Organizing in the Digital Age: How labor unions build power on the web
Open AccessThis paper investigates strategies for labor organizing using information communication technologies (ICTs). The decline in labor union participation has been the central issue of the labor movement for the last four decades. Meanwhile, the rise of social media platforms has led many to believe that the labor movement can harness the power of social media movements to make gains and reverse this trend. Through a review of the literature over three related subject areas: labor history, communications scholarship on ICTs and political activism, and labor scholarship on ICTs, I find two broad camps: one which emphasizes a “bottom-up” approach and another which takes a “top-down” approach. My literature review reveals the problems with such “boundary fetishism” (Chadwick 2013) and discusses the advantages of hybrid analysis. Through interviews with 10 experts across the labor movement, I arrive at three main conclusions: organizations still play a crucial role in labor organizing, despite early promises of internet-enabled decentralization, (Bennett and Segerberg 2012) “backchannel” networks (Karpf 2013, Van Duyn 2022) are essential aspects of online labor organizing, and unions benefit greatly from efficiencies created by online decentralization. I then present a model which I call the “Offline to Online Feedback loop” wherein I describe how labor unions are using in-person organizing wins to create content on social media and gain momentum for sustained organizing efforts across the country.
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Fernandez_gwu_0075M_16167.pdf | 2022-10-04 | Open Access |
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