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 are some non-divestable rights out there. Canada (and others) have a copyright concept of moral rights that cannot be given away by contract or, in other words, nobody can ever force someone to give them away. An artist/creator can decide to not exercise them but the artist/creator retains them regardless of contract language.
>> Unlike other IP rights, moral rights cannot be sold or given away. Even in the case of a sale, an author retains their moral rights in the work, unless they choose to waive these rights.
I was thinking about this as they were covering up murals and stadium names for the world cup. Canada doesnt really do that, but canadian stadiums are not generally named after tech companies (ie BC Place got to keep its name).
How is the right non-divestable if you can waive it? More importantly, how could wikipedia possibly work if contributors retained copyright in any form over their submitted articles and edits?
It seems to be a somewhat murky area of law. In Europe (and, I guess Canada) you can't really have public domain because of moral rights that you can't waive. IANAL but I've talked with IP lawyers about this and they've been sortof "Yes this is often kinda true." So the broad public domain that is generally true of the US government and which individuals can release in the US isn't really true in Europe as I understand it.
Europe is nearly 50 different jurisdictions, spanning multiple very different legal traditions.
But it is mostly not very murky. Moral rights and commercial rights are distinct in a wide range of jurisdictions. You can generally waive commercial rights, and that is for the most part sufficient for things to e.g. be "functionally" public domain in the ways most people care about.
What moral rights prevent is generally speaking usually things like for someone else to take your work and simply put their name on it, or keeping your name on it but making changes that might do harm to the creator in various ways.
There are nuances between jurisdictions, but it's generally not more difficult than being respectful of the effects (positive or negative) of attribution and integrity of a work.
I don't really disagree. Open source is generally recognized among European states and, from a practical perspective, permissive licenses are mostly indistinguishable from public domain other than preserving notice of the original authorship in some form. A permissive license does allow you to make pretty much any changes you want and sell it or use it in another product (or not).
That's pretty crazy, seems like a ticking time bomb to me. I assume the precise meaning of "moral rights" varies by jurisdiction, but if from the integrity part of the Canadian definition started being broadly applied it would seriously change how things like moderation need to be done. I'm not a lawyer but I wouldn't be comfortable making any kind of modifications to text submitted by a Canadian contributor, even basic stuff like PII redaction. I find the Flight Stop example here pretty chilling https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/michael-snow/key-works/flig...
As I say, a murky area. The MIT license was basically created because the X-Windows folks wanted to release it into the public domain but IBM would have nothing to do with it so the MIT lawyers came up with a permissive license.
> The term "X-Windows" (in the manner of the subsequently released "Microsoft Windows") is not officially endorsed – with X Consortium release manager Matt Landau stating in 1993, "There is no such thing as 'X Windows' or 'X Window', despite the repeated misuse of the forms by the trade rags"[60] – though it has been in common informal use since early in the history of X[61] and has been used deliberately for provocative effect, for example in the Unix-Haters Handbook.[8]
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux,” and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use.
Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
Essentially all the distributions are GNU + Linux kernel + a whole bunch of other stuff that tend to have some common elements but vary by distribution. At which point we're into pedantry about what things are called.
And MANY people involved with it and Unix for a very long time routinely use the term, officially endorsed or not. Understandably because it is/was a windowing system and just saying X out of context isn't especially clear.
> More importantly, how could wikipedia possibly work if contributors retained copyright in any form over their submitted articles and edits?
Note, the cc-by-sa 4.0 license that wikipedia uses requires you to waive any moral rights to the extent possible. In canada if you are the creator of the work, then you can waive all of them, so its really a moot point. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode.en
In general though, moral rights tend to be the sort of thing where they only come into play if you're being an asshole, so it mostly doesn't matter.
You waive by actively deciding not to enforce your rights. You just cannot divest those rights. So those who buy art cannot use contract to totally escape the artist. If you buy art, the artist retains a degree of control.
The pivotal case in canada involved a mall sculpture of some geese in flight. The mall put red bows on the geese during christmas. No dice. The original artist said that was an unacceptable change. They needed to get the artist permission before making such a change.
The only legal way to waive copyright rights, is to hire an employee to produce the work. Individual contributors are not cogs in a machine, employees are!
And if someone produced work for 15 years, and edited 10000 articles... very hard to argue it is not permanent worker!
Wikipedia can easily work as "marketplace of ideas", linking original authors. That is not possible if you have editorial policy, political opinions and work like a corporation or a news paper.
A "marketplace of ideas" wikipedia is not wikipedia, that's twitter or maybe reddit. More importantly, your theory of copyright being unwaivable without an employee-employer relationship makes the entire internet unworkable. Nothing could accept user input of any kind unless it can be ruled uncopyrightable.
With a moral rights framework, that depends on the content of the edit.
If for example you edit in racist views and leave the attribution of the original author because it’s just a one word change from “the holocaust” to “the alleged holocaust”, then yes you are open to a lawsuit for any harm that results from that malicious edit.
This is especially true with my example as that view would run afoul of criminal statue in many counties.
So that's what I assumed too but it turns out that's not true, at least in Canada. The Flight Stop example was cited as an example of an artist asserting their moral rights to their art to prevent the owner from tying bows around the necks of a his flock of fiberglass geese for the holidays. For art in Canada, modifying it at all prejudices the author. The standard for other works is higher, but still nothing as high as you think.
Edit: I also wonder how or if this works in reverse, if someone wrote a fantastic article on numerology or whatever with a screed halfway through, would removing it from the article violate their moral rights? I think any framework where the answer is no is also probably going to be unworkable.
This is generally not true, but more importantly Wikipedia does not ask people to waive their copyright rights, only license it under a creative commons license. Its no different than how open source software works.
Have you ever read the ToS/ToU of any social media site? Did you know that by using this site you've agreed to arbitration? https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/#tou
Giving up copyright when you write an article for Wikipedia is literally the only way it could possibly work. The biggest issue Wikimedia has is its full time staff, followed by full time editors.
There is no copyright assignment on wikipedia. You are required to license your work under CC-BY-SA 4.0, so the WMF can distribute it, and other editors can reuse and modify it.
Social media is different from wikipedia. If i write my opinions here, it is not an opinion of ycombinator. If I write stuff on wikipedia, it is opinion of wikipedia and there is rigorous editorial process, to get my stuff published...
Also here my name is right next to the text, not in wikipedia!
In proper jobs you get paid, and there is someone telling you what to do. Neither of those things apply to Wikipedia.
There is no NDA. The only exception is if you volunteer to join the group that deals with private data (this is not the same as being an Admin, its the step above. Its a very small group)
Comittees exist but are largely optional. If you want to change things at a meta level or do wide coordination, there is no getting around that. But such stuff is optional. You don't need to join any comittees if you just want to write articles.
Now, if you want to say its exploitative (editors put in the labour and get almost none of the created value), then fair point. I would say its no more or less exploitative than your average open source project.
I used to work at a call center for a large (fortune 500) company. But that company did not sign my paychecks. It was a shell company with a different name, so that the company could not be held accountable when someone inevitably jumped from the roof.
Since then accountability sinks have stood out to me. I'm going to side with the Union on this one. And plus, unions are good.
Good? They've been a mixed bag in my life. Unions are made up of people and they come with all of the good and bad of people. I watched a union refuse to support a colleague of mine. Why? Because the people in the union were competing against him for resources and they wanted him gone. And they succeeded. I've never really liked unions after that. I suppose I can see some good, but for the most part the union ends up being another branch of management with a few slightly different powers.
If we are going by anecdotes, then I suspect the number and scale of anecdotes of capital misusing it's power are going to vastly outnumber unions doing the same.
Your suspicions are wrong in my case. (Yours may be different.) For the most part, I've found that companies have treated me fairly and, if anything, avoided making overly rosy promises. It's always been a very quid-pro-quo message.
Unions, though, spin up these stories of worker protections that haven't worked out in my life. When the unions didn't defend my colleague, I was pretty much gobsmacked. It was such a clear case. But in the end they didn't even give a reason. And they didn't have to because, well, they're a magical union and people like you reflexively love them and imagine that they'll defeat that evil capital. Hah. The scales fell off my eyes. I'm sure you'll experience the same one day.
> I watched a union refuse to support a colleague of mine. Why? Because the people in the union were competing against him for resources and they wanted him gone. And they succeeded. I've never really liked unions after that
Wait until you see what management does to workers, like fail to pay them on time, give them inhumane working conditions, or fire them arbitrarily.
Sarcasm aside, I've never understood this genre of comment. One second-hand bad experience and you seem opposed to unions for life? Unions are the only way workers can have anything like even footing with management.
Or maybe encountering union workers. Many Americans grow up in schools run by teachers' unions. Maybe the so-called indoctrination isn't working the way you expect. Ask yourself why 12 or so years of being on the receiving end of union labor isn't having the effect you expect?
This is what people say but I have yet to experience it myself. But maybe the problem is that I never had great expectations for management. I always assumed it was all a business. Making money was the goal. The unions, though, push this dreamy narrative about how there are these great knights in shining armor that will always defend you. Bah. Baloney. They're also profit-maximizing people motivated by selfishness, but they hide it.
Speaking of keeping separate things separate: remember that Unions (a business in it's own right) is different from the Union Workers that it represents.
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.
I don't think it comes from the union, Wikimedia has always gone out of it's way to conflate the people who are creating, editing, and maintaining website Wikipedia and the leeches who captured that effort.
> 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.
In the US, you don't really get an option to choose. At most you'll get "paying union dues to the one that controls the contract, or not paying", often you don't get that much.
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.
Representation under a union is voluntary, and if an employee doesn't wish to be represented by that union, they may quit. I'm sure there are some other means of avoiding union representation in unionized workplaces in the US, but I don't know the speciics of them. This is generally called strikebreaking, though the act of working with a company outside of its unionized workforce isn't strongly defined outside the terms of a labor strike. Similarly to agreeing to the employment contract, agreeing to the union contract is binding and one ought to agree to its terms, which may be vague enough to state things such as "advancement in career title and duties may be subject to discretion of the union", or other similar terms. If you don't want to be represented by a union, you should choose not to be.
The tide is a local water level; every boat on the water is lifted by the tide. A swell or wave may lift one boat, regardless of tide.
>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.
> 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.
The question obviously being, what are you supposed to do if they fail to address it?
Suppose the union leadership brought in a bunch of their own incompetent cronies and is now making a hash of things, but you can't vote them out because those same cronies keep voting them in.
if you joined a non-democratic union to begin with, that's on you. This is a rare anomaly though and most unions have democratic processes you can engage with and bring the change
It is a democratic union. There are 100 workers and 55 are the leadership's cronies who keep voting them back in. Classic democracy, two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
Also, how do you get to pick which union to be in? One can get certified even if you voted against it, or already exist at the company where you want to work.
The reverse is true. Unionization of the UK car industry in the 1970s, more than played its part in the collapse of the UK car industry, for example:
> The company became an infamous example of the industrial turmoil that plagued the United Kingdom in the 1970s. Action by unions frequently crippled BL manufacturing.
Unionisation didn't bring down British Leyland, the management did. There was no upward mobility from the unionised shop floor up to the management and design departments and it led to designs and management strategies that were completely divorced from both the realities of building cars and what consumers wanted to buy. The unions were a convenient scapegoat for Margaret Thatcher, but the reality is that Ford of Britain, Vauxhall, Nissan UK, Honda of the UK, and Toyota UK workers were all part of the same union but they didn't have relentless industrial disputes because they were managed effectively by people with actual experience in car production.
British Leyland were extremely reluctant to produce clean-sheet designs as well to save on R&D, which hampered their production capacity because production techniques were moving on from things that were complicated to assemble and maintain towards simpler assemblies which took fewer manual operations to put together. The Morris Ital and Austin Metro launched in 1980 fitted with an engine designed by Austin Motors in 1951 with the Ital inheriting a crudely widened (with deleterious effects on the handling) and very anachronistic front suspension assembly designed during World War 2 by Alec Issigonis debuting in 1948 on the Morris Minor while Vauxhall and Ford were selling cars with McPherson struts in the front and a twist beam in the back like you'd see in a modern car. The shop floor workers saw the problems, but they had no agency to correct them. The industrial disputes were a symptom of deeper rot.
Perhaps. Though if you strike endlessly, you have no product to sell. So people buy elsewhere and you go out of business. If you disagree, perhaps edit this line in wikipedia:
> These internal issues, which were never satisfactorily solved, combined with serious industrial relations problems with trade unions, the 1973 oil crisis, the three-day week, high inflation and ineffectual management meant that BL became an unmanageable and financially crippled behemoth
Indeed. I paraphrased this line from wikipedia - "The LTV is usually associated with Marxian economics" perhaps I should have read the next bit ", although it also appears in the theories of earlier classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. "
> 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.
Isn't that kind of the point? If you're good at your job and the company knows it, you could threaten to take a job somewhere else if they don't give you a raise. When there is a union, you can't do that, and the leadership uses your negotiating power to demand the things they want, which there is no guarantee has any overlap with what you want. Unions frequently demand things like seniority rules or retirement benefits (because the most senior people and those closest to retirement control the union), and compromise your interests for theirs if you're a new hire.
> Your union blocked this because your employer was trying to break your unions negotiating power by separating your interests from the collective workforce.
The trouble is that your interests are separate from the collective workforce. The company is selling its products for as much as it can. If it's in a competitive industry then its profit margins are thin and most of its revenue is already going to suppliers and employees. For someone else to get a bigger piece, yours has to get smaller. That's the consequence of your own logic:
> 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.
If the union leadership doesn't want you to get the opportunity then they must be interested in exploiting you by negotiating against you.
Unions tend to use otherwise arbitrary criteria to determine a members value. Not all people with the same number of years of experience, the same job title or the same degree provide equal value to the company.
As a school board member, I had to deal with the situation of a nationally recognized(awarded) teacher who got paid the same as every other teacher with the same degree and years in district. When asked why we wouldn't pay him what he is worth, the answer was simple, your union won't let us. Not every job type/environment make sense to have a union.
What’s wrong with everyone with same degree and years in district being paid equally? Per the very definition of such a competition, not everyone can pursue and finish number one in national fame machines.
If they don't contribute equally, why should they be paid equally, especially when the individuals desire to be paid per their contribution. Some rest on their years and degree while others go above and beyond to deliver a difference. The union doesn't allow the employer to recognize that.
I think there are jobs where those distinctions don't matter as much, but creative jobs and other areas where the ability of an employee to deliver quality is very personal don't seem to work well with unions in my view.
I would have loved to pay that teacher more because he did so much more and had a huge positive influence on his students, but the union would never have allowed that.
> If they don't contribute equally, why should they be paid equally
I prefer to be paid 150 than be paid 130 and my colleague 110. It is stupid to have as a goal to earn more than you colleagues. Your goal should be to maximize your own pay.
Maybe because the union role is not to encourage anyone to burn themself down in relentless efforts? Maybe in the union eye, trying to protect people in the working class includes to dodge the traps of the exploiting class and the meritocratic myth?
Divide and rule is nothing new, and playing on the extra individual effort rewards is a very cheap trick to lower the working condition of everyone, possibly even the one doing the extra efforts. It doesn’t take a Nobel price in economy and a certificate of adhesion to Marxism to fathom this basic power dynamic leveraging on sociological imbalance, does it?
that's certainly one alternative, but can we stop looking at everything as a bipartisan scenario with binary outcomes? Maybe there's lots of aspects with mutually aligned interests? Perhaps every single thing in life is not a "us" vs. "them"?
For me, the only one who has ever used the standard terms as a floor has been the employer. The union has always backed me up when I wanted higher pay.
I'll give an example. I've had managers switched on me, and they've then said my salary has to be reduced because it's higher than the median. The organisation I work for also has a salary policy where every level you advance, your "personal additional percentage" is cut. This eventually reduces everyone to the same, lower level. This is the employer, not the union.
The union, otoh, backed me up when I wanted to keep my existing extra percentage.
I mean, this is likely factually wrong even in a US context, because presumably the collective bargaining power of a union extends beyond salary to functioning as a buyers group things like health insurance, being loud enough to gain visibility, etc.
But it's a thought process that depends on the idea that you're always in control of staying on the better side of the average in whatever metric a company chooses to judge employees. Which is a bold position to stake out without the anti-discrimination and working time safety measures achieved by unions that are at obvious risk of falling away without them.
Many of the freedoms to individually negotiate with an employer about rights and payment are underwritten by safety nets that are negotiated by unions, and everyone thinks themselves better than average until they aren't.
I'm not sure how it can be "likely factually wrong" that you are better off without paying a third party who does very little for you as an individual who is above average in your field than you would be if you didn't have that money. Concessions in indirect benefits often come at the cost of higher wages and the portability of earnings, the latter being one of the major downsides for skilled professionals.
All above average employees I know don't need to worry about staying on the better of average for some arbitrary metric. If the company makes a mistake and fires them, they can quickly get a job elsewhere. It's the people who have no better alternative than their current job who need the protection provided by a union contract, and they have no better alternative because the company made a mistake in the other direction when agreeing to employ them, and the union's job is to bar the employer from correcting that mistake.
And yes, unions successfully fought for improved work conditions 100+ years ago. What have they done to earn their keep during the careers of anyone posting on this site? Why should I as a non-unionized worker today join one? It's certainly not going to improve my total compensation, and the people who did the hard work you mentioned are long gone so it's no benefit to them for me to pay dues into an organization they were affiliated with at some point.
> I'm not sure how it can be "likely factually wrong" that you are better off without paying a third party who does very little for you as an individual who is above average in your field than you would be if you didn't have that money.
Do you not purchase insurance? Same principle. Collective bargaining and buying power unlocks things even you, a wealthy above average human, might wish to have affordable.
> Why should I as a non-unionized worker today join one?
So they continue to exist and rules don't slide back further.
I mean if you are old and rich enough enough not to care about the next decade of working life then good for you, I guess. But society could very well be ripped apart by the very things that the tech industry is rolling out, and unions are one of the few things that stand in the way of absolutely massive regressions in the way humans who have the temerity to want to eat will have to tolerate being treated.
Personally I want to see them survive, and non-union workers joining them when they can is one of those ways that can happen.
(As an IT freelancer I cannot, meaningfully; I assure you that when my work pattern changes I will)
This comment is much more revealing about you than I think you realise, but it's good to know at least that there's no point in wasting time on arguing things on the merits.
I mean I think it's exactly as revealing as I realize, in that I have again explicitly stated that unions are not beneficial to above average workers because they don't need external protections against job loss or substandard working conditions in modern society. To use your terms, they are best off self-insuring against these issues, as is the case with insurance against most forms of loss.
Fearmongering and/or hand wringing about what could get worse in the future doesn't change that reality today.
The big risk to a worker is that they overestimate their skill level, which absolutely does happen, but those people are not in the above average pool I'm talking about in the first place and would in fact benefit from a union.
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 a 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.
Zero hours contracts were never banned in the UK and in fact have been restricted over the years and debate is still ongoing on whether to ban them altogether.
We have diverged significantly from my original point...
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.
> 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.
The major other defense is competition. If there were infinitely many workers then unions would be useless to begin with, because employers would just let them walk out and hire someone else.
Individuals can likewise use the fact that labor is finite to make employers offer more by credibly threatening to work somewhere else. This is trivially shown by all the people who make an above-median wage despite not being in a union.
You do, however, need competition for that, and in turn to not have laws that prop up incumbents and create barriers to entry to new companies (i.e. new prospective employers).
> Those legal protections are easily eroded without unions.
That's very clearly not true based on the situation in Western Europe, in fact legal rights tend to keep increasing even when union membership is decreasing (e.g. UK, France).
As said, jobs and society as a whole have evolved and noone can be elected in government by promising to take away important protections, what they can be elected on is promising to curb union power but that the unions' fault when they abuse striking action.
My understanding is that workers are extremely well protected in Finland and what's happened is only some restrictions on political and solidarity strikes.
Edit: Unions are not the only defense that workers have. We have democracy with all sides represented and nowadays (in Europe at least) more is done through elections than through unions. That's why I said that society had changed compared to the early days of the labour movement.
Facts-aren't-True people make up a truth they like and then any inconvenient facts can be disregarded because facts-aren't-true.
It's a really popular ideology - it doesn't have any actual successes but since its followers don't believe facts are true the fact it's a dead end doesn't matter to them.
Paying into the legal pot makes sense, as does paying into a medical pot. But its not clear to me that mixing politics and unions is a good idea, especially as their typical support base have politically drifted from them.
I understand why there is that relationship, but it appears the people that make the main membership and the leadership in the unions/Labour party have drifted apart. So now you have this weird situation where the unions and the Labour party are funded by people that are largely ideologically opposed.
That's UK politics in general, which I suppose is microcosm of the UK. Everything is now a career. We have many, many, sitting MPs, that have only ever studied topics like politics with the sole aim of becoming a politician. Or never worked in private industry, or even worked in the public sector in parts that aren't necessarily unionized. In the past many MPs had 'life experience' outside of politics.
They are therefore naturally detached from unions, and more worryingly, the every day reality of the electorate.
For some of these MPs, losing their seat at a General Election is the first time in their entire lives they've ever lost a job, unlike the general public that have to put up with routine dismissals, via redundancy, company bankruptcy and so on.
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
Strong disagree that there is no other side of the question from the employee's perspective. Personally, I don't want to be collectively represented in my work by any group other than myself.
What do you mean by that? A union represents you as a worker and not your work.
Baseball players, for example, are represented by the MLBPA. Collectively they get a say in things like setting the rules of the game and negotiating healthcare, but the union isn't taking credit when a player hits a home run.
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.
In UK to make someone redundant (ie fired not for cause) then the job has to be removed and only the holder of that job can be fired and not any other person.
Of course HR departments and consultants are paid to work around this
The rule is called transferred redundancy and it goes like this in the UK: the company can't eliminate a high level position if some argument can be made that they only needed to eliminate a lower level position. So if a company feels it doesn't need a certain VP position, it can't actually get rid of that VP position if there is some argument that the company would only need to get rid of a lower director position. And the director position can't be eliminated if there's some argument that only a lower senior position could be eliminated. And the senior position cannot be eliminated if there's some argument that only a junior position would need to be eliminated.
In a jobs market place of wide choice, unionization is unnecessary. The tech job pool spans multiple industries, so if your employer is treating you poorly, leave.
In a jobs market where there are few employers, maybe unionize, because those employers are essentially a monopsony. Hence, in the UK, the NHS, teaching, and public transport, where the employer is the Government, they're heavily unionized.
Until fairly recently, the general public used to be very suspicious of government employees unionising. Because it was unionising against them, the general public.
The US was one of the countries I had in mind. Government workers are some of the most unionised of all industries there these days, but eg president FDR was staunchly against the practice.
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.
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.
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.
> I'm sure Alec Baldwin was happy he was a member of a union to represent him.
Why is it that so many union supporters point to entities like SAG and professional athlete unions in the US when advocating for unions, when they are a massive exception to the norm?
I would join a union like SAG. I have zero interest in being forced to make contributions to a political organization who has a passing interest in my well-being at best and is structured to benefit below-average workers.
Ehhh, the darkside is that unions often levelize workers into bins to negotiate fair wages for that bin. This is good if you are a weak player and bad if you are a strong player, because it removes the incentive to work any harder than the weakest link - there is no reward for that. So if you know how the job works and are good at it, unions kinda kill the whole thing.
Pro unionists will tell you that you are a sucker for being a good worker anyway, there is no reward, but what else would they say? Look at all the people who have independently moved up in a company or hopped jobs for better pay? Probably not.
>Hacker news has a lot of owners, managers and what John Steinbeck called "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" (e.g. future failed startup founders).
This way of thinking is so depressing to read about. If we ignore the strawman argument and just look at what 'point' you're making, you're basically making fun of people for having high aspirations. A bit of a 'look at this guy, he thinks he can run his own business! Dummy' energy.
>I'm sure many of them are reaching for the downvote as they read this.
In a perfect world enough people would have hit flag by now where I wouldn't have had to read this at all.
>you're basically making fun of people for having high aspirations.
I'm recognizing that some people have aspirations to become CEO and own a company and thus represent those interests in a class war, instead of their real interests as a laborer.
As it happens startup founders have more in common with labor than they do with capital. It's pretty routine for them to be screwed out of the wealth they created by investors and control over the company they created.
It's also routine for 90% of them to fail and for them to return to wage slavery.
Nonetheless it's common for them to take the side of their aspired societal position than their actual one.
>In a perfect world enough people would have hit flag by now
I can tell I hit a sore spot. Am I right in guessing that you aspire to own and run a successful company one day but are not there yet and were triggered enough to hit the flag button?
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.
I’m not sure what you’re aiming for here. You’re making an assumption that in an alternative history that unions did not exist working conditions of that kind would not exist. This assumption does a lot of work and needs substantiation.
e.g in the tech industry you have high salaries, flexible schedules and generous vacations and unionization is virtually non existent
Singapore is actually a great example of somewhere where communists and trade unionists fought and won a lot of concessions (especially in the 1950s) and where that contribution was airbrushed out of history.
The HDB building program was a reaction to the popularity of 1950s communists, for instance. Lee Kuan Yew yielded to a lot of good ideas like that (and CPF) under intense domestic pressure which he later pretended were just artefacts of his prescient genius.
Singapore has also had its share of wildcat strikes which the government reacted to by cracking down violently on the strikers but also reacted to them by trying to placate the others. They would then the rewrite history to pretend that they weren't pushed into that so you wouldn't accidentally credit "the wrong group".
So yeah, you're both the beneficiary of a rich history of trade unionism in Singapore and the follower of a personality cult that airbrushed that contribution out of history.
Labor rights are also steadily getting worse there because there IS little organized pushback these days and because NTUC has been turned into the government department that provides supermarket discounts, thus nullifying it as a force for advocating for labor rights.
If you've ever wondered why your government is so ridiculously abusive towards bloggers and has one of the worst press freedoms in the entire world: this is why. They need a tight control of that narrative to maintain their grip on power and to get labour to knuckle under and do as it is told.
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.
Ahh I see. I misunderstood what you meant with global prosperity.
I understood it as "everyone being prosperous". You mean a few individual becoming insanely prosperous at the expense of everyone else. Then you're completely right.
Unions have definitely succeeded in redistributing prosperity though (e.g. negotiating for higher wages) and also reducing exploitation (e.g. fairer working conditions).
I meant this. Which one do you think was primarily responsible for prosperity? Unions or businesses/technology? It is by far and obviously businesses and technology.
You can't redistribute anything if you don't have the wealth to distribute it.
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.
The only path for workers to have leverage against capital is if they work together in solidarity. There is no other path. Unions are a path towards achieving that.
Doing a job at a lower wage is giving up leverage and nonsensical on its face. But makes sense that this capital perspective is taken here …
British have no concept of unionisation and avoid conflict at all cost. Their employer tells them they must go back to five days to the office? They all obediently do it
Second part — avoiding conflict at all cost — mostly true.
First part - the British invented the modern labour union and there are still many, many examples of labour union negotiation every year that are highly visible to us.
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!
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.
Most jobs on the planet are non-union. Most jobs historically are non-union. Describing that as “a normal thing” ignores the amount of effort they take to erect and maintain.
> The tug between management and unions is the balance
The fundamental tug is between capital and labour. Management intermediates, normally, capital. (Owner managers are the exception.) Labour can be intermediated by agents and/or unions, though they’re far from “normal.” (More common is owner-management of labour, e.g. in small trades.)
> If you consider that safety is something that is impeding
Unions are a solution to a power imbalance, not a sign of maturity, neither when maturity is defined as "having attained a final or desired state" or as "having achieved a low but stable growth rate".
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.
Oddly enough, employers will often give wage increases more easily than other concessions. I’ve seen at least two union negotiation go that way - employees seeking better working conditions are given a hard no on something they are asking for like advance notice of scheduling changes but offered a wage increase in exchange.
Also, a 5% raise is approximately what inflation is likely to be this year (2.8% in the UK as of may) so if that’s all they get that’s basically a wage freeze.
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.
Oh, i don’t think I realized you were calling wikimedia rent seekers - not just the employees.
I guess that does vaguely match the description of rent seeking. But given that the alternative is handing the AI companies the wikipedia data set for free, so they can rent-seek with it - i’m not sure I care about that.
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)
I've been mostly resistant to unionization for my whole career, but I think now is the right time. Between AI and H1B, the pool of jobs available for engineers is getting smaller and smaller, especially at the low end.
When you destroy the entry level position, you also destroy the pipeline that creates senior engineers, a shortage of which is used as leverage to increase H1B in America.
Now may be the right time to HAVE a union, but the time to unionize was when engineers had more power. That same soft job market means we have much less leverage to unionize than we used to.
>When you destroy the entry level position, you also destroy the pipeline that creates senior engineers, a shortage of which is used as leverage to increase H1B in America.
It's okay, the same is happening across the board, everywhere. Companies are engineering their own labor shortage 10-20 years from now.
Unions are not the primary mechanism between employers and workers for establishing fairer wages in many European countries. Unions are designed to level a power imbalance between an employer (typically a legal vehicle which aggregates the material self interest of various actors) and the employees who would otherwise have to act alone.
Myopically focusing on wages while ignoring the many other concerns about the distribution of power and legal rights is a common misunderstanding.
Real wages (adjusted for inflation) were relatively flat from 2001 to the mid-2010s, especially for the bottom half of the wage distribution. Since then, there have been periods where real wages grew, but inflation often outpaced wage growth, particularly from April 2021 to early 2026. As of May 2026, real wages were still down 1.4% compared to January 2021, meaning that, after accounting for price increases, American workers are making less than they did five years ago.
Not every American citizen is having incomes like SWE in SV.
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, ...
I see. That paper is looking a median income from a PPP perspective but without accounting for taxes and transfers, which is a tiny bit unorthodox in this exact context which tries to get into the weeds slightly more than just standard PPP adjusted GDP per-capita or something like that. It's valid statistically, but typically if you're trying to adjust for cost of living it makes a lot of sense to use the amount of actual income the individuals have left over after paying taxes and receiving transfers from social programs. Otherwise you'll have a number which accounts for differences in prices but not differences in the proportion of "income" which is actually retained by the earner. This is what that wikipedia article I linked is reporting. Comparing two different countries with very different tax/social program policies with PPP adjustments but without tax/transfer adjustments is less than ideal.
It's not wrong, it's just not very useful. It's typically a more intermediary statistic rather than a final one when doing this type of comparison.
Yes, comparisons are difficult between countries. With respect to unions and wages, not sure hourly wages are that bad a starting point - but happy to look at research there on differential impact. Adjusting for taxes and social programs also can create issues in terms of accounting for things accruing from those for the future (pay as you go pensions come to mind).
You'd similarly factor in comparable medical insurance/
avg. out of pocket medical expenses, taxes etc. for a median income earner the other side then, right?
At median income, does that really tilt the scales much when all is said and done?
Medical expenses would be a combination of cost of insurance / treatment (PPP relevant) and government transfers in a country with partially or fully public healthcare, which is why it's so important to do both.
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.
Far from the richest by capita, average income, PPP average income, mean/median household wealth, etc., which feels like what we're actually talking about here. A lot of countries in the EU/Europe that would make the US look far worse, no?
Either way, no, if unions don't reduce how much people make and provide stronger worker's rights, protection from corporate abuse, workplace safety, collective bargaining for things like holidays, you can think it doesn't change your take-home at all and pretty undeniably see the benefits. How many weeks of legally mandated paid time off do you get, and how many additional days do you get on top of that as a median worker in the US? :b
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.
They recently laid off an internal team that was popular among workers and also fired one of the oldest employees for dubious reasons. Notably all of the people laid off or fired were union advocates, so this can be seen as a supercharged reaction to an effort to union bust (whether it was or not, it was certainly perceived that way).
The team was popular among contributors/editors. Their entire job was to handle the most upvited issues from the community and they were formed after the community felt like the management's priorities we not aligned with the community.
So like, the community was angry management was ignoring them. The response was to create a group to ensure some engineering time was put towards community priorities. Now that group has been fired.
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.
But that's exactly what a union is: a lobbying group that strives for a better outcome on behalf of its members. "Independence" is not part of their job description. Why wouldn't they talk to politicians, or even publicly support the political parties that are more aligned with their goals? Or do you believe that is a privilege to be reserved only for the rich?
Ah, but that's not your tax money you see; your tax money is being spent on other things you don't like such as teacher salaries. It's other people's tax money that's being used to maintain unions.
You make a lot of assumptions about other people don’t you and what they believe. You should learn to see the world as a spectrum of grays instead of black and white. Two things can be true at the same time.
There are other lines in the post that, to me, provide clarity.
First is this, the second paragraph:
> British-based employees at the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) wrote a letter to management today (Wednesday 24thJune) requesting their right to be represented by the United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW) section of the Communication Workers Union (CWU).
That makes it clear that this is regarding the "British-based employees at the Wikimedia Foundation". Yes, the headline does say "Wikipedia": I expect the CWU chose that because many more folks know what Wikipedia is, vs. the Wikimedia foundation.
Second is this:
> Over 1000 Wikimedia volunteers and community members have also signed petitions in support of the workers, who have networked globally under the banner of Wiki Workers United (WWU).
I view terms like "[wikipedia] editors" as terms of art: "Editor" in the Wikipedia context maps to the more-generic "volunteer" in the broader context, which is why the post is referring here to "volunteers and community members".
So, I don't see any inconsistency in the article, but I see how the current post title can make it confusing.
In my opinion, I think it would be appropriate for you to email the HN folks, to ask the title be changed to something like "Wikimedia Foundation Workers to Seek Union Recognition".
You can be a member of a labor union without that union being recognized as your exclusive bargaining representative for a certain employer (or whatever unit).
I read that as the majority of wikimedia employees in the uk have joined the union, but the union has yet to be recognized by the company with a collective agreement.
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...
Yes, you pay income taxes (and insurances) on all membership fees like gym (about 50%). If you put money into union, and union pays your gym fees, you save tons of money.
But there is tons of legal bs around unions. You need to structure it, like you are promoting socialism, and only reason to go into gym, is to smash capitalism!
Wow, they're on a roll over there. Just two days ago they permanently banned the cofounder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger.
Per his tweet: "Well, that’s that—I’ve been blocked by Wikipedia “indefinitely” for unstated reasons, by the “consensus” of a mob. There was no due process, no prosecutor, no dispassionate judge, no jury, no interpretation of law. All my judges were self-selected and hated me."
off-wiki canvassing for his proposal. its in the title of the issue and the summary is right at the top of the page.
"There is clear consensus for a community ban of User:Larry Sanger. There is general agreement among participants that he has engaged in off-wiki canvassing and is not here to constructively build the encyclopedia. There is also a significant concern shared by many editors that his actions constitute calls for outing."
you don’t really need to know the ins and outs of the culture.
the discussion for his ban was public and he actively participated in it. the reasons for the ban are clearly stated in that discussion. he knows the reasons because he argued against them. so, saying they were “unstated reasons” is a lie.
the issue is linked by the sibling comment if you want more context and links to definitions of canvassing, bludgeoning, etc
The charge against him is specifically "Stealth canvassing", which, beyond the use of the word "Stealth", is clarified several times as:
"""Stealth canvassing: Contacting users off-wiki (by e-mail, IRC, or Discord, for example) to persuade them to join in discussions (unless there is a specific reason not to use talk pages)"""
Between calling it "stealth" and specifically calling out email/IRC/Discord, it makes it pretty clear that it is not referring to public platforms.
Iterpreting it as a ban on any public discussion of Wikipedia by Wikipedia editors, anywhere on the public internet, is a very dishonest move by the people involved in that thread, and you can tell the real reason for it by reading the many comments simply lobbing politically charged accusations against him.
Seeing folks over there policing violations of taboos that are enforced by a very small minority of the English speaking world (around 15-25% of the US for the combined equity-progressives and further left groups) makes me worry about this wonderful site, which has taught me so much over the years :(
i don’t really care to get into litigating the issue itself (i have not made up my mind). my only point is that the reasons were stated and discussed publicly, so saying they were “unstated” is a lie
While the merits of Sanger's banning are worth debating, Sanger is dishonestly representing the process here. The reasons, rather than being 'unstated', were stated repeatedly and were not unreasonable. [0]
It was even directly linked to in the post on his talk page, that he took a screenshot of. Hardly unstated.
To be fair, there's a lot of text in that thread, but that is pretty unavoidable if the accusations have any sort of merit. He also actively participated in it, so he's probably actually read the majority of it.
Then he should justify that. When I read through the discussion though it seems that the stated reasons were arguably sufficient to justify the action taken.
Sanger has been given a lot more leeway over the years, because of his status as a co-founder, than anyone else would have been given.
That seems completely irrelevant to the post. Plus, isn't that the guy who hasn't been involved in the project since 2002? If it's been 2 decades, maybe it's time to find something else
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.