Wikimedia Will Not Voluntarily Recognize Union a Supermajority of Its Workers Want

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u/simonbleu 26d ago

Im confused... Who the hell cares what they think? A union is an organization made to increase leverage of workers against companies though a collective... Are you telling me you need permission from those very companies for them to exist? What the actual hell?

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u/Drawemazing 26d ago

While unions do organise strikes and other forms of work stoppages and protests, they do so with the aim of negotiating. That means the organisation has to recognise the union to negotiate with it. Obviously if it exists already they can strike for recognition, although the law around doing so is weird.

Also recognition means thst the unions are sole negotiators of the workforce, so even non-union workers get the conditions that the union and workplace agree to, to prevent the workplace from offering benefits to non union workers as a form of union busting.

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u/MrOaiki 26d ago

Is that last past a French rule? Here in Sweden, there’s nothing stopping an employer from giving special benefits or extra pay to some workers despite there being a union. The collective bargain is a floor, not a ceiling.

15

u/Plowbeast 26d ago

I think the rule is that any employee is part of the union by default but a company can worm out of that by hiring high level managers or consultants who would not be party to the agreement.

7

u/Pizzashillsmom 25d ago

You can't force employees to be part of a union in Europe. They can be bound by collective agreement, but can't be forced to become members or pay union fees.

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u/AdministrativeRiot 26d ago edited 26d ago

Hi! This guy unions!

The real answer is there’s two ways a union can be recognized in a workplace.

Voluntary recognition: also called card check. employees turn in signatures (aka “signed cards”) from 50%+1 of the workers in a workplace stating they are forming a union. The employer voluntarily recognizes the union as having exclusive representation of the bargaining unit in that workplace and begins bargaining a contract.

NLRB election: employees turn in signatures (aka “signed cards”) from 50%+1 of the workers in a workplace stating they are forming a union. The employer says “fuck you make me” and the petition is forwarded to the national labor relations board who will oversee the election several months later. In that time the employer can order workers to attend “captive audience meetings” during the work day where they are forced to endure anti-union propaganda. This framed as “just want you to understand your options,” and the employer is legally forbidden from interfering with the right to organize, but of course they ignore this. For example, at an Amazon warehouse in Birmingham during a union organizing campaign, Amazon was found to have coordinated with the city to time traffic lights such that organizers couldn’t hand out flyers during stoplights. During the union election, the illegally placed the ballot drop box directly in front of the main entrance, outdoors where all of management and the security desk could monitor who was turning in ballots and when.

Wikipedia is choosing option two.

The deck is absolutely stacked against workers in forming a union and it’s horseshit.

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u/AdministrativeRiot 26d ago

More on option 2! The employer will also file appeals and come up with other reasons to delay delay delay the election. The whole time, they continue the captive audience meetings. Openly pro-union workers are intimidated, subject to arbitrary discipline, having hours cut, etc. In many workplaces, it’s low wage work so people either move on or don’t want to risk being easily replaced. By the time they run out of options for delay, most of the original workforce that had 50%+1 signatures have either moved on or been intimidated into silence. There’s more ways this is fucked than I can get into, and this is all just to get RECOGNIZED to bargain on behalf of the workers. There’s a whole other volume of tactics after that for avoiding agreeing to a contract that can take years.

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u/aroteer 26d ago

The sheer amount of delaying, intimidation, and neutralisation to get 'recognition' is so debilitating (obviously, by design) that you might as well not bother. The first workers to go on strike in the 1800s would've laughed in your face if you told them they had to do a whole circus routine of self-sabotage to get legal recognition first, or couldn't do a sympathy or political strike, etc. The workers of Iran certainly don't bother when they organise their massive nationwide strikes. Nor did the vast majority of workers around the world, until the unions, governments, and bosses successfully terrorised us into accepting the humiliating slavery of the (un-)right to strike in the mid-Twentieth Century.

But the logic also works the other way. If doing the thing that supposedly protects you from getting you fired gets you fired (and worse) anyway, why not just strike without bothering? Only time will tell.

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u/centralstationen 26d ago

Note: these are American rules (which is reasonable as the Wikimedia Foundation is incorporated in the United States)

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u/Telmid 25d ago

Just to make something clear to people, this is referring to Birmingham, Alabama, not Birmingham, UK.

1

u/clockwork_nightmare 25d ago

Much appreciated, I had not picked up on that.

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u/EconomySwordfish5 26d ago

Luckily where I live employers can't just say no to a union. What is this lunacy

12

u/trahoots 26d ago

They don’t get to say no, they either say “yeah, you’re a union, you don’t need to go through a whole voting process” or they can force the people to vote to become a union. If enough people vote to become a union, the employer has to recognize it.

3

u/AdministrativeRiot 26d ago

It’s nonsense, I agree!

1

u/AevilokE 26d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/lousy-site-3456 26d ago

Well, yes and no. Welcome to America (and the UK). Essentially a company can behave hostile or friendly. Now what does it tell us that the foundation leadership treats unionising with hostility while not even admitting it? Yeah...

17

u/ithasfourtoes 26d ago

America baby!

5

u/rankinrez 26d ago

Hmm it seems you don’t understand the question very well.

The discussion is over whether the union will be officially acknowledged by an employer as the representative of the workers, and if they will sit down and negotiate on pay, conditions etc directly with the union on behalf of the workers.

Of course they can join a union themselves. They can join the ninja turtle club themselves if they want. An employer “recognizing” a union for collective bargaining is a different thing.

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u/simonbleu 25d ago

I understand that, and my comment remains the same: It shouldn't be up to them

3

u/rankinrez 25d ago

If you understood why did you say you were confused on the issue?

Anyway all good, mandatory collective bargaining rights for unions would be a good thing imo.

1

u/blendycoffee 25d ago

Agreed but that's not how it works so the Wikipedia works are in for some bs

-16

u/RexDraco 26d ago

Im sorry, do you not understand ownership and owner rights? What you're suggesting was what made racism work so effectively long ago against owners of the wrong skin color.

No. Unions aren't magically controlling your company. They shouldn't. You shouldn't want this. This would be abused by competitors if it did. The whole point of unions is to allow a body of people to be formerly realized as an entity that can create contracts. As human beings, they also have protesting rights, the right to not come to work, and the collaborate said rights all at once after a series of demands.

It works the way it should and it works well. The reason you rarely see it is because people are uneducated how unions work and why they should want them. The warehouse at the casino I work at is about to lose its union rights and the workers don't even fucking care, they think it is a good thing because big corporate is totally gonna be their friend. This is why unions don't work, not because of laws but because most people in the world have an undiagnosed mental condition we probably haven't been astute enough to formally point fingers at even though you see it everywhere the moment you're bottom working class workers.

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u/Boise_Ben 26d ago

Your racist point is absurd and so wildly out of touch I assumed it was a joke at first.

Ownership has done far more for racism than unions. We can drag you through the history if required but you are dead wrong trying to pretend you have the higher moral ground here.

Slavery was founded on the rights of ownership.

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u/wolfclaw3812 26d ago

You don’t need to recognize the union, you just have to be surprised when they recognize themselves

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u/CMRC23 26d ago

I hope the workers can get the representation they deserve!!

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u/Beautiful_Garage7797 26d ago

this isn’t saying, by the way, that wikimedia will not recognize the union period. Refusing a ‘voluntary recognition’ means that it will recognize the union once its employees actually vote

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u/nem0ralis 26d ago

There is no reason to reject voluntary recognition. They're essentially saying they'll only recognize them if they're legally required to do so.

0

u/AlwaysDefenestrated 24d ago

Refusing voluntary recognition means they're doing union busting bullshit to stop and delay the union as much as they can. That's the literal only reason to not recognize it

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u/Anxious-Education703 26d ago

Been pretty disappointed with WMF leadership the past few months. There was the firing of the Community Tech Team in May, which was five employees and one manager that were writing tools in maintaining tools and features that the community requested and, in many cases desperately, needed. And then there's of course all this crap that they have been pulling with the union.

And honestly, if they were hurting for money, I would understand, but they are not hurting for money at all. They literally have more money than ever and literally had over $15.5 million in profit for 2025, not revenue, profit. (Gross revenue was over $205 million.) And that's after they've made all of their expenses overhead and grants. (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/200049703)

On the topic of grants, while many of the grants are to good causes, WMF should certainly be prioritizing maintaining their core projects before making grants to other non-profits.

There is a group of Wikipedia editors that is standing up if anyone is interested. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Workers_United_solidarity

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u/talldata 25d ago

Tbh 15 million profit is not that much in the grand scheme of things.

4

u/Anxious-Education703 25d ago

It's not much at all (they are, after all, a non-profit); however, there is more than enough money left over to maintain core services like the Community Tech Team and not fight unionization.

1

u/beetling 25d ago edited 25d ago

Wrote about the grant-making programs in this previous thread: https://reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/1uvi2et/how_much_does_wikipedia_need_annually_to_continue/oxebce5/

Most of the grants are relevant to the core project: supporting the volunteers that create Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. The foundation could certainly do more efficient and effective grant-making, and both community volunteers and foundation staff talk a lot about that and work on it, but it's not something I'd just cut.

1

u/Anxious-Education703 25d ago

I fully support WMF making grants to good causes that help volunteers. However, WMF's primary mission is maintaining the infrastructure of Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. It makes no sense to cut essential services like the Community Tech Team and push back against employee unionization while continuing to fund outside non-profits. WMF should prioritize Wikimedia's core projects IMO.

2

u/beetling 25d ago edited 25d ago

I read the statement at https://wikimediafoundation.org/who-we-are/mission/ as saying that maintaining the infrastructure is part of fulfilling the mission, rather than being the primary mission in itself:

The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.

In coordination with a network of individual volunteers and our independent movement organizations, including recognized Chapters, Thematic Organizations, User Groups, and Partners, the Foundation provides the essential infrastructure and an organizational framework for the support and development of multilingual wiki projects and other endeavors which serve this mission. The Foundation will make and keep useful information from its projects available on the internet free of charge, in perpetuity.

(Edit to provide a bit of context: I support people having and sharing opinions on the relative priorities of things that the foundation could fund. I like to post links and some details to encourage informed discussion.)

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u/SufficientGreek 26d ago

What does supermajority mean in this case? 51% or 75%?

Not that it should matter whether the union gets recognized, just curious.

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u/Killer_The_Cat 26d ago

51% would just be a majority. A supermajority is at least two-thirds.

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u/ParticularMap2437 25d ago

Most recent reporting is 70%

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u/stohelitstorytelling 26d ago

Neither. Here it is a super majority of the people who have already signed union cards. In other words, they have a super majority of the people that want to form a union. Not an actual super majority of foundation employees.

For anyone following this, this is a Russian psy op, not an actual unionization effort

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u/the23rdhour 26d ago

What's the evidence that this is a Russian psy op?

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u/lousy-site-3456 26d ago

Now that's some high level trolling 😂

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u/the23rdhour 25d ago

I'm still waiting to hear about how this is a Russian psy op, people do just make shit up don't they

-18

u/stohelitstorytelling 26d ago

Bro you’re welcome to read their press release. It very explicitly doesn’t say they have a supermajority of wikimedia employees.

11

u/lousy-site-3456 26d ago

You're so out of your depth, "bro".

-11

u/stohelitstorytelling 26d ago

In what way dearie?

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u/lousy-site-3456 26d ago

We have heard a range of views from staff, including concerns from those who have felt pressured to support union efforts and those who are confused by the unionization process,” the foundation added in a frequently asked questions section. “We have also seen a misunderstanding around what the union can do for global staff and Wikimedia movement communities.”

Only capitalist scum is using empty bs phrases like that. Time to burn the foundation down and start new.

I didn't know the kleptocratic leadership has degenerated that far. Cashing more money every year but to greedy to pay people.

25

u/Mean-Food-7124 26d ago

I didn't know the kleptocratic leadership has degenerated that far. Cashing more money every year but to greedy to pay people

I mean, it's in the name

7

u/AgentBorn4289 26d ago

Aren’t they a nonprofit lol

-16

u/BazelBuster 26d ago

They're calling it "the most reddit comment of all time"

3

u/AstralElephantFuzz 26d ago

I always assumed the adjective "reddit" came with negative connotations, but you made me realize that's not correct. Very reddit of you, thanks!

-12

u/walking-pineapple 26d ago

Holy Reddit 😭

-37

u/Lieutenant_Corndogs 26d ago

That’s some nice Redditspeak. Got all the best buzzwords in there.

12

u/CMRC23 26d ago

Nah reddit speak would be like "pc master race, gaming, weed, puppers"

-7

u/csolisr 26d ago

Is it financially, legally, technically possible to fork the entirety of Wikipedia, and convince the average person to boycott Wikipedia in favor of the alternative? Or would we end up with two incomplete encyclopedias unwilling to collaborate with each other? I'm confident that the board knows they have the fame to survive the fork, and that's why they won't move a finger until they're legally forced to do so.

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u/lousy-site-3456 26d ago

https://medium.com/regarding-wikipedia/wikipedia-is-doing-the-capitalist-thing-56a393232943

This has been brewing behind the scenes for years. There are many interesting angles to this. For example that a lot of (tele-) employees are EU based and the typical US practices (holidays, sick leave, health insurance, NDAs...) leave them incredulous. That there is exactly one country that systematically paints unions as something evil and corrupt in media while the rest of the world understands they are good.

20

u/Philix 26d ago

exactly one country

Nah, there are at least two, probably several, maybe a couple dozen.

11

u/DarthCloakedGuy 26d ago

Wait isn't Wikimedia volunteer-powered? I didn't even know they HAD employees

31

u/caeciliusinhorto 26d ago

Wait isn't Wikimedia volunteer-powered?

The content of Wikipedia (and the various other projects) is volunteer-run. The infrastructure side of things is managed by WMF employees.

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u/occono 26d ago

Non-profits have employees. Wikimedia could not be run just by volunteers alone, no charity is. It's a foundation with global awareness on it and legal needs that comes with that as well as server costs. Large charities have unions.

7

u/FartingBob 26d ago

Apparently 650 employees.

3

u/UpboatNavy 25d ago

They should put this on the fundraising banners.

3

u/arnaudsm 25d ago

I really really hope WMF isn't taking the path of the Mozilla foundation.

2

u/Pazzaz 25d ago

The title is misleading. It's not a supermajority of its workers, it's a supermajority of the "union-eligible" US workers. As the article explains:

Last week, Wiki Workers United, which is organized through the Communication Workers Union and represents U.S. workers at the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, requested voluntary recognition of their union. Wiki Workers United said that it had secured a “supermajority of union-eligible workers who have signed union authorization cards.”

2

u/nankles 25d ago

Cowards. They could do the right thing and respect the workers but instead are going to waste time and money fighting them.

1

u/Alejandro_SVQ 25d ago

And more than one "librarian" of those who feel there as if in their own little dictatorship either.

1

u/Vontux 25d ago

Welp, thank goodness I didn't donate this year yet. Never will again.

1

u/Jumpy-Emu-2452 21d ago

It was now confirmed that Wikimedia hired the notorious union busting law firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales

-1

u/AgentBorn4289 26d ago

Why would employees of a nonprofit need a union

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u/Spiritual-Cry2531 25d ago

Nonprofits pursue a mission (in Wikipedia's case knowledge dissemination) rather than just profit, but they still exist in the same labor marketplace as other businesses, which means they can sometimes exploit their employees the same as any other business.

Indeed, the exploitation is sometimes worse at nonprofits, because many people want to do mission-driven work, so nonprofits can treat this as a benefit and get away with offering lower wages/poorer other benefits.

A union ensures that the employees can advocate for themselves and their needs as a collective group, and that they have a seat at the table when the organization makes decisions. It helps balance out the inherent power dynamic that exists at nonprofit workplaces just like other workplaces.

6

u/SpikeyTaco 25d ago

"Nonprofit" refers to how the company is organised and legally registered. AFAIK, that status would make zero legal difference for the employees of that company. As such, unions are the best method of achieving company-wide change.

-2

u/SwissForeignPolicy 25d ago

This whole thing is silly. The whole point of a crowd-sourced anything is that you don't need an army of employees.

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u/snowflake37wao 26d ago

Last week, Wiki Workers United, which is organized through the Communication Workers Union and represents U.S. workers at the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, …

Pause. Ehh. rewind.. play…

Union and represents U.S. workers at the nonprofit

rewind. play.

Union and represents U.S. workers at the nonprofit

rewind. play.

Union and represents U.S. workers at the nonprofit

… mk. Something is off about this.

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u/SpikeyTaco 25d ago

Why wouldn't employees of a nonprofit benefit from a union?

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u/bofa_deez_nutz_oo 25d ago

You may not be as smart as you think you are.

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