The Wikimedia Foundation waited until immediately after its largest annual conference to say it wouldn’t voluntarily recognize its workers’ union.
Last week, Wiki Workers United, which is organized through the Communication Workers Union and represents U.S. workers at the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, requested voluntary recognition of their union. Wiki Workers United said that it had secured a “supermajority of union-eligible workers who have signed union authorization cards.” A group of more than 1,100 Wikipedia editors have also signed a letter of support for the union.
On Monday, just days after the massive Wikimania Conference concluded in Paris, the Wikimedia Foundation announced it would not voluntarily recognize the union and said the union would have to conduct a vote as overseen by the National Labor Relations Board.
Why are Wikimedia workers unionizing? I was expecting a non-profit to be on the less greedy end of the spectrum
Knowing people who’ve worked for non-profits there’s a lot of horror stories out there. When the work is important and money is scarce you get a lot of shitty behavior. But also just in general no big workplace is going to be free of terrible bosses
Allegedly they fire and bully the employees a lot. Recently they fired the entire team that was dealing with the “Community Wishlist”, the most direct way WP editors had to make requests for technical improvements and tools to WMF.
Good article on why nonprofit workers need unions, too