Online social networking and trade union membership: what the Facebook phenomenon truly means for labor organizers

Alex Bryson, Rafael Gomez and Paul Willman

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Union membership has declined precipitously in a number of countries, including in the United States, over the past fifty years. Can anything be done to stem this decline? This article argues that union voice is a positive attribute (among others) of union membership that is experiential in nature and that, unlike the costs of unionization, can be discerned only after exposure to a union. This makes the act of 'selling' unionism to workers (and to some extent firms as well) difficult. Supportive social trends and social customs are required in order to make unionization's hard-to-observe benefits easier to discern. Most membership-based institutions face the same dilemma. However, recent social networking organizations such as Facebook have been rather successful in attracting millions of active members in a relatively short period of time. The question of whether the union movement can appropriate some of these lessons is discussed with reference to historical and contemporary examples.

Keywords: ISI; History; History Of Social Sciences; Industrial Relations & Labor (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J01 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Published in Labor History, 2010, 51(1), pp. 41-53. ISSN: 0023-656X

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/27771/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:27771

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().