The linked article doesn't even come close to suggesting money laundering. It really just argues that Wikimedia is similar to virtually every other successful organization on earth and that its bloat grows with its resources.
Wow insightful.
The mere existence of The Mythical Man-Month or Peopleware does not prevent this behavior. Turns out it's actually super, super hard to avoid. It's pervasive enough to have several books written about it, and several more angry blogs written about specific companies' failure to achieve the allegedly "easy, obvious" thing that very, very few companies actually succeed at doing!
Makes me wonder if it's not so obvious or so easy... hmm... Nah, probably everyone else is malicious and/or stupid.
People are really not curious enough about bureaucracy. We complain literally our entire lives about "bureaucracy" and all the bad outcomes it produces.
But I've met literally no one who thought "hmm... if there's this emergent phenomenon across virtually every single large-scale human endeavor... and that phenomenon seems to systematically produce undesirable outcomes... at the cost of billions of dollars or millions of lives... maybe I oughta inspect this phenomenon more closely!"
Which as your article points out, is as easy to solve as reading The Mythical Man-Month. That's why it's an Iron Law. It's easy to remove!
Also, as you point out, it's actually the same as money laundering, which is an actual crime. So as it goes, every large organization is committing massive scale money laundering (to their own detriment, oddly enough), but they can stop doing so by just reading The Mythical Man-Month.
I could not find any indication that the purpose of this ever-increasing spending (while alarming) is money laundering in the essay you linked. Can you provide any other source to back up this claim? Money laundering is illegal, while spending money in of itself is definitely not.
> [W]e believe a secret-ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board is the appropriate path forward. This process protects individual choice and ensures that any outcome reflects the collective will of those eligible to participate.
> [Jimmy Wales:] One of the problems with the process so far is that it was not secret and we have heard from some staff members that they felt pressured because the organizers would know how they decided. That isn't a great process and it goes against our movement's values quite badly to have people in a situation where they are pressured into something one way or the other.
Counter-argument
> The community response to the WMF statement has mostly been one of dismay, with fears that the Foundation will use the time gap between now and the secret ballot to discourage employees from union involvement, using union busting methods as described humorously in an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Honestly, I'm on Wikipedia's side: there should be a true secret ballot. It should be soon and I'd be fine seeing the union win. Sure Wikipedia can use threats and propaganda in the meantime (so can Wiki Workers United), but that is less coercive than a public ballot.
Yeah for the counterargument like... if you were afraid of tipping your hand, maybe you should've done it the correct way (anonymously) the first time?
At the conceptual level, unionising is simply a group of workers gathering into a group and saying we want to negotiate as a group. Usually this is done by workers to improve conditions and to have a better say when they’ve been being ignored or worse, poorly treated.
Union recognition is then the company accepting that the union exists and then agreeing to meet and engage with it.
Not accepting it, is usually a crappy corporate move in an attempt to not have workers collaborating together.
Lots of research shows that generally places where unions exist have better work conditions and perform better over the long term.
The US has lower union involvement than in many countries.
The conceptual level breaks down in places where an open shop is illegal or disincentivized, which I suspect is the case in California where the Wikimedia Foundation is based. Europe usually has open shops, not closed shops, for example.
> Lots of research shows that generally places where unions exist have better work conditions and perform better over the long term.
Do you have any non-partisan sources for this? Genuinely curious. When you say perform better what do you mean specifically? And does better work conditions include better pay or just on-site conditions or something similar?
The non partisan source is the history of the industrial revolution itself.
I am not saying that you are doing this, but I tend to find that people who think we don't need unions anymore are engaging with the status quo in the same way as people who say we don't need vaccines anymore.
Is union recognition legally required to, say, organise a strike? Do workers who participate in a strike organised by a non-recognised union expose themselves to getting fired?
This is incorrect. Voluntary recognition, which is what this article is about, means that an election is not done. Wikimedia Foundation is asking for an election to ensure everyone actually wants this.
Naturally, the activists feel this is the worst thing in the world and makes them evil.
> This is incorrect. Voluntary recognition, which is what this article is about, means that an election is not done. Wikimedia Foundation is asking for an election to ensure everyone actually wants this.
Misinformation.
Voluntary recognition just means that there isn't a 120 hard fight against union elections to decide if there CAN BE a union.
Dark Horse comics just voluntarily acknowledged their union. After that is union elections, to decide who the union elected is.
My dad worked for the United States Postal Service for decades. He never joined the union, but he was still legally required to pay union dues, and the union was still legally required to represent him. So at least in some cases, yes, starting a union does affect all employees and practically requires them to "join" even if there's an option to not join on paper.
Is not what happened?
WWU announced on 28 July that they would file for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board. The announcement also accused the Wikimedia Foundation of being disingenuous in their public communications:
Also on the communication by wales he says he wasn’t happy with the election because people knew who voted for, but he didn’t deny there was some kinda of election?
At the very minimum, the company acknowledges the union and negotiates with the union for working conditions for union members.
It’s quite common that that also extends to negotiation on salary bands, and it’s also quite common the company then applies the same salary bands to non union employees also, rather than the norm in tech of individual negotiation. Many people think they’re in the group that is negotiating outlier salaries and would lose from this. However, many people with that viewpoint are also wrong about their position in the salary scale.
Sometimes this extends to promotion criteria and some unions push for tenure or seniority based promotions. This may or may not be better than your individual companies specific combination of merit, nepotism, the political clout of your managers and the business criticality of your department.
One thing that happens in the US that is illegal here is some companies agree to becoming a union shop and make joining the union compulsory.
“Union recognition” means the employer acknowledges that the union is the bargaining representative for a subset of employees within the organization. This comes with additional legal duties on the part of the employer, such as exclusively bargaining with the union and not attempting to negotiate directly with individuals the union represents.
Good. Most tech unions are worthless and only accelerate outsourcing. Unions can be good though, like in construction where the work is inherently dangerous.
They followed the process for forming a union in the US.
The claim that the Foundation totally supports the right to unionize but wants to hold a secret election would be a lot more credible if this happened before the workers had a supermajority (!) of signatures collected.
> They followed the process for forming a union in the US.
They followed a process. Secret ballots are also an established process. From your own link:
> Since the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) became law in 1935, card check has been an alternative to the National Labor Relations Board's (NLRB) election process.
My understanding is that a secret ballot election is actually the more common scenario.
> The claim that the Foundation totally supports the right to unionize but wants to hold a secret election would be a lot more credible if this happened before the workers had a supermajority (!) of signatures collected.
Do you really envision a situation where a supermajority of signatures were collected from fully non-coerced and well-informed employees, but some union-busting magic is going to cause them to lose a secret ballot election?
You need to be more specific than that if you want to convince people. As far as I can tell, the title is factually correct; if it's not, I'd like to hear your argument.
Wikipedia is a money laundering outfit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER
The linked article doesn't even come close to suggesting money laundering. It really just argues that Wikimedia is similar to virtually every other successful organization on earth and that its bloat grows with its resources.
Wow insightful.
The mere existence of The Mythical Man-Month or Peopleware does not prevent this behavior. Turns out it's actually super, super hard to avoid. It's pervasive enough to have several books written about it, and several more angry blogs written about specific companies' failure to achieve the allegedly "easy, obvious" thing that very, very few companies actually succeed at doing!
Makes me wonder if it's not so obvious or so easy... hmm... Nah, probably everyone else is malicious and/or stupid.
It is interesting how "enshittification" just happens because of scale.
People are really not curious enough about bureaucracy. We complain literally our entire lives about "bureaucracy" and all the bad outcomes it produces.
But I've met literally no one who thought "hmm... if there's this emergent phenomenon across virtually every single large-scale human endeavor... and that phenomenon seems to systematically produce undesirable outcomes... at the cost of billions of dollars or millions of lives... maybe I oughta inspect this phenomenon more closely!"
This is called the Iron Law of Bureaucracy
Which as your article points out, is as easy to solve as reading The Mythical Man-Month. That's why it's an Iron Law. It's easy to remove!
Also, as you point out, it's actually the same as money laundering, which is an actual crime. So as it goes, every large organization is committing massive scale money laundering (to their own detriment, oddly enough), but they can stop doing so by just reading The Mythical Man-Month.
Yes. everyone kinda sucks in their own ways. Mostly not enough to matter in their lives, but in large groups, the suck adds up.
I could not find any indication that the purpose of this ever-increasing spending (while alarming) is money laundering in the essay you linked. Can you provide any other source to back up this claim? Money laundering is illegal, while spending money in of itself is definitely not.
This makes it look like the goal of the union is to get into the piggy bank, rather than reverse some kind of hellish work environment.
SV is a cancer. Even its charities are like this.
“SV”?
Silicon Valey
Maybe silicon valley
Wikipedia's side
> [W]e believe a secret-ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board is the appropriate path forward. This process protects individual choice and ensures that any outcome reflects the collective will of those eligible to participate.
> [Jimmy Wales:] One of the problems with the process so far is that it was not secret and we have heard from some staff members that they felt pressured because the organizers would know how they decided. That isn't a great process and it goes against our movement's values quite badly to have people in a situation where they are pressured into something one way or the other.
Counter-argument
> The community response to the WMF statement has mostly been one of dismay, with fears that the Foundation will use the time gap between now and the secret ballot to discourage employees from union involvement, using union busting methods as described humorously in an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
The episode is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk8dUXRpoy8, a transcript is at https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/tv-series/union-busting-last-w...
---
Honestly, I'm on Wikipedia's side: there should be a true secret ballot. It should be soon and I'd be fine seeing the union win. Sure Wikipedia can use threats and propaganda in the meantime (so can Wiki Workers United), but that is less coercive than a public ballot.
Yeah for the counterargument like... if you were afraid of tipping your hand, maybe you should've done it the correct way (anonymously) the first time?
Remember that this is what your money funds when you donate to it...
Disabled my automatic payments.
Can someone explain what "union recognition" means, concretely?
At the conceptual level, unionising is simply a group of workers gathering into a group and saying we want to negotiate as a group. Usually this is done by workers to improve conditions and to have a better say when they’ve been being ignored or worse, poorly treated.
Union recognition is then the company accepting that the union exists and then agreeing to meet and engage with it.
Not accepting it, is usually a crappy corporate move in an attempt to not have workers collaborating together.
Lots of research shows that generally places where unions exist have better work conditions and perform better over the long term.
The US has lower union involvement than in many countries.
The conceptual level breaks down in places where an open shop is illegal or disincentivized, which I suspect is the case in California where the Wikimedia Foundation is based. Europe usually has open shops, not closed shops, for example.
> Lots of research shows that generally places where unions exist have better work conditions and perform better over the long term.
Do you have any non-partisan sources for this? Genuinely curious. When you say perform better what do you mean specifically? And does better work conditions include better pay or just on-site conditions or something similar?
The non partisan source is the history of the industrial revolution itself.
I am not saying that you are doing this, but I tend to find that people who think we don't need unions anymore are engaging with the status quo in the same way as people who say we don't need vaccines anymore.
Is union recognition legally required to, say, organise a strike? Do workers who participate in a strike organised by a non-recognised union expose themselves to getting fired?
This is incorrect. Voluntary recognition, which is what this article is about, means that an election is not done. Wikimedia Foundation is asking for an election to ensure everyone actually wants this.
Naturally, the activists feel this is the worst thing in the world and makes them evil.
> This is incorrect. Voluntary recognition, which is what this article is about, means that an election is not done. Wikimedia Foundation is asking for an election to ensure everyone actually wants this.
Misinformation.
Voluntary recognition just means that there isn't a 120 hard fight against union elections to decide if there CAN BE a union.
Dark Horse comics just voluntarily acknowledged their union. After that is union elections, to decide who the union elected is.
> Wikimedia Foundation is asking for an election to ensure everyone actually wants this.
Why? Does recognition entail that every worker is compelled to join the union?
My dad worked for the United States Postal Service for decades. He never joined the union, but he was still legally required to pay union dues, and the union was still legally required to represent him. So at least in some cases, yes, starting a union does affect all employees and practically requires them to "join" even if there's an option to not join on paper.
Is not what happened? WWU announced on 28 July that they would file for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board. The announcement also accused the Wikimedia Foundation of being disingenuous in their public communications:
Also on the communication by wales he says he wasn’t happy with the election because people knew who voted for, but he didn’t deny there was some kinda of election?
At the very minimum, the company acknowledges the union and negotiates with the union for working conditions for union members.
It’s quite common that that also extends to negotiation on salary bands, and it’s also quite common the company then applies the same salary bands to non union employees also, rather than the norm in tech of individual negotiation. Many people think they’re in the group that is negotiating outlier salaries and would lose from this. However, many people with that viewpoint are also wrong about their position in the salary scale.
Sometimes this extends to promotion criteria and some unions push for tenure or seniority based promotions. This may or may not be better than your individual companies specific combination of merit, nepotism, the political clout of your managers and the business criticality of your department.
One thing that happens in the US that is illegal here is some companies agree to becoming a union shop and make joining the union compulsory.
“Union recognition” means the employer acknowledges that the union is the bargaining representative for a subset of employees within the organization. This comes with additional legal duties on the part of the employer, such as exclusively bargaining with the union and not attempting to negotiate directly with individuals the union represents.
Which Side Are You On?
> we have heard from some staff members that they felt pressured because the organizers would know how they decided
in 2026? one would think wikipedia people pick up some self-help literature now and then and know how to fake a backbone until you grow one ...
( I have my own share of behaviors that I should have fixed when I was 11 so don't take this the wrong way )
What is this?
Hierarchical pressure? At freaking wikipedia? Fear of getting pressured into eventual compliance? At freaking wikipedia?
How the hell does a foundation select a board like that? And what are they gonna do? Send Napalm, Agent Orange, Sarin Gas?
There are union-busting law firms? What are they gonna do? Infiltrate your meetups?
I'm a bit baffled
Good. Most tech unions are worthless and only accelerate outsourcing. Unions can be good though, like in construction where the work is inherently dangerous.
yes, yes, blame the victims. It's always the fault of the pedestrian for being in the road.
This is a very, very inaccurate take on the situation that relies on assumptions rather than facts. Shameful.
Given your other, completely insane comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49143931
I am inclined to assume that you are paid to oppose unions online.
Also your recent comment history consists entirely of angry contrarianism.
GP posting account is 4 months old, 40 karma. Recently became active.
Check comment history. Does not seem to engage in productive dialogue.
Can you provide your view of the events, then?
Note that I know nothing about the topic but the article, but the article says:
> [W]e believe a secret-ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board is the appropriate path forward.
Honestly, that was the point where I stopped reading and hid this story.
They used a non-secret election! Fuck them tbh. Jimmy Wales is entirely right here.
See, what you are missing is the games that would be played if they did a secret election.
"Can you prove that only employees voted in this?" "Can you prove there was no ballot stuffing? "
I am not generally pro-union, I believe it has it's place but have also seen downsides but I have seen these games played out before.
They followed the process for forming a union in the US.
The claim that the Foundation totally supports the right to unionize but wants to hold a secret election would be a lot more credible if this happened before the workers had a supermajority (!) of signatures collected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_check
> They followed the process for forming a union in the US.
They followed a process. Secret ballots are also an established process. From your own link:
> Since the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) became law in 1935, card check has been an alternative to the National Labor Relations Board's (NLRB) election process.
My understanding is that a secret ballot election is actually the more common scenario.
> The claim that the Foundation totally supports the right to unionize but wants to hold a secret election would be a lot more credible if this happened before the workers had a supermajority (!) of signatures collected.
Do you really envision a situation where a supermajority of signatures were collected from fully non-coerced and well-informed employees, but some union-busting magic is going to cause them to lose a secret ballot election?
Read the post.
It's all fear mongering around a very balanced response from the WMF.
Could they engage in union-busting? Sure. Did they? No.
The article appeared to state both the facts and the assumptions being made off of them pretty clearly.
The title of this submission is disingenuous as well.
You need to be more specific than that if you want to convince people. As far as I can tell, the title is factually correct; if it's not, I'd like to hear your argument.
Both halves of the title are true statements.
Unfortunately you can construct just about any narrative using true statements. Omission of facts is usually the damning trait of dishonesty.