Collective and Connective Action: Workers and Social Media

Collective action of workers and the role of social media have seen an increasing attention in the past years, embedded in a larger literature about the logics of connective action. In recent times, the use of digital platforms has appeared more and more frequently in terms of the daily life of unions, associations and collectives of workers, even more intensified by the Covid19 pandemic, and therefore deserves further investigation and debate. In this panel we aim to explore the possibilities of the use of social media for workers action as well as its limits, looking at the effectivity of internet 2.0 for workers activism. We call for contributions that look at the pros and cons of connective action, and in what way it can mobilise new parts of the working class, or helps create new forms of organization and mobilization, and to what extent it favours rather fleeting or ephemeral forms of action or can be embedded in more long-term organizing. The phenomena of street protests during the 2010s which erupted quickly and at large scale and then disappeared quickly or of Corbynmania as mass membership without offline engagement are not completely unknown to recent labour movements, for example of app-based workers. However, this could be an early phase of online mobilization, and it would be interesting if there is a learning curve among workers and labour activists.