I never would have heard about this if not for the fediverse
What a good use for donations!
Wikimedia, what the actual fuck…
Can’t wait for ol’ Jimbo to come by with his hand out this year, "Please dear reader, won’t you give us money to abuse our employees?’
I’m not familiar with how unions work in the USA. Why does a union need to he recognized by a company? Just to have a formal communication pathway or is there more to it?
I do know the answer to this. In the US, the process goes roughly so:
Workers want to form a union. Workers sign authorization cards allowing a specific union to represent them. The union approaches the company and says, we have enough of your workers who want to join, (50% +1) will you voluntarily recognize that your workers have formed a union.
At this point it can go a few ways. The company can demand proof that there are 50%+1 workers authorizing the union to rep them. A neutral 3rd party will inspect the cards and attest this to the National Labor Relations Board office in that state. Like a public notary or professional witness. This protects the anonymity of the workers.
The company can immediately, or following this process recognize the union. They can go to the bargaining table and strike a deal with the workers, or enroll with the union under the area agreement and get the workers signed up.
The company can refuse, like wikimedia did, and demand it go to an election. A date is set and the workers come in to vote by anonymous ballot wether to be represented by the union.
If the company is some real shitheels they’ll start dumping $$ into discouraging the workers from voting yes. They hire a union buster and hold captive audience meetings. The union buster tells the workers any kind of lies and bullshit they want, they are a 3rd party and therefore not liable for the bullshit they spout. They say the company will go bankrupt. The company can’t afford to have union workers. Unions are corrupt and suck you dry with dues and don’t deliver a better life for you and your family. Etc.
Companies frequently violate labor law during this time period. They give raises and benefits to anti-union workers. They fire union supporters (they will owe these workers back wages later). They lie to their workers, threaten the workers, intimidate the workers. Often this corrupts the election process and if the election fails, it can be overturned and repeated because of the illegal practices of the company and union busters. Their goal is to wear out and drive away pro-union workers by dragging the process on indefinately. When you see pickets, this is often what the picket is about. Informing the public that the company is mistreating the workers violating their right to form a union.
Wikimedia are some real shitheels.
INAL and even further away from am American one, but I shall inboke the law of Cunningham . Having the company recognising or just generally being okay with the union formation makes the whole process easier. No hiding your unionisation activities and such. I believe the role of the union-buster is to dissuade the employees from signing up to it, see if there’s any dirt on union leaders to have then fired, and to just generally be a royal pain in the arse for everyone.
If I got the story right a bunch of Blizzard developers got fired because they shared company secrets/IP in the same discord server they discussed their unionisation work, so Blizzard’s lawyers found an easy way to get rid of them.
Granted I don’t know much about the foundation, I wasn’t expecting such an organism, financed through donations, mostly built by the good will of contributors, to have the same values as amazon.
God dammit, this is like the moment the Titanic first hit the iceberg. No matter how this labor issue is resolved, it will permanently demonize Wikimedia. No matter how valuable Wikipedia is or has ever been, current culture provides no foregiveness or path of redemption after an ethical transgression. Again, dammit, I love Wikipedia and have been donating steadily for years.
Yeah I’m probably never donating again after this. Why even bother arguing with the current US administration when the foundation is just going to copy all the bullshit the administration is pushing anyway…like, congratulations now literally everybody is pissed at your service.
Yeah, not getting another dime from me.
Aaand bye bye any intent I ever had to donate again. Fuckers.
You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
A few months ago I cancelled my donations due to them firing a group of workers who stated their intent to unionize.
I’ve never even considered donating since I learned they have reserve that can cover site upkeep for decades, and the way Jimbo Wales spends the money. And this is like, more than a decade ago.
It’s the same for St Jude. They sit on millions in reserve and ask for donations that end up in the CEOs pocket.
Source?
Which one? There’s so many scandals St Jude is involved in. A 5 second search on Google will give you at least 20 different ones just on the first page.
Where they actually fired? From skimming your linked article it was more of a restructuring, moving them to different positions. The restructuring might be ill advised, though I could not find real information about any connection to the union topic, besides someone from the community claming that, without further information on that connection.
*Were
Find this reference on Reddit.
including those laid off, since some are still hoping to find jobs elsewhere at the WMF, and others are depending on severance pay
Am I too european to understand this? If they “get jobs elsewhere at the WMF” this is not a layoff, is it? I know the US has nearly no worker protections, so maybe that makes it a layoff. Do they need to interview for these positions again?
If this were something other than Community Tech, maybe I could convince myself it’s all just a coincidence. But the WMF has been on a generally upward trajectory at avoiding decisions that will piss off the entire community. “Don’t disband CommTech” might as well be the "don’t mess with the pancreas"of WMF governance. The only explanation for the WMF doing this—not just reörganizing but outright laying off the team—is that they are so determined to prevent the union from becoming official that they are willing to risk the massive community blowback (which, from a corporate-brain point of view, is a greater downside than the five people left jobless).
That paragraph I don’t understand. Why is union busting the only explanation?
From one of the comments of that Reddit thread:
the union was apparently formed exactly 90 days prior to the layoff announcement; under california state law (where they are located) “a termination within 90 days of protected union activity creates a rebuttable presumption that the termination was illegal retaliation”
I think that is an interesting detail here, though I have not bothered to go through the sources for this.
some are still hoping to find jobs elsewhere at the WMF
American translation: what happens here is you’re officially laid off. You then have to find an open position within the company and apply for it just like anyone else would. In theory, you’re supposed to have an easier time and the company will say they’ll help you. In theory. You still don’t have a job though and none of that is a guarantee. Most of us have sent out 2,000+ applications and get rejected regularly even from within our own companies. This can also succeed in firing you for a higher salary and hiring you back for less because that’s all there is. Or as we’ve seen, switching you from a full time position to a contract one, which does not require the employer to provide you with benefits like healthcare.
That paragraph I don’t understand. Why is union busting the only explanation?
Similar to what may have occurred at Rockstar games, to form a union we need to reach a certain percentage of employees to sign on and form it. If that number was being approached (all of this is normally done outside the company and in secret which makes it all the harder to organize) then, if suddenly 100 employees were laid off and don’t technically work at the company anymore, then they can’t sign on to form the union anymore. Especially if they’re able to lay off the leaders and organizers of the burgeoning union, this is incredibly damaging to organization efforts. So the paragraph is saying that an actual re-org doesn’t make sense, but it makes sense if the layoffs were attempting to remove individuals to prevent the official formation of the union. Which, while the company might say they’ll help you find a role within the company, if they suspect they were part of the union, itçs relatively easy to blacklist them.
the union was apparently formed exactly 90 days prior to the layoff announcement; under california state law (where they are located) “a termination within 90 days of protected union activity creates a rebuttable presumption that the termination was illegal retaliation”
Another reason it feels likely that the goal was preventing the union rather than a reorg. And while potentially true, it would have to be argued in court. And here in America, we don’t have public civil defenders to automatically be assigned if someone doesn’t have one or anything (ThAt WoUlD bE sOcIaLiSm!), so the “wrongful termination” suit would need lawyers, which are very expensive. And people without jobs receiving severance typically don’t have lots of money to pay lawyers, which I’m sure a corporation with lawyers on retainer, especially union busting ones, are aware of this.
Hope that helps explain our capitalist shithole a bit better.
Ah, ok. That exlains it. It’s really a shitty move. I guess no CEO or other high up manager in the US would do this differently. What a shit
My employer does this too. It is a layoff technically but employees are given the opportunity to interview for another position in the company if they want to stay. If it was a “restructuring” the employees would’ve been moved to another department and possibly a new role without their consent.
I instantly regret every donation I’ve made to Wikipedia, and won’t be making more in the future.
I stopped my yearly contribution last year when they felt the need to start guilt tripping their donors into trying to get them to donate more. It put a massive bad taste in my mouth.
I had the same instinct, but then I read an argument from a contributor who recommended continuing to support the organization financially while writing privately and publicly in support of the union. Voting with your wallet in this case has a good chance of backfiring, or at least sending the wrong message. The bottom line is taking money away from the organization hurts regular employees more than the leaders. Then again, if you believe the leadership is going to do this no matter what you do, it’s understandable not to want to give the organization any support. It would be a terrible thing for this organization to die, but the ones putting it on this path are the leadership.
This is the same as gamers ranting about cosmetic prices while spending $100 a month on them. It does nothing. The company sees the balance sheets and walks away laughing while your words are ignored. Money talks and words are only worth anything when it threatens their future money streams.
I think I’ll stop my donations. Nothing gets executives’ attention like dropping revenue. I read a lot of exec responses to employee dissatisfaction at other big tech companies that basically said ‘too bad if a bunch of you are unhappy, the company is doing great so we’re right, you can leave.’
I don’t care if this backfires. My money helps people and union busting is modern day evil against the people.
Besides, we have seen it work recently. A bunch of local stations took Kimmel off the air, pressuring Disney to cancel his show. So Disney was about to cancel Kimmel, and instead everybody canceled their Hulu/Disney+ memberships, and a couple of days later, Kimmel was back.
It would be a terrible thing for this organization to die
If an organization won’t respect the fact that it exists ONLY because of its workers, it would be a great thing if it died and made way for one that will. There are enough backups, we can survive the transition period. I have two, currently; one that gets updated, another from the pre-LLM era.
I can’t disagree with the points being made in the replies here. It doesn’t seem like continuing to give them more money will help the situation, and maybe a funding crunch would be the incentive they need to change course and save the organization. Or maybe it would just accelerate its demise.
I guess I’d rephrase my previous statement to: Wikipedia has been one of the world’s greatest free repositories of public knowledge for decades, and it would be a terrible thing for the world to lose that resource. The contributors and employees were always the reason it was such a great resource. If an organization can’t exist without exploiting the people that are responsible for its product, then I agree, it should die and make way for something else. But I (perhaps naively) believe that Wikipedia can exist without exploitation, so the present situation is not fundamental to the organization; it’s the result of poor leadership. So while I don’t want to kill it by withholding funding to send a message, the leadership may kill it anyway by refusing to negotiate with their workers in good faith.
This is yet another case where I can see people in power ruining something I loved, and I don’t know what can be done from the outside. From that standpoint, yeah… if Wikipedia is damned if I do and damned if I don’t, then it’s better to “don’t”.
Are they working with any kind of union organizer like Tech Workers Coalition? We could donate to them instead.
They mention in the US they are affiliated with the US branch of Communications Workers of America (CWA). “Separately, the WWU-UK branch has affiliated with United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW), a national branch of the Communication Workers Union (CWU).” You can see their FAQ for more details.
Maybe we can create a fund that goes towards the employees and divert our contributions there for now. Send a message and support to the ones who want to unionize.
A Jewish Zionist urges you to continue donating to Jewish Zionist Wikimedia foundation? Shocker
They’re the “good guys” until their power is slightly threatened.
I don’t regret my donations, because though this was predictable, I suppose, it hadn’t happened yet. It’s like the people who bought Teslas before the big reveal that Musk is a Nazi. Maybe we all should have seen it coming, but it’s hard to blame anyone for missing it.
Relevant to mention: I’ve just posted a thread about users reporting that apparently WMF has hired a union-busting firm.
https://lemmy.world/post/50205578
It is publicly confirmed that WMF contracted the notorious union-busting law firm Littler Mendelson to fight Wiki Workers United.
(I also posted it to this community but it got deleted by the autobot.)
Edit: I just realised the OP link/article talks about this as well, ah 🤦♂️
Also may be worth mentioning the later part of the article, talking about Abstract Wikipedia, a beta project regarding whose future a request for comments has been called. Many editors believe it is unviable and a waste of money and time: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/The_future_of_Abstract_Wikipedia
So, why do they need these anti-union assholes? What service do they give to the foundation?
