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.
bawolff 22 minutes ago [-]
British-based employees at the Wikimedia Foundation United doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
I suspect its just because naming things concisely is hard.
functionmouse 6 hours ago [-]
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.
xhkkffbf 2 hours ago [-]
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.
khriss 1 hours ago [-]
If we are going by anecdotes, then I suspect the number and scale of anecdotes of capita missing it's power are going to vastly outnumber unions doing the same.
teachrdan 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
rjh29 31 minutes ago [-]
I've noticed a lot of Americans have an anti-union sentiment, probably a product of indoctrination.
psychoslave 32 minutes ago [-]
So, coming with its own pitfalls. How does it feel however with no counter power at all in similar structures, in your own experience?
throw93949444 8 hours ago [-]
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!!!
bawolff 15 minutes ago [-]
> Smells like proper job to me!
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.
weberer 7 hours ago [-]
>There is non disclosure agreement
No there is not. You don't have to sign anything to make edits to Wikipedia. On the other hand, these people are full employees with work contracts.
throw93949444 7 hours ago [-]
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).
sandworm101 6 hours ago [-]
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).
some_random 5 hours ago [-]
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?
bawolff 8 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
ghaff 4 hours ago [-]
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.
vidarh 1 hours ago [-]
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.
some_random 3 hours ago [-]
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...
ghaff 3 hours ago [-]
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 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.
bawolff 5 minutes ago [-]
> The only legal way to waive copyright rights
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.
some_random 4 hours ago [-]
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.
throw93949444 3 hours ago [-]
Just link original author, and do notndestroy their work, even copyleft license wikipedia uses demands that!
some_random 3 hours ago [-]
If editing an article opens you up to copyright lawsuits for "destroying their work", it's completely untenable.
true_religion 1 hours ago [-]
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.
some_random 4 minutes ago [-]
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.
some_random 5 hours ago [-]
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.
4 hours ago [-]
throw93949444 4 hours ago [-]
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!
Platform vs publisher...
lkbm 2 hours ago [-]
> If I write stuff on wikipedia, it is opinion of wikipedia
That's obviously false, if for no other reason than:
> and there is rigorous editorial process, to get my stuff published...
There are people who will see and review your work after the fact, but it's published immediately.
> Also here my name is right next to the text, not in wikipedia!
There's a link at the top of every page to see who wrote what text.
some_random 4 hours ago [-]
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.
chobeat 8 hours ago [-]
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.
bpt3 6 hours ago [-]
What are the legal protections for collectively bargaining as non-employees with a corporation, if any?
It seems like there wouldn't be (and shouldn't be) any.
arethuza 6 hours ago [-]
Different legal systems have options for groups organizing to do a join litigation e.g. England and Wales have Group Litigation Orders.
I'm not a lawyer and not in England or Wales! ;-)
nvr219 7 hours ago [-]
Oh boy here we go
HugoTea 6 hours ago [-]
Very exciting good luck to them all
Frieren 9 hours ago [-]
There is no reason for any employee to not search for unionization. It is your right and it is in your best interest. Good for them.
lucumo 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
aaa_aaa 7 hours ago [-]
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.
tovej 7 hours ago [-]
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.
aaa_aaa 5 hours ago [-]
No it was not in US
one33seven 7 hours ago [-]
So your point is, you have to look for a good union? Fully agreed!
lucumo 4 hours ago [-]
Almost. My point is that you have to see if a union is good (for you).
eru 5 hours ago [-]
The top level command suggested that any unionisation is good. Even with a terrible union.
changoplatanero 8 hours ago [-]
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.
shit_game 7 hours ago [-]
The rising tide lifts all boats.
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.
lucumo 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
> The rising tide lifts all boats.
Apparently not ALL boats.
shit_game 5 hours ago [-]
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.
skeeter2020 3 hours ago [-]
>> Representation under a union is voluntary, and if an employee doesn't wish to be represented by that union, they may quit.
Come on, that's not voluntary in any true sense - especially since the same justification could be made for not having a union in the first place!
DrBazza 5 hours ago [-]
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.
'work deserves to be compensated fairly' - are you talking about Marx's 'labour theory of value'? Even though Marx himself criticised it?
Thedarkb 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Giefo6ah 1 hours ago [-]
The labour theory of value is Adam Smith's, not Marx's.
logicchains 7 hours ago [-]
>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.
shit_game 7 hours ago [-]
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.
AnthonyMouse 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
chobeat 6 hours ago [-]
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
AnthonyMouse 6 hours ago [-]
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.
AnthonyMouse 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
cdkmoose 1 hours ago [-]
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.
psychoslave 26 minutes ago [-]
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.
cdkmoose 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
malfist 4 hours ago [-]
> What’s in the collective best interest may not match with what’s in the individual best interest.
The alternative isn't what is in your best interest, but what is in your boss's best interest
skeeter2020 3 hours ago [-]
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"?
malfist 2 hours ago [-]
Sure, that's exactly what a union is for.
dofm 7 hours ago [-]
You can fall ill or need working accommodations regardless of whether you are above or below average.
bpt3 6 hours ago [-]
And you can more easily take care of those needs yourself if you aren't required to subsidize your below average colleagues.
dofm 2 hours ago [-]
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.
tovej 6 hours ago [-]
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.
bArray 8 hours ago [-]
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.
irl_ 8 hours ago [-]
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)
mytailorisrich 8 hours ago [-]
It depends on the job and country.
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.
6LLvveMx2koXfwn 8 hours ago [-]
I wonder why workers in Western Europe are so protected.
mytailorisrich 7 hours ago [-]
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.
6LLvveMx2koXfwn 7 hours ago [-]
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.
iamacyborg 7 hours ago [-]
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.
who knows what's going to happens with yet another leadership change though.
mytailorisrich 6 hours ago [-]
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...
tovej 7 hours ago [-]
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.
AnthonyMouse 6 hours ago [-]
> 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).
psychoslave 18 minutes ago [-]
>The major other defense is competition.
Yes. As sure as the casino fear the competition among players in games on which they unilaterally set the rules.
mytailorisrich 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
tovej 6 hours ago [-]
I just gave you an example. How can you say it is "very clearly not true".
You would have to somehow disprove the reality of what has already happened in order to make that statement
tialaramex 5 hours ago [-]
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.
DrBazza 5 hours ago [-]
The Labour party was founded by unions, so it's no surprise they're still completely beholden to them.
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.
criddell 4 hours ago [-]
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.
bko 8 hours ago [-]
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
DrBazza 5 hours ago [-]
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.
eru 5 hours ago [-]
Until fairly recently, the general public used to be very suspicious of government employees unionising. Because it was unionising against them, the general public.
DrBazza 4 hours ago [-]
In which country, the USA? In the UK, all Government bodies are unionized.
WarmWash 3 hours ago [-]
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.
IncreasePosts 8 hours ago [-]
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?
krior 8 hours ago [-]
The wikipedia atricle only cites american sources so that may be something unique to how US unions operate.
IncreasePosts 8 hours ago [-]
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.
pasc1878 6 hours ago [-]
I don't think so in UK.
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
IncreasePosts 14 minutes ago [-]
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.
siqncidif 8 hours ago [-]
You didn't provide any argument, so you could have said the exact opposite and it would have been the same comment.
Here, I'll do it for you:
No, you are wrong it's the other way around
sevenzero 9 hours ago [-]
I work in a 2 man company, for sure a Union will have many advantages for me x)
Parae 9 hours ago [-]
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.
hirako2000 8 hours ago [-]
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.
gbanfalvi 8 hours ago [-]
It’s true. The best approach is to stand alone against the fire and try to put it out yourself. Maybe the fire will be nice to you if you beg.
irl_ 8 hours ago [-]
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.
8 hours ago [-]
apelapan 9 hours ago [-]
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.
sevenzero 9 hours ago [-]
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.
LtWorf 9 hours ago [-]
Ah yes we all know unions take at least 99% of your salary…
sevenzero 9 hours ago [-]
Did I ever claim that?
Its 1% of my montly gross salary which is about 40€/month which is just too much given I have 2.500€/month to survive with.
esperent 8 hours ago [-]
Have you evaluated how much better bargaining power that €40 would get you? You might stand to make a lot more back.
roenxi 8 hours ago [-]
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.
mrweasel 8 hours ago [-]
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.
8 hours ago [-]
6510 7 hours ago [-]
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.
Ill let myself out
iso1631 9 hours ago [-]
Aside from legal support, advice, and contributing to industry influence?
Telaneo 9 hours ago [-]
What have the Romans ever done for us?
iso1631 8 hours ago [-]
My union does very little for me directly. Neither does my house or car insurance. I've never needed either.
Indirectly though my union does do stuff
I'm sure Alec Baldwin was happy he was a member of a union to represent him.
bpt3 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
pydry 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ApolloFortyNine 3 hours ago [-]
>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.
pydry 3 hours ago [-]
>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?
N_Lens 7 hours ago [-]
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.
meta_gunslinger 8 hours ago [-]
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.
pydry 8 hours ago [-]
How much do you hate for time off at weekends, paid vacations and medical leave?
eru 5 hours ago [-]
We have these in Singapore as well, and our unions are toothless.
pydry 4 hours ago [-]
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.
simianwords 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
arrrg 8 hours ago [-]
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.
simianwords 8 hours ago [-]
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.
So please spare me the bit about solidarity!
chpatrick 8 hours ago [-]
That's like saying not wanting to work 14 hours a day in a coal mine is selfish because it's at the expense of global prosperity.
gbanfalvi 8 hours ago [-]
“Global prosperity” is a good one.
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.
simianwords 8 hours ago [-]
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.
isgb 4 hours ago [-]
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).
simianwords 1 hours ago [-]
> I understood it as "everyone being prosperous".
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.
irl_ 8 hours ago [-]
I think this may be a US thing, in the UK at least unions work to promote solidarity.
babagan0ush 8 hours ago [-]
this comment is satire right?
throe9338e8 9 hours ago [-]
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!
cellu 3 hours ago [-]
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
dofm 2 hours ago [-]
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.
nephihaha 2 hours ago [-]
No idea where you get that from. Most of my childhood was dominated by strikes. We still have them.
philipallstar 9 hours ago [-]
> The workers are longtime contributors and organisers, and are deeply committed to the Wikimedia movement.
It always starts this way, and ends with over half the people not bothered but still under union protection, and cannot be removed.
jonkoops 9 hours ago [-]
Ahhh the American mindset.
philipallstar 8 hours ago [-]
Your zero-content bias is on display, but I'm not in the least American. If I were American I probably wouldn't have seen so much union nonsense.
throwaway93135 8 hours ago [-]
Imagine how high must those salaries be in union-prolific Euro nations, compared to the measly ones of those uncivilized Americans!
anothermathbozo 5 hours ago [-]
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.
some_random 4 hours ago [-]
What a great excuse for stagnant wages.
psychoslave 8 minutes ago [-]
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, ...
thunderbird120 7 hours ago [-]
>median is higher in Germnay
I cannot think of any standard by which this is true, certainly not by nominal or PPP income for either personal or household income.
Not looking at households or disposable income here but at hourly wages.
thunderbird120 6 hours ago [-]
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.
RandomLensman 6 hours ago [-]
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).
Martinussen 6 hours ago [-]
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?
thunderbird120 5 hours ago [-]
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.
throwaway93135 7 hours ago [-]
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.
Martinussen 5 hours ago [-]
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
eru 5 hours ago [-]
> 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
For comparison: unions are at best toothless in Singapore, there's no minimum wage, yet we have some of the highest wages in the world.
RandomLensman 7 hours ago [-]
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.
tovej 6 hours ago [-]
Real wages are higher in every EU country with strong unions.
Seems entirely reasonable and I would hope will be accepted as such by the management.
throw93949444 7 hours ago [-]
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...
Worth asking AI about local lawx...
klez 6 hours ago [-]
> In EU
Where, exactly?
> Union fees are usually exempt from tax
What do you mean? You pay taxes on other membership fees?
Martinussen 6 hours ago [-]
As in you can subtract it from your taxable income, I assume. I think it's fairly normal (in this part of the world*).
throw93949444 4 hours ago [-]
In germany and poland.
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!
hulahoof 6 hours ago [-]
Whatever happened to the deepmind union effort ?
chobeat 6 hours ago [-]
they are still in talks for recognition
NooneAtAll3 50 minutes ago [-]
what does recognition even mean?
shouldn't main way of demanding recognition by a union just be a strike?
christkv 8 hours ago [-]
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.
chobeat 8 hours ago [-]
Guess how those labor laws were achieved. Spoiler: unions. Same as weekends, 40-hour work week and so on. Strong unions win laws.
christkv 7 hours ago [-]
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.
tremon 6 hours ago [-]
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?
christkv 4 hours ago [-]
Sure be a lobbying group but without public funding. If your members can't be bothered to pay the cost of the union it can cease to exist.
tremon 3 hours ago [-]
In other words, yes you do believe that having direct access to politicians is a privilege to be reserved only for the rich.
christkv 3 hours ago [-]
No I believe that you should not be paid my tax money to run your politically motivated union. The members of the union should.
tremon 2 hours ago [-]
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.
christkv 1 hours ago [-]
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.
3997531578 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Ylpertnodi 7 hours ago [-]
As a union member - my union can fuck off.
Dirty back-door deals, scratchy-back 'allowances', management collusion...
But, we went on strike, got a pay rise, my disciplinaries were found to be baseless, I got a pay rise they hid from us.
Swings and roundabouts, but I have got two people fired -it takes time, and it's done correctly. Or the law gets involved.
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.
I suspect its just because naming things concisely is hard.
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.
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.
Smells like proper job to me!
We closed the same loophole with uber and doordash employees. Wikimedia should employ its editors!!!
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.
No there is not. You don't have to sign anything to make edits to Wikipedia. On the other hand, these people are full employees with work contracts.
https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Policy:Terms_of_Use
I (lawyer) have never encountered a jurisdiction where a contractor could not license their work under the contract with their employer (the person contracting them).
>> 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.
https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/canadian-intellectual-prope...
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).
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.
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.
https://opensource.com/article/19/4/history-mit-license
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.
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.
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.
https://www.aci-iac.ca/art-books/michael-snow/key-works/flig...
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.
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.
Also here my name is right next to the text, not in wikipedia!
Platform vs publisher...
That's obviously false, if for no other reason than:
> and there is rigorous editorial process, to get my stuff published...
There are people who will see and review your work after the fact, but it's published immediately.
> Also here my name is right next to the text, not in wikipedia!
There's a link at the top of every page to see who wrote what text.
It seems like there wouldn't be (and shouldn't be) any.
I'm not a lawyer and not in England or Wales! ;-)
That's a very theoretical view. (As most absolutes are.)
Unions and rules around unions can be very different depending on locality, industry and other specifics. The power and benefits a union gives a specific employee may not outweigh the cost they impose on that specific employee.
Furthermore, unions are organizations. They have their own internal power structures that can be corrupted by self-serving individuals or special interests. A blanket "union = good" view can make that invisible to you.
There's also LOTS of anti-union misinformation spreading in the US.
Denying people agency and power in their negotiation by claiming they are "not as good as someone else" is antithetical to the struggle of labor - work deserves to be compensated fairly.
>When I worked at a unionized place I was blocked from an opportunity my employer offered me because it was better than what the standard negotiated terms were
Your union blocked this because your employer was trying to break your unions negotiating power by separating your interests from the collective workforce. If people who are sympathetic to management and accept that they will be compensated greater by acting against the interests of the labor union, the union should block these promotions. If you don't want to protect your coworkers by negotiating with them, then you must be interested in exploiting them by negotiating against them. Labor is a zero sum game.
Be that as it may, for this specific employee the union was a negative. In effect, he is asked to sacrifice for the collective. It's understandable that that's acceptable to the collective, but it's also not hard to see why the sacrifice wouldn't like that.
> The rising tide lifts all boats.
Apparently not ALL boats.
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.
Come on, that's not voluntary in any true sense - especially since the same justification could be made for not having a union in the first place!
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Leyland#1975%E2%80%931...
'work deserves to be compensated fairly' - are you talking about Marx's 'labour theory of value'? Even though Marx himself criticised it?
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.
Labor is not a homogenous block. A huge chunk of workers are lazy as fuck and only do the bare minimum; it's unfair for people who work hard that their compensation should be lowered just so the lazy ones can be paid more. And lowered it must be, because a company only can only afford a certain total amount of spending on wages, so if the shirkers must be paid more than the hard workers must be paid less. It's not exploitation to pay the bare minimum possible to someone who puts in the bare minimum of effort.
If you work in a unionized workplace and have complaints about a coworkers capability, your complaints should first be heard by your union because your union is the arbiter of your labor force, as per the contract you sign with said union.
Guilds were (and in some non-US places still are) a solution to this issue, in which some level of competence must be demonstrated through time spent and qualifications earned to gain acceptance to a guild. Some unions in the US still practice this measure of trial for their members, but they are generally relegated to the skilled trades, and this isn't something that common labor unions do.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The alternative isn't what is in your best interest, but what is in your boss's best interest
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'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.
At least here in the UK our unions are heavily involved in politics - which is a massive issue. Currently, the leadership of the unions and the people in them are literally opposite sides of the political spectrum.
In Western Europe workers are very protected so unless you are in a low end job or specific public sector job and might gain from collective wage bargaining there is often little actual benefits in being in a union, taking into account that membership isn't free.
We have diverged significantly from my original point...
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.
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).
Yes. As sure as the casino fear the competition among players in games on which they unilaterally set the rules.
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.
You would have to somehow disprove the reality of what has already happened in order to make that statement
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Labour_Party_(U...
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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
Here, I'll do it for you:
No, you are wrong it's the other way around
Not sure fighting fire with fire is the solution, a last resort.
If he can't leverage his power when he already represents 100% of the company's employees a union is unlikely to help.
Another larger union, which organises industrial workers, cleaning staff and generally people with less formal education, is almost twice the cost. They do negotiate at least base pay for the industries they represent. Many of the people they represent are often better off having their union do the negotiations. When handling negotiations it's obviously not only about money, but the unions do need to be able to provide at least raise in salary that can cover their dues, and sometimes they can't.
Republican jesus said: It would have been easier if the good Samaritan would have just taken the guys money without helping him.
I have this wild theory that civilization isn't actually about me. It means one can join a union without any direct personal benefits of any kind.
When for example my health insurance helps pay someone for their care I point first at them then at my chest and announce smugly, see? I paid for that!
No one thinks it's funny but that is not important, as long as I think it's funny it's a good joke.
The trial is over, it is now abundantly obvious that if everyone acts in their own self interest everything gets increasingly fucked up for everyone.
If you are hungry the free market gives you an advert for a sandwich you cant afford but would probably kill you slowly if you could.
Imagine retired people still being union members. Crazy right? They could have better spend their time looking at pictures of their children who never visit.
Ill let myself out
Indirectly though my union does do stuff
I'm sure Alec Baldwin was happy he was a member of a union to represent him.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Workers working together in solidarity is the right approach to get more power in the lopsided power dynamic between owners and workers. Owners have too much power, workers too little. Solidarity is a path towards fixing that.
I don’t see anything virtuous about self preservation. It doesn’t take much for a person to save their own job.
What’s virtuous is the ability to do understand the free market and uphold meritocracy ESPECIALLY when you aren’t the top dog in the hierarchy.
Unions may protect jobs but does it at the expense of other people who want your jobs who can do it better at a lower wage. Do people have the virtue to voluntarily give up their job for that person who is better than them? I don’t think so.
So please spare me the bit about solidarity!
How is global prosperity achieved? Business owners get all the profits of our labor and maybe some of it trickles down? Workers get “prosperous” on crumbs?
I’ll be expectantly awaiting for my prosperity in the mail.
Primarily global prosperity was achieved by higher productivity - the ability to do more with less work. Unions had very less to do for increasing productivity.
I’m not saying anything extreme because this is the academic consensus.
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.
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.
It always starts this way, and ends with over half the people not bothered but still under union protection, and cannot be removed.
Myopically focusing on wages while ignoring the many other concerns about the distribution of power and legal rights is a common misunderstanding.
Not every American citizen is having incomes like SWE in SV.
https://www.statista.com/chart/32428/inflation-and-wage-grow...
I cannot think of any standard by which this is true, certainly not by nominal or PPP income for either personal or household income.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
[2]https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
Not looking at households or disposable income here but at hourly wages.
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.
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
For comparison: unions are at best toothless in Singapore, there's no minimum wage, yet we have some of the highest wages in the world.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48663861
Worth asking AI about local lawx...
Where, exactly?
> Union fees are usually exempt from tax
What do you mean? You pay taxes on other membership fees?
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!
shouldn't main way of demanding recognition by a union just be a strike?
But, we went on strike, got a pay rise, my disciplinaries were found to be baseless, I got a pay rise they hid from us.
Swings and roundabouts, but I have got two people fired -it takes time, and it's done correctly. Or the law gets involved.
I'll take a shitty union over not.