Documents Pasquier, Vincent 5 results

"This policy brief discusses how social media can help renew trade union collective action and strengthen the labour movement's capacity to mobilise. It demonstrates how social media can strengthen campaigning activities by examining two recent union-led campaigns in the United States: ‘OUR Walmart' and ‘Fight for 15'. Both campaigns made intensive use of social media and gained unexpected and significant victories on minimum wage increases and improvements to working conditions. However, while the potential benefits of social media for union campaigns are significant, a number of conditions need to be in place to be successful, and the brief also provides warnings about the limitations and potential risks of these new technologies."

"Unionism renewal has been described as a hybridization process between ‘old' and ‘new' logics. Understanding how these two potentially conflicting logics might be combined, however, has so far received little attention. Through the study of the Fight for 15 (FF15) movement, we investigate how the old ‘collectivist' logic of action‐oriented unions and the new ‘connectivist' logic are being hybridized. To do so, we develop a mixed‐methods approach that combines interviews with Twitter data. We evidence three mechanisms through which the collectivist and connectivist logics are being hybridized, namely, imbrication, camouflage and cumulation. We suggest to name ‘flashmob unionism' the hybrid logic of FF15, characterized by apparently spontaneous mobilizations, a loosely co‐ordinated organization, a personalized communication and online virality."

"This article examines the affordances that digital technologies offer to labour unions. The results of our study of 13 trade unions in Canada contrast with the prevailing techno-deterministic perspectives in the literature which describe digital technologies as fundamentally good, bad or neutral for unions. By adopting an affordance approach, our paper examines how union actors perceive digital technology utility and constraints across five union core functions. The study identifies four digital information and communication technology affordances for unions (visibility, intensification, aggregation and addressability) and contributes to the literature on union renewal by showing how these affordances interact in a complex way and can reinforce trade unions' capabilities."