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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
>” 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.
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.
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.
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).
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
(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)
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.