Tweeting and Retweeting for Fight for $15: Unions as Dinosaur Opinion Leaders?

Abstract

Advocacy campaigns are central to unions' efforts to impact labour rights beyond unionized workplaces. Social media and on-the-ground campaign dynamics are intimately related. Thus, if unions can become leaders on social media, they could have more impact on campaign framing and mobilizing. Drawing on primary data and applying a sequential mixed method, we analyse unions' ability to emerge as opinion leaders in Twitter dialogues on the Fight for $15 (FF$15) campaign. We track FF$15-related activities of Twitter profiles over seven months and compare union actions to those of others along three dimensions: level of activity, prevalence of tweeting versus retweeting and endorsement within FF$15 community and in the Twitter universe. Regression results show unions prefer advancing their own ideas over supporting those of others, and their messages are more endorsed than others' messages in the Twitter universe. Indepth interviews and a focus group reveal that while their actions are slow and conservative, unions can count on internal support and institutional reputation to gain leadership. The article concludes by noting the implications of the findings for unions' strategies to become opinion leaders on social media.

Unions, social media and young workers—evidence from the UK

“…PCS provided the exception during a small period of industrial action in 2014–15, but the general pattern persisted beyond this. Our findings mirror the limited previous research in the area (Hodder and Houghton, ; Frangi et al , ), which has also identified the most frequent tweet types to be tweets relating to campaigning and provision of news information. Despite suggestions to the contrary (Panagiotopoulos, ; Panagiotopoulos and Barnett, ), we found that each of the accounts made limited attempts to use Twitter for recruitment.…”

“…While Geelan and Hodder () extended analysis to compare Internet and social media usage, it should be noted that Union Solidarity International is not a union and takes the debate in a different direction. Similarly, Frangi et al 's () study considered union action alongside other civil society organisations and political groups, but both articles confirmed the static one‐way nature of communications found in Hodder and Houghton (). Thus, further research is required to develop this area of enquiry, specifically to ascertain the extent to which unions engage with young workers across a longer time period.…”

“…Existing research suggested that unions adopt a passive approach to utilising Web 2.0 (Hodder and Houghton, ; Frangi et al , ). Our findings here suggest youth sections of unions go beyond this passive engagement, evolving to a more active approach (see Leek et al , ) in the second year of the investigated time period, demonstrating an increase in the use of likes, retweets and hashtags.…”

“…Only Hodder and Houghton (2015) and Frangi et al (2019) have analysed the content of union posts on social media. Despite the potential for Web 2.0 to free unions of the constraints they faced with Web 1.0 (Martinez Lucio, 2003;Bergman, 2016), Hodder and Houghton (2015) found that message content was predominantly used akin to an online noticeboard and that the union did not fully utilise the interactive capabilities available through Web 2.0 technologies.…”

“…In a similar study, Geelan and Hodder () also found limited user interaction and engagement when analysing Union Solidarity International's use of Twitter. Frangi et al () undertook a mixed‐methods analysis of the Fight for $15 movement in the United States, considering the extent to which unions were able to use social media to become opinion leaders.…”