A traditional union is also difficult, honestly, because of the nature of
the WMF as an incredibly global organization. We are a huge mix of staff in
SF from the US, staff in SF on Visas (I don't know if this matters), Full
Time Equivalent contractors outside the US (and numerous different ways to
do that os that it's better for the staff member such as being a 'vender'
of a sole company etc), temporary contractors and more. I am not perfect at
Labour law but I'm fairly certainly not all of those can actually unionize
together officially and so no matter what we do a huge portion of the force
would be outside of a union and not get the legal protections that
provides. There are other options I imagine, and people are looking into
it, but sadly unionization laws weren't really written with the idea of us
in mind.
Now that said I'm not 100% sure a union would really be the most beneficial
thing for the org. I'm just not sure they would be able to fix many of our
issues while at the same time probably adding some of their own. They can
be hugely beneficial when used in the right place but I'm not sure this is
one of those (they also take a long time to set up and so would not really
help for the specific, current, issues). Of course as a manager I don't
have a vote (and won't be protected) anyway if we go down that route so my
opinion is mostly academic.
James
User:Jamesofur
[Manager, Trust & Safety, WMF]
On Sat, Mar 5, 2016 at 11:47 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Hoi,
That would not be a bad idea in and of itself. However, the kind of
troubles are not necessarily the kind where a Union has its experience.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 5 March 2016 at 20:45, Gordon Joly <gordon.joly(a)pobox.com> wrote:
On 05/03/16 16:49, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Arguably, the employees have a bigger stake in the Wikimedia
Foundation,
they are
not even represented.
Then they should unionise?
Gordo
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