Watchdog
A public tracker that follows nonprofit and tech employers through their union drives, logging public statements, hired law firms, NLRB filings, and petition signatures so journalists, donors, and community members can see the full picture without scraping dozens of pages.
Labor journalists and engaged members of open-source and nonprofit communities
- Timeline view of every public statement from employer, union, and community
- Side-by-side comparison of an employer's stated values vs. their labor practices
- Alerts when a tracked employer hires a known union-avoidance firm
- Embeddable widgets for Wikipedia talk pages and Mastodon posts
The WMF story is one of several recent cases where a mission-driven organization is accused of union busting, and there is no neutral public ledger for this kind of dispute.
The Wikimedia Foundation union dispute is actively covered by The Verge, Wikipedia Signpost, and editors' strikes, showing real audience interest; however the HN source link only shows 6 points/0 comments, signaling modest Hacker News traction for a niche topic.The union drive at the Wikimedia Foundation is expanding ↗Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm ↗
ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer and the NLRB's own Advanced Data Search already provide raw structured data (cases, filings, leadership pay); what is missing is a curated, narrative-aware tracker that stitches statements + law firms + signatures together, but several close-adjacent tools exist (NLRB Research, BKY Union Drive, Tech Workers Coalition resources).Nonprofit Explorer - ProPublica ↗NLRB Research ↗
No clear willingness-to-pay signal found; labor journalists typically work for outlets that already pay for ProPublica/NLRB data, and engaged open-source community members are notoriously resistant to paid tools. Likely dependency on grants, donations, or pro-bono model rather than direct subscriptions.Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE-CWA) ↗
Union activity at mission-driven orgs is a sustained trend (WMF, GitHub, Kickstarter, Glitch history), and NLRB filings are durable public records, giving the data backbone longevity even if specific disputes fade.Wikipedia's Foundation Is Running Big Tech's Anti-Labor Playbook ↗
Technically feasible: NLRB case data is downloadable in bulk, law-firm names appear in public statements/filings, and petition signatures are public. The hard parts are normalization, neutral framing without legal exposure, and ongoing maintenance of multiple data sources.Advanced Data Search - National Labor Relations Board ↗