On Mon, Mar 7, 2016 at 1:57 PM, Pine W <wiki.p...@gmail.com> wrote: > Employees have some rights too, including the right to organize and the > right to quit. Good employees quitting may be a sign of problems with > management. > > In WMF's case, many of the staff have plenty of employment options outside > of WMF, which is all the more reason to select a WMF ED who has good people > management skills in addition to a wide array of other skills. >
I'm sorry, but that's simply not true. I'm highlighting this not to be harsh but to correct a pretty serious misunderstanding with the nature of the WMF's employee base, one which I think is partially responsible for a lack of proper understanding of precisely how scary, stressful and frankly amazing the dissent over the last 12 months has been. Take the number of WMF employees. Pretty much all of them are good, smart, qualified people for the work they do, so clearly they could get awesome jobs elsewhere, right? Now, split out all the non-engineers. Our programme and education and grants teams are fantastic; so are our administrative teams. But their prospects aren't as great as those for engineers simply for the reason that there is literally an entire industry, one of the few ones with continuous growth, built on the existence and recruitment of engineers. It's a lot harder to get a new job if you're outside that group. So now we've got engineers. Still a pretty big chunk of the organisation. Cool! Now remove anyone on a H1B visa. See, if you're on a H1B and you quit, you're instantaneously no longer in the country legally. Ditto if you're fired. The only way around it is to convince a second employer to hire you, and file to transfer the petition over, while still _at_ the first employer. Otherwise, bzzt. You quit, you were fired, either way, get out of our country please. So that's US-citizen or resident engineers left. Let's scrap from that people outside the default stereotype of engineers as 20-something people without dependants. If you're someone who does have dependants or responsibilities - children, a partner not working, elderly relatives - well that makes finding a new job a lot harder. Not only do you have less energy and time in which to do it, because you're looking after these people, you have to find a job that's as flexible on when you work your 40 hours as the WMF is, otherwise you risk running into some serious collisions with your out-of-work duties. And heaven forfend if you're *having* a kid or have serious medical conditions because not only do you have to deal with that, any gap in employment is potentially financially crippling since you're now without medical insurance. Okay! So: "many of the staff have plenty of employment options outside of WMF". And by that we mean: employees who are US citizens or residents, have no dependants or serious medical issues, and work in an engineering-centric role, have plenty of employment options outside of WMF. Which is, in practice, like: Mikhail. Mikhail has plenty of employment opportunities. Congrats to Mikhail. The rest of us? Various amounts of "seriously boned". I know staff who did not speak up because they were scared of losing medical coverage or, worse, being forced out of the country, if dissent was reacted to with firings. I know people who did speak up *despite* being subject to these risks. This perception that many staff have many viable and good options they can just jump to if stuff gets bad glosses over the fact that, actually, the vast majority don't. The fact they chose to do something even in those conditions is amazing. The idea that we have a "right to quit" is not a justification for selecting an ED with empathy and sympathy and a soul. The idea that there might be turnover is not a justification either. The justification is that it would be hideously unethical for us to appoint people we know or suspect might make living people miserable. It is not a practical question, it is a *principle* question. And if we have to justify our principles with retention rates, they're no longer principles. > Pine > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
