Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-02-04/WikiProject report

WikiProject Organized Labour was created by Canadian editor Bookandcoffee on 10 January 2006 with the title of WikiProject on Organized Labo(u)r. Already then, there was an appetite to focus on the global labour movement, not just in the Western hemisphere. Within one year, 48 members joined, including currently-active members Goldsztajn and Warofdreams.

The WikiProject mission has largely stayed the same 17 years later:


 * 1) To expand and globalize articles related to Organized Labour.
 * 2) To create and expand articles for individual labour organizations.
 * 3) To establish fair and consistent representation of labour in business, government, organizational, corporate and economic information articles.

The focus of WikiProject Organized Labour includes trade union organizations/people in each country, sector, strike actions, labour laws/history etc.. Today the project has a smaller but steady number of editors, who are actively contributing new articles, maintaining the existing 11,000 articles and countless more sections within company tagged articles. Previously Wikipedia Signpost published an op-ed How to make your factory's safety and labor issues disappear by Zarasophos. Consider participating in our online edit-a-thon that is happening throughout February 2023.

Labo(u)r organi(s/z)ing is difficult
The question of MOS:ENGVAR already came up, with 3 different spelling variants including American English: Organized Labor, British English: Organised Labour and Oxford English which is notably used by the ILO: Organized Labour. Regardless of which variant was used, editors were in agreement that handy redirects should be created, so WP:LABOR and WP:LABOUR both work as expected. In some cases Labor union/Labour union pragmatically redirects to Trade union instead. Either way, we are here, with or without u!

Other language editions
Not all Wikipedia language editions have WikiProjects but of the ones that do, the following four language editions have WikiProjects dedicated to Organized Labour with activity varying mid-active to defunct.
 * 2007 April 21 Swedish Wikipedia edition sv:Wikipedia:Projekt arbetarrörelsen was created
 * 2008 July 4 French Wikipedia edition fr:Projet:Syndicalisme was created
 * 2020 May 12 Spanish Wikipedia edition es:Wikiproyecto:Sindicalismo was created
 * 2022 May 8 Chinese Wikipedia edition zh:维基专题:勞工運動 was created. The creator subsequently retired in November 2022, so the future of that project is uncertain.

Two years ago Zarasophos interviewed Shushugah about WP:LABOUR particularly its relations to unionization in the high tech sector. Now Shushugah wants to pay it forward and interview the rest of the Organized Labour Project members.

Interview
Why do you think it is important that WikiProject Organized Labour exists?
 * JJonahJackalope: I think the WikiProject is important because it helps to coordinate editing efforts, such as with the upcoming edit-a-thon, and serves as a hub where people can discuss topics related to the articles and content associated with organized labor.
 * Goldsztajn: I agree with, but more generally, it's important that projects exist because of the way in which they encourage collaboration amongst editors with shared interests.
 * Zarasophos: Because there is precious little activity related to labour organising here on Wikipedia already. If we didn't have the WikiProject, there probably wouldn't be any at all.

What are your favorite contributions in the project area?
 * JJonahJackalope: My favorite contributions have been articles that highlight the interconnectedness between organized labor and broader civil rights movements, such as the 1964–1965 Scripto strike and the Coors strike and boycott.
 * Goldsztajn: First, would be getting Member states of the International Labour Organization to featured list status – it took a bit more than 18 months of work from creation, with research covering most of the 20th century (chapeau Wikipedia Library!). Second, I enjoy working in areas with little coverage. It's particularly pleasing for me when I'm able to produce sourced content on parts of the world with previously limited coverage – for example, Trade unions in Saint Helena. Finally, I got involved in a limited way in template work and recoded one of the project's templates, so that it would differentiate between the ratification or declaration of an International Labour Convention (treaty) – somewhat of an obscure international public law difference, but important in terms of ensuring the information which appears on Wikipedia is accurate (less unreliable, if you will!).
 * Zarasophos: Basically what Goldsztajn wrote about. I worked a lot on trade unions in South and Southeast Asia, for which there were very few articles, and also did some work on templates listing trade unions for individual countries. That was quite a lot of work – try finding an authoritative source on what trade unions exist in some of those countries! One article I particularly like having written is the one on the 2012 Bavet shooting, where a town official (!) shot three striking garment workers (!!), who luckily were not permanently injured, and was imprisoned after three years of hiding for 18 months and afterwards rehabilitated (!!!).
 * czar: One of my favorite moments was to watch the major news outlets correct their headlines/reporting as they rediscovered that the "first Starbucks union" was in the 1980s, not 2001. I'd like to think that having it display prominently in the lede of the new article helped.

How does this WikiProject differ from or complement other related WikiProjects like Anarchism, Socialism and Companies?
 * Goldsztajn: I'm also active in the Women in Red and Women in Green projects (unfortunately, less than I'd like to be!). Beyond that, organised labour issues are transversal across so many areas; economics, politics (national and international), law, history, sociology, human rights, all forms of equality (gender, racial etc), so almost by definition, anyone working here is going to also be contributing to other topic areas. I think where trade unions are different (which impacts on the need for descriptive sourcing), it's that in a formal, structural sense, trade unions are unique organisations – as a group they're the world's largest democratic non-state actors (in practice as much as in breach!). They operate within increasingly constrained legal and political frameworks, there's fewer than a handful of countries I can think of which in the last 30 years have made trade union operations less restrictive. I'm not sure those aspects, although widely reported on and analysed elsewhere, have made it into our work as much as is necessary.
 * Zarasophos: I think broad ideologies are much easier topics to get into from a theoretical point of view, as in, "yeah, that sounds cool". That's true for the basic concept of a trade union, but then you get down into details and then stuff gets really minute and really boring really easily. Yeah, sure, garment workers are striking for the tenth time for a better minimum wage and will probably not succeed this time either, woohoo. I imagine that is one of the reasons why there are fewer people interested in writing all of this stuff up for the Wiki. Not that it's deterring me, but I'm a sucker for really minute and really boring stuff.
 * czar: I'd encourage other editors to view "WikiProjects" simply as editor affinity group in which helping other interested editors in turn promotes continued editing: digging up sourcing, peering review each other's work, resolving disputes, and so on. The groups are most effective as noticeboards for editors to continually bring good notices and topics for discussion. When each group stays active, the overall editor support network widens. For example, I've seen editors move into adjacent topical areas (with reviews and participating in edit drives) after participating in the anarchism noticeboard. This is good. It shows that Wikipedia and their fellow editors have sustained their interest. I anticipate there to be frequent crossover between adjacent noticeboards, each providing different flavors of useful tips and camaraderie.

'''During February 2023 we are hosting a month long edit-a-thon. What do you hope people prioritize/focus on?'''
 * Goldsztajn: We've got 29% of the project's articles marked for cleanup, with 4,087 issues identified. Getting that below 3,000 I think would be a great result.
 * Zarasophos: We need some more articles for women trade unionists. There are a lot of potential ones, they just need to be written.
 * czar: Do the one thing you set out to do and cheer others who accomplish the same

Can union/labor representation be used as an attack on an article subject?
 * Shushugah: I am rather irritated by the notion that an article about a corporation could ever be considered comprehensive when existing independent secondary sources covering workers and their organizational structures are absent. In high profile cases like Amazon Inc., all negative coverage was shifted over to Criticism of Amazon, but I managed to trim it down significantly by expanding Amazon worker organization which is global and adequately summarizing that in the original Amazon Inc article without being a WP:coat rack of all random labor issue at Amazon. One of my favorite essays is WP:CRITOFSOC which shuts down the false dichotomy between criticism and neutral encyclopedic coverage.
 * Goldsztajn: No more or less than any other area which involves social conflict. No matter what we write in such areas, it can be considered an "attack". Is a trade union campaign for an increase in wages an attack? For some employers (not all and there's certainly great variation on this depending on national origin of the company), any public statement on working conditions which is not positive can be viewed as an attack. It just reinforces the need, as everywhere with this encyclopaedia, how vitally necessary it is that we base our work on reliable sources bearing in mind due and undue weight as much as possible. I've got academic training, so I more or less default to peer-reviewed materials whenever I can. Nevertheless, that's not always possible. About 14 years ago I was involved in an extremely lengthy discussion/debate over the term union busting and its definition.  It was somewhat resolved, but it taught me that in some areas despite discussions deeply rooted in reliable sources, it can still be very difficult to arrive at consensus, especially when national contexts produce extremely different viewpoints on a phenomenon which is global (or even interplanetary).
 * Zarasophos: It can be used like that, yes, but so can any other topic. As Shushugah and Goldsztajn have said, if workers are unhappy with their employer, that belongs in the article about their employer just as much as stock prices do.

'''Is it ironic that people interested in (paid) labour are committed to a project that is built on volunteer/unpaid labour? How do you reconcile the two?'''
 * Goldsztajn: Not really to me. The modern labour movement grew from volunteerism (see Tolpuddle martyrs). There are still currents within labour movements worldwide that are highly critical of trade unions that produce bureaucratic/paid structures.  In some regions, South Asia comes to mind in particular, due to a mixture of history, necessity and ideology, almost all trade union officials are volunteers. Also, trade unions can be seen as a subset of organised labour, they're not necessarily synonymous.  Historically there have also been movements of unemployed workers or people not paid for their labour (e.g., farmers and peasants) which can be seen as forms of organised labour grounded in volunteerism.
 * Zarasophos: I do find that a bit funny. I personally like contributing my time here, as a hobby, but it does make me a bit mad that at least in my home country there are tons of paid union people who would probably be using their time better by contributing to articles in our WikiProject (keeping COI rules in mind, obviously). That's maybe one reason for why I write mostly about countries where unions aren't as professionalised as in my home country.
 * czar: Isn't most rank-and-file union organizing also volunteered labor? And no, not particularly surprised, given that volunteering is often part of the "everyday communism" that makes the paid labor worthwhile!

Is there anything else you would like to say/share that has not been asked?
 * Goldsztajn: I encourage people interested in the topic to reach out and contribute – we're literally a collaborative crowd.
 * Zarasophos: We still need a section on unions / works councils in an Infobox company. We started a process for this a while ago, but I think there was some problem and we abandoned it again. I think this is one thing that would be really useful to have.

Links

 * Wikipedia Signpost/Series/WikiProject reports archive
 * 2023 February Online Labour edit-a-thon