Comment by stasomatic
8 hours ago
They have enough employees to need a union and a board? It's a CRUD PHP site that I could run from a VPS (joking ofc, but not that much off).
I've never worked in an industry where unionization was a thing, but my general understanding is that the unions are protectionist dreaming of things that were true before but not today, but they want to keep things as they were. Good luck.
I've benefited from Wikipedia, but I don't romanticize it. Either side of the table can't stop the AI onslaught, they are all out of jobs. Another Wikimedia will rise up from the ashes.
>my general understanding is that the unions are protectionist dreaming of things that were true before but not today, but they want to keep things as they were.
This mindset really baffles me, as a unionized guy with a white collar email job. Don't you, like, want things that your employer doesn't want to give you? Job protection? Better than CoL wage growth? Work from home? Internal job progression? Clear, understandable job factors agreed upon in advance?
The union negotiates for what its members want. There's nothing magical about unions that mean, like, a white collar union is going to be negotiating for all its members to get a new hard hat every year, just because that's what auto worker unions do.
I don’t “understand it” because it’s an antagonist relationship, us vs them. How’s that solved anything ever without violence?
I don’t know what the solution is, we’ve tried a few. Perhaps there are none.
Do you want to keep trying for your union to earn their seat at the table each year proving their worth, or “else”?
There is going to be another meeting where the bosses from each side will sip martinis and introduce their spouses and then they depart the galla in long black limos. It’s been written.
P.S. Your employer, your chosen object of warship, your partner or children, owe you nothing. Gotta find a way to reconcile that.
You're unfamiliar with the scale of Wikimedia. Besides Wikipedia, they also host multiple other projects, like Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. Besides that, a huge portion of their budget goes towards grants to organizations that help distribute information for free on the internet. This absolutely isn't a "CRUD PHP site".
Well, that’s what the output looks like. Like a barebones phpMyAdmin query result from 20 plus years ago.
Wikimedia requires a board. IMO that board should include at least one representative selected by the employees (i.e. a union rep.) It has one seat reserved for the founder.
This governance question doesn't go away if another Wikimedia rises from the ashes. You still will still need a board making decisions, and someone needs to pick the members of the board. Right now there are 8 seats selected by "the community," 7 seats selected by the board, and 1 seat selected by the founder.
Yes, so? If you are here you could clone that thing in a weekend, no? You’d be the sole Chairman, CEO, and Supreme Leader for life. Wikipedia needs to be eminent domained, but we can’t agree on things while the US is headed by you know who.