I am also excited and inspired by the release of the Human Rights Policy and on the occasion of Human Rights Day, wanted to contribute to this intriguing conversation.
Addressing the conflicts between the different policy instruments and their constitutive provisions, international human rights law and advocacy is a constant exercise in the balancing of rights, liberties, and other protections. I think isolating the right to a 'just and favorable remuneration clause’ from Article 23 itself and the Declaration of Human Rights as a whole is misleading, at the very least confusing. (See http://www.claiminghumanrights.org/work_definition.html for more context). For a discussion faithful to the protection of human rights as an objective, and as a North Star - the issues related to volunteer work need to also incorporate the distinctions within the international human rights regime generally and policy instruments identified specifically.
The fundamental values of the right to work protections are primarily about discrimination amongst workers, and the support for societal protections of public benefits explicitly directed at state actors in relationship to citizens. The public policy issues specifically contemplated for work without pay is focused on forced labor, underaged labor, and as also mentioned in this thread - about the rights to collective bargaining. Distinctions regarding work towards public goods vs. private goods, modalities of motivation and reputation economies, household labor and volunteer expectations of paid employees are some starting points for thinking this through. An interpretation of the remuneration clause however requiring pay for all productive labor is not only untenable, but also in conflict with the recognition of various UN bodies of the importance and necessity of volunteer work to the progress towards sustainable development goals.
I do not intend to dismiss the admittedly complex considerations of open knowledge/open source economics was they relate to human rights. Not being a regular contributor to these discussions, I chime in because I agree that these questions shouldn’t be ignored. The foundational contribution in the issuance of Wikimedia's Human Rights Policy in fact enables the serious consideration of how these tensions play out in context, rather than minimizing them.
I find a human rights policy based on major human rights documents of the world very conflicting and equally amusing in an organization which grows itself in an inherently exploitative system feeding on volunteer works. While volunteers from around the world, who generate contents and technologies every day, build partnerships to gather more human knowledge, man different committees to make important decisions for the movement and so on and without whom the Wikimedia movement would not exist at all, are not remunerated in any way, forget ensuring minimum wage for their time and effort or social protection, medical care etc. and the organization which collects weath based on these people's works talk about Universal Declaration of Human Rights whose Articles 23 and 25 say about right to just and favorable remuneration, social protection, equal pay for equal work etc. I would be very interested to see if this policy, mentioned as North Star, can guide the movement addressing the conflicting and complicated issue w.r.t. human rights in the future.
The Wikimedia Foundation’s Global Advocacy team is excited to announce the approval of the Human Rights Policy by the Board of Trustees on 8 December 2021. Please read our blog post about the policy and what it means for the Wikimedia Foundation’s work in the coming years on Diff. We invite you to join representatives of the Foundation’s Global Advocacy and Human Rights teams here for a conversation hour tomorrow, 10 December, at 10:00 AM ET (15:00 UTC) to address any immediate concerns, questions, or suggestions regarding this policy or how it will be implemented. The session will be recorded for later viewing and you may submit questions by email to myself (rgaines@wikimedia.org) and Ziski Putz (zputz@wikimedia.org) ahead of or following the conversation hour. Additional conversation hours on this policy will be made available in the coming weeks.
