Trade Unions and Online Activism: The Case of "Fight for $15"

Scholars have noted the synergy between industrial relations and social movement frameworks, particularly when the goal of the social movement is to improve labour conditions. The “Fight for $15” is a perfect example, as it is both a social movement involving multiple actors and coalitions and a labour relations struggle. It has the policy goal of a legislated minimum wage of $15 and is designed to improve the wages of some of North America’s lowest-paid workers. Drawing on the previous experiences of living wage movements, the "Fight for $15" has found supporters civil society organizations, a number of individuals, and also trade unions. The movement has become socially visible and vibrant. Supporters' activism has allowed for two major achievements: first, people have been made aware of the cause of $15 per hour as a minimum wage in the United States and elsewhere, especially through the use of social media; and second, individuals have been encouraged to advocate for the cause in order to influence policy-makers (e.g., increasing minimum wage levels in Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York State).

Although the impact of social media on activism has been discussed by a number of labour scholars, as it has yet to be investigated empirically, and the role of unions has been hitherto neglected. Labour relations scholars have highlighted the fact that activism is "the very fabric" of a labour movement and have dedicated much attention to several dimensions of activism. Social media studies of online activism, on the other hand, have been directed mainly at understanding the relations between on-line and off-line activism. Results to date have been mixed and not very robust. In addition, an opportunity to understand the very nature of on-line activism has been missed. Using the “Fight for $15” as a case study, our aim is to understand and explain how on-line activism has varied among the respective actors (trade unions, different individuals) over time specifically stressing the role of unions.

Among social media, we focus on Twitter, since it has been identified by media studies as the most significant. To date we have collected 250,367 messages related to the “Fight for $15”campaign between June 2015 and the time of writing, and we are still collecting. Our unit of analysis is individual accounts that are following the main movement accounts and/or have actively retweeted relevant messages in the public domain. We endeavour to explain the volume of online activism (both original posting and retweeting), taking into account the effects of: different sources of tweets (i.e., trade unions, civil society organizations, and individual supporters); the prevailing sentiment of the tweets (i.e., diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational) in a specific timespan; as well as offline events in the "Fight for $15" campaign.