The linked article doesn't even come close to suggesting money laundering. It really just argues that Wikimedia is similar to virtually every other successful organization on earth and that its bloat grows with its resources.
Wow insightful.
The mere existence of The Mythical Man-Month or Peopleware does not prevent this behavior. Turns out it's actually super, super hard to avoid. It's pervasive enough to have several books written about it, and several more angry blogs written about specific companies' failure to achieve the allegedly "easy, obvious" thing that very, very few companies actually succeed at doing!
Makes me wonder if it's not so obvious or so easy... hmm... Nah, probably everyone else is malicious and/or stupid.
Money laundering has become a default catch all term for "monetary misuse / suboptimal allocation".
I worked in AML tech for a bank earlier in my career. I put up a fight against this misuse of terminology for a while, but eventually just gave up. Just embrace that everything is money laundering to many people and life is easier.
People are really not curious enough about bureaucracy. We complain literally our entire lives about "bureaucracy" and all the bad outcomes it produces.
But I've met literally no one who thought "hmm... if there's this emergent phenomenon across virtually every single large-scale human endeavor... and that phenomenon seems to systematically produce undesirable outcomes... at the cost of billions of dollars or millions of lives... maybe I oughta inspect this phenomenon more closely!"
I don't think of non profit bloat as enshittification. Enshittification is gradual reduction in quality of a user facing service over time that used to be trusted. Here it's just a matter of (arguably) inefficient spending as fundraising had increased but I don't think there's any rollback in services.
Which as your article points out, is as easy to solve as reading The Mythical Man-Month. That's why it's an Iron Law. It's easy to remove!
Also, as you point out, it's actually the same as money laundering, which is an actual crime. So as it goes, every large organization is committing massive scale organized crime (to their own detriment, oddly enough), but they can stop doing so by just reading The Mythical Man-Month.
Enshitification doesn’t just happen, it’s a choice to sacrifice quality and integrity for short term profit. There are plenty of large products and companies that haven’t gone this way.
I could not find any indication that the purpose of this ever-increasing spending (while alarming) is money laundering in the essay you linked. Can you provide any other source to back up this claim? Money laundering is illegal, while spending money in of itself is definitely not.
No wonder they've upped the guilt tripping this year. Wikipedia has enough money right now to run Wikipedia forever but it keeps wasting it on useless stuff and feeling like it needs more. The WMF cannot fathom how to operate without continuous growing wastes of money, and without donations, Wikipedia would die within two years. We need to starve the beast so it learns to live frugally again.
> [W]e believe a secret-ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board is the appropriate path forward. This process protects individual choice and ensures that any outcome reflects the collective will of those eligible to participate.
> [Jimmy Wales:] One of the problems with the process so far is that it was not secret and we have heard from some staff members that they felt pressured because the organizers would know how they decided. That isn't a great process and it goes against our movement's values quite badly to have people in a situation where they are pressured into something one way or the other.
Counter-argument
> The community response to the WMF statement has mostly been one of dismay, with fears that the Foundation will use the time gap between now and the secret ballot to discourage employees from union involvement, using union busting methods as described humorously in an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
Honestly, I'm on Wikipedia's side: there should be a true secret ballot. It should be soon and I'd be fine seeing the union win. Sure Wikipedia can use threats and propaganda in the meantime (so can Wiki Workers United), but that is less coercive than a public ballot.
Yeah for the counterargument like... if you were afraid of tipping your hand, maybe you should've done it the correct way (anonymously) the first time?
They are doing it the correct way. In order to get union recognition you need to get enough people in the company to sign union cards. This is the normal way to create a union.
Companies argued that some people could be coerced and so the NLRB created a "two step" process in case the company protests the creation of the union. Basically if the company says "we don't think these cards were signed under proper circumstances" the NLRB would come in and hold a secret ballot.
That is basically what's happening here, and "wikipedia's side" is actually them reading a statement written by their lawyers in order to activate the NLRB balloting process.
The real reason why the companies like to invoke the secret ballot process is it takes a long time, and this gives them a lot of time to fight the union, fire the organizers, and "convince" employees to withdraw their support.
That's not how it works. You need the signed cards to hold an election. Employers can, seeing a large majority publically willing to sign the cards before they have any solid protections, choose to forgo the election on the basis that a majority of employees were willing to sign.
If the only reason WMF had to request a formal election was to allow secret ballot, they would not be hiring union busting law firms. The point of such firms is to legally and illegally discourage union membership - the penalties for doing so illegally are comically small.
At the conceptual level, unionising is simply a group of workers gathering into a group and saying we want to negotiate as a group. Usually this is done by workers to improve conditions and to have a better say when they’ve been being ignored or worse, poorly treated.
Union recognition is then the company accepting that the union exists and then agreeing to meet and engage with it.
Not accepting it, is usually a crappy corporate move in an attempt to not have workers collaborating together.
Lots of research shows that generally places where unions exist have better work conditions and perform better over the long term.
The US has lower union involvement than in many countries.
> Lots of research shows that generally places where unions exist have better work conditions and perform better over the long term.
Do you have any non-partisan sources for this? Genuinely curious. When you say perform better what do you mean specifically? And does better work conditions include better pay or just on-site conditions or something similar?
The non partisan source is the history of the industrial revolution itself.
I am not saying that you are doing this, but I tend to find that people who think we don't need unions anymore are engaging with the status quo in the same way as people who say we don't need vaccines anymore.
I think working conditions have changed enough since then to make a request for non-biased studies a reasonable one.
Most debates about unions seem to boil down to “I just know” or anecdotes. I would expect unions to fund research to show that working conditions are better in union shops, but not include the fact that some unionized shops can’t compete in a market with non union shops and might go out of business. (But have great working conditions until the last day)
And vice-versa for pro industry research.
Unions are adversarial, and feel necessary to people that view employment or employers through that lens.
It’s possible that we can still credit unions with the status quo, but 1they have nowhere near the adoption of vaccines to make the analogy a good one.
I’d rather debate “which employers/industries” need unions than debate whether they are objectively good in all circumstances.
The conceptual level breaks down in places where an open shop is illegal or disincentivized, which I suspect is the case in California where the Wikimedia Foundation is based. Europe usually has open shops, not closed shops, for example.
Is union recognition legally required to, say, organise a strike? Do workers who participate in a strike organised by a non-recognised union expose themselves to getting fired?
When strikes are legal is really complicated and depends on industry.
The thing to understand is that labor law in the US was created to "reduce labor strife." Unions existed before they were recognized as legal. What labor law tries to do is make an orderly process with the goal is no strikes and a mutually agreed-on contract.
The company recognizing the union is the first step towards a contract. Basically it's saying "I understand this organization represents these employees and I should negotiate with it."
This is incorrect. Voluntary recognition, which is what this article is about, means that an election is not done. Wikimedia Foundation is asking for an election to ensure everyone actually wants this.
Naturally, the activists feel this is the worst thing in the world and makes them evil.
My dad worked for the United States Postal Service for decades. He never joined the union, but he was still legally required to pay union dues, and the union was still legally required to represent him. So at least in some cases, yes, starting a union does affect all employees and practically requires them to "join" even if there's an option to not join on paper.
Is not what happened?
WWU announced on 28 July that they would file for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board. The announcement also accused the Wikimedia Foundation of being disingenuous in their public communications:
Also on the communication by wales he says he wasn’t happy with the election because people knew who voted for, but he didn’t deny there was some kinda of election?
> This is incorrect. Voluntary recognition, which is what this article is about, means that an election is not done. Wikimedia Foundation is asking for an election to ensure everyone actually wants this.
Misinformation.
Voluntary recognition just means that there isn't a 120 hard fight against union elections to decide if there CAN BE a union.
Dark Horse comics just voluntarily acknowledged their union. After that is union elections, to decide who the union elected is.
At the very minimum, the company acknowledges the union and negotiates with the union for working conditions for union members.
It’s quite common that that also extends to negotiation on salary bands, and it’s also quite common the company then applies the same salary bands to non union employees also, rather than the norm in tech of individual negotiation. Many people think they’re in the group that is negotiating outlier salaries and would lose from this. However, many people with that viewpoint are also wrong about their position in the salary scale.
Sometimes this extends to promotion criteria and some unions push for tenure or seniority based promotions. This may or may not be better than your individual companies specific combination of merit, nepotism, the political clout of your managers and the business criticality of your department.
One thing that happens in the US that is illegal here is some companies agree to becoming a union shop and make joining the union compulsory.
> At the very minimum, the company acknowledges the union and negotiates with the union for working conditions for union members.
By federal law, if a company has a union, the union must represent ALL non-management workers, even those who do not pay dues.
This is obviously fucked up. But this has been union law at the NLRB for a long time.
The fair response: a union should only legally be responsible for representing its members. But these sorts of terrible union laws are the consequence of attempting to destroy them since their creation.
And for those of you who think unions are terrible (capitalists and ilk), what we had before was 'firebomb the business or the bosses house', and basically waging war between capitalists and labor. Unions and legal representation WAS the compromise.
Labor history has always been a bloody and murderous affair. Go look up the history of the pinkertons.
“Union recognition” means the employer acknowledges that the union is the bargaining representative for a subset of employees within the organization. This comes with additional legal duties on the part of the employer, such as exclusively bargaining with the union and not attempting to negotiate directly with individuals the union represents.
Good. Most tech unions are worthless and only accelerate outsourcing. Unions can be good though, like in construction where the work is inherently dangerous.