Trade Unions on YouTube by Jenny Jansson & Katrin Uba

Author:Jenny Jansson & Katrin Uba
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783030249144
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

3.5 Trade Unions’ Political Engagement on YouTube

It has been suggested that clearly and openly engaging in politics could help to revitalize the trade union movement. As social media is now a natural part of engagement with political campaigns, YouTube could be a means for political activism. Our analysis of the YouTube videos uploaded by Swedish trade unions showed that some of the Swedish unions have taken this suggestion seriously. For example, the Municipal Workers’ Union, which is affiliated with the LO , carried out comprehensive electoral engagement in 2010. Many of the other trade unions, especially those affiliated with Saco , neglected the electoral campaign altogether and opted for agenda-setting activism.

As expected, working-class unions are still more politically active than white-collar and upper-middle-class unions , as they have been in the past. Moreover, the working-class unions clearly support one specific party—namely the Social Democratic Party . The other two union confederations emphasize their political neutrality both offline and online. However, they do not refrain from engaging in politics. The findings show that the TCO- and Saco-affiliated unions try to have an influence on which specific issues are politically debated. Our study demonstrates that the unions affiliated with these confederations are active in uploading videos about politics during election years, making them an indirect part of election campaigns in Sweden. Thus, the strategy of TCO- and Saco-affiliated unions seems to be one of trying to impact the political agenda without siding with a specific political party.

Finally, our analysis showed that the Swedish unions have not used YouTube to engage in ‘contentious politics’. The working-class unions uploaded most of the few protest videos we detected; however, the TCO- and Saco-affiliated unions did not seem to have spread a message of contention through their YouTube videos.

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