Commentary

Union Lobbies Social Media to Fight Free Trade

One of the remarkable things about social media is its flexibility, which allows people to use it for pretty much any purpose you can imagine, running the gamut from personal to political to professional and everywhere in between.

For example, IndustryWeek reports that one of the nation's largest unions is using Facebook to organize a campaign against free trade agreements which it says threaten American jobs. The International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers, with total of about 700,000 members, is drumming up opposition to planned trade deals with South Korea, Columbia, and Panama with an ad campaign claiming that 682,900 American jobs have been lost since NAFTA took effect, and warning of something similar happening again.

While there's much to be said for social media's specific contextual advantages, part of the motivation seems to simply be saving money, as IAM communications director Rick Sloan noted that social media "reaches a much wider audience at far lower costs than main street media." Of course it's still not clear whether this reach translates into real influence, considering that social media ROI remains a matter for debate.

I am also skeptical about social media's suitability for niche political causes. Social causes with broad emotional appeal are one thing: the "It's Get Better" anti-bullying PSAs, for example, are made for social media. But the American public has been distinctly less supportive of organized labor, judging by the results of a Gallup poll which show support for labor unions sliding from 59% in 2008 to 48% in 2009.

On the other hand, Americans also seem increasingly skeptical about free trade: in a poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal in 2010, 47% of respondents said they thought free trade with foreign countries hurt the U.S., compared to 23% who said it helped.

Back in February I wrote about an online campaign staged by the GOP, "America Speaking Out," which invited concerned voters to submit suggestions for the GOP agenda. The second-most-popular entry in the "jobs creation" category would "Stop the outsourcing of jobs from America to other countries that do not pay taxes into the U.S. and stop the tax breaks that are given to these companies that are outsourcing" (although this suggestion was quietly omitted from the party's platform).

1 comment about "Union Lobbies Social Media to Fight Free Trade".
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  1. John Jainschigg from World2Worlds, Inc., June 10, 2011 at 5:07 p.m.

    I disagree.

    I think you're quite right in saying that (today's, capital-letter) Organized Labor's use of social media is likely to be a phail. But that's because most Americans a) aren't members of a union, b) are jealous of union gains in compensation, benefits, and control over allocation of jobs, c) are outraged by (in their view, and inaccurately) 'having to bear the tax burden of outrageous union pension and benefits deals for government workers, etc.,' and d) have lost faith in the ideal of unions due to repeated evidence of their corruption. Also e) this has become a generational issue, with young people (who use social media) having only marginal access to fast-diminishing union-membership opportunities and protections such as their parents and grandparents enjoyed.

    That doesn't, however, mean that the idea of (small-O, small-L) organized labor is bad, or that it can't be sold via social media to the present generation. In fact, if American have any serious interest in surviving as a command economy (as opposed to our present course towards a future of alpha-tech capitalists and their supporting technocrats living in bubbles surrounded by hundreds of millions of the rest of us farming highway greenspaces for starch and salad greens -- and if you think I'm kidding, drive two miles outside any major city in China and look around), this is something that needs to happen PDQ.

    The question is, how to do it. One would think it might be possible to educate the tens of millions of recently-graduated college students, slowly coming to an understanding that 'diminishing expectations' barely touches the humiliating misery of their underemployed working lives to come. To teach them simple things like: "Dude - the weekend. Unions invented that." and slowly make a case for an American Spring-style reinvention of the labor movement in a reborn, more-hopeful, and more-savvy form.

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Erik Sass is editor of Publishers Daily. You can reach Erik at eriksass@gmail.com.