Enhancing transnational labour solidarity: the unfulfilled promise of the Internet and social media

• Date: 01 July 2017
• Published date: 01 July 2017
• Author: Andy Hodder,Torsten Geelan
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12190

Enhancing transnational labour solidarity:

the unfulfilled promise of the Internet and

social media

Torsten Geelan and Andy Hodder

ABSTRACT

This article examines the activities of Union Solidarity International (USI), a new

UK-based organisation in the international union arena. USI seeks to encourage

and support international solidarity between trade unions and other worker move-

ments around the world by harnessing the dynamism of the Internet and social media.

Drawing on a combination of in-depth semi-structured interviews, documentary anal-

ysis, Google Analytics and social media data, the findings of this case study suggest

that USI is successfully developing an international audience in the United States,

the UK and Ireland. However, USI’s ability to reach beyond English-speaking coun-

tries and mobilise people to engage in collective action appears limited. The article

makes an important contribution to the growing literature on social media in indus-

trial relations through analysing the extent to which digital technologies can contrib-

ute to effective transnational labour solidarity.

1 INTRODUCTION

The use of the Internet has become widespread; almost half of the world’s population

now have access to an internet connection at home, via computer or mobile device

(Internet Live Stats, 2016). This amounts to almost three and a half billion people.

The adoption of the smart-phone means that people can now be reached almost any-

where and at any time of the day or night, and social networking sites like Facebook

and Twitter have also become integral parts of many people’s communicative envi-

ronment and everyday lives. These developments present the international trade

union movement with enormous potential for enhancing transnational labour solidar-

ity. For social movements, more broadly, the potential power of the Internet and so-

cial media for communicating and organising was vividly illustrated by the

unexpected emergence of two new transnational movements in the aftermath of the

North-Atlantic financial crisis: the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement (Castells,

2012; Mason, 2012). In the UK, they took the form of Occupy London (Taylor et al.,

2011; Chomsky, 2012) and UK Uncut (UK Uncut, 2016). Despite few financial re-

sources and little institutional support, they garnered hundreds of thousands of

❒Torsten Geelan, Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge

CB2 3RQ, UK and Andy Hodder, Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston

Park Road, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK. Correspondence should be addressed to Andy Hodder,

Birmingham Business School, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston Park Road, Birmingham B15 2TT,

UK; email: a.j.hodder@bham.ac.uk

Industrial Relations Journal 48:4, 345–364

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2017 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

followers on Twitter and Facebook, engaging in direct action targeting the City of

London and tax avoidance by multi-national corporations.

Inspired by these developments, the UK’s largest trade union Unite spearheaded

the founding of Union Solidarity International (USI) in 2010. After two years of plan-

ning, USI was launched in May 2012. USI’s mission is to encourage and support

transnational labour solidarity by harnessing the dynamism of the Internet and social

media. This involves two key strands of activity: disseminating news to the public

which highlights the role of trade unions in defending and securing the rights of

workers around the world and generating grassroots international organisation for

union solidarity using social media. As a new actor in the international union arena,

USI presents a unique opportunity to explore the specific advantages and limitations

of using digital technologies to enhance transnational labour solidarity outside of the

constraints of traditional union organisations. Despite this, USI has only been subject

to preliminary examination (Geelan, 2013). Thus, this article makes two contribu-

tions to extant literature in being the first to provide an in-depth case study of one

of the newest actors in transnational labour issues, and in doing so, complements

the growing body of literature on social media usage in industrial relations research.

The remainder of the article is structured as follows. The next section reviews the

existing literature on the evolving relationship between trade unions and the Internet

from the Web 1.0 era to the Web 2.0 era. The case study of USI is then introduced by

way of a background before our mixed method approach of semi-structured inter-

views, thematic analysis of Twitter content and Google Analytics is outlined. Our

analysis then examines the communication strategy of USI and who their audience

comprises on their website and Twitter account. The final section brings the article

to a close by way of a discussion and conclusion.

2 TRANSNATIONAL LABOUR SOLIDARITY: FROM WEB 1.0 TO WEB 2.0

The relationship between trade unions and the Internet began in the early 1980s

during the Web 1.0 era. This era epitomises what Castells (2009: 55) termed mass

self-communication, which is multi-directional, potentially able to reach a global

audience (using email, discussion boards and instant messengers), and is ‘character-

ized by the capacity of sending messages from many to many, in real time or chosen

time, and with the possibility of using point-to-point communication, narrowcasting

or broadcasting, depending on the purpose and characteristics of the intended com-

munication practice’. The Internet quickly became central to the debate on union

revitalisation (Bergman, 2016) because it could help service members, aid union

organising, promote union democracy and enhance transnational solidarity

campaigns (e.g. Diamond and Freeman, 2002; Wills, 2002; Greene et al., 2003).

On an international level, the ability to communicate at little cost compared with

print media was adopted by the formal institutions of labour transnationalism em-

bodied in global unions, helping them to improve their capacity for communication

and drive their expansion,

1

for example by enabling them to organise transnational

solidarity conflicts and to alert unions of impending attacks by employers. By the

1990s, the Internet also allowed for a proliferation of informal activist-driven

1

Global unions include the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, Global Union Federations

and the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and

Development.

346 Torsten Geelan and Andy Hodder

© 2017 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd