This is the same press release from the union as at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48663861, and the same discussion points apply as there, including the fact that the press release is conflating 'Wikipedia Workers' and 'British-based employees at the Wikimedia Foundation'. The two are not the same.
This conflation appears to be the fault of the union. Certainly the people who write Wikipedia well know the difference between themselves and the Wikimedia Foundation staff.
Seems like a loophole not to employ people. "Editor" sounds like a job title! There is code of conduct, all sort of paperwork, you have to deal with comitees, editorial process... There is non disclosure agreement, you are not allowed to discus internal stuff with people outside from company... wery far from "i seen something was wrong, so i just made quick edit"!
Smells like proper job to me!
We closed the same loophole with uber and doordash employees. Wikimedia should employ its editors!!!
There is like 50 page agreement, you even have to give up your copyright rights! The only way to do it legally in my country, is to hire editor as an employee!!! (Contractors can not legally give up copyright to their work)
You license your contributions under an open licence. You don't give up your copyright. There would be no other sensible way to operate a collaborative encyclopedia without a license of this kind.
I (lawyer) have never encountered a jurisdiction where a contractor could not license their work under the contract with their employer (the person contracting them).
There's a union of wikipedia editors being formed and they are in alliance with the US and UK Wikimedia union. More public statements will follow in the next weeks about this.
> There is no reason for any employee to not search for unionization.
That's a very theoretical view. (As most absolutes are.)
Unions and rules around unions can be very different depending on locality, industry and other specifics. The power and benefits a union gives a specific employee may not outweigh the cost they impose on that specific employee.
Furthermore, unions are organizations. They have their own internal power structures that can be corrupted by self-serving individuals or special interests. A blanket "union = good" view can make that invisible to you.
In one of my previous work, I was "forced" to enter a public union. They were simply leeches sucking government money (surprise, government was paying union premiums) through workers with almost no actual benefits. Whenever somebody glorifies Unions I just chukle.
Was this in the US? In the US, anti-union action by the government and employers has been extra egregious historically. This has obviously impacted unions in the US.
There's also LOTS of anti-union misinformation spreading in the US.
The only real reason for me in the UK to join a union would be for legal representation, otherwise I can represent my own interests.
At least here in the UK our unions are heavily involved in politics - which is a massive issue. Currently, the leadership of the unions and the people in them are literally opposite sides of the political spectrum.
At any moment some change outside my control could occur and my place in society would change. Right now I'm pretty self sufficient and don't really need the support of others in day to day life, but that can change, and there's nothing I can do about it. Seems like a good idea to use this opportunity to try and improve things for everyone, even if you don't care about others, just in case your place in society changes. (I actually think it's neat if we try to improve things for everyone for everyone's sake tbh but I get there are people that do not have such empathy)
In Western Europe workers are very protected so unless you are in a low end job or specific public sector job and might gain from collective wage bargaining there is often little actual benefits in being in an union, taking into account that membership isn't free.
The fact that unions played a big role in the past does not imply that they are as important now because of the changes in legal protection, types of jobs, and society.
If you believe the legal protections in place as a direct result of the labour movement (of which Unions are just one part) will remain in place in the face of constant well funded opposition by Capital then I have a case study for you in the UK, we call them Zero Hours Contracts.
Another UK example, you effectively have very limited rights until you’ve worked for a company for 2 years. Before then they can fire you for any reason they care to.
Those legal protections are easily eroded without unions.
Just look at Finland. Here, the current government first made it illegal for unions to strike when the government takes action to weaken employment law, and then they significantly weakened employment law.
The only protection left is collective bargaining agreements, which can still uphold some of the old legal protections through contract law.
This was also only possible after decades of work by industry lobby groups to significantly weaken unions by targeting them with tax code changes, splitting up unemployment funds from unions (with the employers then founding their own unemployment fund, so that union membership is drained).
Unions are the only defense that workers have. If there are no unions, the employer can have their pick among desperate job seekers, and give them the lowest wage they can live on.
What’s in the collective best interest may not match with what’s in the individual best interest. Perhaps unions are more likely to be in the self interest of the below average employees, the ones with no negotiating power. The best school teachers are almost certainly being held back by their unions and the worst ones are getting a free pass. When I worked at a unionized place I was blocked from an opportunity my employer offered me because it was better than what the standard negotiated terms were.
Denying people agency and power in their negotiation by claiming they are "not as good as someone else" is antithetical to the struggle of labor - work deserves to be compensated fairly.
>When I worked at a unionized place I was blocked from an opportunity my employer offered me because it was better than what the standard negotiated terms were
Your union blocked this because your employer was trying to break your unions negotiating power by separating your interests from the collective workforce. If people who are sympathetic to management and accept that they will be compensated greater by acting against the interests of the labor union, the union should block these promotions. If you don't want to protect your coworkers by negotiating with them, then you must be interested in exploiting them by negotiating against them. Labor is a zero sum game.
> Your union blocked this because your employer was trying to break your unions negotiating power by separating your interests from the collective workforce.
Be that as it may, for this specific employee the union was a negative. In effect, he is asked to sacrifice for the collective. It's understandable that that's acceptable to the collective, but it's also not hard to see why the sacrifice wouldn't like that.
>Denying people agency and power in their negotiation by claiming they are "not as good as someone else" is antithetical to the struggle of labor - work deserves to be compensated fairly.
Labor is not a homogenous block. A huge chunk of workers are lazy as fuck and only do the bare minimum; it's unfair for people who work hard that their compensation should be lowered just so the lazy ones can be paid more. And lowered it must be, because a company only can only afford a certain total amount of spending on wages, so if the shirkers must be paid more than the hard workers must be paid less. It's not exploitation to pay the bare minimum possible to someone who puts in the bare minimum of effort.
Any company is free to hire whoever it cares at its own discretion, and in most (49/50) US states fire them without cause; perhaps due diligence is required of companies that are unionized to ensure that they are investing wisely in the labor they pay for, rather than accepting that all labor must be paid less on the argument that maybe it is of poorer quality than desired.
If you work in a unionized workplace and have complaints about a coworkers capability, your complaints should first be heard by your union because your union is the arbiter of your labor force, as per the contract you sign with said union.
Guilds were (and in some non-US places still are) a solution to this issue, in which some level of competence must be demonstrated through time spent and qualifications earned to gain acceptance to a guild. Some unions in the US still practice this measure of trial for their members, but they are generally relegated to the skilled trades, and this isn't something that common labor unions do.
I don't believe a union would be to my best interest. Unions generally operate by encoding rules that purport to be fair and transparent. This includes things like determining how much someone gets paid based on things like tenure and education.
That sounds good in theory but as soon as you enter the workforce you'll realize that there is a huge range of capabilities thats difficult to capture but obvious to people in the weeds.
You'll also realize that strong workers want to work with other strong workers. Unions don't care where their unions fees come from so they protect all equally. This means they make it difficult to fire. Just look at police unions where they went to great lengths to "protect their own"
There are some benefits but I believe that accrue to the most mediocre or incompetent. Sure it sounds great that it's difficult to fire me and I know my salary for the next twenty years. But this is not what I'm trying to optimize for
It may or may not be in any individual's best interest.
For example, look at "bumping rights". If a company needs to eliminate a union position, and this is occupied by someone with say 20 years seniority, that person can "bump" some other union member out of their position who has a lower seniority. So, that person whose role was eliminated can push a person with only 5 years seniority out of their position. And then that person with 5 years seniority can bump a person with only one year seniority out of their position. And the person with 1 year seniority has no one newer than them so they get laid off.
Was it in the best interest of that newish employee to be part of a union? So they can act as a meat shield for someone much further in their career who would theoretically be much more employable in the general market?
Cousins of American style bumping is definitely in employment law in the UK(where it is done by the employer instead of the employees and union). It also exists at least in Germany(sozialauswahl) where employees theoretically who could get chopped are given points to determine who to chop, where seniority is one of the ways to gain points, as well as age, as well as having children.
Yes, a union is a way to gather forces, not only in your company, but also in broader spaces. It's easier for a union (even of two) to ask to meet your local elected officials, to seek legal support, advices from other union.
It also has a tendency to yield corruption. Some would call it lobbying but in the end it's a counter political force because forces on the other sides exist already.
Not sure fighting fire with fire is the solution, a last resort.
I'm a director of my small company, and a member of UTAW. The union doesn't just help with employment disputes but also campaigns generally on improving working conditions for all, through things like health and safety and setting reasonable expectations for how work will be done.
Are you just an employee or also an owner in that company? If you are an employee only, having a union to back you up could be extremely useful if things ever go bad.
Only employee. Joining an union is too expensive for me though given the reward seems pretty small. My industry does not even have a proper union (in Germany) so I'd have to join a generic one (verdi) which doesn't offer enough perks for me personally.
He's the only employee in a 2 man company. How exactly do your think the relationship here is likely to be play out? IMO it is likely that he has a pretty good and probably rather personable relationship with the company owner. And quite likely has rather good bargaining power already given that he can double his employer's workload by walking out the door and it'd in all likelihood be a big headache to replace him.
If he can't leverage his power when he already represents 100% of the company's employees a union is unlikely to help.
That really depends on your industry and your union (and where you're based). My union doesn't negotiate my salary, I do. They do provide help with contracts, NDAs, legal advise and a bunch of other stuff and do provide salary guidance. They are also cheap at ~€475 a year.
Another larger union, which organises industrial workers, cleaning staff and generally people with less formal education, is almost twice the cost. They do negotiate at least base pay for the industries they represent. Many of the people they represent are often better off having their union do the negotiations. When handling negotiations it's obviously not only about money, but the unions do need to be able to provide at least raise in salary that can cover their dues, and sometimes they can't.
If this was my blog I would have written something like the below which is entirely out of character not aimed at you and quite silly:
Republican jesus said: It would have been easier if the good Samaritan would have just taken the guys money without helping him.
I have this wild theory that civilization isn't actually about me. It means one can join a union without any direct personal benefits of any kind.
When for example my health insurance helps pay someone for their care I point first at them then at my chest and announce smugly, see? I paid for that!
No one thinks it's funny but that is not important, as long as I think it's funny it's a good joke.
The trial is over, it is now abundantly obvious that if everyone acts in their own self interest everything gets increasingly fucked up for everyone.
If you are hungry the free market gives you an advert for a sandwich you cant afford but would probably kill you slowly if you could.
Imagine retired people still being union members. Crazy right? They could have better spend their time looking at pictures of their children who never visit.
Not everyone here will feel that way. Hacker news has a lot of owners, managers and what John Steinbeck called "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" (e.g. future failed startup founders).
They won't frame what they consider to be their self interest as naked self interest though, they'll dress it up as concern for the average worker or an opinion that organizing is ultimately futile because sometimes you lose.
I'm sure many of them are reaching for the downvote as they read this.
Anti union propaganda has been thoroughly effective in America, and union membership coincides with the decline of middle class real wages and political power quite nicely. Ofcourse the causes are multivariate (As they always are), but seeing all this anti-union discourse in this thread gave me a chuckle.
Worker here, with no aspiration of being a millionaire, a manager or an owner:
I hate unions. They always end up being led by parasites that have no idea how to do the actual job, looking to rent-seek on the backs of people who do.
It‘s the exact opposite of selfish. It’s solidarity and efforts to denigrate solidarity and lift up stories about selfishness as the only important thing are the thing that keeps unions down.
Workers working together in solidarity is the right approach to get more power in the lopsided power dynamic between owners and workers. Owners have too much power, workers too little. Solidarity is a path towards fixing that.
You think it’s solidarity with the workers because you see it is a fight between two classes. I reject that framework itself. Unions are about solidarity (if any) for the incumbents and in this case it is solidarity for the existing workers in Wikimedia.
I don’t see anything virtuous about self preservation. It doesn’t take much for a person to save their own job.
What’s virtuous is the ability to do understand the free market and uphold meritocracy ESPECIALLY when you aren’t the top dog in the hierarchy.
Unions may protect jobs but does it at the expense of other people who want your jobs who can do it better at a lower wage. Do people have the virtue to voluntarily give up their job for that person who is better than them? I don’t think so.
How is global prosperity achieved? Business owners get all the profits of our labor and maybe some of it trickles down? Workers get “prosperous” on crumbs?
I’ll be expectantly awaiting for my prosperity in the mail.
You think global prosperity was won by unions fighting for rights? This is untrue and a folk theory that people hold on to, to justify their ideology.
Primarily global prosperity was achieved by higher productivity - the ability to do more with less work. Unions had very less to do for increasing productivity.
I’m not saying anything extreme because this is the academic consensus.
Do you think trolls should have a right to unionize? We are working really hard, but conditions are not best. For start we demand salary from local goverment (I am in EU)! Nobody should be forced to work for free!
In EU I would form union even at 3 person company. There are all sorts of tax benefits. Union fees are usually exempt from tax and social and health insurance. In my country we make dinner (yearly union meeting), produce meeting notes and get about 50 euro per employee. Union also organizes trips for families, tax free...
Hourly wages in Germany are not that different from the US. Depends a bit on how exactly to compare - nominal, PPP, net/gross, etc.: e.g., average nominal is about 10% higher in the US, real median is higher in Germnay, ...
Overlooking that we are comparing the richest EU state to all 50 US states, doesn't that further the point that having unions is are at best uninfluential.
No. (And comparing one country to another seems fine anyway.) Hard to make the case that unions in Germany have had no effects on wages, working time, etc.
Unions at least in the European setting not really effective in protecting workers in the way people seem to imagine. The labor laws are somewhat but not really. It just increases the cost of getting rid of people and reduces mobility. So i don’t know what utopian view people have of unions but reality does not reflect that. It also leads to a salaried class of union representatives inside big companies that causes their own problems as they are the ones granting favors and benefits to their friends.
I don't dispute that unions were important and offer some sort of benefit. What I don't like is that most of the big unions in Europe receive a lot of governmental money and become lobbying groups for political parties. I would not consider them independent in any sense of the word.
This conflation appears to be the fault of the union. Certainly the people who write Wikipedia well know the difference between themselves and the Wikimedia Foundation staff.
Smells like proper job to me!
We closed the same loophole with uber and doordash employees. Wikimedia should employ its editors!!!
No there is not. You don't have to sign anything to make edits to Wikipedia. On the other hand, these people are full employees with work contracts.
https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Terms_of_Use
I (lawyer) have never encountered a jurisdiction where a contractor could not license their work under the contract with their employer (the person contracting them).
That's a very theoretical view. (As most absolutes are.)
Unions and rules around unions can be very different depending on locality, industry and other specifics. The power and benefits a union gives a specific employee may not outweigh the cost they impose on that specific employee.
Furthermore, unions are organizations. They have their own internal power structures that can be corrupted by self-serving individuals or special interests. A blanket "union = good" view can make that invisible to you.
There's also LOTS of anti-union misinformation spreading in the US.
At least here in the UK our unions are heavily involved in politics - which is a massive issue. Currently, the leadership of the unions and the people in them are literally opposite sides of the political spectrum.
In Western Europe workers are very protected so unless you are in a low end job or specific public sector job and might gain from collective wage bargaining there is often little actual benefits in being in an union, taking into account that membership isn't free.
Just look at Finland. Here, the current government first made it illegal for unions to strike when the government takes action to weaken employment law, and then they significantly weakened employment law.
The only protection left is collective bargaining agreements, which can still uphold some of the old legal protections through contract law.
This was also only possible after decades of work by industry lobby groups to significantly weaken unions by targeting them with tax code changes, splitting up unemployment funds from unions (with the employers then founding their own unemployment fund, so that union membership is drained).
Unions are the only defense that workers have. If there are no unions, the employer can have their pick among desperate job seekers, and give them the lowest wage they can live on.
Denying people agency and power in their negotiation by claiming they are "not as good as someone else" is antithetical to the struggle of labor - work deserves to be compensated fairly.
>When I worked at a unionized place I was blocked from an opportunity my employer offered me because it was better than what the standard negotiated terms were
Your union blocked this because your employer was trying to break your unions negotiating power by separating your interests from the collective workforce. If people who are sympathetic to management and accept that they will be compensated greater by acting against the interests of the labor union, the union should block these promotions. If you don't want to protect your coworkers by negotiating with them, then you must be interested in exploiting them by negotiating against them. Labor is a zero sum game.
Be that as it may, for this specific employee the union was a negative. In effect, he is asked to sacrifice for the collective. It's understandable that that's acceptable to the collective, but it's also not hard to see why the sacrifice wouldn't like that.
> The rising tide lifts all boats.
Apparently not ALL boats.
Labor is not a homogenous block. A huge chunk of workers are lazy as fuck and only do the bare minimum; it's unfair for people who work hard that their compensation should be lowered just so the lazy ones can be paid more. And lowered it must be, because a company only can only afford a certain total amount of spending on wages, so if the shirkers must be paid more than the hard workers must be paid less. It's not exploitation to pay the bare minimum possible to someone who puts in the bare minimum of effort.
If you work in a unionized workplace and have complaints about a coworkers capability, your complaints should first be heard by your union because your union is the arbiter of your labor force, as per the contract you sign with said union.
Guilds were (and in some non-US places still are) a solution to this issue, in which some level of competence must be demonstrated through time spent and qualifications earned to gain acceptance to a guild. Some unions in the US still practice this measure of trial for their members, but they are generally relegated to the skilled trades, and this isn't something that common labor unions do.
That sounds good in theory but as soon as you enter the workforce you'll realize that there is a huge range of capabilities thats difficult to capture but obvious to people in the weeds.
You'll also realize that strong workers want to work with other strong workers. Unions don't care where their unions fees come from so they protect all equally. This means they make it difficult to fire. Just look at police unions where they went to great lengths to "protect their own"
There are some benefits but I believe that accrue to the most mediocre or incompetent. Sure it sounds great that it's difficult to fire me and I know my salary for the next twenty years. But this is not what I'm trying to optimize for
Here, I'll do it for you:
No, you are wrong it's the other way around
For example, look at "bumping rights". If a company needs to eliminate a union position, and this is occupied by someone with say 20 years seniority, that person can "bump" some other union member out of their position who has a lower seniority. So, that person whose role was eliminated can push a person with only 5 years seniority out of their position. And then that person with 5 years seniority can bump a person with only one year seniority out of their position. And the person with 1 year seniority has no one newer than them so they get laid off.
Was it in the best interest of that newish employee to be part of a union? So they can act as a meat shield for someone much further in their career who would theoretically be much more employable in the general market?
Not sure fighting fire with fire is the solution, a last resort.
If he can't leverage his power when he already represents 100% of the company's employees a union is unlikely to help.
Another larger union, which organises industrial workers, cleaning staff and generally people with less formal education, is almost twice the cost. They do negotiate at least base pay for the industries they represent. Many of the people they represent are often better off having their union do the negotiations. When handling negotiations it's obviously not only about money, but the unions do need to be able to provide at least raise in salary that can cover their dues, and sometimes they can't.
Republican jesus said: It would have been easier if the good Samaritan would have just taken the guys money without helping him.
I have this wild theory that civilization isn't actually about me. It means one can join a union without any direct personal benefits of any kind.
When for example my health insurance helps pay someone for their care I point first at them then at my chest and announce smugly, see? I paid for that!
No one thinks it's funny but that is not important, as long as I think it's funny it's a good joke.
The trial is over, it is now abundantly obvious that if everyone acts in their own self interest everything gets increasingly fucked up for everyone.
If you are hungry the free market gives you an advert for a sandwich you cant afford but would probably kill you slowly if you could.
Imagine retired people still being union members. Crazy right? They could have better spend their time looking at pictures of their children who never visit.
Ill let myself out
Indirectly though my union does do stuff
I'm sure Alec Baldwin was happy he was a member of a union to represent him.
They won't frame what they consider to be their self interest as naked self interest though, they'll dress it up as concern for the average worker or an opinion that organizing is ultimately futile because sometimes you lose.
I'm sure many of them are reaching for the downvote as they read this.
I hate unions. They always end up being led by parasites that have no idea how to do the actual job, looking to rent-seek on the backs of people who do.
Workers working together in solidarity is the right approach to get more power in the lopsided power dynamic between owners and workers. Owners have too much power, workers too little. Solidarity is a path towards fixing that.
I don’t see anything virtuous about self preservation. It doesn’t take much for a person to save their own job.
What’s virtuous is the ability to do understand the free market and uphold meritocracy ESPECIALLY when you aren’t the top dog in the hierarchy.
Unions may protect jobs but does it at the expense of other people who want your jobs who can do it better at a lower wage. Do people have the virtue to voluntarily give up their job for that person who is better than them? I don’t think so.
So please spare me the bit about solidarity!
How is global prosperity achieved? Business owners get all the profits of our labor and maybe some of it trickles down? Workers get “prosperous” on crumbs?
I’ll be expectantly awaiting for my prosperity in the mail.
Primarily global prosperity was achieved by higher productivity - the ability to do more with less work. Unions had very less to do for increasing productivity.
I’m not saying anything extreme because this is the academic consensus.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48663861
Worth asking AI about local lawx...
It always starts this way, and ends with over half the people not bothered but still under union protection, and cannot be removed.
I cannot think of any standard by which this is true, certainly not by nominal or PPP income for either personal or household income.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
[2]https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
But, we went on strike, got a pay rise, my disciplinaries were found to be baseless, I got a pay rise they hid from us.
Swings and roundabouts, but I have got two people fired -it takes time, and it's done correctly. Or the law gets involved.
I'll take a shitty union over not.