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Have the WMF done something bad that needs counterbalancing or are they just forming a union out of some sort of principle?

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They recently laid off an internal team that was popular among workers and also fired one of the oldest employees for dubious reasons. Notably all of the people laid off or fired were union advocates, so this can be seen as a supercharged reaction to an effort to union bust (whether it was or not, it was certainly perceived that way).

The team was popular among contributors/editors. Their entire job was to handle the most upvited issues from the community and they were formed after the community felt like the management's priorities we not aligned with the community.

So like, the community was angry management was ignoring them. The response was to create a group to ensure some engineering time was put towards community priorities. Now that group has been fired.

unions are institutions for bargaining power, even under decent employers

Yes but people generally don't bother with them under decent employers.

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