept of collective bargaining and indeed your Google example "attempted" to do something; management can simply do it.
> it’s not a stretch to imagine a union attempting to change Wiki policy to achieve political goals. Wikipedia is a public good and I would highly oppose this.
Wikipedia is not a "public" good. There is no mechanism preventing Wales and co taking it whatever direction they want.
> Co-ops are a better model for workers who want to join a company where they have full democratic control.
Co-ops are indeed great, but Wikipedia is not offering to become a co-op. You are arguing for "designated powers and limits" on one side only. If you're "pro-union" you have to accept that this grants powers to the collective, and if you start putting brakes on it without doing the same for management, it's anti-union.
The point of a private company is that it is owned and steered by the private owners, while a public company is owned and steered (through the board) by public investors. Now you may say that neither of these models should exist, but if that’s your position then the public should put it to a vote. Capturing and subverting companies through the back door inverts the entire ownership model without democratic input.
I actually do think that we should consider rewriting the model for public companies, at least, but it should be done democratically unless we’re opening the door to ending the current Constitutional order. Which may also be a possibility, but until then, the country still nominally operates under that framework.
Also, Wikipedia is “owned” by a nonprofit foundation governed by bylaws and values aligned with the public interest. This is much better than being fully private.
In a US context, with none of these kinds of arrangements in force, I do not accept arguments against much anything restricting worker's rights to organize here as there is so little alternative and even after organizing, true collective bargaining can be thwarted almost indefinitely (look at Amazon warehouse union efforts for examples of post-formation stonewalling).
In the German case or wherever there is a seat at the table for unions, a discussion can indeed be had. Here, I have zero sympathy for management which holds all the cards most of the time. Wikipedia in particular engaged a notorious anti-labor lawfirm to help their noble effort so I do not trust them in any way.
I do think more union rights need to be enshrined in law, and the only way to get there may be mass protest like a general strike, but it would need to be politically well-timed. Unions in the US are anemic by design.
There's nobody more replaceable than the maintainers of a collaborative encyclopedia. A lot of AI will fail where the rubber meets the road. For wikipedia, the rubber never meets the road.
They were dropping a lot of anti grokopedia (I think that's what it's called) shadow press releases a while back. They gradually disappeared, and I started seeing slop showing up on wikipedia. I'm officially starting the countdown until the talk pages disappear.
edit: first stage is that they go behind a registration wall. This will be justified by AI-written comments.
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?
That wouldn't get them off the hook.
I’ve never been to lunch with one, although my son worked as a welder’s helper at a pipe-fitting company.
I’ll note one key difference. Software output and skills vary on a power scale. Blue collar work is often heavily defined by formal procedures and codes so that trained personnel are largely interchangeable from a business perspective (not always or completely true). So without a union it’s a constant race to the bottom because the labor is fungible and the only requirement for success is passing minimum criteria.
Based on what?
There are unionization attempts I understand like Amazon warehouse workers and unionization attempts that I don't like the Minneapolis small coffee chain workers whose demands included being able to decide the milk supplier. One seems like standing up for necessary rights, the other seems like cosplay.
The raised fist is union iconography. It is commonplace among all kinds of trade union, union, and other labor orgs.
And this is one of the things that's really annoying about trying to explain the appeal of unionising. You don't need to have a bad workplace first to have a union.
You can have a good workplace and it's better if you do. The point of the union is to codify structures that empower workers to keep their workplace good and drag it back to being good if problems arise.
This is a solidarity union and therefore the leadership are not paid. They are exist to provide a counterbalance against the management chain and provide a safe avenue for workers to communicate concerns and have them addressed. Notably one where they are on the side of the worker and not the side of the company (HR has its use but it's also often going to side with the company).
The wikimedia union's purpose according to https://wikiworkersunited.org/focus-areas/:
Our international union will officially empower the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) workers to work together with WMF management to address long-standing concerns, including:
- Encouraging transparency and accountability on various issues from WMF leadership toward both the WMF staff and the Wikimedia movement communities
- Ensuring staff are heard and have effective ways to provide input on policy changes or annual planning (ideally while in deliberation and not as post-factum pushback)
- Prevent questionable or unclear hiring, firing, promotion and other HR practices
- Guarantee ability to safely express dissent
- Advocate for mental health support for staff
- Advocate for pay and benefits equity that makes sense to the staff
- Hold management accountable to promises made to staff
Many of the concerns above have been raised by staff repeatedly over several years. Through unionizing, WMF workers can take proactive steps to address them in collaboration with management.
-----
Those are reasonable complaints and a union makes sense to provide a continuous mechanism towards improving on those concerns.
>And this is one of the things that's really annoying about trying to explain the appeal of unionising. You don't need to have a bad workplace first to have a union.
Some reflection is in order. If you're annoyed about constantly having to explain what you REALLY mean, perhaps your message and your symbolism need reconciliation.
The fist is a fist none the less because the workers have the power if they need to use it. The hope is that they never have to but if changes in management force the workers' hands it is far better to be already organised and ready to correct management than for the workers to have to scramble to organise after the fact.
Talking about how unions are for everyone and not about antagonism while adopting clearly antagonist symbolism while trying to take both sides simultaneously really sends the messages: A) we're cosplaying rebellion because we think it's cool and B) we're the ones starting the antagonistic relationship.
This is the problem with supporting unions rationally. They are sometimes necessary in certain industries and situations but also full of people who want to cosplay rebellion and grab power so they can abuse it instead of someone else.
Adopting a fist raised in defiance is definitely a way to attract cosplayers and repel support from everyone but the extreme. Particularly when your message loud and clear is "unions are for everyone not just those in trouble".
It's also raised in solidarity and in support.
And either way a raised fist is just basic union iconography and I don't see any issue
You reenforce this by flying flags with raised fists to represent knowledge workers at a nonprofit unionizing with nothing in particular that they seem to want to fix.
1. they very much have things they want to fix and they list them on said website.
2. Don't forget that WMF fired 7 people for trying to start the formation of this union. It had a peaceful formation at the end of the day but even if it's currently a pleasant workplace, that doesn't mean management won't throw you to the wayside the moment they see you as a threat or a liability. That's why you want a union. So you can fix shit and be ready to react should something happen in the future.
Unions even the balance of power between the executives and labour at an organization. Even if WMF conditions are perfect and there's never any abuse of power (which seems unlikely) -- you should want a union in place _before_ an org decides to do layoffs, or force a practice on its workers that they don't want.
I worked at a tech company a few years ago and the standard anti-union cliche from execs was "we already treat you well" but then about 20 months later they laid off 2000 people, including folks on parental leave. A bit late to try and organize a union at that point.
(edit: typo fix)
Europe is nice to visit but a giant pain in the ass to do business in. Certainly don't even consider aspiring to anything. If you can manage that, then yeah...France, Spain, and Italy are cheap and have good food and weather :-)
In my country we don't have minimum pay in law, but union contract defines minimum pay and they also negotiate collective salary increases. So everyone (even non-union workers) gets higher pay because of unions.
The median per capita GDP numbers say otherwise. I have watched Europe get noticeably poorer in my lifetime. Even the tourists can see it.
But having a union doesn't mean "never do layoffs" either -- it just means that they are negotiated. Usually that means severance packages are standardized and the layoff process is transparent. It also often means you have to try and place suitable employees internally, rather than let people go while you are actually still hiring for roles that they could be doing.
In general, even with a union, the company has far more leverage anyway (they control the money) -- a union makes it a negotiation between two organizations (one of which, the company, has more power) vs. a negotiation between the HR & legal departments of a company and one individual employee.
Why is everyone so apprehensive about democracy?
"On 3 September 2026, the WWU–US NLRB election was successful, with 158 of the 172 ballots cast supporting unionisation"
My read is this is privileged kids play-acting their political fantasies. You could just...get a job that pays 2-5x as much elsewhere if you actually want fair exchange of labor for money?
I would be shocked if anyone but the janitors was working at WMF in an "exchanging labor for money" sense.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Workers_United