# **Trade Unions on YouTube** Online Revitalization in Sweden

**Jenny Jansson Katrin Uba**

Trade Unions on YouTube

Jenny Jansson · Katrin Uba

# Trade Unions on YouTube

Online Revitalization in Sweden

Jenny Jansson Department of Government Uppsala University Uppsala, Sweden

Katrin Uba Department of Government Uppsala University Uppsala, Sweden

#### ISBN 978-3-030-24913-7 ISBN 978-3-030-24914-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24914-4

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019. This book is an open access publication.

**Open Access** This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affliations.

Cover illustration: © Harvey Loake

This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

# Acknowledgements

This book was written thanks to the generous support of the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences (Riksbankens jubileumsfond, IN14-0698:1). We would also like to thank Jens Andersson for great assistance with the coding of our data, Jaanus Karo for aiding us with all the programming and data-related questions, as well as helping us to set up the DigiFacket Archive, and Peter Knutar for restoring the crashed server. We have received many helpful comments on different versions and parts of the manuscript from colleagues and participants of the European Sociological Association conferences in Prague 2015 and Athens 2017, the European Consortium for Political Research General Conference in Oslo 2017, and the International Sociology Association Research Committee 10's midterm conference, titled Democracy and Participation in the twenty-frst century, in Lisbon 2017. In particular, we would like to thank Cassandra Engeman, Bia Carneiro, Raquel Rego and Kerstin Hamann.

We would also like to thank our colleagues at the Department of Government at Uppsala University and at the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

Of course, our work would not have been possible if the Swedish trade unions had not uploaded so many wonderful YouTube videos. We are also grateful to all the union representatives who answered our questions about their use of social media and helped us to collect data for the DigiFacket Archive.

January 2019 Jenny Jansson Katrin Uba

# Contents



# List of Figures


#### x List of Figures


# List of Tables


#### xii List of Tables


# Introduction

**Abstract** This chapter briefy describes the goal and general argument of the book, along with its theoretical framework and data collection, and introduces the Swedish case. First, we set the discussion of labour movements' trade union revitalization and usage of social media—and particularly of YouTube—into the broader context of scholarly literature. Second, we introduce the Swedish case and compare the videos uploaded by Swedish trade unions with those uploaded by trade union confederations in other European countries. We also explain why we are investigating trade unions representing different social classes—namely, the working class, middle class and upper middle class. Third, we briefy describe the data collection and coding process and explain the methods of analysis used in this book: the rough metadata-based analysis of all videos uploaded by Swedish trade unions to YouTube during the period 2007–2017 (a total of 4535 videos), the detailed qualitative content analysis of 624 randomly selected videos and a qualitative analysis of 60 videos.

**Keywords** Revitalization · Trade unions · Social classes · YouTube · Metadata

'What does a woman need to do to get a raise?' This question, posed in a YouTube video produced by the Swedish Municipal Workers' Union in March 2014 (Kommunal 2014, March 5), is a central one. Although Sweden is considered one of the most progressive and gender-equal countries in the world, there is still a persistent gender wage gap, and women still earn less than men: 'women work for free after four o'clock whereas men get paid until fve'. In the video, Annelie Nordström, chairperson of the union at the time, sits quietly on a chair in front of the camera. The background is white. A make-up artist puts a protective apron on her and then starts giving her a makeover, tucking her hair away in a hair cap and putting on a wig. The video uses a speed-up effect, so the whole transformation is fnished in less than a minute. When the make-up artist removes the apron that was covering Nordström's shoulders, the blouse, skirt and necklace she was initially wearing are gone; she now wears a grey suit and a tie. Her brown pageboy haircut is gone, and she has been transformed into a partially bald grey-haired man. At this point, the speaker's voice asks: 'So what does a woman need to do the get a raise? The answer is simple', and for the frst time in the video, Annelie Nordström speaks straight into the camera: 'Be a man'. The video ends with a call for action: 'We cannot wait for another hundred years. Protest against gender inequality!'

This video, which is appropriately titled 'How to get a raise in 47 seconds' (the video lasts exactly 47 seconds), constitutes a good example of online activism and is one of thousands of videos posted on YouTube by trade unions all over the world. Indeed, online activism is a natural part of communication—not only for unions, but for all organizations today.

With the launch of Web 2.0 with social media, the way people used the Internet shifted: instead of one-way communication in which people consumed what was posted by others on webpages, social media offered easy ways for users to generate and publish their own content on the Internet. More importantly, social media offered a means to interact with viewers and other users. Communication channels have never been so easy to access, and platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube were quickly adopted by all kinds of activists from less-organized crowds to traditional social movements (Bennett and Segerberg 2012; Mattoni and Treré 2014). A simple post on Facebook can facilitate the spontaneous coordination of demonstrations, and activities that used to require resources and planning in advance can now occur very quickly. The low cost of online social action has decreased the importance of resources for mobilization (Earl and Kimport 2011), and it has been argued that the collective action of social movements and civil society organizations has been converted into online 'connective action' (Bennett and Segerberg 2012). In order to better understand these changes, and how social movements function today, it is necessary to scrutinize these new means of communication.

In this book, we investigate new communication strategies used by 'old' social movements, with a specifc focus on the labour movement. It was foreseen years ago (Cloward and Piven 2001, p. 93) that the Internet could provide the labour movement with new means of strengthening its power. However, information and communication technology (ICT) not only offers new possibilities, but also challenges established organizations, their mobilization strategies and their identities. Adjusting to the new digital environment can be troublesome for some organizations, and smooth and easy for others.

Throughout its history, the labour movement has been eager to adopt new technology (e.g. newspapers and flm) to communicate with its members and with society at large. Contemporary social media platforms are no exception. In a time when an increasing share of the population has a smartphone, which ensures Internet access everywhere and at any time, trade unions (along with many other organizations) have entered social media. One incentive for choosing these new channels of communication is the outreach and appeal of social media to young people, which could solve the unions' continual problem of membership decline. In the wake of signifcant membership losses, unions' bargaining powers and political infuence have weakened, creating a crisis for organized labour (Waddington 2014). Even countries with traditionally strong trade unions, such as Sweden, have come to experience a decline in union density. In response, both activists and researchers have focused on formulating strategies to reverse the trend and *revitalize* the union movement (Frege and Kelly 2004). One of these proposed 'revitalization strategies' is the use of ICT, and particularly of social media (Bailey et al. 2010).

Trade unions and Internet usage are not a new topic; in fact, a growing number of studies have analysed various aspects of unionism and ICT. Researchers quickly saw the potential of the Internet for mobilization; they claimed that ICT would empower the union movement (Shostack 1999) and improve ordinary union work (Diamond and Freeman 2002), and suggested that the new technology could even be used to realize the labour movement's goal of internationalism (Lee 1997). One area of study focused on trade unions and Web 1.0 and investigated how unions use home pages and what type of information they post online (Kerr and Waddington 2014; Rego et al. 2014). Existing studies on Web 2.0 have examined trade unions and social media, with a particular focus on the potential of social media for improving the interactions between a union and its members (Panagiotopoulos 2012), facilitating transnational networks (Dahlberg-Grundberg et al. 2016) and building transnational labour solidarity (Geelan and Hodder 2017). Prior research has also studied how Web 2.0 has infuenced the member-elite relations within labour organizations (Lucio et al. 2009). Despite this comprehensive research, however, there is still a lack of systematic knowledge about the different ways unions use Web 2.0 platforms for revitalization.

One reason for this research gap is methodological: there is a bias towards using survey data to detect social media strategies, which involves *asking* unions about their social media use (Kerr and Waddington 2014; Panagiotopoulos and Barnett 2015; Scaramuzzino and Scaramuzzino 2017). Survey data and interviews with union representatives are certainly important for our understanding of how unions perceive the new technology in terms of opportunities and challenges, or how members use these new technologies (Thornthwaite et al. 2018). However, this approach says little about the content of unions' communication—that is, what unions actually *do* and *say* on social media. An emerging research feld has acknowledged this gap in our knowledge about unions' online activities and has turned its focus towards the content of unions' social media activities and messages. In particular the use of hashtags (e.g. Chivers et al. 2017; Hodder and Houghton 2015) and network analyses mapping how unions interact with each other and other organizations online (Carneiro 2018; Chivers et al. 2017) have been scrutinized. Frequencies as well as content of tweets have also been mapped (Fowler and Hagar 2013). There is a clear bias, however, towards analysing Twitter among these studies, and we still lack in-depth studies that focus on the content of unions' messages: Do trade unions target new non-unionized groups, as revitalization proponents suggest? Do trade unions react to political events such as elections via social media? Or, more generally, what images of trade unions are communicated via social media? How have unions changed their communication over time, and are there any differences in online communication between unions that represent different societal groups?

This book aims to answer these questions based on a systematic analysis of more than 4500 videos that have been uploaded to YouTube by Swedish trade unions.

#### 1.1 Why Focus on Trade Union Revitalization via Social Media?

The crux of the trade union crisis undoubtedly lies in unions' decreasing membership numbers. Declining membership is part of a vicious cycle of decreased membership engagement, weakening bargaining powers and declining political infuence (Murray 2017). This trend cuts across all of Europe: all countries have experienced similar trends, including countries with traditionally high union density, such as Sweden. Studies tracing the cause of the trade union crisis indicate that structural changes in the economy and in the labour force have played signifcant roles. Above all, such analyses reveal that globalization is at the core of the situation, resulting in innumerable studies on how globalization has changed labour standards, strengthened the bargaining power of employers, contributed to changed employment contracts and made labour global while unions remain national (Bieler and Lindberg 2011; Fleming and Søborg 2014; Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman 2014; Kim and Kim 2003; Standing 2011; Williams et al. 2013). Government politics and unions' poor choice of strategies to mobilize workers are two other explanations that have been suggested by research mapping the decline in organized labour (Verma and Kochan 2004, pp. 5–6). It has been argued that unions have lost both their 'stick' and their 'carrot': with fewer members, well-organized industrial action is no longer a threat for employers or governments. Once unions have lost their ability to mobilize support in favour of particular political reforms, they can no longer offer help to implement delicate political reforms. Thus, the incentive for governments to uphold social partnership has decreased (Culpepper and Regan 2014).

Scholars have proposed many different renewal strategies to solve the situation. There is not just a need to 'bring back' former members; it is also necessary to recruit groups that have been previously underrepresented in trade unions (Frege et al. 2014; Frege and Kelly 2004; Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman 2014, pp. 81–101; Mrozowicki and Trawińska 2013). Although different studies have given these strategies different names, the categorizations overlap greatly (Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman 2014, pp. 46ff.). Frege and Kelly (2003, p. 9) have identifed six different strategies for trade union revitalization: the organizing model, organizational restructuring, coalition building, cooperation with employers, political actions and international cooperation. In other words, unions should return to social movement unionism—an organizational model in which members take an active part.

While some of these strategies are related to organizational change, others are more related to various communication strategies. For example, Waddington (2000) and Behrens et al. (2004) particularly emphasize the need to formulate a new agenda that appeals to groups that have traditionally been diffcult to organize, with a particular focus on migrant labour and youth (Behrens et al. 2004; Waddington 2000). Migrant labour has been diffcult to organize because of communication diffculties due to language barriers, and because of a lack of regular contact with these groups due to their precarious working conditions. Young people often have temporary or part-time employment and therefore do not consider union membership to be useful; furthermore, the union fee may be seen as too high, and many young people may not yet have experienced employment situations in which union membership would be benefcial. Using ICT, and particularly social media, to reach out to these groups and convince them to join a union has been described as an important revitalization strategy (Cockfeld 2005; Dencik and Wilkin 2015; Fiorito et al. 2002; Murray 2017). Although research has indicated that unions have not been very successful in engaging with young people via the prime Web 1.0 tool of home pages (Bailey et al. 2010), Web 2.0 with its main feature of social media offers an entirely different potential for outreach. Our analysis will demonstrate whether and how unions in Sweden engage with young people via YouTube.

Another way to revitalize unions via social media is through an increasing focus on politics. It has been suggested that unions should increase their infuence over policy-making, either by strengthening traditional ties between unions and political parties, or by seeking cooperation with other relevant political actors in civil society or on the supranational level (Behrens et al. 2004). This revitalization strategy suggests that trade unions should be more political—whether by mobilizing their own political campaigns, being active during elections or participating in cross-movement mobilization (i.e. common campaigns with other social movements). Cooperation with other social movements has been advocated as a way to make trade unions relevant again, although such cooperation often comes with a cost (Frege et al. 2014; Heery et al. 2012). Given the growing importance of social media in political campaigns, our analysis of trade union videos on YouTube will demonstrate whether and how unions have opted for this particular revitalization strategy.

Still, revitalization processes, like all organizational changes, challenge and alter the identity and image of a union. The simple fact that members are being lost implies that the organization is starting to think about itself as being weaker than it used to be. Furthermore, recruiting new groups changes the member composition of the union, which affects its identity. The constant trend towards individualization in post-industrial societies also poses challenges for trade unions. This trend is reinforced by social media, prompting scholars to talk about 'connective' rather than 'collective' actions (Bennett and Segerberg 2012). This trend might encourage unions to focus more on the individual benefts of their membership than on the traditional values of solidarity between workers. Moreover, it is known that emotional rather than purely informative messages are more likely to 'go viral' (Berger and Milkman 2012), which could affect the ways in which trade unions construct their selfimage online. A content analysis of the videos that have been uploaded to YouTube will allow us to investigate how Swedish trade unions have reacted to these challenges, and to observe what kind of images these organizations promote of themselves and their members.

In sum, revitalization is crucial in order to bring the trade union movement out its current crisis, and revitalization strategies that use social media—in this case, videos uploaded to YouTube—are a good indicator of how unions are coping with this challenge.

### 1.2 Why Focus on YouTube?

YouTube—or, more precisely, the website www.youtube.com—was launched in February 2005 and quickly gained popularity. Today, with over 1.9 billion logged-in users per month worldwide, YouTube is one of the most-used Web 2.0 platforms and is arguably the third most frequently used webpage (after Google and Facebook). Most of these users are mere *consumers*: they watch (consume) the videos that have been uploaded on YouTube. On YouTube, the *producers* are those who actively produce content: they record and upload videos. YouTube producers consist of both amateur and professional participants, such as enterprises, organizations and social media infuencers ('YouTubers'); many groups and individuals professionally generate content for different purposes on social media (Burgess and Green 2009b; Lange 2007, p. 93). In this particular case, the Swedish trade unions are the YouTube producers. The most active YouTube users are the *participants*—consumers who treat YouTube as social media and actively participate by commenting, sharing, liking and disliking alreadyuploaded videos. Of course, these categories overlap; for example, producers often actively participate as well.

Although YouTube was originally designed to allow individuals to share videos, the platform quickly became an important social networking medium (Burgess and Green 2009a, pp. 1–5). Today, YouTube is not only used for entertainment in the form of music videos, TV series and flm; it is also used effectively to promote citizens' political online discussions and political campaigns (Auger 2013; English et al. 2011; Hanson et al. 2010), as well as used for educational purposes (Ha 2018). In addition to contributing to the relatively sparse research that exists on social movements and YouTube, we had three reasons for choosing YouTube as the social medium to examine when studying unions' revitalization strategies.

First, the vast majority of global YouTube users are below 44 years of age, even though the digital divide between age groups has decreased over time.1 Users primarily turn to YouTube for entertainment. However, many consumers also look for informational and instructional videos (Khan 2017). It has been shown that YouTube videos have changed the ways in which young people seek information; for the younger generation, YouTube has developed into a major source of information (Stiegler 2009). Thus, for any organization, including trade unions, communication via YouTube provides an opportunity to reach a diverse—and, in particular, young—audience.

Facebook, another social media platform, also allows videos to be uploaded and supports live streaming. Many organizations make use of this opportunity, including trade unions. However, this Facebook feature is relatively recent and thus lacks suffcient data for a study of longterm organizational strategies. Facebook also lacks the autoplay function, which in YouTube automatically starts a new video after one has fnished. This algorithm uses information about video tags (keywords that the producer adds to the video) and the user's previously watched videos. Thus, whereas on Facebook, unions would have to wait until someone shares their video, on YouTube, there is an excellent chance that their videos will be seen even without users actively searching for them. Moreover, YouTube users tend to be much younger than mainstream Facebook users (Ha 2018). Hence, if trade unions wish to catch the attention of young people, YouTube appears to be the preferable arena.

The second reason for our focus on YouTube is related to the *format* rather than to the audience. YouTube videos resemble flm, which is a format that has been used by the labour movement to communicate messages to its members and to the public for the past 90 years. Unions have long used flm as a means of agitating, dispersing information and exercising political activism (Hogenkamp 1986; Moitra 2004; Vesterlund 2007, pp. 227f.). Eisenstein's silent flm *Strike*, which was made in 1926 in the Soviet Union, and the silent flm *Brüder*, which was made by Werner Hochbaum in 1929 in Germany, are both motion pictures that illustrate industrial action; in fact, the latter was produced by the trade union movement. Film became 'the medium of the working class' in the 1930s (Wring 2005, p. 35); thus, producing flms for the cinema that contained the values of the labour movement was deemed an important way to construct a working-class identity. Unions also made political commercials early on in the history of flm (Lindman 2011, pp. 192ff.), and the Swedish labour movement was no exception. From the 1920s onwards, the labour movement took a particular interest in using flm for propaganda and to disperse the values of the movement. Trade unions started to produce their own motion pictures in the early 1930s, with two famous examples being *Chansen* (The chance) by the Union of Commercial Employees and *Järnets män* (The men of iron) by the Metal Workers' Union (Blomberg 2007). In sum, trade unions have a long tradition of flm making and should therefore possess the necessary know-how for the production of YouTube videos. Moreover, videos do not require a verbal message, and this non-verbal form of communication makes it possible to overcome language barriers. Thus, YouTube can be an important channel for the transmission of union messages to non-native-language speakers, such as migrant labour groups.

Third, we focus on YouTube because videos uploaded to YouTube are a more stable form of communication than those on other social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter. In addition, while Twitter only allows the use of 280 characters for its tweets (before 2017, only 140 characters were allowed), YouTube videos can be as long as twelve hours.2 Moreover, Twitter and Facebook updates are often responses to current events; thus, the use of these social media platforms is characterized by high speed and direct communication between members, the media or other actors.

The very nature of Facebook and Twitter would make their successful use dependent on the individual trade union offcial administering the account—in other words, the use of these mediums is sensitive to the skill of particular individuals. In contrast, the YouTube videos produced by organizations are seldom a quick response to the comments of other actors. Video production is rarely a one-person job (Barber 2015); it is usually time consuming, and effort is required to write a script, prepare flming and execute the production of videos. It is also a costly process. Thus, it can be assumed that organizations producing videos on YouTube carefully consider the message they wish to convey, and that communication via YouTube is thus more likely than updates on Facebook or tweets to reveal an organization's long-term mobilization strategies and collective identity.

There is a certain platform bias towards Facebook and Twitter in the studies analysing unions' social media use (e.g. Panagiotopoulos and Barnett 2015; Rego et al. 2016). In particular, how unions use Twitter has been thoroughly analysed (e.g. Chivers et al. 2017; Dahlberg-Grundberg et al. 2016; Geelan and Hodder 2017; Hodder and Houghton 2015). Several studies on trade unions and social media do mention YouTube, albeit without focusing on this particular medium (e.g. Geelan 2013; Rego et al. 2016). The few studies that we are aware of describe how Australian trade unions document their activities (especially strikes) by uploading videos about various actions to YouTube (Milner 2012); these studies analyse flm as a mobilization strategy and focus on how the production of YouTube videos by members helps to increase intra-union solidarity (Milner 2014). In this book, we will show that the use of YouTube by European and Swedish trade unions is actually not as rare as prior studies (or the lack thereof) may imply.

#### 1.3 Why Focus on Trade Unions in Sweden?

We use the Swedish trade union movement as the empirical case in our analysis of trade union revitalization on YouTube. We focus on Sweden for four reasons. First, although Swedish trade unions enjoy a comparatively high union density (approximately 70% of all Swedish employees are members of a trade union), they have experienced a rapid decline in the past twenty years (see more in Kjellberg 2011; Johansson and Magnusson 2012; Palm 2017). Thus, like their European counterparts, Swedish trade unions have an incentive to employ revitalization strategies. Although the number of union members increased somewhat in the early 1990s (Medlingsinstitutet 2016), the situation changed in the mid-1990s and the decline escalated in the 2000s (Figs. 1.1 and 1.2). In the 2006 parliamentary elections, the Social Democratic Party lost its governmental powers after having governed Sweden for twelve consecutive years. The new centre-right government brought in a number of reforms to unemployment insurance and removed the tax deduction on trade union membership, resulting in a considerable increase in membership fees. As a consequence, union membership dropped rapidly in 2006–2007, which, according to the chairperson of the *Tjänstemännens centralorganisation* (TCO, the Swedish Confederation of Professional Employees), 'threatened the entire Swedish collective bargaining model' (Nordmark 2013).

However, membership decline varies across the unions (Fig. 1.2), which leads to the second reason for choosing Sweden. Unlike many other countries, where employees with positions of different classes can be members of the same union (e.g. ver.di in Germany and UNISON in the UK), Swedish trade unions are divided into three major trade union confederations that represent different societal classes—the

**Fig. 1.1** Swedish trade union membership across three confederations and their affliated unions over time (*Source* Medlingsinstitutet 2016; Kjellberg 2017)

**Fig. 1.2** Proportional change in union membership over time, using 1990 as a base (*Source* Kjellberg 2017)

working class, white-collar workers and the upper middle class (Hyman and Gumbrell-McCormick 2010; Kjellberg 2011).3 The unions organizing the working class are affliated with the *Landsorganisationen* (LO, the Trade Union Confederation); the unions representing whitecollar workers are affliated with the *Tjänstemännens centralorganisation* (TCO, the Swedish Confederation of Professional Employees); and the unions representing the upper middle class are affliated with the *Sveriges Akademikers Centralorganisation* (Saco, the Swedish Confederation of Professional Associations). These three confederations coordinate 51 trade unions: the LO consists of 14 unions, the TCO organizes 14 unions and Saco organizes 23 unions.4 Union density is higher in the public sector and is higher in middle-class unions than in working-class unions.

As shown in Figs. 1.1 and 1.2, the three confederations have been affected differently by the trade union crisis. Although it is not our goal to explain these varying declines in membership, it is worth noting that some of the differences between the unions in terms of membership losses refect the changing structure of the labour market in Sweden over the past thirty years. Deindustrialization has led to manual labour being replaced by the service sector; at the same time, rising educational levels have made the middle class bigger. While about 63% of employees belonged to the working class in 1985, this number had decreased to below 50% by 2015; during the same time period, the percentage of white-collar workers had increased from 17 to 23%, and the percentage of upper-middle-class workers had increased from 9 to 18% (Ahrne et al. 2018). Thus, in terms of potential trade union membership, the pool of people who can become members of TCO and Saco has increased, whereas the pool of people who can join traditional working-class unions has decreased over time. These fgures are important to keep in mind when discussing the different revitalization strategies unions use on YouTube.

Changes in the economy and in the trade union structure can be viewed from a class perspective; as Figs. 1.1 and 1.2 show, the LO has lost the most members over time. This loss is partly an effect of the above-mentioned structural changes in the economy and partly a result of policy changes. The 2006–2007 reforms in unemployment insurance and membership fees affected different sectors differently. The fee for unemployment insurance is related to unemployment within the sector. Since unemployment and the risk of unemployment is higher among the working class than among white-collar workers and the upper middle class—a difference that became especially visible during the recession after the 2008 fnancial crisis (SCB 2017)—working-class trade union members have been left with higher fees than middle-class members. Similarly, removing the tax deduction on the trade union fee raised membership costs, which was obviously more noticeable for low-income earners in the working class.

The different confederations also responded differently to the sharp membership decline in 2006–2007. The unions took a series of measures to stop membership losses. In particular, the white-collar unions affliated with the TCO mobilized. The TCO suffered from severe membership losses during the 1990s and 2000s, but has slowly managed to reverse this trend. After conducting a number of surveys to determine young people's perception of the union movement, the confederation launched the campaign *Facketförändras.nu* (The trade union movement is changing now) in the autumn of 2007. This campaign included major renewal processes in several TCO-affliated unions that involved amalgamations, name changes and the hiring of PR and marketing companies to rebrand the unions (Galli 2016, p. 157). No prior research describes similar actions being taken within the LO, even though the LO's membership declined considerably more than the TCO's. Finally, Saco has never experienced a 'crisis'. In contrast to the other organizations, the upper-middle-class unions in Sweden have grown incrementally over time. From the perspective of revitalization, these differences between the changes in Swedish trade union confederation membership numbers and changes in societal class structure provide a good basis to expect different usages of social media.

The third and fourth reasons for examining trade unions in Sweden are related to the spread of YouTube usage among the general population as well as within the labour movement. Sweden is one of the most digitalized countries in the European Union,5 and 81% of the Swedish population over the age of 12 used social media occasionally in 2017, while 56% used it daily (Davidsson and Thoresson 2017, p. 41). Young Swedes are particularly active on YouTube: young people aged 12–25 use YouTube daily, and 85% of people aged 26–35 use YouTube at least every month (but often more frequently) (Davidsson and Thoresson 2017, p. 62). Men are slightly more active on YouTube than women (88% versus 80%), and people born outside of the Nordic countries are more active YouTube users than those born in Sweden or in other Nordic countries.6 Thus, the groups of people that trade unions must reach and recruit are present on YouTube and can be targeted there.

Finally, from a cross-national perspective, Swedish trade unions are active on YouTube. A comparison of the videos uploaded by all trade union confederations in the European Union, Switzerland and Norway during the period 2007–2017 revealed that trade union confederations in Sweden uploaded as many videos as larger countries such as the UK and Poland (Table 1.1). Although the number of videos posted by Swedish confederations is considerably lower than the numbers posted by confederations in Italy, France and Spain, Swedish confederations have a higher average number of views (Fig. 1.3); in this aspect, Sweden holds the second place after Switzerland (where confederations uploaded only fourteen very popular videos). Thus, Swedish confederations are not only active in uploading material, but also fairly successful in dispersing their videos, from a comparative perspective (see Jansson and Uba [2018] for further comparisons of videos uploaded by European confederations). Swedish unions are far from being typical European unions (due to their historically large membership and strong


**Table 1.1** Trade union confederations in the EU, Switzerland and Norway, and their representation on YouTube

a Indicates OECD statistics; the remainder is the authors' data. No YouTube channels were found for trade union confederations in Estonia, Hungary, Latvia or Romania

bargaining power). From a European perspective, Swedish unions constitute the most likely case for this study; that is, if any unions in Europe are pursuing revitalization strategies on YouTube, they are most likely to be Swedish unions, given the number of videos Swedish unions have uploaded and their viewer statistics. The need for union revitalization is universal, and knowledge about how YouTube is used by Swedish unions could also be used to better understand developments elsewhere.

**Fig. 1.3** Average number of views per YouTube video per country and for the EU, 2007–2016 (*Source* Authors' data)

#### 1.4 The Argument—Audiences, Messages and Self-Image Across Unions

It is clear that trade unions in Sweden are relatively active users of YouTube in a European context. In a way, this activity indicates that these unions have adopted the suggestion of revitalization scholars to use social media. However, we still lack knowledge of *how* they use social media. Prior studies mainly emphasize that ICT should be used for revitalization without analysing how this is done. Purely being present on social media, which in this case entails the ownership of a channel or uploading videos to YouTube, is not enough to accomplish trade union renewal, however. Rather, the literature on trade union revitalization indicates the importance of unions using social media to engage with and organize particular audiences, conveying the right messages to those audiences and presenting self-images that appeal to those groups. These aspects are yet to be examined. Moreover, the trade union movement is heterogeneous, and there are reasons to expect differences in how unions representing different social classes use social media. It is clear that differing class compositions ought to affect the ways in which unions use social media, because the audiences of these unions—that is, the members and potential members—have different educational backgrounds, different Internet habits and perhaps even different opportunities to use social media. Unions representing different classes have also had different experiences with the trade union crisis and membership decline. Thus, a comparison of working-class, white-collar workers' and upper-middleclass unions not only makes sense, but can also provide important information about the trade union landscape in the twenty-frst century.

The following chapters of this book investigate how unions representing different social classes use this popular social media channel for revitalization purposes. We provide evidence for our arguments by building on existing research on trade union revitalization and empirically investigating whether and how Swedish unions (1) engage with and organize more diverse groups, (2) employ political campaigns, and (3) pursue image management via YouTube videos.

Thus, the second chapter aims to investigate *audiences*. If the Swedish trade unions use YouTube for revitalization, they are expected to address new audiences with their videos—particularly young people, people with atypical employment contracts and people born outside of the Nordic countries. These groups have been underrepresented in trade unions in general, including Swedish trade unions. As already noted, the membership decline and subsequent need for revitalization differs between unions. Hence, we expect differences in the ways the three trade union confederations—the LO, the TCO and Saco—and their affliated trade unions address potential audiences via YouTube. For example, we expect working-class unions to be particularly active in trying to reach out to young people, immigrants and persons with atypical employment contracts, since these groups often (but not always) belong to the working class: young people usually have their frst work experience in unqualifed jobs where no education is required, migrant workers are often found in working-class jobs (e.g. construction and the service sector) and atypical contracts are more common among working-class jobs.

Similarly, regarding variations in addressing audiences, which is the focus of Chapter 3, we expect the unions affliated with the three different confederations to communicate different *messages* via their YouTube videos. It is likely that different issues are of different importance to different groups and social classes; more specifcally, we expect to observe different degrees of political activism from the different confederations. Working-class unions have always had political aims and thus conveyed political messages; in most countries, there has been an institutionalized cooperation between unions and labour parties (Allern and Bale 2017). The latter is also true in the Swedish case, where the LO still cooperates with the Social Democratic Party. However, white-collar unions and upper-middle-class unions have been very reluctant to cooperate with specifc parties and have cherished a 'politically neutral' image.

Finally, the union crisis and revitalization strategies are challenging prevalent identities in trade unions. Any changes in membership composition—both gains and losses—will affect what the organization is and how it perceives itself. All organizations have unique identities, and the self-image they display is crucial for member identifcation with the organization and membership recruitment. By focusing on the *selfimages* the unions communicate via social media, we highlight the challenges union renewal has brought to the unions. Two dimensions of a union's image are of particular importance for membership recruitment: (1) the degree to which the union presents itself as an inclusive or exclusive organization and (2) the degree to which the union expresses the values of collectivism or individualism. We expect these dimensions to play different roles for the different classes.

Analysing the audiences of, and the messages and self-images communicated by, the trade unions' YouTube videos allows us to not only present a thorough analysis of the social media communication patterns of trade unions in Sweden, but also describe the contemporary trade union movement. The following chapters demonstrate how Swedish unions have accomplished these tasks.

#### 1.5 Data Collection, Coding and Analysis Methods

The analysis presented in this book is based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 4535 YouTube videos uploaded by almost all the Swedish trade unions between January 2007 and December 2016.7 In addition to almost all being active on YouTube, all of the Swedish unions have webpages. All but two have Facebook accounts, all but eight have Twitter accounts and many are also present on Instagram. Ninety-one YouTube channels are directly or indirectly related to Swedish unions.

Our quantitative analysis is based on YouTube metadata—more specifcally, on all the data that could be scraped using the YouTube application programming interface (API) in January 2017. Details of this process and the data are described in the Appendix; here, it suffces to note that this metadata provided detailed information (i.e. title, upload date, duration, short description of the video provided by the union, number of views, number of likes, number of dislikes and number of comments) for all the videos uploaded to our pre-selected trade union channels up to the specifc date of data collection (31 January 2017). Since mediums like YouTube focus on users providing content, YouTube's metadata production is also a bottom-up process in which the producers of the material decide how they want to present it (Stiegler 2009, p. 52).

Focusing on YouTube metadata will reveal patterns regarding what trade unions post on YouTube in terms of length, timing, content and so forth. Metadata on views, likes and dislikes will also provide some information on the audience's responses to the videos, making it possible to move beyond a traditional content-based media analysis. Of course, the number of views is not a reliable measure of a video's popularity, since viewers can click on a video without watching it or watch the video but not rate it positively (i.e. not click 'like'). Although YouTube viewers are given the option to choose 'dislike', this is not very frequently used. We did not analyse written comments from the audience because our interviews with the people responsible for the unions' social media accounts stated that they (irregularly) remove comments that are perceived as disturbing (mostly racist and sexist comments). Thus, analysing the remaining comments would not refect the full picture of the audience's views. Still, the metadata and content analysis provide some insight into how unions use YouTube and how their audience responds to their videos. The metadata and analysis are particularly useful for demonstrating the differences between the three Swedish trade union confederations.

Table 1.28 summarizes the collected information for all three trade union confederations. The LO and its affliated unions uploaded the greatest number of videos, but since the confederations differ in size considerably, a relative measure paints a different picture. It is clear that the Saco-affliated unions have the greatest number of videos per member (0.003), while the white-collar unions affliated with TCO have the lowest number of videos per member (0.001), and the LO-affliated unions fall between (0.002). The variation in the average duration, number of views and number of likes suggests that there are signifcant differences in the videos uploaded by the different unions. For example, Saco uploads videos that are an average of four times longer than those uploaded by the LO, and this pattern has not changed over time (Table 1.2 and Fig. 1.49). This fnding indicates differences in content in the video uploads of the different confederations. As the following chapters will reveal, one explanation for the differences in duration is that Saco has uploaded many videos of conferences and workshops on issues related to specifc professions; in contrast, the longest videos uploaded by the LO and the TCO are reports from the unions' congresses.

The main empirical analysis of this book investigates the videos' audiences, messages and self-images and is carried out in two phases:

First, we apply a simple content analysis to the metadata. Taking the literature on trade union revitalization as our point of departure, we identify a number of words that we suggest reveal the audiences and messages. We then search for this combination of words in the metadata (video title and description). For example, to determine which videos address young people, we look for the use of words such as 'youth', 'young', 'summer job', 'student' and so forth. To detect messages referring to political activism, we use an inductive method instead of relying on predefned theoretical categories, namely "the word cloud analysis" (see appendix for details). Since we do not rely on surveys with representatives of the unions, we do not examine the unions' intentions in making the videos; rather, we try to assess the audiences, based on the topics discussed and the actors mentioned. This method allows us to see patterns in the vast quantity of


**Table 1.2** Number of videos per trade union confederation (total population large N set)

*Source* Medlingsinstitutet (2017), the authors' data

**Fig. 1.4** Average duration (min) of uploaded videos across confederations by year

material, as certain words and topics may change over time and may vary between trade union confederations. Nevertheless, we acknowledge that such an 'automated' content analysis is vague and has several limitations. For example, young people do not necessarily watch videos that include the word 'youth' in their title, and all videos containing the word 'youth' in the title and description may not be directed towards 'youth' specifcally. Therefore, in order to complement our simplifed method, we also performed a more detailed analysis of a smaller sample of videos.

The second phase of our data collection and analysis was a qualitative approach involving two kinds of coding processes. First, we made a stratifed random selection of 624 videos for further analysis. The aim was to choose 20% of the videos that were shorter than 15 minutes from each confederation (see descriptive data in Table 1.3). This length limit was set because longer videos are mainly about seminars, workshops and congresses, which are not our primary interest. As Saco had many videos lasting more than 20 minutes (25% of their videos), we ended up with


**Table 1.3** Number of videos per trade union confederation in the small N (624) set

*Source* Authors' data

a distribution in which the LO had 335 videos, the TCO had 185 videos and Saco had only 104 videos. The fact that Saco uploaded many long videos that are unlikely to have a wide audience (also see Fig. 1.4) suggests that in addition to communication, unions use YouTube as a medium to archive various flm material.10

A research assistant applied a predefned coding scheme and used the visual, audio and text information for each video to identify specifc topics and characters in the videos (the codebook is available in the Appendix). There were a variety of video types, with differing content and actors. For example, some videos showed interviews with union leaders, who summarized recent policy decisions taken by the union (e.g. Byggnads 2014, June 14); others showed political campaigns that were mobilized in relation to national elections (e.g. LO 2014, April 28); other videos presented new collective agreements (e.g. Fackförbundet-ST 2010, October 15); and some described how to write a CV (e.g. Civilekonomerna 2013, October 22).

The videos were categorized based on genre (i.e. advertisement, cartoon, report, coverage of congresses or interviews), main content (e.g. educational material, political campaign, protest action, call for membership or information distribution for current members), main actor (e.g. regular member, leader or politician), location shown in video (e.g. offce, factory or natural environment), or addressee (e.g. young people, members of the unions) and issue discussed in the video (e.g. wages, gender equality, international solidarity, unemployment insurance, or collective agreement and bargaining). This small set of videos is fully described in the Appendix, and the audiences and messages are described in Chapters 2 and 3. However, it is worth noting here that 45% of these videos are various kinds of interviews, 10% are clear advertisements for union membership and 14% are various reports on trade union events such as conferences, competitions and seminars. The careful categorization and coding of the data in the small N set provided a detailed picture of the videos and operated as a control for the robust coding of the metadata.

Finally, in order to further improve the understanding of the content of the videos, the fourth chapter contains an in-depth qualitative analysis of the self-images of the union movement that are portrayed on YouTube. In this fnal empirical chapter, we focus on two trade unions from each confederation, for a total of six unions. For each confederation, we examine one large union organizing employees in the industrial (private) sector and one large union organizing employees in the public sector. We provide an in-depth analysis of 10–12 videos for each of these six unions. All the analysed videos in this section have many views and contain information on the union that permits an analysis of self-images.

#### 1.6 Outline of the Book

Analysing how trade unions use YouTube leads to a better understanding of how contemporary unions act and behave in the digital era. It is a way of detecting what audiences appear to be targeted by unions, what issues dominate union videos' messages and what kind of mobilization unions encourage in the (digital) public sphere. The video titled 'How to get a raise in 47 seconds', which was produced by the Municipal Workers' Union, is a good example of the videos analysed in this book: it targets the general public, raises the issue of equal payment, refers to the general problem of gender inequality and calls for further action from everyone, not just from the members of the union that produced the video. All these topics are covered in the following chapters.

We start by investigating the videos' audiences. Thus, Chapter 2 asks and answers the question of whether Swedish trade unions use YouTube to target groups that have been diffcult to organize—namely, youth, people with a foreign background and people with precarious employment. We fnd distinct differences across the confederations in terms of the targeting of certain audiences. For example, the Saco-affliated unions are relatively successful at targeting potential members. A striking observation is that all the unions use YouTube to disperse information to members (and non-members) about union work such as congresses and collective bargaining.

The third chapter focuses on the messages that are expressed in the videos, and demonstrates that unions discuss a signifcant variety of issues on YouTube. Even though political activism is more present (as expected) in the videos uploaded by working-class unions (the LO), all the unions use YouTube to enhance internal democracy and to target their own members.

While Chapters 2 and 3 examine how unions choose to use different revitalization strategies on YouTube—such as diversifying the membership base and becoming politically active—Chapter 4 describes how the need for revitalization has challenged the unions, and how this challenge is refected in their self-images. Chapter four's in-depth analysis of videos from six unions reveals that collectivism is still strong in the LO- and Saco-affliated unions. However, whereas social identities such as class and gender are particularly important in the former, the profession is central for the latter. Among the TCO unions, individualism is used as the basis for mobilization.

#### Notes


#### References


**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# Audiences: Who Do Unions Target?

**Abstract** This chapter investigates what groups are typically addressed by unions' YouTube videos and analyses how well the three Swedish trade union confederations apply the revitalization strategy of targeting more diverse groups. Based on a rough analysis of video titles and descriptions (large N sample), as well as a qualitative analysis of a smaller set of videos (small N sample), we demonstrate that unions only rarely address traditionally unorganized groups such as young people or people with a foreign background, although upper-middle-class unions do so more frequently than the working-class and white-collar workers' unions. We also show that most of the unions' videos target their own members. Thus, in their use of YouTube, unions tend to address internal issues by uploading videos that help to increase the internal democracy of the organization, which may be helpful in keeping existing members and perhaps also bringing back members that have been lost over the years.

**Keywords** Young people · Precarious workers · Internal democracy

It is reasonable to assume that when the Municipal Workers' Union posted the video titled 'How to get a raise in 47 seconds', they had several different audiences in mind. The act of transforming their chairperson, Annelie Nordström, into a man in order to 'solve' the problem of women's lower life earnings activates different social identities and speaks to a variety of groups: employers, politicians, the media, union members, other social movements fghting for equal pay and the general public. But above all, the video speaks to anyone concerned about gender inequality and encourages these people to mobilize. This video illustrates not only the multiple identities of contemporary trade unions (see further discussion in Chapter 4), but also the necessity of addressing various societal groups while mobilizing.

Targeting the right groups is crucial for the successful outreach of a message—but what is the right audience for trade unions on YouTube? It has been widely argued that trade unions interested in revitalization should catch the attention of a broader range of people than the traditionally organized groups. Unions need to not only regain former members, but also organize groups that have been historically underrepresented in trade unions, such as part-time employees, employees with atypical employment contracts (i.e. precarious workers), women, young people, ethnic minorities and migrant workers. Of course, unions can also use social media to communicate with their members. In this chapter, we examine how unions deal with these issues in practice.

### 2.1 Targeting Members and Potential Members of Swedish Trade Unions

There is little doubt that trade unions want to reach out to their *members* in order to strengthen the bonds between an organization and its members, promote activism and improve internal democracy. Thus, targeting existing members via social media not only has an important identity-building function, but also helps unions improve their internal democracy—a problem that has been on the agenda for more than a 100 years (Michels 2001 [1915]). In their work on information and communication technology (ICT) and trade union internal democracy, Greene et al. (2003) note that two obstacles to internal democracy (as described by Michels in his classic study of the German labour movement) are information dispersion within the organization and control over the means of communication. These two problems can be addressed via social media (Greene et al. 2003). It has been claimed that the Internet facilitates 'distributed discourse' (Clegg 2002; Geelan and Hodder 2017; Upchurch and Grassman 2016). In the past, union leaders have controlled communication within the movement, but with the emergence of ICT, this control has been distributed within the movement (Greene et al. 2003); leaders no longer have the monopoly on the distribution of information and the creation of discourses. ICT offers higher levels of transparency and greater possibilities for more extensive interaction between the organization and its members (Zivkovic and Hogan 2005). Members can easily subscribe to various communication channels of the union (i.e. e-mail lists, Facebook groups or YouTube channels) and thereby receive relevant information as soon it is posted. Members can also easily use the Internet and social media for spreading information themselves. Thus, these new communication channels can facilitate greater 'equality of knowledge' within the movement (Carter et al. 2003). Moreover, anyone can participate in online discussions related to these posts; in fact, social media offers good opportunities to establish direct contact between an organization and its individual members, something that has been diffcult to accomplish in the past. Approaching the union through social media initiates conversations in public settings, thus, creating pressure on the organization to respond to members' questions. It has also been argued that ICT has the potential to increase the participation of union members who would otherwise be inactive, because participation through the Internet has no time or space limits (Greene and Kirton 2003; Thornthwaite et al. 2018). Thus, in comparison with 'old' paper-based newsletters, ICT and social media, such as YouTube, hold great potential for advancing information dispersion and transparency within an organization, and YouTube is an especially good medium for publicizing congresses and conferences, which can be streamed live online.

This thoroughly positive view of what the Internet can offer has been criticized. Of course, extensive reliance on ICT may reproduce the hierarchies that already exist within labour movements and society (Lucio et al. 2009). It has been claimed that unions choose to use ICT techniques in which they can control the information fow, such as webpages (Fitzgerald et al. 2012), instead of using the more democratic, interactive mediums. Research also indicates that ICT does not activate member groups that are inactive offine (Kerr and Waddington 2014). Online technological solutions can also be misused, for instance, through surveillance of employees (Upchurch and Grassman 2016). Thus, research on internal democracy and social media has so far come to ambiguous conclusions, and it is therefore particularly interesting to analyse whether and how Swedish unions target their own members using YouTube videos.

Reaching *potential members* is more diffcult, although social media and YouTube—could be particularly useful for such purposes. YouTube is so popular worldwide that any video has an opportunity to be watched. The audiences that trade unions need to reach are the groups that have been historically underrepresented in trade unions: part-time employees, precarious workers, women, young people, ethnic minorities and migrant workers (Frege et al. 2014; Frege and Kelly 2003, 2004; Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman 2014, pp. 81–101; Mrozowicki and Trawińska 2013; Mustchin 2012). YouTube is a useful way to address this task, for several reasons.

First, precarious workers have always been hard to organize because they work in sectors with non-standard hours, making it diffcult for unions to contact these groups (Bailey et al. 2010). Moreover, precarious employment is often temporary, and research shows that unions have found it diffcult to reach out to these workers in time through the regular organizing model, before the workers have already moved on. Research indicates that temporary workers tend to join unions if unions are available (Sánchez 2007). Thus, the problem is often one of practically reaching these groups. Considering that communication via YouTube videos is not limited by time or space, unions should perceive it as a good means of reaching this large and growing group of employees.

Two groups that are often in precarious employment contracts are young people (Pedersini 2010, p. 13; Vandaele 2013) and people with foreign backgrounds (Alberti et al. 2013). It is well known that young people use the Internet, including YouTube, more than other groups. Thus, it makes sense for organizations that want to reach young people to maintain a presence on online forums where young people spend a great deal of their time. The average YouTube user stays on the site for 40 min, and this time is steadily increasing (Omnicore 2018, September 18). Furthermore, young people are 'inadvertent news consumers' through social media (Bowyer et al. 2017); thus, they tend to receive and adopt information that they did not originally intend to look for. All of this suggests that YouTube is a place where unions can reach young people. In fact, one of the few prior studies about trade unions and the use of YouTube has demonstrated that young people became aware of trade unions' campaigns through YouTube videos (Geelan 2015, pp. 81–83).

Finally, in order to revitalize the movement and enlarge and differentiate the membership base, unions should also attract migrant workers. There is a wide scope of research analysing unions' strategies to organize migrant workers (e.g. Alberti et al. 2013; Connolly et al. 2014; Marino 2012; Mustchin 2012). Like youth, this group is often temporarily employed, has irregular working hours and commonly has precarious working conditions (Alberti et al. 2013). Unlike youth recruitment, however, the recruitment of migrant workers often implies language barriers. Using videos to transmit visual messages can overcome these barriers and transmit information to people who lack the necessary language skills and/or are unable to read complex texts about union membership. Women are another group that research has claimed that unions need to target. In the case studied here, however, the situation is different; the gender bias that exists in other countries (although there has been a global increase in women's participation in unions) is not visible in Sweden. On the contrary, women are more unionized than men in Sweden (Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman 2014, pp. 53–54). In sum, the second main task of this chapter is to examine whether and how unions target precarious workers, young people and people with a foreign background. First, however, we will explain why we expect Swedish unions to vary in terms of reaching out to members and potential members.

#### 2.2 Swedish Trade Unions and Audiences

Based on the existing literature on trade union revitalization, we expect Swedish unions to address both members and potential members through their YouTube videos. However, we also expect different unions to choose different 'targeting strategies'. It is likely that all unions, regardless of class position or experience with the union crisis, will use social media to improve their communication with their members. Nevertheless, we expect differences in terms of reaching out to potential members through social media. Unions affliated with the three different confederations—the LO, the TCO and Saco—have had different experiences with membership decline and the union crisis. Structural changes in the economy have shrunk the industrial sector signifcantly, while simultaneously increasing the service sector (Pashev et al. 2015). This shift has impacted the 'supply' of potential members: the working class has decreased and the number of white-collar workers and the number of upper-middle-class workers have increased. More importantly, the shift from the industrial sector to the service sector, which has occurred within the working-class occupations, has had an impact on union density. Whereas union density has increased among white-collar workers and the upper middle class, it has decreased among the working class.

These changes call for different reactions from the unions, depending on the class composition of the union. The current union density among young Swedish workers (16–24 years of age) who do not simultaneously study has declined from 70% in 1995 to only 40% in 2015 (Larsson 2018). Furthermore, white-collar and upper-middle-class jobs often require education; thus, very young employees usually work in working-class jobs, which make young people more likely to become members of the LO unions than of the TCO and Saco unions. This means that working-class unions have a particular need to reach young people. Therefore, it is probable that the LO is engaged in targeting youth.

The same reasoning applies to precarious workers and people with foreign backgrounds. The 'supply' of migrant workers has signifcantly increased since the enlargement of the EU in 2004, with the increase mainly occurring in working-class occupations such as construction, transport and basic services. This shift has led to a number of active mobilizations of working-class unions on behalf of migrant workers, including berry pickers from Thailand and construction workers from Latvia (Marino et al. 2017). Nevertheless, the overall union density among this group is still low. Precarious employment has increased over time in Sweden, largely due to globalization and the 2008 economic crisis. Although temporary contracts are also increasing in white-collar and upper-middle-class jobs, they are still more prevalent within the working class.

Due to these differences, we expect the examined trade unions to target somewhat different groups with their YouTube videos, depending on which class the unions represent. Although all unions are expected to address their own members to a similar degree, *working*-*class unions affliated with the LO are expected to target all three unorganized groups more than the other two confederations*. We test this hypothesis empirically using two datasets: frst, by performing a simple content analysis of the metadata (titles, descriptions, numbers of views and likes) of 4535 videos (the large N sample) and second, by watching and carefully coding 624 randomly selected videos (the small N sample).

#### 2.3 Targets in the Large N Dataset: Method and Findings

In the frst step of our analysis to identify the groups targeted by trade unions in YouTube videos, we conducted a simple content analysis based on the title and description of the videos. As noted in the introductory chapter, this investigation was not based on a survey asking the unions what groups they want to target or who their intended audience is. Furthermore, we did not identify the groups targeted by unions by profling those who commented on the videos or subscribed to the channels, as these were very few and thus insuffcient to use to draw conclusions. Instead, we identifed the targeted groups from the perspective of YouTube consumers. Most people fnd YouTube videos by using Google or the integral YouTube search engine; therefore, unions must produce videos that can easily be found and that can be understood by particular consumers. One key element in increasing visibility is the careful use of video tags, keywords and descriptions. These items are metadata defned by the producer of the video and are used by the YouTube search engine and by other search engines. Thus, video titles and descriptions are crucial for visibility. By analysing this information, we can obtain information on the audiences that are most likely to fnd the videos. Therefore, we looked for targeted audiences *by searching for specifc keywords* that the groups of interest (i.e. members and potential members, the latter of which include employees with precarious employment, youth and people with a foreign background) might search for. We also looked for direct references to these groups. This last point is important, because a union targeting young people might tag a video with keywords such as 'young workers'.

Of course, in addition to targeting specifc groups in order to recruit new members to the trade union movement, unions can produce videos with general recruitment material and thus target *potential members in general* rather than specifc groups. Such videos are best found using keywords such as 'recruitment'. Table 2.1 presents the coding scheme that was applied to the titles and descriptions of the 4535 videos.

In order to identify videos that directly address union members, we searched for videos with information on current actions of trade union leaders, congresses, updates on collective bargaining processes and interviews with unions' chairmen that explain ongoing union work. These types of information dispersion can improve the transparency of organizational activities in a union and thereby help to strengthen the union's


#### **Table 2.1** Targets and keywords

a This insurance is specifc for trade union members and differs from general unemployment insurance

internal democracy. Of course, potential members might also watch these videos; however, it is likely that the majority of the audience of these videos are union members.

We identifed videos targeting people with precarious employment by searching using a combination of keywords that capture employment-related issues that are likely to be interesting to this group, such as *parttime*, *seasonal work*, *temporary jobs* and *working conditions*. This category partially overlaps with young people and people with a foreign background because these groups often have precarious employment.

To identify videos that might interest young people and signal the unions' interest in organizing youth, we searched using keywords such as *young*, *student*, *apprentice*, *internship* and *summer job*. As some unions have their own youth and student channels, we coded the videos in these channels as targeting youth, since these channels are exclusively devoted to informing young people about union issues (all detailed codes in Swedish are presented in the Appendix). We assumed that young people looking for information on trade unions or employment issues would search for words such as *summer job* and *apprentice*, since these occupations are mainly populated by young people. In order to minimize the number of false positives, we excluded words such as *pupil* and *school*, as such terms are more likely to be mentioned by teachers' unions, and as union membership is not open for pupils in lower grades. However, pupils learning a specifc occupation in high school can join a union, often with a reduced or non-existent membership fee.

Videos targeting people with a foreign background such as migrant labour and frst-generation immigrants (SCB 2002:3) were harder to identify through a content analysis of the video titles and descriptions. People who have been in Sweden for a relatively short time, or who plan to come to work in Sweden, may not be fuent in Swedish. We manually checked how many of the videos were in languages other than Swedish and found 91 non-Swedish videos, all of which were in English. In our analysis, we assumed that when unions discussed issues such as immigration, refugees and migrant labour in their YouTube videos, such discussions signalled the union's openness towards these groups. Theoretically, however, unions could also post videos that are critical or negative towards immigration. It is known, for example, that many LO members support the populist radical right party, the Sweden Democrats; however, none of the Swedish trade unions have displayed any anti-immigrant rhetoric in public. In fact, Swedish trade unions—and especially working-class unions—have raised the issue of ensuring that migrant workers are covered by collective agreements (see e.g. the infamous Laval case in Woolfson et al. 2010). We examined all the videos in this category more closely and noted that none of them had a negative framing of migrants or of migrant labour. Thus, all videos including the terms *immigration*, *migration* and *asylum seekers* were coded as attempts to reach out to people with a foreign background.

Finally, we looked for videos describing membership recruitment and the general benefts of joining the union, as these topics would be of interest to any potential member. Of course, this category also contains vital information for existing members, such as information on how income insurance works, union services offered to members and so forth. Therefore, it was diffcult to distinguish between videos targeting 'members' and those targeting 'potential members'. However, after watching many of the videos (and performing the more detailed analysis presented in Chapter 4), it seemed to us that most of these videos were actually intended to inform potential members about the benefts of joining the union.

#### 2.4 Findings in the Large N Dataset

All of the videos were coded using the categories of members, precarious employment, youth, people with a foreign background and potential members in general. Since these categories are not mutually exclusive, a


**Table 2.2** Proportion (%) of videos addressing the different targets (*N*=4535)

\*The difference between confederations is signifcant at the 95% level; all but the 'general public' categories are not mutually exclusive; and the total percentage in all rows can exceed 100

single video could fall into multiple categories. Videos that did not seem to target any of the groups of interest (i.e. videos that did not include any of our keywords) were coded as targeting the general public.

As shown in Table 2.2, slightly more than half of the videos (2323) were categorized as addressing the general public. Even though some of these videos could easily be found and watched by union members or potential members, these videos did not directly target any of the groups of interest. For example, most of the videos in this category provided general information on unions, on a specifc career opportunity or occupation or on political campaigns mobilized by the union. These videos can be viewed as increasing public awareness of trade unions among the general public and thus *indirectly* recruiting people to trade unions.

In terms of targeting potential members, the frst obvious result from the analysis was that Saco-affliated unions representing the upper-middle-class professions uploaded almost three times more videos targeting 'youth' than the white-collar TCO-affliated and working-class LO-affliated unions. Saco stands out in this regard, which is not surprising, given that Saco-affliated unions are based on specifc professions (e.g. engineers, teachers, architects, doctors, dentists, etc.) that require a university education. Thus, Saco-affliated trade unions can easily identify potential members while they are still students and begin to organize them during their student time (many of the unions offer special membership for students). Saco has a strong presence at universities; in fact, the confederation has its own YouTube channel for student fairs (Saco Studentmässor). Thus, the high visibility of youth-related issues in the Saco videos relates to the character of these particular unions.

Although most TCO-affliated unions also organize employees with a university education, there were relatively few youth-targeting videos by TCO-affliated unions—despite the fact that the TCO-affliated Unionen has its own channel for students (Unionen Student). One possible reason for this fnding is that unlike Saco-affliated unions, some of the major TCO-affliated unions (e.g. Unionen, Fackförbundet ST and Vision) organize multiple occupations and professions. Thus, these unions may fnd it more diffcult to identify and customize videos to specifc groups.

In contrast to our expectation that working-class unions would be particularly interested in approaching youth, the LO-affliated unions did not mention youth or youth-related words particularly often in their videos. There are two youth channels among the LO-affliated unions the Municipal Workers' Union Youth (KommunalUng) and the Young Electricians (Unga Elektriker). Videos from these channels made up half of the LO's videos in the category 'youth'. Since 2017, LO-affliated unions have opened more youth-focused channels, so a stronger focus on addressing young people may be expected in future.

When additional metadata of the videos—that is, the average number of views and likes—was included in the analysis, an interesting twist was observed for the videos in the category 'youth' (Fig. 2.1).1 The videos uploaded by the TCO unions were watched four times more often than those uploaded by Saco and the LO unions, whereas the videos of the LO and the TCO unions gained far more 'likes' than Saco's youth-related videos. Although the number of likes of LO- and TCO-affliated union videos in Fig. 2.1 appears to be similar, in fact since the LO posted far fewer videos, these few videos received far more 'likes'. However, the average values were caused by a few very popular videos, so no statistically signifcant difference was found between the confederations. Many of the youth-related videos had very few views and likes. Nevertheless, the results still suggest that in this particular category, the videos uploaded by LO- and TCO-affliated unions are more popular than the larger number of videos uploaded by the Saco-affliated unions.

Although membership diversifcation should be of interest to all Swedish unions, the unions do not appear to be attempting to diversify by means of YouTube videos. Only a tiny proportion of the videos uploaded by the unions address people with precarious employment (1%) or people with a foreign background (3%). Of course, many precarious

**Fig. 2.1** Average number of views and likes for trade union YouTube videos targeting 'youth'

and migrant workers are young and therefore are also likely to be targeted by the youth-related videos described above.

Although the video categories targeting precarious and migrant workers constituted a very small proportion of the total number of videos, they can still be used to compare the three trade union confederations. Precarious employment was addressed by LO-affliated unions three times more often than by TCO- or Saco-affliated unions. This fnding can partly be explained by the fact that such employment conditions are comparably rare within Saco and less common within the TCO than the LO. The videos targeting this particular group tended to address various problems related to insecure working conditions or atypical employment contracts (Handels 2014, May 2; HRF-avd02 2014, July 7; Kommunal 2010, January 12), or to call for a change in related policies (Handels 2015, March 27). The videos in this category were watched and liked fewer times than those targeting youth (compare Figs. 2.1 and 2.2). In this case, the difference between the average number of views and likes of the videos uploaded by the LO-affliated unions and those of the videos uploaded by TCO and Saco unions was statistically signifcant.

**Fig. 2.2** Average number of views and likes for trade union YouTube videos targeting people with precarious employment

The proportion of videos in English (only videos in Swedish or English were found) and videos with any information relevant to people with a foreign background was very low (3% of all videos). Thus, we can conclude that Swedish trade unions are not using YouTube to target people with foreign backgrounds—or at least, not by producing videos in other languages. Among the few videos posted in English were two very popular TCO videos: 'Like a Swede (a way of living)' and 'Business like a Swede' (the latter with 790,314 views and 2104 likes). However, these videos are humorous professional commercials that present the Swedish welfare state and the labour market model; the videos say hardly anything about membership recruitment and do not appear to be targeting people with a foreign background. A few videos in English demonstrate solidarity with trade unions outside of Sweden (GS-Facket 2016, May 21; Transport 2012, August 27); these videos are not about people with a foreign background in unions either. Saco-affliated unions posted more videos in English and thus have a higher proportion of videos in this category than the other two confederations. This can be explained by the fact that Saco and its affliated unions have uploaded many videos with seminars, conferences and other union events in English. Such events are often purely academic, with researchers talking about fndings; thus, these videos do not really contribute to the mobilization of new members.

Finally, videos that directly address potential members without targeting a specifc group constituted 9% of all the videos. Although the differences between the confederations in this case were small, white-collar unions affliated with the TCO posted slightly more videos with direct recruitment information (e.g. information on the benefts of membership) than working-class (LO) unions and signifcantly more than uppermiddle-class (Saco) unions. Since both the LO- and TCO-affliated unions have suffered more membership losses than the Saco-affliated unions, it is not surprising for the LO and TCO to be more motivated to address the issue of membership recruitment. Still, as Fig. 2.3 indicates, the videos that address potential members in general are the most viewed videos among the studied categories. Thus, it appears that producing YouTube videos on recruitment in general may be a better strategy for capturing viewers' attention than producing videos that focus on specifc groups.

Thus far, it is possible to conclude that few videos contain information that would attract specifc groups or that contain information about specifc groups; young people, people with a foreign background and precarious workers are clearly not the main target of the videos, according to our fndings.

So, who is the target? An examination of the fnal category of targets—the members—reveals the answer. Almost 40% of the videos uploaded by LO-affliated unions, 36% of the videos uploaded by TCOaffliated unions and 21% of the videos uploaded by Saco-affliated unions are directed towards members (Table 2.2). These videos contain reports on internal meetings and congresses, information about collective agreements and accounts of general decisions made by the union. Swedish trade unions are clearly using YouTube to improve information dispersion within the organizations, as predicted by Greene et al. (2003). Even though these videos are not very popular in terms of average views and likes (Fig. 2.4), they are important from the perspective of revitalization. For example, giving members the opportunity to follow the elections of representatives and debates during annual meetings can enhance their trust in the organization and improve internal democracy, which will eventually strengthen the trade union movement.

**Fig. 2.3** Average number of views and likes for trade union YouTube videos targeting 'potential members'

**Fig. 2.4** Average number of views and likes for trade union YouTube videos targeting 'members'

In sum, the results of the analysis of the large N sample reveal that while some Swedish trade unions do target specifc groups with their videos, it is still much more common to address union members or the general public. Not as many videos addressing young people directly were created as might be expected, especially given that the LO has prioritized the recruitment of young people in their congress of 2010. Rather, the upper-middle-class unions are the ones that targeted a younger audience by focusing on university students.

However, this rough content analysis is insuffcient to provide a complete picture of the possible targets of unions' videos. Therefore, we also performed a more detailed analysis of 624 randomly selected videos.

### 2.5 Targets in the Small N Dataset

To deepen our understanding of the intended audiences of trade unions' YouTube videos, we complemented our analysis of titles, descriptions, views and likes with an analysis of a small N dataset. We watched and analysed 624 randomly selected videos from the large N sample. Rather than identifying potential audiences via video titles and descriptions, we used the well-known method of political claims analysis (Koopmans and Statham 1999) for this more detailed investigation. That is, we assumed that every video makes some kind of claim, and that the actor making the claim (i.e. the trade union) is the producer of the video. Moreover, we assumed that every video has a specifc addressee, who is the actor the claim (i.e. video) is directed to. By watching the videos, we were able to detect a larger variety of addressees. We used a codebook in which we listed twelve possible addressees of the unions' messages: other unions, union members, potential members, politicians, employers, youth, women, people with a foreign background, precarious workers, an international audience, people with a specifc occupation (e.g. plumber or teacher) and the general public. However, detecting the addressees of the videos was not always easy, as many of the videos appeared to target multiple audiences. When this was the case, we coded two addressees and ranked them as the 'main' and 'secondary' identifable addressed actors. (See the Appendix for the codebook for all relevant categories in the small N analysis.)

Table 2.3 shows the results, which clearly demonstrate that the main audiences for unions are their own members and the general public. Considering the results from the large N sample, this is not a surprising


**Table 2.3** Proportion (%) of videos by categorized audience for each confederation (*N*=624)

a These videos also include those that fall into the category of internal democracy

result. All the other targets were rarely addressed in the videos. No video primarily targeted other unions. Since our main interest in this book is trade union revitalization, we once again focus on specifc groups (shown in bold font in Table 2.3): members, people with precarious employment, youth, people with a foreign background and potential members in general.2

Similar to the analysis of the large N sample, our investigation of the small N sample demonstrates that unions address 'members' in at least half of their videos, and that the majority of these videos contain information about trade union congresses—either videos with highlights from a congress, such as opening speeches (see e.g. Vårdförbundet 2011, May 10), or videos depicting an entire general congress of a confederation (e.g. the LO's 2014 congress). There were also a considerable number of videos containing information about collective bargaining rounds, with representatives from the unions explaining what was happening in the bargaining process (see e.g. IF Metall 2011, December 7; Sveriges ingenjörer 2017, August 7). Our carefully coded data indicates that the number of videos targeting members is in fact greater than what was revealed by the large N analysis; that is, the analysis of the large N dataset underestimated the proportion of videos targeting members.

People with precarious employment conditions appear to be a main concern of working-class unions. Here, the small N sample revealed that such videos are more common than we were able to capture with the simple content analysis of the large N sample. Only the LO-affliated unions uploaded videos that directly addressed atypical employments and precarious jobs. The majority (71%) of these 21 videos were uploaded by the LO-affliated Swedish Commercial Employees' Union (Handelsanställdas förbund). The videos mainly provide information on problems and possible solutions for people with temporary or short-term working contracts (Handels 2014, May 2; Handels 2016, March 1), which are common within the retail sector. These videos not only provide useful information regarding the negative economic consequences of insecure employment contracts; they also signal that the union is mobilizing against this situation. One of the videos ends with the statement: 'Handels [Commercial Employees' Union] wants to have secure jobs!' (Handels 2015, March 27). Even though this video does not call anyone to join the union, the video clearly shows that the union is engaged in improving this particular employment situation.

The analysis of the small N sample added some interesting perspectives to the unions' targeting of the group categorized as 'youth'. These results support the fndings from the large N analysis, in that the proportional difference between Saco and the other two confederations remains. Saco has ten times more youth-targeting videos than the LO-affliated unions in this sample. However, unlike the observations on 'members' and 'people with precarious employment', careful examination and coding of the videos revealed that the large N analysis *overestimated* the number of videos belonging to the 'youth' category (compare Tables 2.2 and 2.3). In the large N sample, 11.3% of the videos targeted youth, while in the small N sample, this fgure was only 5.4%. One reason for this difference may be that manual coding makes it possible to better distinguish between precarious employment conditions and youth, given that these are overlapping groups. Another reason may be that many Saco's videos which targeted youth were longer than 15 minutes and thereby not included into the small N sample.

Videos addressing 'people with a foreign background' in the small N sample were as rare as in the large N sample. The few existing videos were, however, signifcant. The LO-affliated Building Workers' Union's video titled 'Interpreter organize members' demonstrates how the union has made a strategic decision to use a translator to recruit members among (Polish) migrant workers (Byggnads 2012, February 10). A video by another LO-affliated union, IF Metall, titled 'What if there were no trade unions' (IF Metall 2014, December 5), gives a clear indication of recruiting workers who not speak Swedish; considering its relatively large number of views (4835) and likes (26), this strategy is popular among the audience, in comparison with other videos uploaded by the unions.

Videos addressing 'potential members' directly made up a relatively small category in our small N sample, at only 2.2% of all videos, with no differences between the confederations. The corresponding number in the large N sample was 9%. Thus, creating videos aimed at member recruitment in general is not particularly common.

Finally, the category 'general public' formed a very large part of the examined videos. This category contains many different themes—politics (40%), education (13.5%), justice (8%), occupation-specifc information (8%) and general information about the work of trade unions (5%). Chapter 3 further analyses the large share of videos that address the general public and that contain political issues; however, it is worth noting here that targeting the general public indicates a wish to impact the political debate. Most of the videos that target the general public depict the unions' logo or name during the video and thereby increase public awareness of the organization. The question of whether this indirect recruitment might lead to increased membership is, however, beyond the scope of this book.

#### 2.6 Conclusion

Making videos to appeal to specifc groups may appear to be a good revitalization strategy for trade unions. YouTube is the third most visited webpage and thus constitutes a forum where unions might encounter new audiences and new members. Our analysis of Swedish trade unions' YouTube videos primarily demonstrates that unions use this social media channel to disperse information about trade unions and to target both the general public and their own members. While it is not surprising that unions address their own members, we found a signifcant proportion of videos reporting on union activities such as congresses and collective bargaining. Such reporting is important in strengthening internal democracy by making the organization more transparent to its members. Although these videos may not be very popular, they are likely to be important for members who are interested in related questions. Future research could examine whether this union strategy does in fact lead to an increased perception of the union's transparency among its members.

However, another suggested revitalization strategy—that of addressing specifc groups that are diffcult to organize in unions—has not been widely adopted in the YouTube videos of Swedish unions. In comparison with other audience categories, such as union members or the general public, only a very small proportion of union videos address youth, people with a foreign background or precarious workers. Saco-affliated unions can be seen as an exception, since these unions do use YouTube to target young people more frequently than other unions. Thus, these upper-middle-class unions are certainly better in terms of reaching out to underrepresented potential members. Our analyses lend some support to the hypothesis that working-class unions (those affliated with the LO) address people with precarious working conditions more frequently than the other unions. On the other hand, such videos are few. The following chapter will demonstrate whether and how the unions have adopted another suggested strategy for renewal in their use of YouTube—namely political engagement.

#### Notes


#### References

Alberti, G., Holgate, J., & Tapia, M. (2013). Organising migrants as workers or as migrant workers? Intersectionality, trade unions and precarious work. *The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 24*(22), 4132–4148.


**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# Messages: Political Action—Agenda-Setting, Elections and Protests

**Abstract** This chapter describes the predominant issues in the YouTube videos uploaded by Swedish trade unions and examines how these messages vary across the three union confederations. We particularly focus on three different forms of political activism: agenda-setting, electoral campaigns and protests. The results demonstrate that political activism does not form a signifcant part of the Swedish unions' YouTube videos, except during election time, which includes national elections and elections to the EU parliament. It is also shown that working-class unions with historical links to the Social Democratic Party are more politically active than other unions.

**Keywords** Political messages · Agenda-setting · Electoral campaign · Protest

By releasing the video 'How to get a raise in 47 seconds' only three days before International Women's Day, the Municipal Workers' Union made a clear political statement (Kommunal 2014, March 5). It has been claimed by scholars of trade union revitalization that this is the route forward: unions must increase their engagement in politics (Baccaro et al. 2003; Hamann and Kelly 2004). It is important not only for unions to engage in narrowly defned employment issues, but also for them to attempt to impact politics in general, since the interests of trade union members are broader than employment-related issues alone; the structure of the welfare state, taxation and other redistribution issues are of interest to all employees (Hyman and Gumbrell-McCormick 2010). Moreover—and perhaps more importantly—engaging in politics can demonstrate a union's broader societal relevance to its members and potential members and can create a more active membership.

Political activism among trade unions is not new; however, critics have argued that over time, unions have come to focus on narrow employment-related issues and that much of union work has gone through juridifcation, with professional trade union offcials 'serving' the members (so-called business trade unionism) as a result (Lopez 2004; Voss and Sherman 2000). Deepening a union's political activism implies a return to 'the roots': engaging in politics can make trade unions into a strong political force once again; it can improve the relationship between the members and the organizations and thus bring social movement unionism back into the movement (Fairbrother 2008; Milkman and Voss 2004, pp. 9–11).

Unions can pursue political infuence in different ways, including engagement with election campaigns, institutionalized cooperation with political parties and classical corporatist arrangements, such as involvement in legislation processes and the implementation of legislation (Hamann and Kelly 2004, p. 94). Social media cannot be used for all of these different strategies for pursuing political activism; however, communicating via YouTube could be very important in unions' agenda-setting, engagement in electoral campaigns and protest mobilization.

Infuencing the *political agenda* is a strategy that is part of ordinary interest-group activities. Like any interest-based organization, trade unions try to impact the issues that are discussed in the political debate. The second type of political activism that is of interest here, namely *election campaigns*, has become increasingly important over time, as voters have become unfaithful to a single party (Norris 2000, p. 177). This trend is relevant not only for political parties, but also for anyone wishing to affect electoral campaigns. Trade unions cooperating with political parties have often been very active during election campaigns; for example, they may provide fnancial support to a political party or provide volunteers to assist with practical duties during the campaign (Allern and Bale 2017; Jacobson 1999; Sinyai 2006). Such ties have been thoroughly examined by interest-group scholars. According to the cost-beneft exchange model, when trade unions assist in elections, political parties (if they win) implement certain policies in exchange (Streeck and Hassel 2003; Öberg et al. 2011). Thus, there is nothing new about unions participating in election campaigns. However, recent studies suggest that since the link between political parties and unions has weakened over time, there has been a shift in union participation in election campaigns (Allern and Bale 2017). Finally, to these institutional forms of political actions, more contentious actions can be added: that is, the *mobilization of political protest* in the form of political strikes (i.e. strikes with political aims, rather than strikes that occur during collective bargaining rounds), demonstrations or boycotts.

All these activities—involvement in election campaigns, placing issues on the political agenda and mobilizing protest campaigns—can be performed through strategic communication on social media in general and, without a doubt, through uploaded videos on YouTube. In fact, the Municipal Workers' Union's video in which the chairperson is transformed into a man is a good example of several different forms of political activism. First, it points to the central political issue of women's smaller life earnings. Second, although the video was posted during an ongoing election campaign for the 2014 Swedish general elections and the EU parliament, the video is in English, which gives its message a far wider reach than Sweden. This can be seen as an attempt to impact the agenda of a more general political debate. Third, the end of the video exhorts the viewer to protest gender inequality. The fact that the video was uploaded only a few days before International Women's Day, when protests against gender inequality often take place, emphasizes this effect even more. Thus, all three types of activism are present in the same video. Whether this is typical for the videos of all Swedish unions, or whether there are differences across the three confederations, is the major question addressed in this chapter.

### 3.1 Unions' Political Activism and Expected Variations in Sweden

It has been widely noted that organizations' communication via social media tends to follow a similar pattern as their communication through regular media, even though the former method carries certain benefts. Regular media outlets (e.g. newspapers) have a 'gate-keeper' role that can work both in favour of and against the unions' agenda. Early on in its development, the labour movement was aware of the necessity for communication strategies through the media (Wring 2005); this often led to the establishment of specifc communication departments in union organizations. In the Swedish case, the LO had already hired its frst press commissioner by 1931 (Enbom 2009, p. 56). Above all, the labour movement invested in newspapers in order to ensure that their perspectives would be published, since conservative and liberal newspapers would not expound the unions' views. Over time, unions' investments and ownership in newspapers have decreased, causing other channels of communication to grow in importance. Social media offers unions new opportunities to spread their messages; more importantly, it allows unions to control their messages and bypass the newspapers' gate-keeping role.

It is known that trade unions' choice to exercise political activism whether offine or online—is related to a range of different factors, such as the dominant structure of industrial relations in a country, or the unions' leadership, available resources and historical experiences. Since we focus on Sweden in this work, it is important to note that the strong corporatist institutions that were established in the early twentieth century gave Swedish trade unions good opportunities for political engagement (Hermansson et al. 1999; Rothstein 1992). The preconditions allowing unions to impact politics changed drastically in 1992, when the Employers' Organization, SAF, withdrew all of its representatives from state agencies' boards and caused a shift into pluralistic relations between the state and interest organizations (Johansson 2000; Rothstein and Bergström 1999). Nevertheless, the strong historical tradition of trade unions' political activism in Sweden remains present today.

In most countries, unions have experienced institutionalized cooperation with social democratic and left parties (Allern and Bale 2017). This holds true for the Swedish working-class unions affliated with the LO. In fact, the LO was founded by the Social Democratic Party. Initially, the union movement mainly organized workers, and the working class usually voted for social democratic and left parties. Thus, pursuing this direction in political activism was expected. In Sweden today, most of the LO-affliated unions still actively support and fnancially contribute to the Social Democratic Party, even though the collective affliation to the party was abolished in 1991. Cooperation between unions and the political party is still highly institutionalized; for example, many of the LO-affliated unions' chairmen also hold a position in the Social Democratic Party, such as being a member of the party board (Jansson 2017).

The TCO and Saco and their affliated unions, on the other hand, have always stressed political neutrality, even though some connections exist between the TCO and the Social Democratic Party. For example, the party has separate clubs for party members that are active in the TCO unions. There have also been several personal overlaps, as a few of the TCO's chairmen have held positions in social democratic governments. However, such overlaps also existed during the centre-right government from 2010 to 2014. Thus, the 'neutrality' of these union confederations and their affliated unions means that the white-collar and upper-middle-class unions do not explicitly support specifc political parties. This neutrality is motivated by the argument that cooperation with specifc political parties is inconvenient for the union members (and potential members). It is known, for example, that during the 2014 elections, a larger share of LO members voted for the Social Democratic Party (52%) than TCO members (33%) or Saco members (22%) (Oscarsson 2018). Furthermore, 23% of TCO and Saco members voted for the centre-right Moderate Party, suggesting that there is no clear interest among the white-collar and upper-middle-class unions to support a specifc party. The fact that 17% of LO members voted for the radical right Sweden Democrats in 2014 (Oscarsson 2018) shows that over time, the cooperation between the LO and the Social Democratic Party may be challenged further. Thus, given that the different unions have approached political engagement differently in the past, and due to their different member compositions, we expect the LO-affliated unions to carry out more electoral activities via YouTube than the TCO- and Saco-affliated unions.

In addition to electoral engagement and agenda-setting, the third form of political action for unions is the mobilization of protests. Even though the main protest activity of trade unions has always been the strike (Vandaele 2016), there are plenty of examples of mass demonstrations mobilized by unions in cooperation with other social groups, especially since the 1990s. This trend is related to the role of unions in the democratization processes in Latin America, Eastern Europe and South Africa, as well as to the increasing mobilization that is occurring against globalization and neoliberal political reforms (Della Porta 2006; Fantasia and Stepan-Norris 2004). Although social movement scholars often neglect the analysis of protests mobilized by trade unions due to the interest in 'new' social movements, the contemporary shift towards materialistic protests, especially since the Great Recession of 2008, has increased scholarly interest in trade unions' contentious actions (Andretta et al. 2016; Peterson et al. 2015). Swedish unions are not as radical in their political activism as unions in France, Italy or Spain; however, there are plenty of instances of such political engagement. For example, Swedish unions combined strikes with calls for broader consumer boycotts in their Toys 'R' Us dispute in 1994 (Vandenberg 2006), and the Swedish Protest Database 1980–2011 reports on more than 270 demonstrations that were mobilized by the unions, excluding the regular May Day demonstrations (Uba 2016). There are no studies comparing the protest activism of different Swedish unions; however, Peterson et al. (2012) have used survey data to show that LO members have more experience with joining strikes than the members of the TCO and Saco, while Saco and TCO members have boycotted various products more often than the members of the LO (Peterson et al. 2012, p. 640). These fndings suggest that there should not be much difference in terms of protest mobilization via YouTube across the examined unions. In order to detect the political engagement in unions' YouTube videos—including agenda-setting, electoral engagement and protest mobilization—we examined the messages in 4535 videos uploaded by the unions by means of a simple word cloud analysis of the large N dataset and then performed a more detailed examination using the small N dataset of coded videos.

### 3.2 Political Messages in the Large N Sample: Method and Findings

By combining the rough word cloud analysis with the other available metadata (i.e. the upload date, duration, etc.), we were able to obtain a general description of the ways in which unions have used YouTube and the messages they have transmitted in their political communication.

Our analysis was performed in several steps. As it is unlikely that all union videos contain political activism, the frst step of the analysis was purely inductive: we counted the most frequently used words in the titles and descriptions provided by the unions when they uploaded the 4535 videos. In order to minimize unnecessary noise, we excluded commonly used verbs, pronouns, adverbs, and conjunctions such as 'and', 'we' and 'here'; the names of the unions; the names of cities such as Stockholm or Gothenburg; and frst names such as Per, Annelie and Thor. For simplifcation purposes, we also substituted all words related to collective agreement, such as demands in collective bargaining (*avtalskrav*) or negotiations of collective agreement (*avtalsrörelse*), with the word 'collective agreement' (i.e. *avtal*). This was important because all of these words refer to the same issue; thus, counting them as separate words could lead to an underestimation of the importance of this particular theme in the unions' videos. All of the details of this process are provided in the Appendix to this book. The resulting table of the most frequently used words was visualized in the form of a word cloud, with a larger font size indicating words that were used more often by the unions (Fig. 3.1 shows the word cloud; the table itself is in the Appendix).

As indicated in Fig. 3.1, the most frequently used words in the video titles and descriptions relate to the unions themselves and to 'ordinary union work'. Examples include 'chairperson' (*ordförande*) and 'congress' (*kongress*), followed by words such as 'job' (*jobb*), 'collective agreement' (*avtal*), 'member' (*medlem*) and 'seminar' (*seminarium*). Other frequently used words are 'agenda item' (*dagordningspunkt*) and 'trade

**Fig. 3.1** The most commonly used words in titles and descriptions

union board' (*förbundstyrelse*). In other words, the trade unions seem to use YouTube to communicate with their members and to disperse information about their regular work. This is a reasonable fnding, considering that our analyses of the videos' audiences in Chapter 2 clearly demonstrated that union members are the most common audience.

A few of the words in the word cloud are clearly related to politics. First, the words '*byta*' (change) and '*regering*' (government) form the phrase '*byta regering*', which was used in 242 videos entitled 'Therefore, I want to change the government' that were uploaded by the LO-affliated Municipal Workers' Union in 2010. These videos depict union members speaking into the camera for only a few seconds each, explaining why they want to change the government. (Sweden had a centre-right government from 2006 to 2014, and this video campaign was an attempt to get voters to vote for the Social Democratic Party.) Thus, these videos are strong and clear examples of election campaigns driven by trade unions on YouTube. The word 'elections' (*val*) is another frequently used word, albeit less so than 'change' and 'government'.

Second, another word that is clearly related to politics is '*Almedalen*'. This word refers to a park in Visby on Gotland Island, which hosts the so-called politicians' week every summer in July. This event is the biggest trade fair for politicians and lobby organizations in Sweden and involves all party leaders and interest organizations in the country. It is a place where politicians, bureaucrats and various interest groups meet and have numerous seminars, lectures and debates. All of the union confederations and most of the trade unions are present. Most of the videos containing the word *Almedalen* report on the major questions for the unions during this week. Thus, these videos are good examples of attempts to impact the political agenda.

Third, other examples reveal attempts to infuence the political agenda that are mainly related to education and healthcare. The former includes words such as 'school' (*skolan*), 'teachers' (*lärare*) and 'education' (*utbildning*), which occur frequently in the word cloud. This fnding is not surprising, for two reasons: (1) Sweden had poor results in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA); this issue has been frequently discussed in the Swedish public debate over the past ten years, and the unions have actively participated in such debates. (2) There are two very active teachers' unions in Sweden (one affliated with the TCO and another with Saco), and these unions' posts naturally focus on education-related issues. The latter, 'healthcare' (*vård*), appears relatively frequently in the unions' YouTube videos and has been an important political issue due to the various healthcare reforms made by the centre-right government.

The overall results from the word cloud analysis of the titles and descriptions of the 4535 videos indicate that YouTube is primarily used by unions as a means of strengthening internal democracy, as was noted in the previous chapter. Still, our rough estimation of words related to any type of political activism shows that such videos make up about 25% of all videos uploaded by trade unions on YouTube. We have no international or theoretical comparison point that allows us to state whether this is a considerable proportion or not, but we can compare the unions with each other.

#### 3.3 Comparing Unions in the Large N Sample

The next step of our analysis focused only on the unions' political activism on YouTube. In order to test our hypothesis that the working-class unions are more likely to engage in electoral campaigns and to detect whether and how political activism on YouTube varies across the confederations, we conducted a second large N word-frequency analysis separately for each confederation (Fig. 3.2). This time, we excluded words related to 'regular trade union work' such as 'collective agreement', 'employment', 'congresses' and related words (see the Appendix for the complete list). The word clouds in Fig. 3.2 contain words that were mentioned at least 15 times or more in the video titles or descriptions.

**Fig. 3.2** Words related to unions' political activism on YouTube: (**a**) unions affliated with the LO and the LO, (**b**) unions affliated with the TCO and the TCO and (**c**) unions affliated with Saco and Saco

As shown in Fig. 3.2, clear differences emerge between the unions affliated with the LO, the TCO and Saco. First, the proportion of videos containing political messages differs between the unions: 32% of the LO videos refer to some political content, in comparison with 24% of the TCO videos and 15% of the Saco videos. Second, the visual appearance of the three word clouds reveals that the LO's word cloud is 'thinner' than those of the TCO and Saco: the LO cloud contains only a few words in large font. This is due to the distribution of the words; the LO-affliated unions have a skewed word distribution. For these unions, the most common words are mentioned about 300 times, whereas the rest of the words are mentioned about 30 times or less; thus, there are a few political themes that the LO-affliated unions talk about a great deal. There is no such skewed distribution of the word frequency in the TCO or Saco videos, indicating that the political themes or issues discussed among TCO- and Saco-affliated unions are more diverse.

Third, the most common words in the videos uploaded by the LO-affliated unions relate to election campaigns, which is not the case for the TCO and Saco videos. 'Elections' are mentioned more frequently by Saco than by the TCO-affliated unions (40 times versus 29 times, in comparison with 69 times for the LO); however, the TCO and Saco give no clear calls to change the government or to perform other electoral engagements. This fnding suggests that the TCO- and Saco-affliated unions are not engaging with elections campaigns. In general, these results support our expectations regarding the political neutrality of the white-collar and upper-middle-class unions and the more intensive electoral activism of the working-class unions.

Fourth, the most frequent words in the TCO and Saco clouds can be interpreted as referring to agenda-setting. As displayed in Fig. 3.2, the word '*Almedalen*' is very common in the TCO and Saco videos, indicating that these unions seem to value (or at least discuss) the yearly Almedalen event more than the LO. This phenomenon may be a result of the political neutrality of the TCO and Saco unions: without predefned cooperation with a political party, it is necessary to use lobby opportunities to impact agenda-setting, and Almedalen is an excellent forum to do so. Another notable trend among the videos of the white-collar and upper-middle-class unions is the frequent mention of the welfare state. Common words in the videos uploaded by the TCOaffliated unions are 'teachers' (*lärare*), 'school' (*skola*), 'healthcare' (*vård*) and 'tax reform' (*skattereform*); these words refer to issues that are important to the middle class. Hence, it makes sense that the trade unions organizing the middle class are engaging in such issues and the mentioning of these issues, such as 'tax reform', indicate attempts to impact the political agenda. A similar pattern can be seen in the Saco videos, which use many education-related words ('university' [*universitet*], 'teacher' [*lärare*] and 'education' [*utbildning*]). Here, it is necessary to account for a methodological caveat: the unions affliated to both of these union confederations might mention these words because they organize employees working in these sectors (e.g. teachers). Later, in the small N analysis, we will combine the education-related words with the audiences in order to try to distinguish which videos present political campaigns and which do not.

We found little evidence of contentious politics in our frequency analysis of the words used in the video titles and descriptions. The closest to protest action was the term 'fght' (*kamp*), which was found 28 times in the LO videos, whereas the other confederations used this term less than ten times in their video titles or descriptions. Other protest-related or collective action-related words such as 'demonstration' or 'manifestation' (in Swedish, the word 'manifestation' is often used for denoting a demonstration) were more or less absent in the material. One example of demonstration is a video posted by the LO that contains joint action among the LO, TCO and Saco; the video shows the chairpersons of the three confederations collectively demanding improvement in unemployment insurance in Almedalen (LO 2015b, February 5). The lack of protest in the unions' YouTube videos does not mean that the unions did not mobilize protests during this time period, however. For example, the Municipal Workers' Union organized demonstrations against the centre-right government's cutbacks to the social insurance system; these demonstrations took place close to the Swedish parliament and to the building in which the Moderate Party (Moderaterna) has had its headquarters on Thursdays for several years (Antonsson 2009, September 24; Beckström 2011). These protests were shown in a few videos (Kommunal 2010a, June 17); however, in relation to the total number of videos uploaded to YouTube by Swedish unions, the lack of words referring to contentious action shows that such political engagement is rare. One reason may be that videos risk exposing the activists' identities; in fact, our interviews with trade union activists confrmed that they view such exposure as a major concern (interview, 2015, May 21).

**Fig. 3.3** The average number of views and likes of political videos across confederations

Finally, even though the overall number of videos containing political activism was modest, such videos could still be important in terms of dissemination. Since our metadata contained measurements of popularity—that is views and likes—we could determine the spread of the videos to some extent. As Fig. 3.31 demonstrates, not only do the LO-affliated unions post the most videos on electoral campaigns, but their videos also receive far more views and likes than those of the other two confederations. The most liked video containing a political message that was uploaded by the working-class unions was a video produced by the LO that was part of the 2014 election campaign. This video, titled 'Reinfeldt's Sweden' (LO 2014, February 23), listed a number of problems (mainly related to increased income and wealth inequalities) caused by the centre-right government led by Fredrik Reinfeldt. The video contains graphics that are easy to follow and has English subtitles. It has received 1148 likes and over 270,000 views from 2014 to 2017. The general popularity of the TCO and Saco videos is very low in comparison with that of the LO videos.

#### *3.3.1 Election Campaigns: All About Timing?*

The third step in our analysis of the videos' metadata focused on when the video was uploaded. The word clouds demonstrated that electoral activism among the TCO- and Saco-affliated unions was rare. However, it is also possible to take part in an election campaign more generally, by being active in social media during election years. Such activities would not be captured by our word clouds. Therefore, we used another way to examine which trade unions took an active part in electoral campaigning, by focusing on timing. Two general elections (2010 and 2014) and two elections to the European Parliament (2009 and 2014) were covered by our observation period of 2007–2017. Figure 3.4 displays the number of videos uploaded over time.

A comparison of the videos uploaded by the three confederations reveals different patterns. While the unions affliated with LO and TCO were the frst to upload videos in 2007 and clearly used YouTube more during the 2010 election year, the unions affliated with Saco had a slower start but gradually became energetic users of YouTube. Figure 3.4 contains one clear peak in 2010, which suggests that YouTube was used

**Fig. 3.4** Number of videos per year by confederation and their affliated unions

for political campaigning. In 2014, however, there is no clear peak for the TCO and Saco unions; rather, they continued to upload videos at roughly the same rate over the two following years. On the other hand, the LO uploaded fewer videos after the 2014 election, but this decrease was not as great as the decrease in uploads after the 2010 election.

It is important to note that elections in Sweden always take place on the second Sunday in September, while the EU elections take place in May or June. Figure 3.5 illustrates the unions' activities on YouTube during the 2009, 2010 and 2014 election years. It is clear that LO-affliated unions were very active in uploading videos during the 2010 election campaign; the number of videos increases in September. Many of the videos uploaded by the Saco-affliated unions in June 2010 were not related to the Swedish elections, and they contain reports from the congress of the World Federation of Occupational Therapists (WFOT) in Chile. The LO-, TCO- and Saco-affliated unions were also very active in May 2014, which suggests that they were engaged in the election campaigns for the EU elections. In fact, they were more active before the EU elections than before the general elections. Although this information is not visible in the graph, a few videos were uploaded by the LO-affliated unions before the 2009 EU parliamentary elections, exhorting everyone to vote in the EU elections (IF Metall 2009b, June 2;

**Fig. 3.5** Monthly distribution of videos on election years by confederation and their affliated unions

Kommunal 2009, May 18). All graphs in Fig. 3.5 indicate that the TCO also uploaded many videos at the beginning of July (as did Saco in 2014), which mirrors the unions' activities in Almedalen.

### 3.4 Political Activism in the Small N Sample: Method and Findings

Analysing the metadata provided us with a rough picture of the trade unions' messages on YouTube. In order to obtain a more detailed picture of the unions' political activism, we used our dataset of 624 randomly selected and carefully coded videos. The manually coded data also allowed us to evaluate whether our simple content analysis of the metadata was accurate. For each video, we asked: *What is the main content of this video and who is the audience?* Since our interest here was in the political messages, we classifed the content according to the three types of political activism examined in the large N analysis: agendasetting, participation in election campaigns and protest-related videos (i.e. reports of events and calls for action). The category 'agenda-setting' contained videos that focused on policy issues such as welfare, education, health care, equality, justice or economy and that targeted the general public or politicians. Since it can be diffcult to distinguish agendasetting from ordinary trade union work, we identifed these videos through the *issue* being discussed in the video and through the *addressee* of the video: if the video discussed general political issues or specifc policies, and if the addressees were politicians or the general public, then we assumed that the union was trying to impact the political agenda. The category 'election campaigns' held videos related to elections, including mobilization to vote for specifc parties and participation in elections in general. The category 'protest' contained videos that either reported on protest events (e.g. demonstrations) or mobilized viewers for a protest event (e.g. calling viewers to sign a petition).

In addition to these three political activism categories, we included two other categories in the small N analysis. The category 'ordinary trade union work' contained various types of videos that discussed unionrelated issues or were part of the regular work of the unions. These videos covered topics such as employment issues, questions related to collective agreement, wages, reports on internal events (e.g. congresses, seminars and meetings) and more. They addressed a variety of audiences including members of the union, employers, other trade unions and the


**Table 3.1** Messages in the small N sample (percentage and number of cases)

general public. Finally, the category 'other' contained videos that did not ft into any of the other categories.

Table 3.1 shows how the videos in our sample were distributed across these categories. In comparison with the large N analysis, the small N sample contained a larger proportion of political activism—about 38% (in comparison with 25% for the large N sample); however, the differences between the confederations were very similar in the two analyses. Whereas almost 47% of the videos uploaded by the LO-affliated unions carried a political message, the respective fgures were 36% for the TCO-affliated unions and 16% for Saco-affliated unions. Although the difference between the large N and the small N analyses may relate to the sampling process, watching the videos provided greater validity of the coding process than the rough counting of words in the large N analysis allowed.

As displayed in Table 3.1, the TCO-affliated unions uploaded videos containing 'agenda-setting' messages twice as often as the LO- and Saco-affliated unions. This is not surprising, since the word cloud indicated that policy issues related to the welfare state frequently appeared in the videos of the TCO unions. Education was the most prevalent issue addressed in the TCO's videos, with 53% of the TCO's agenda-setting videos discussing some aspect of education. This prevalence is probably due to one of the two teachers' unions in Sweden, the Swedish Teachers' Union (Lärarförbundet), being part of the TCO. A closer look at the videos that discuss 'education', however, revealed that half of these videos address politicians and/or the public. Thus, these videos are not 'ordinary union work'; rather, they must be considered as attempts to impact the political agenda. Some of these videos are very political. For example, a few of the videos were produced by a local section of the Teachers' Union and showed members posing questions to politicians regarding the number of children per teacher in preschool and primary school (Lärarförbundet 2015a, September 17; 2015b, September 24). Since all education in Sweden is fnanced by the state, these videos undoubtedly address the question of relocating tax money to schools; therefore, they are attempts to impact the political agenda. The rest of the TCO's agenda-setting videos referred to the politicians' week— Almedalen—during which the Teachers' Union has been very active.

The agenda-setting videos by the LO-affliated unions also addressed specifc policy issues, with a particular focus on unemployment insurance (IF Metall 2013, October 25) and on cutbacks made in sickness insurance (LO 2015a, January 16). Some of them raised bigger issues regarding inequalities and insecure employment (Byggnads 2013, March 6). In the case of Saco, the agenda-setting videos were very diverse and focused on health and education.

Turning to 'election campaigns', the fndings were similar to the results of the large N analysis and showed that the videos uploaded by working-class unions in the small N sample focused on electoral campaigns three times more frequently than those uploaded by the other confederations. In fact, our small N sample contained no election-related videos from any Saco-affliated union.

About 80% of the videos categorized under 'election campaigns' were uploaded by one union—the Municipal Workers' Union—and were related to the 'Therefore, I want to change the government' campaign. Some of the videos uploaded by LO-affliated unions clearly called viewers to vote for the Social Democratic Party (Kommunal 2010b, August 17; 2010c, September 13), while other election-related videos mobilized the viewers to improve the conditions of the working class (IF Metall 2010b, August 22).

Of the videos uploaded by the TCO-affliated unions in this category, the majority were uploaded by the Teachers' Union. This union posted a number of videos in 2010 and again in 2014, which stressed the importance of a well-functioning school system. These videos were active attempts to make primary education into a major issue in the election campaign (Lärarförbundet 2014, May 7). The political neutrality of the TCO-affliated unions could again be seen in these videos: in 2014, the Teachers' Union published videos showing the union chairperson talking to each of the political parties in parliament (except for the populist radical right party) and asking questions on education politics. This type of engagement in the election campaign, which displays different voting alternatives for viewers without recommending a particular party, demonstrates political neutrality while simultaneously encouraging the audience to vote.

Finally, in terms of videos about 'protests', as in the large N study, very few references were made to contentious politics in the small N study. Only 12 videos could be placed in this category: four videos from Saco-affliated unions and eight from LO-affliated unions. It should be emphasized that very few of these videos were in themselves protest actions. Surprisingly, there was only one such video: a video from the Saco-affliated National Union of Teachers exhorting the viewers to sign a petition on the union's homepage to increase the time teachers get per pupil (Lärarnas Riksförbund 2011, February 18).

It has been argued that when social movements use YouTube, they often *present* their major goals in their videos rather than using YouTube as the means to *achieve* their goals (Vraga et al. 2014). Our results confrm this. The other videos in the 'protest' category simply reported on contentious politics by displaying different protest events that had taken place. For example, one video reported on a demonstration for higher salaries for teachers (Lärarnas Riksförbund 2013, October 2); another video showed a fashmob organized by the union Akademikerförbundet SSR (Akademikerförbundet SSR 2013, October 17); and a third video uploaded by the Swedish Engineers showed the symbolic action of distributing soup (in a reference to a student's low income) in front of the students' loan offce (Sveriges ingenjörer 2010, June 17). Finally, two videos referred to the crisis in the Swedish automobile industry: one reports on a demonstration against the closing of the production of the Swedish car SAAB and calls out General Motors (IF Metall 2010a, August 16) and the other targeted the government and called for fnancial support to the car industry during the recession (IF Metall 2009a, March 17). The crisis of the Swedish automobile industry was one of the few clear signs of the Great Recession of 2008 in Sweden. In these videos, the unions' political actions primarily oppose the government policies that allowed the closures. Both videos were produced and uploaded by the Metal Workers' Union, although the second video was created in cooperation with the Saco-affliated union Sweden's Engineers. These videos use protest events to draw attention to important issues for the trade union movement. Nevertheless, the number of protest-related videos and videos referring to unions' protest actions in Sweden was so small that we are unable to discuss patterns in these videos.

#### 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 affliated with the LO, carried out comprehensive electoral engagement in 2010. Many of the other trade unions, especially those affliated 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 specifc party—namely the Social Democratic Party. The other two union confederations emphasize their political neutrality both offine and online. However, they do not refrain from engaging in politics. The fndings show that the TCO- and Saco-affliated unions try to have an infuence on which specifc issues are politically debated. Our study demonstrates that the unions affliated 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-affliated unions seems to be one of trying to impact the political agenda without siding with a specifc 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-affliated unions did not seem to have spread a message of contention through their YouTube videos.

#### Note

1. In all tables and fgures in this chapter, 'the LO' refers to the LO and its affliated unions, 'the TCO' refers to the TCO and its affliated unions, and 'Saco' refers to Saco and its affliated unions.

#### References


**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

CHAPTER 4

# Self-Images on YouTube

**Abstract** This chapter discusses how unions have carried out revitalization processes by using YouTube videos to change their self-images. Here, we analyse the self-images of six different trade unions representing different social classes using two dimensions: the degree to which the trade union presents itself as an inclusive or exclusive organization and the degree to which the union expresses the values of collectivism or individualism. Exclusive collectivism, which has historically been crucial for union formation, remains relevant for working-class unions and upper-middle-class unions. However, inclusive individualism has become an increasingly important feature of white-collar workers' unions.

**Keywords** Self-image · Collectivism · Individualism · Inclusive organization · Exclusive organization

While YouTube provides unions with good opportunities to recruit new members or convey political campaigns, it is also a sphere in which images of the unions are produced and reproduced. When the second largest trade union in Sweden, the Municipal Workers' Union, transformed its chairperson Annelie Nordström into a man as the answer to the question 'How to get a raise in 47 seconds', the union was not only drawing attention to the issue of equal remuneration; it also created an image of itself as a feminist organization (Kommunal 2014, March 5). The video clearly stated that women's lower life earnings are the result of their gender and nothing else. A feminist identity is not new for this union, as the female-dominated Municipal Workers' Union has not only fought for women's life earnings, but also battled other, male-dominated, unions (Arvidsson and Wettergren 1997; Nordström 2018; Waldemarson 2010). Fighting against gender inequality has become an integral part of this union; thus, it is important for this union to demonstrate this identity via social media.

Displaying a specifc self-image is an important part of an organization's communication strategy and is particularly important for social movements, both internally and externally. Organizational images often—and especially in this context—refect how the organizational elites choose to present the organization; that is, it is a projected image (see Gioia et al. 2000). Image management is crucial for member recruitment because organizational images trigger identifcation processes, and identity is often the very reason people choose to participate in movements (Snow and McAdam 2000). Building on social movement research, Kelly (1998) suggests in his union mobilization framework that identity is a crucial ingredient in successful mobilization. Identities are dynamic, however, and need to be constantly redefned and renegotiated as changes occur, and research indicates that unions have not been successful at adapting. One part of the union crisis is unions' incapability to adjust their self-image to changes in employment relations and the composition of the labour force (Lévesque et al. 2005; Moore 2011), triggering a vicious cycle: unions, then, are perceived as less relevant, leading to diminishing membership numbers. Losing many members, in turn, indicates low status for an organization. No one wants to be a member of a group or organization that has a low status or that does not align with one's identity. In such situations, members and organizational elites are likely to invest in changing an organization's image (Klandermans and de Weerd 2000), making it fruitful to examine self-images in the context of union online revitalization.

Thus, image management is an important issue for trade unions but not a new phenomenon. Unions, like most organizations, have always employed forms of image management (see for instance Jansson 2012; Manning 1998; Seaton 1982). Image management requires a movement or organization to have a clear vision of its own identity, along with insight into who it wants to attract and recruit. According to the literature on union revitalization, trade unions should try to attract new groups. In order to catch the attention of these groups, changing the image of the union seems to be necessary.

However, such active image management might be a double-edged sword: although image management might allow a union to add new elements to its image in order to attract new groups, the same process may result in a loss of its old identity and thereby alienate existing members. According to organizational theory, organizational identity is commonly defned as the mutual understanding of what is central, distinctive and endurable in an organization (Albert and Whetten 1985). Thus, organizational identity theory implies that the self-image emerges in the interaction between the members and the leaders. If one of these components changes, the self-image will also change. For example, if a male-dominated union suddenly recruits a large number of women, the union will hardly be able to describe itself as a 'male' organization anymore. New members that hold somewhat different ideas of what the organization is will change the organization from within; such processes can be considered to be 'natural' changes in self-image. If a union's membership composition changes very quickly, or if the organizational leaders try to strategically infuence identity formation through image management (e.g. by focusing on certain groups or stressing certain properties or values), then internal confict can result. Toocomprehensive changes might result in old members not 'recognizing' the organization anymore and, in the worst case, choosing to leave the union.

Image management is thus a delicate yet important matter for movements. Revitalization policies hold the potential to change the trade union movement profoundly, for better or for worse. In the digitalized age, social media is an important arena for image management, and YouTube is especially suitable for organization branding. Therefore, this fnal empirical chapter is devoted to how unions display their self-images on YouTube, as seen from a revitalization perspective.

#### 4.1 Self-Images: A Theoretical Framework

Analysing the self-images of Swedish trade unions in their YouTube videos requires a defnition of the concept of 'self-image', as well as a theoretical framework for interpreting the empirical fndings. The theoretical and methodological literature on identity and self-image in movements is comprehensive (for identity and trade unions see, e.g., Hodder and Edwards 2015; Hyman 2001; Kelly 1998; Moore 2011). Building on organizational theory (Albert et al. 2000; Albert and Whetten 1985; Jansson 2012), we consider a 'self-image' to consist of three crucial components: (1) how a union talks about and describes *itself*, (2) how a union talks about and describes *its members* and (3) how a union talks about and describes *others*.

The frst component of an organization's self-image, its description of itself, includes the properties the union ascribes to itself, the values the union defends and the actions it demonstrates as being appropriate for itself and its members. Its identity claim—that is, who or what the union claims to be—is an important and straightforward part of a union's description of itself. The second component, descriptions of the organization's members (and potential members), is also part of the organization's image because 'organizations often seek to generalize identifcation with an individual to identifcation with the organization through the routinization of charisma' (Ashforth and Mael 1989, p. 22). When a person identifes with another individual, it often implies that the person wishes 'to be like' that individual and thus to adopt the qualities of the other. Ashforth and Mael have applied this mechanism to organizations and have claimed that charismatic leadership works in the same way, as does the construction of the 'ideal member'. The image of an ideal member can attract the attention of members and potential members: if the organization frames its members as 'bold and courageous', this member image will impact the organization image. The third component of an organization's self-image is based on what the organization is *not*. According to social identity theory, self-perception and selfdefnition are constructed by what researchers call 'social identities'. In simple terms, people classify themselves and others in their environment in terms of various categories (Tajfel 1981, pp. 31, 45–49). Social identities are a person's perceived group affliations—that is, 'the perception of oneness with or belongingness to some human aggregate' (Ashforth and Mael 1989, p. 21). Individuals always have a range of group affliations, such as gender, parenthood or being a member of an association. Following the constant classifcation of 'we' versus 'others', our concept of what and who the 'others' are becomes a mirror of our self. Therefore, in order to capture unions' self-images, it is important to include how the unions talk about 'others'.

Together, these three elements—descriptions of the self, of the member and of 'others'—form the self-image of an organization and constitute the focus of our analysis. These three components can be detected not only through the spoken word, but also through visual details such as logos, photos, colours and the characters of the actors shown in the videos (Corrigall-Brown and Wilkes 2011; Doerr et al. 2013). Visual images are not a new tool for unions to use in their image management; flm and photos have been frequently used by the labour movement throughout its history (Hardt and Ohrn 1981). Thus, we focused on these elements in our analysis of the videos.

#### 4.2 Revitalization Dimensions of Self-Images

Establishing what the unions' self-images are and where they can be found in the material is insuffcient to place the self-images in the context of revitalization; we need a framework for interpreting the self-images that are displayed in the unions' videos. What types of self-image, then, would we expect unions to display in an era of revitalization? We suggest that there are two particularly important dimensions in this context: the degree to which the trade union presents itself as *an inclusive or exclusive organization* and the degree to which the union expresses the values of *collectivism or individualism*.

With the frst dimension, we aim to capture the complex issue of who belongs to the 'we' and who belongs to the 'others'. On the one hand, stressing specifc traits and distinctiveness such as professional, occupational or class identity can be very effective for organizing, since it allows the unions to make use of already established identities. This is what most unions have traditionally done, and it implicates a certain *exclusiveness*—that is, not everyone can be a member of any union because union members share certain specifc characteristic traits, such as profession. This organizational structure was challenged by the syndicalist movement, which emphasized that one union can organize everyone, and that the only 'other' that exists is the employer. This *inclusive* organizational principle has lately gained support and not only in a rhetorical sense. Research on union amalgamation as a revitalization strategy has reported that bigger unions have been created as a response to the union crisis (Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman 2014). In this case, however, we are not examining whether or not the unions have broadened their membership composition; rather, we wish to know whether they are displaying an image that represents a broad set of employees. When a union presents itself as an inclusive organization, which implies a 'catch-all' strategy (cf. Kirchheimer 1966 in political party research), it opens the union's potential membership pool to encompass a broad range of people and occupations. Such an image, which implies that anyone can become a member, could appeal to new, previously unorganized, groups and could ultimately be a way of recruiting members.

With the second dimension, we seek to capture the elements of collectivism and individualism in the material. It may seem redundant to have such a category, as unions are social movements and ought to advocate collectivism; however, this is in fact an important aspect that addresses an old scholarly debate on why people join unions. It has been claimed that union membership is the result of strategic calculation of personal gain. In his famous book *The Logic of Collective Action*, Mancur Olson (1965) claimed that the only reasons for anyone to join any organization would be selfsh reasons and that so-called selective incentives drive mobilization. Research suggests that in the absence of ideological traditions, post-industrial activists—and especially activists belonging to the middle class—engage in 'personalized politics' (Lichterman 1996). For such activists, individual expression rather than collective belonging becomes the driving force for activism. An organization that adopts such policies will display an image as a facilitator of self-fulflment. The assumption that actors calculate the usefulness of each and every decision they make, and that self-fulflment is their primary driving force, stands in a sharp contrast to identity research. Scholars within the latter feld claim that selective incentives are far from being the only reason why individuals become members of associations or movements. Identifcation with the cause of a movement is equally important, if not more important, when joining a movement (Kelly 1998). In the context of revitalization, the notion of 'the collective' may be eroded as a result of a union reaching out to and recruiting new groups. Without a clear sense of 'what the organization is' and given the mission of capturing the politically volatile middle class, selective incentives may offer a way forward.

Thus, the second analytical dimension focuses on the unions' views on collectivism and individualism by analysing how the union talks about itself and its members in the videos: *What is the role of the member in the organization and is a sense of 'we' present in the videos?* Following social identity theory, we suggest that some unions emphasizing *collectivistic* values will present themselves as a strong 'we' and will present their members as part of the collective or movement. We call this


**Fig. 4.1** Analytical framework of types of self-image

category 'collectivism'. Following the Olsian analysis, we suggest that other unions will instead emphasize individualistic values and will focus on the individual gains members receive from membership, while downplaying the idea that members are part of a movement. We call this category 'individualism'.

Combining the two dimensions results in four (ideal) types of self-image, which are displayed in Fig. 4.1. Trade unions have traditionally been characterized by *exclusive collectivism*: a strong collective with pronounced boundaries (often based on occupation) separating those who belong to the union from those who do not. *Inclusive collectivism* has traditionally been represented by the syndicalist movement: a strong collective at the centre of the movement, yet a movement that is open to anyone. Unions practising *inclusive individualism* have a catch-all strategy: a union that is open to anyone, but that stresses selective incentives for people to join rather than emphasizing a collective struggle. Such a member-organization contract becomes more of a transaction of services than a movement and has been described as 'the insurance company model' (Pettersson and Jansson 2013). Finally, *exclusive individualism* presents boundaries for the 'in group' and the 'out group': the union constitutes a unique entity for a particular group, but does so by emphasizing individualistic values and gains rather than collective struggle—that is, the union becomes a channel for self-expression.

We expect all these categories to be present in the videos uploaded on YouTube by Swedish unions, and we expect the class position of the union to infuence the type of self-image that is displayed.

#### 4.3 Selection of Cases

The rapid loss of members after the 2006–2007 reforms by the centre-right government created a new situation for Swedish unions. The LO- and TCO-affliated unions had already been incrementally losing members; however, these membership losses rapidly increased after 2006. Swedish unions have historically depicted themselves as 'growing' and 'successful', even as late as the 1980s (Jansson 2012, 2016); yet declining membership numbers do not align well with such a self-image. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that this crisis challenged the identity of the union movement and called for changes in how the unions presented themselves.

In the previous chapters, we compared all unions based on the three different trade union confederations. This qualitative analysis of unions' self-images in their YouTube videos requires a smaller sample, however. In order to obtain a comprehensive picture of different identity constructions, we focused on six different unions: two LO affliates, two TCO affliates and two Saco affliates (Table 4.1). We chose to examine large unions; furthermore, for each confederation, we chose one union organizing employees in the private export-oriented sector and one union organizing employees in the sheltered public sector. Thus, we cover both male-dominated unions (i.e. the private industrial sector) and female-dominated unions (i.e. the public sector).

For the LO-affliated unions in our analysis, we chose IF Metall and the Municipal Workers' Union (Kommunal). These are the two biggest unions in the LO; together, they constitute approximately 60% of the LO members (Medlingsinstitutet 2018, p. 222). Both have lost a considerable number of members in the past decades; however, the


**Table 4.1** Unions selected for the self-image analysis

*Sources* Medlingsinstitutet (2018, pp. 222–223), membership numbers as of 31 December 2017

**Fig. 4.2** Proportion of change in membership as of 2017, in comparison with 1990 (*Source* Kjellberg [2017], authors' calculations of changed membership)

Municipal Workers' Union, in contrast to IF Metall, managed to stop the trend and grew for a few years (see Fig. 4.2). The loss in members for IF Metall is not only due to the 2006–2007 reforms; structural changes in the economy have also caused the decline, as the industrial sector has shrunk since the 1990s. According to IF Metall, union density in the metal industry is still 77% (IF Metall 2018, p. 13), in comparison with the national union density of 69%. The Municipal Workers' Union was Sweden's largest union for decades, but was surpassed by Unionen in 2014. Traditional bonds to the Social Democratic Party have been preserved in both the Municipal Workers' Union and IF Metall; in fact, the present party leader of the Social Democratic Party is the former chairperson of IF Metall.

For the TCO-affliated unions in our analysis, we again chose two large unions: Unionen and Vision. Both unions organize a broad set of occupations: Unionen organizes mainly white-collar workers in the private sector, while Vision organizes white-collar workers in the municipalities and regions (i.e. the public sector). Unionen was founded in 2008 through an amalgamation of the Swedish Union of Commercial Salaried Employees (HTF) and the Swedish Union of Clerical and Technical Employees in Industry (Sif). In 2014, the Union of Pharmacy Employees joined Unionen, making it the biggest union in Sweden. Unionen is the only trade union in our sample with a close gender balance among its members (approx. 56% men and 44% women). There are several similarities between the two white-collar unions in our sample. Both Unionen and Vision have lost members since 1990 (see Fig. 4.2) and both underwent thorough renewal processes as a result of their membership losses after 2006. They became the frst unions to abandon their traditional informative union names (until then, union names had always contained information about who their members were). By changing names, these unions opened themselves to a broader membership. Unionen has managed to reverse the trend of membership decline, while Vision has stopped its decline. Within Vision, awareness of the need for image management was clear: the chairperson of Vision actually described the old organization as 'grey, old-mannish and outof-date' and as therefore needing a remake, including a name change (Jansson 2019).

For the Saco-affliated unions in our analysis, we chose the Swedish Association of Graduate Engineers (referred to herein as the Engineers) and the Union for Professionals (i.e. the Akademikerförbundet SSR). The Engineers, which is the biggest Saco-affliated union, belongs to the private sector, whereas the Akademikerförbundet SSR organizes professional employees in social services and thus belongs to the public sector. The Engineers was founded in 2007 through an amalgamation of the Swedish Society of College Engineers and the Association of Civil Engineers. Both Saco-affliated unions have grown steadily over time (Fig. 4.2), a shift that is connected to structural changes in the economy as more people obtain university degrees. It was very diffcult to fnd statistics on union density for each union in our sample; however, the Engineers estimated themselves to have a union density of 60% in 2008 (Hallstedt 2008, September 9), which is lower than the average union density in Sweden. Thus, the Engineers still have reason to engage in recruiting new members.

For each of the six unions in our sample, we chose approximately ten videos for an in-depth analysis1 (see Appendix). Most of the videos posted by each union were found to be very similar; thus, after analysing about fve of a union's videos, we did not fnd much new content in the subsequent fve. Therefore, we assumed that ten videos were enough for the analysis.

#### 4.4 Exclusive Collectivism: The LO Unions

The mobilization of the working class in unions in Sweden and beyond has been built on a strong sense of collectivism. This in turn has been rooted in a strong value-based identity, which lingers on in the unions today, albeit with some modifcations.

The clearest example of a strong 'we' was found in IF Metall's videos. The union talks about itself as 'we as workers' (IF Metall 2014, September 3), 'we in the union' (IF Metall 2013, October 4) and 'we as an organization' (IF Metall 2014, December 22). For IF Metall, the whole notion of trade unions is built on the idea of a collective; by joining the union, each individual member will be strengthened by the collective (IF Metall 2013, October 4). To illustrate the empowering force of the collective, the union organized a demonstration in 2010, in which members from the local section worked together to turn a car upsidedown in six cities across Sweden. These events were flmed and posted on YouTube under the name 'The members in [city name] turn a car upside-down' (IF Metall 2010a, November 20; 2010b, November 20). The slogan of this campaign—'together we are strong'—was intended to highlight the work performed by safety representatives in workplaces (Larsson 2010, November 20). Of course, the videos did not only demonstrate that ordinary people can lift heavy objects if they cooperate; it was also important that the objects being overturned in this case were cars—a primary product of the metal industry.

The word 'we' in the videos of IF Metall refers to either 'the union' or 'the workers'. The union is an organization that fghts for

<sup>1</sup>Some of these videos are no longer available online. The owner of the YouTube account can always remove content as desired, and in our case, the Municipal Workers' Union has removed the majority of the videos used in this study, making them no longer available online (although some have been preserved in the e-archive DigiFacket).

its members' rights to a safe and sustainable work environment, higher wages and spare time (IF Metall 2013, October 4; 2014, December 5). The union supports the member (IF Metall 2013, August 28), but ultimately consists of its members; thus, the union will be what the members want it to be (IF Metall 2014, December 22; 2017, May 21), leading to a strong emphasis on the collective. The usage of the concept of the 'worker' is another characteristic trait of IF Metall's self-image. Using the word 'worker' clearly connects the union and its members to a particular class position, of the unions in our sample, IF Metall was the only one to do this. Since it organizes workers in the industrial, metal and mining sectors, IF Metall consists of 'traditional workers'—a categorization that limits who 'we' are and excludes employees with other class positions and occupations from membership.

The Municipal Workers' Union, on the other hand, covers several different occupations, which could hamper the construction of a cohesive organizational identity; thus, class identity could offer a solution to this problem. However, the Municipal Workers' Union does not use the language of class when describing itself in its videos. Instead, like IF Metall, the Municipal Workers' Union displays a strong 'we', albeit using different social identities such as gender and member occupation. Many of the videos depict women performing different tasks in the welfare-state sector. A majority (approximately 78%) of the members of the Municipal Workers' Union are women (Kjellberg 2017, pp. 125–126), which has affected the self-image of the union in many ways, not least as displayed by the video 'How to get a raise in 47 seconds' (Kommunal 2014, March 5). The Municipal Workers' Union also conducts campaigns related to what women do at work (Kommunal 2015, June 18) and has performed a number of actions addressing gender equality (e.g. Kommunal 2010, March 8; 2015, March 2). Many of the tasks performed by the Municipal Workers' Union's members involve heavy lifting, as they perform jobs such as assistant nurses or day-care workers. The physical strength demanded by the women in these occupations is emphasized in the videos. One of the videos begins with a woman asking: 'Can you manage an assistant nurse's work shift?' The video then shows a female assistant nurse performing normal work tasks simultaneously with a well-trained man lifting weights at a gym. The message is that while young men might go to the gym to work out, women working in care services get the same exercise by performing normal work tasks (Kommunal 2015, June 18). The video ends with the same question, and the text informs the viewer of an ongoing campaign in which all the tasks performed by an assistant nurse in one day have been converted into a physical test that anyone training at a gym can take.2

The occupational identities of the members are also used in the Municipal Workers' Union's videos to create a cohesive 'we'. The videos emphasize the importance of the work of the different occupational groups in the union. By performing welfare-state tasks in occupations such as assistant nurses, childcare workers, frefghters and bus drivers, the members are an indispensable part of society. Without people performing these tasks, the services provided by the state would stop functioning and turmoil would ensue (Kommunal 2014, August 27; 2017, January 30). The union repeatedly stresses that the members of these groups are 'heroes' (Kommunal 2014, August 27) that they perform the most important tasks in the world (Kommunal 2017, November 23) and that they struggle with both a physically and a psychologically diffcult work environment (Kommunal 2015, June 18). Nevertheless, these groups perform tasks that tend to have a low status and low wages. Raising public awareness of what they do could also raise the status of the occupations and ultimately make a better case for increasing their wages. The image of the Municipal Workers' Union that is displayed in its videos bears the traits of 'exclusive collectivism': there is a clear 'we', but the union is not for everyone; it is for specifc (struggling) groups.

Not only is there a clear 'we' among the LO-affliated unions; there is also a distinguishable 'others'. 'Others' consist of the employers (IF Metall 2011, December 7; 2013, October 4; 2014, December 5), the centre-right government and the Sweden Democrats (IF-Metall 2014, September 3). Of course, 'employers' comprise the natural 'others' for unions; thus, by talking about employers as the opponent, and referring to an actor with interests opposite to those of the workers, a union emphasizes class. Employers are implicitly present in the videos of the Saco-affliated union the Akademikerförbundet SSR, but are absent in the videos uploaded by the other unions. This does not mean that employers are not 'the other' for the rest of the unions in our sample; it only means that, for example, IF Metall choose to display such values.

In the LO unions' descriptions of 'others', exclusive collectivism is probably best characterized by the depictions of the struggle against

<sup>2</sup>http://klarapasset.nu/ (accessed 8 October 2018).

the cutbacks and reforms adopted by the centre-right government in 2006–2014 (see, e.g., IF Metall 2012, September 10; 2012, September 14) and against the rising popularity of the Sweden Democrats. The Municipal Workers' Union uploaded an astonishing 242 videos with the title 'Therefore I want to change the government' before the 2010 parliamentary elections, and many of these videos referred to cutbacks and reforms targeting the Municipal Workers' Union's members. The rightwing populist party, the Sweden Democrats, also emerges as a signifcant 'other'. Using class analysis, IF Metall explains in the video titled 'It's about us' (*Det handlar om oss*) that the Sweden Democrats want to split up the working class along cultural lines; but '(…) that would mean that the worker Kajsa would have more in common with the CEO Gustav than with her co-worker Samir. We do not believe that is true' (IF Metall 2014, September 3). The message is simple: all workers, regardless of cultural background or ethnicity, should join together in the struggle between labour and capital.

In summary, both of the LO-affliated unions show similarities in regard to the self-images they display on YouTube: collectivism is strong, and both present a certain degree of exclusiveness; furthermore, there are clear boundaries around who belongs to the organization and who does not.

#### 4.5 Inclusive Individualism: The TCO Unions

As the backbone of the middle class (Mills 1951), white-collar workers possess a central position as '(…) those who are not particularly powerful, but who are not excluded from power; and who do not appear to exploit anyone in a particularly obvious way, but who do not seem to be exploited either' (Savage 1992, p. 1). As opposed to the working class, whose often-precarious position on the labour market has played a role in the construction of identity and the mobilization of organizations, white-collar workers have not shared 'lived experiences' that can be used to organize them into unions. Thus, from an international perspective, it has proven to be diffcult to organize white-collar workers. This has not been the case in Sweden, however, where white-collar workers have been well-organized, especially from the 1970s onwards.

Both Vision and Unionen have produced a number of professional commercials with short messages explaining what services the unions could offer the viewer as a member. In general, however, very few of their videos contained information on the union per se, a description of what values the union stands for or an explanation of the main idea of a trade union membership.

Although Unionen produced a number of professional commercials with superheroes as the main characters (Unionen 2014, August 14; 2016, October 13; 2017, October 20), these videos differed signifcantly from the Municipal Workers' Union's videos that used the concept of a 'hero'. Unionen's superhero theme, which was initiated in 2011 by a public relations frm (Anr bbdo) (Ström 2011, November 14), is visualized through people *dressed up* as superheroes. Thus, while the Municipal Workers' Union presents its members as heroes by showing people performing work-related tasks, Unionen does not focus on what its members do, possibly because Unionen organizes so many different occupations that work-related tasks cannot be used as an identity-building element. The slogan used in Unionen's commercials claims that the members 'get extraordinary powers' (*kraft utöver det vanliga*). The argument that joining together empowers employees is a well-known phrase used by the trade union movement. Paradoxically, however, even while using such a traditional mobilizing phrase, Unionen's videos do not contain references to the collective. When IF Metall used the same phrase and showed workers turning cars upside-down, the strength of the collective was clearly demonstrated. In contrast, Unionen's videos focus on the individual member and consistently inform the viewer about 'you as a member'.

A similar self-image is displayed in Vision's videos, in which a distinct focus on 'I' and 'you' emerges. Vision uses individuals as the point of departure in most of its videos. Focusing on individuals talking about their work-life experiences or their opinions on different issues, rather than having an offcial representative of the organization speak, diverts attention away from the collective. For example, in Vision's videos, individuals tell the viewer things such as, 'For me, a fair work life is to be seen for my skills and knowledge' (Vision 2015a, June 24); 'For me, a good work life is about a working dialog between employers and employees' (Vision 2015b, June 24); 'an unimportant issue for me, might be an important one for someone else' (Vision 2012b, October 1); and 'I have good communication with my boss; she has been able to tell me which tools I need to reach my goals' (Vision 2011, January 20). These videos raise important—and, for unions, relevant—questions through the perspectives of individual members. The point of departure, however, is exactly that: the perspectives of individual members. There is hardly any information on what the union defnes as important issues or what the union's stance on such issues may be. More importantly, there is no clear defnition of 'we', description of who a Vision member is or list of characteristics Vision members share. Nevertheless, Vision's videos contain notable visual indicators of identity: a majority of the people visible in the videos are women, and quite a few of them are young. Compared with the other unions in our sample, Vision's videos display pluralism by depicting people with different backgrounds and characteristics (i.e. ethnicity, gender, disabilities and age) (Vision 2012a, October 1). This is hardly a coincidence, as Vision stresses pluralism (Jansson 2016). The organization has set the goal of having 30% of the entire organization's board members, at both central and local levels, be under 35 years of age (Vision 2015, p. 3). Vision does not argue whether the boards should mirror the membership composition—it simply views young people in unions as desirable. The background of Vision's policy was its aging membership; age quotas make it easier for younger people to advance as offcials in the union (TCO-tidningen 2010). Thus, despite the lack of specifc messages about gender and age, Vision's projected image in the videos is young and female.

Instead of arguing for better wages or gender equality, most of Unionen's commercials contain messages on the services the union can offer individual members (Unionen 2014, March 24; 2014, March 25). Unionen also stresses that membership helps employees who wish to develop 'a personal career' (Unionen 2014, March 24; 2014, August 14). In the video entitled 'That is why I am a member of Unionen', Unionen uses the same rhetorical method as Vision and focuses on individual members talking about why they joined the union. The reasons given include safety at work, insurance and career planning. One woman at the end of the video explains to the viewer: '(…) and that the union wants me to become even more valuable to my employer; that is such a right way to think! That is why I am a member of Unionen' (Unionen 2014, March 24). A similar trend is visible in Vision's videos. For example, in a video entitled 'That's why you should be a member of Vision when you start to work' (Vision 2016, February 12), Vision lists a number of reasons why viewers should join the union, all of which refer to benefts for the individual, such as 'getting the best income insurance on the market'. The viewer is told that if *you* want to reach *your* dream job and invest in *your* career, Vision is the right union for *you*. There are few comments on what membership contains in terms of obligations towards the organization, what the union values are or who a Vision member is defned as. The same is true for Unionen. Instead, there seems to be an assumption that the potential members of Unionen and Vision are more interested in services and insurances than in joining a social movement. Unlike the Saco-affliated unions (the Engineers and the Akademikerförbundet SSR), both of which stress who the member is and what the members have in common (i.e. being an engineer or working in the social services), Unionen and Vision make no references to shared values or characteristics. Unionen represents itself as an organization that serves its members with an impersonal member–union relationship: if the members pay the membership fees, they receive certain services. In fact, this image of a union is similar to that of an insurance company.

Individualism, in the form of self-expression and selective incentives, is a prominent feature in the self-image of these two TCO-affliated unions. It should be noted here that Unionen does acknowledge the problems that are associated with being perceived as a kind of insurance company. In a video of a seminar arranged by Unionen, the vice chairperson discusses how the fact that its members expect services or other material gains in return for membership makes it diffcult for the union to recruit offcials and volunteers—so much so that in some cases, the union may need to pay members to perform union-related tasks (Unionen 2015, June 1).

Unlike the LO-affliated unions and the Akademikerförbundet SSR, the videos of Vision and Unionen contain no references to 'others'. No mention is made of employers, other unions or politicians. By avoiding descriptions of values or ideology when describing the organization, Unionen and Vision are able to adopt an inclusive catch-all strategy for membership recruitment. A good example of Vision's inclusive selfimage is the campaign titled 'Everyone should receive the question', which started in 2012. Here, the question is: 'Do you want to become a member of Vision?' (Vision 2012a, October 1). Vision's message is that employees in Sweden are not actively against joining a union; in fact, most employees will join a union *if they are asked to join*. In other words, unions need to become better at approaching and reaching out to potential members. Like Unionen, Vision makes membership recruitment an important goal; in fact, Vision displays a counter on its webpage that shows how many new members have been recruited in the past month (Jansson 2016). Of course, making a video about its strategy of inviting as many people as possible to join the union would scarcely provide a good argument for *why* someone would join (for similar content, also see Vision 2016, December 15). Instead, Vision's videos inform its members about union work or demonstrate to other unions that Vision is very active in recruiting.

In attempting to organize almost anyone working as a white-collar worker in the private sector, as Unionen does, the union has been very aggressive in marketing itself. However, this kind of marketing challenges the old consensus of not 'stealing' other unions' members. Early in its development, the Swedish trade union movement adopted the principle of industrial unionism, meaning one union per workplace and thus only one collective agreement (Gråbacke 2002, pp. 17–19). When the white-collar workers and upper-middle classes eventually formed unions and gained collective bargaining rights, the praxis of 'one union per trade union confederation per work place' became the norm. These informal rules were aimed at preventing unions from competing over the same members. But with the new, inclusive, 'catch-all' strategy, which is employed by Unionen in particular, these old arrangements are challenged.

The self-images of the two TCO-affliated unions are best described as 'inclusive individualism'. Although this type of self-image may be used for recruiting purposes, it is not clear whether this strategy is sustainable, or how the 'older' members will react to these changes in their unions. In future, the fact that there seems to be very little reason for members to identify with the organization may create a problem.

#### 4.6 Professions Above All? The Saco Unions

The Saco-affliated unions—the Engineers and the Akademikerförbundet SSR—constitute the last two organizations in our study. The Engineers' videos provide the most clear-cut example of 'exclusive collectivism' in our sample. Most of the videos uploaded by the Engineers centre on profession: as engineers, the union's members are told that they have a great deal to be proud of. This union's videos continually and effectively use history to highlight the importance of engineers; the viewer is constantly reminded that engineers have played a crucial role in human development and, through their inventions, have solved problems to make life easier for humans. Furthermore, engineers will continue to solve problems in the future (Sveriges ingenjörer 2012, January 20; 2015, July 6; 2016, January 16; 2016, October 11). Glorifcation of the engineering profession and a strong belief in technological development characterize the videos. There is no critical discussion on the disadvantages of technical innovations (e.g. war, pollution or climate change). The engineer is presented as the brain behind all technical innovations, and technical innovations are framed as having made society into what it is today. The exclusiveness of this organization is very clear.

Thus, a strong 'we' emerges in the Engineers' videos that consists of those in the engineering profession. This constant referral to 'we, as engineers' emphasizes collectivism. The Engineers started as an association for people interested in technology, and then developed into a trade union for the engineering profession, thus blurring the line between professional association and trade union (Sveriges ingenjörer 2012, January 20).

Historicity is an important component in formulating an organizational identity (Jansson 2012; Steinmetz 1992), and the Engineers make good use of it to create its self-image. The profession is further emphasized through videos containing seminars or information on important engineering-related issues such as eye tracking (i.e. controlling your computer with your eyes) and artifcial intelligence (Sveriges ingenjörer 2015, November 10; 2018, April 26). These videos also serve the union members by providing information about their profession that is likely to interest them. In the Engineers' videos, there is no uncertainty about what the organization is and who its members are.

The Akademikerförbundet SSR also talks about itself as a cohesive 'we', unlike Vision and Union, whose videos often talk about 'the member' (Akademikerförbundet SSR 2016, April 6). For the Akademikerförbundet SSR, as for the Engineers, the word 'we' is rooted in the profession—in this case, social worker (*socialsekreterare*). Most of this union's videos take this perspective as their point of departure (see, e.g., Akademikerförbundet SSR 2014, March 13; 2015, March 19; 2015, April 7; 2018, May 2). One video depicts the collective by discussing the union's history as one in which people have interacted in order to achieve goals; in one scene, two people help each other to lift an iron bar. In the same video, the union uses the word 'struggle' to describe its work (Akademikerförbundet SSR 2018, May 2). The organization has been growing and has thus been successful in its mission. But the videos uploaded by the Akademikerförbundet SSR depict a duality in its defnition of 'we': the union and its members are not only social workers but also part of a larger movement—the trade union movement. One prominent example of the Akademikerförbundet SSR being depicted as an actor in the greater trade union movement is a video presenting a recent campaign to increase membership numbers in the union movement in general. In this video, the chairperson of the union, Heike Erkers, talks to Anders Ferbe, the former chairperson of IF Metall (Akademikerförbundet SSR 2018b, April 12). Erkers announces that the union has just appointed Ferbe to investigate ways to increase membership rates. 'What is important is that people join *a* union, not which. Increasing union membership numbers in general is important to preserve the collective bargaining system in Sweden', Ferbe says. In the next frame, the viewer hears a crashing sound of glass breaking and the text 'without us, it all goes to hell' emerges.

This video presents a clear message about the aims and uses of unions while simultaneously saying something about how the Akademikerförbundet SSR positions itself in the trade union landscape. First, the union talks about 'we in the union movement', thus clearly defning the Akademikerförbundet SSR as a part of the larger labour movement. Even though the Akademikerförbundet SSR is exclusive in terms of who its members are (i.e. employees with a college degree working in the social services), defning itself as a part of a larger movement signals inclusiveness. Second, appointing Ferbe, who served as the chairperson of IF Metall for many years, signals cooperation beyond the boundaries of class and sector (Akademikerförbundet SSR 2018a, April 12). Third, the video implies that unorganized workers comprise a group that needs to be mobilized and thus constitute an 'other' to all trade unions.

While collectivism is strong in the videos posted by the Engineers, the union has also posted videos containing advice on labour law, work environmental issues and the forms of insurance that membership provides (Sveriges ingenjörer 2009, September 7; 2016, May 13; 2017, August 7; year unknown). Of course, videos on insurance and career advice can be considered to be selective incentives; however, unlike the descriptions of services in the TCO videos, these 'services' provided by the union are not presented as arguments for joining the union; rather, they are described in order to inform members of their existence.

In contrast to Vision and Unionen, the Akademikerförbundet SSR uses YouTube to spread political messages. The Akademikerförbundet SSR and Vision have partially overlapping membership cohorts: many of the members of the Akademikerförbundet SSR could just as well join Vision. Therefore, the differences between these unions are interesting. Many of the videos posted by the Akademikerförbundet SSR are openly critical of how politicians have mismanaged social insurance systems and suggest that when the unemployed or ill end up with social welfare assistance instead of receiving unemployment or health insurance, the welfare system will collapse (Akademikerförbundet SSR 2014, March 13; 2015, March 19; 2015, April 7). Under the hashtag #lagavälfärden (fx the welfare state), the union started a campaign in 2014 that launched policy proposals on how to fx the welfare-state system (Akademikerförbundet SSR 2014, March 13). In this, the Akademikerförbundet SSR clearly aimed to impact politics in order to allocate more resources not only to the social welfare system (where most of its members work), but also to the other forms of social insurance (particularly unemployment insurance and health insurance), because when one type of insurance does not work properly, the other types also suffer. Left-leaning parties are usually the ones that advocate the allocation of more resources to the social insurances; thus, this issue is not politically neutral. In most of the videos, politicians are depicted as the 'others' the union wants to impact. Employers are mentioned as well, however. The Akademikerförbundet SSR describes the current situation in the social services as problematic: the welfare-state system will only work if there are individuals who want to perform the tasks. If the working conditions for employees deteriorate more than they have already done, it will be diffcult to recruit employees in the future. This is presented as a well-known fact to employers and politicians; thus, the videos imply, employers and politicians should do something about the situation (Akademikerförbundet SSR 2015, March 19; 2016, April 6). The task of the union, according to its videos, is to negotiate wages and improve working conditions (Akademikerförbundet SSR 2016, April 6).

In summary, the two Saco-affliated unions display clear self-images of organizations that are built on professions. Collectivism is very strong; however, even though both unions are exclusive in the sense that the membership cohort is clearly defned, the videos of the Akademikerförbundet SSR contain some degree of inclusiveness and cross-class cooperation.

#### 4.7 Conclusions

Videos are a good means of presenting, promoting and displaying self-images. Swedish trade unions surely know this and use YouTube accordingly as an excellent medium for this purpose. A comparison of the self-images of the working-class, white-collar-worker and upper-middle-class unions revealed similarities and differences in how the unions have chosen to present themselves and their members. Collectivism is still strong in the working class and among the Sacoaffliated unions, but with somewhat different points of departure: for IF Metall, class identity is still an important part of the union's self-image; for the Municipal Workers' Union, occupational identities and gender are used instead; and for upper-middle-class unions, the professions they represent are used to build their self-images. Professions and occupational identities are good grounds for mobilization in unions; these identities are disconnected from ideologies and political issues, yet are shared by members of that occupation or profession.

Perhaps the most interesting cases in our sample were those of the white-collar worker unions, in which inclusive individualism was strong. Selective incentives have become an important part of membership recruitment for these unions and appear to be a successful strategy, at least in terms of increasing the number of members. These results partly coincide with Hodder and Edward's claim that unions in the manufacturing industry use a more class-based approach while organizing, whereas white-collar unions have a market focus (Hodder and Edwards 2015). White-collar workers have had fewer common structural features to use in terms of creating self-images, and it is known that the middle class, is far more individualistic than the working class. Additionally, Sweden is a highly individualized country that scores very high on self-expression values (Ingelhart and Welzel 2005). Therefore, inclusive individualism is understandable and may even be a precondition for recruiting new members. Diminishing differences between the working class and white-collar workers, increased individualism among people's attitudes in general and the ambition to be a 'catch-all' union may be factors affecting these self-images. The question of what implications inclusive individualism has for the trade union movement and for its abilities to act as a collective actor in the long run remains to be answered.

#### References

Akademikerförbundet SSR. (2014, March 13). *Något blev väldigt fel*. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I26uMrhQdfg. Accessed 17 Sept 2018. Akademikerförbundet SSR. (2015, March 19). *Det hjälper inte att blunda*. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM7D\_4VuSkI. Accessed 17 Sept 2018.


**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# Trade Unions on YouTube: Conclusions

**Abstract** It has been claimed that various social media platforms can be important means for trade union revitalization: social media can reach groups traditionally diffcult to organize; it can be used for political campaigning and social media is also an important tool for image management. Analysing Swedish trade unions' use of YouTube confrms that YouTube is a means for union revitalization although many of the videos posted frst and foremost target members and the general public and thus have less clear connections to the revitalization debate. Comparing unions organizing employees with different class backgrounds, we fnd that the upper-middle-class unions particularly targeted youth in their YouTube videos, the working-class unions are the ones most devoted to political activism, and that the white-collar unions are particularly keen on using YouTube for image management.

**Keywords** Social media · Trade union movement · Revitalization · YouTube · Social classes

ICT—and social media in particular—has been presented as a new way of mobilizing movements due to its speed, coverage and low costs: it no longer takes days or weeks to organize meetings, demonstrations or campaigns. Social media can change and certainly has infuenced how social movements mobilize (Earl and Kimport 2011; Mattoni and Treré 2014). Whether, how and to what degree 'old' social movements such as trade unions have adopted this new means of communication is one of the most important research questions for scholars within the feld of union research to disentangle. What do trade unions actually *do* and *say* on social media? Our analyses of trade unions' actions online shed some light upon this issue. In contrast to prior studies examining unions' own accounts of how they use social media (Kerr and Waddington 2014; Panagiotopoulos and Barnett 2015), we examined unions' actual 'actions' on social media. Thus, our analysis of Swedish trade unions' use of YouTube provides an important contribution to this research feld.

We argue that in order to better understand how trade unions use social media, it is necessary to account for the class background of the union members, among other factors. Trade unions are not cohesive actors; rather, all unions have unique traits. But for unions that organize employees, the status of the union members on the labour market plays an important role in how the union uses various means of communication. We have shown that working-class unions use YouTube differently than white-collar or upper-middle-class unions, for two reasons. First, the structural transformation of the economy—the so-called third industrial revolution—has led to major changes in employment conditions. While the industrial era in Western Europe was characterized by stable jobs and by working hours that were mainly determined by the industry, post-industrial society is defned by an increasingly important service sector and a diminishing industrial sector (Pashev et al. 2015). In the wake of these structural changes, many countries have experienced labour reforms dismantling laws on job security and working conditions (Kalleberg 2009; Standing 2011), resulting in the growth of precarious employment. This shift has placed all the trade unions in a new situation. Trade unions have traditionally been successful in organizing workers within the industrial sector; as a result, trade unionism has had the industrial sector as its organizational norm. The contemporary societal changes mean that unions must adapt to new circumstances when recruiting new members—for example, by addressing more diverse groups of employees. This new type of recruitment requires the use of a variety of strategies to attract the attention of a diverse set of potential members. In the Swedish case, where otherwise similar trade unions organize employees from different social classes, the shrinking of the working class and the simultaneous growth of the middle class have changed the trade union landscape: union density is increasing among white-collar workers and the upper middle class, whereas working-class unions are in decline. Thus, different Swedish unions have a different need to attract new members and a different 'supply' of potential members—factors that subsequently affect how the unions use social media.

Second, the growth of the middle class is changing the character of the trade union movement. In the past, the historically close relationship between working-class unions and the social democratic and left parties made it easy for unions to engage in politics. Scholars of trade union revitalization have also suggested political activism as a means of union renewal. However, engaging in politics is more challenging for white-collar and upper-middle-class unions than for working-class unions. The ideological leaning of the contemporary middle class is very diverse, making it diffcult to address the members of these unions with political messages related to the politics of a specifc party. Political campaigns could eventually delegitimize the unions. Therefore, the ways in which trade unions choose to frame their communication via social media were expected to vary and did in fact do so.

Three major conclusions were formed based on the analyses outlined in this book. First, we assumed that since one of the biggest challenges for the contemporary trade union movement is organizing trade union members, unions would be particularly eager to use social media to target specifc groups that have been diffcult to organize in unions. Scholars examining trade union revitalization have pointed out the necessity to not only retrieve lost members, but also fnd new ones. Our analyses, however, yielded unexpected results. Trade unions mainly addressed union members and the general public in their YouTube videos. Only the upper-middle-class unions affliated with the union confederation Saco were particularly focused on targeting a specifc group on YouTube—namely youth. Directing videos towards members can, however, solve another long-standing union problem: that of information dispersion within the movement. The more transparent organizations are about the activities of their leaders, the decisions that are made and their plans for future activities, the more their members can trust them. For 'old' social movement organizations, such as unions, transparency may be a particularly important issue to address, since over time, the organization will become more complex than a new movement would be. Therefore, it is reasonable for unions to care about the dispersion of internal affairs and to focus on internal democracy. While less institutionalized movements have seen social media as an opportunity to quickly and cheaply mobilize people for events such as protest actions, the Swedish unions seem to view YouTube as an opportunity to communicate with their members.

Second, by scrutinizing the degree to which trade unions use YouTube to engage in political campaigns, we have shown that working-class unions affliated with the LO are the most devoted to political activism, particularly during election campaigns. Although the other unions also seemed to be active during election years, their activities were aimed at impacting the political agenda and debate in Sweden. This was done by emphasizing issues that were important to their members (most of these videos were connected to the welfare state) without supporting a particular political party's policy solutions. Of course, this fnding should be considered within the context of the political preferences of the middle class: unions must engage in political campaigns in order to be perceived as relevant and to serve the interests of their members, but being 'too political' (i.e. advocating one party's political preferences) can scare off members and potential members. Despite the theoretical opportunities to mobilize protest action through social media, the trade unions in our study hardly employed such strategies at all. Considering that other sources have testifed that contentious action from the unions did occur during the time period under study (Uba 2016), we can only conclude that the unions did not use YouTube to display such actions.

Finally, we focused on the unions' self-images, as presented in their YouTube videos. Movements and organizations cherish their self-images because they are important for member recruitment as well as for retaining existent members, building organizational identities and controlling how the organization is perceived by others. Our analysis of the selfimages presented in the videos not only revealed that the unions in question have dealt with the union crisis differently, but also demonstrated how the unions have changed in character. The working-class unions are still traditionally social democratic; they displayed strong collectivism in their videos. Strong collectivism was also displayed by the upper-middle-class unions affliated with Saco. In the latter case, the 'collective' referred to a very strong shared professional identity, whereas in the former case, the 'collective' still mainly referred to class. Unlike the LOand Saco-affliated unions, which displayed collectivism, the white-collar unions emphasized the individual benefts of joining a union. The two white-collar unions analysed in Chapter 4—Unionen and Vision—have clearly embraced revitalization, not only through name changes and amalgamations, but also in terms of image management. In their videos, both unions appear to be selling membership rather than mobilizing people within a social movement. It can be claimed that Unionen and Vision have adopted Mancur Olsson's message: that selective incentives will make people join unions (Olson 1965). This strategy has seemingly paid off; as shown in the Fig. 4.2, the memberships of these two unions are growing in size. Still, organizing the middle class is diffcult, especially in a country such as Sweden, which is well known for widespread individualistic values (Ingelhart and Welzel 2005). Refraining from defning a union in terms of specifc values or ideologies makes it possible to recruit members with very different ideological positions; therefore, this may be the most successful route to organizing the middle class. Historically, both Unionen and Vision have had narrower membership bases and more pronounced values than displayed in their YouTube videos (Jansson 2019). As structural changes decrease the size of the working class and blurring the line between the workers and the white-collar workers, it is possible that the organizational traits displayed by Vision and Unionen will become more common in future.

All these results demonstrate that the class background of a union is an important factor to account for when examining how unions use YouTube for revitalization strategies. Our investigation made use of three kinds of analyses—a rough quantitative analysis of more than 4500 videos, a qualitative analysis of 624 randomly selected videos and a detailed content analysis of approximately 60 videos. Of these, the relatively new method that was used in this study within the context of trade union research—that is, the usage of YouTube metadata—requires further refection.

#### 5.1 Examining YouTube: What Can Be Inferred from Metadata?

The YouTube video titled 'How to get a raise in 47 seconds', which was uploaded by the Swedish Municipal Workers' Union in March 2014, gained more than 290,000 views and almost 500 likes by the end of 2016. If the union had not removed this video from its channel, by now it would probably be one of the most popular videos produced by the Swedish trade unions in terms of views and likes. Of course, this video and trade union videos in general—is much less popular than typical YouTube entries focusing on entertainment. Nevertheless, being present in a social media channel is only one part of general labour movement activism; it is well known that social movements combine offine mobilization with online efforts (Earl 2016; Vraga et al. 2014).

Thus, this book examines only a tiny part of Swedish trade unions' everyday organizing and mobilization, and certainly only a fraction of the measures that are being taken to revitalize the union movement, since many of these strategies occur purely offine. That said, we consider that the videos unions have uploaded to YouTube over a period of almost a decade are useful for studying general trends in how unions use social media.

First, the metadata analysis in this book primarily made use of the titles and descriptions that were provided by the unions when they uploaded the videos (in Chapters 2 and 3); the timing of when the video was uploaded (in Chapter 3); and the numbers of views and likes the videos received from the moment of uploading until the end of 2016 (in Chapters 2 and 3). Although the timing of the upload was very useful when analysing unions' political activism, we also observed that the unions tended to remove many of their videos after they had been up on YouTube for a while. Although some of the removed videos might be uploaded again by private users, the volatility of this data should be of concern for scholars interested in further analysis of YouTube videos.

Information on the numbers of views and likes can be used to detect the popularity of YouTube videos and is thus important and interesting when comparing organizations, video types or video messages. On the other hand, these anonymous numbers are not as informative as the comments made by YouTube viewers in response to specifc videos. While scholars of YouTube communication do use viewer comment data as well, we were not able to do so in this case because of the small number of comments and the fact that unions often remove comments they perceive as unpleasant. Thus, we could not make use of all the possible options provided by the metadata available for YouTube videos.

Still, the video titles and descriptions appeared to be useful. The results of the rough quantitative analysis based on the titles and descriptions of more than 4500 videos did not differ too much from the results of the qualitative analysis of 624 randomly selected videos. However, the analysis of the titles and descriptions did underestimate the proportion of videos targeting members and precarious workers and overestimated the proportion of videos targeting youth and the general public (Chapter 2). These faws in the analysis of the large N sample are not surprising, because watching a video (as was done for the smaller qualitative analysis) makes it easier to detect the targeted audience than simply reading a video description. When analysing the videos' messages and political campaigns. It is clear that the results presented in Chapter 4 would not have been possible to achieve with the use of metadata alone; therefore, a mixed-methods approach holds further beneft for social media analysis.

#### 5.2 For the Future

This book has shown that Swedish trade unions representing different social classes—that is, the working class, middle class and upper middle class—use different revitalization strategies via YouTube. Working-class unions are active in electoral politics, upper-middle-class unions target young people and white-collar unions attract members by focusing on benefts rather than on ideas of solidarity. Above all, the studied trade unions all use YouTube to disperse information about organizational work to their members. It is likely that similar patterns of attracting new members, improving internal democracy and demonstrating political (electoral) activism would be found in YouTube videos uploaded by unions in other countries. Uploading videos to YouTube is not a rare Swedish phenomenon, and future studies should certainly delve deeper into cross-national comparisons: Do unions' videos have similar themes across nations or do they differ? Are unions in other countries also primarily targeting members? Do white-collar workers in other countries engage in political campaigns (in contrast to Swedish white-collar workers)? Answering such questions would deepen our understanding of trade unions' social media use.

Unions are slowly moving their videos to other platforms (mainly Facebook); thus, future studies should not neglect such platforms. It could be suggested that due to the differing dominant audiences of these platforms (e.g. the average YouTube user and the average Facebook user vary signifcantly in age), important variations may occur based on the platform unions use to upload their videos.

Although the use of information and communication technology and social media can beneft unions' mobilization, it is certainly not the panacea for revitalization or distributing power between employers and unions or within the union movement between union members and leaders (Upchurch and Grassman 2016; Hodder and Houghton 2015). The Internet, and particularly social media, can be used for ridiculing and suppressing groups with alternative ideas within unions or used by a digitally aware elite for increasing its power (Lucio et al. 2009). Our conversations with union activists also indicate that the comment felds related to the YouTube videos are carefully observed. In other words, hierarchies, conficts and dilemmas that exist offine can be transferred to online mediums, and new dilemmas can occur, such as the need to constantly monitor the social media feeds for handling inappropriate or offensive comments. Thus, social media should be considered as a medium, and there are multiple ways that this medium can be used and misused. Whether or not social media is good or bad for revitalization is beyond this study but a crucial question for future research to examine.

#### References


**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# Appendix

#### Appendix: YouTube Metadata

*Trade Unions on YouTube* consists of a number of different analyses of different forms of data, all of which capture trade unions' various uses of YouTube. In our analyses, we use three different datasets. The frst dataset is used in Chapter 1 to position the Swedish case within a larger context; it consists of metadata from trade union confederations in the EU, Norway and Switzerland. The second dataset—namely, the large-N dataset—constitutes the primary material for the book and consists of the metadata from the YouTube videos uploaded by Swedish trade unions between 2007 and 2017. We use this data for the descriptive statistics of the Swedish trade unions' YouTube channels in Chapter 1, as well as for more detailed analyses in Chapters 2 and 3. The third dataset is a human-coded dataset of a sample of Swedish YouTube videos. All three of these datasets, and how they were created, will be further described in this appendix. Besides these three datasets, the book also contains an in-depth qualitative analysis of a smaller number of videos in Chapter 4. Finally, we discuss and describe in this appendix the methodological choices we made while conducting the qualitative study.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 117 J. Jansson and K. Uba, *Trade Unions on YouTube*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24914-4

#### The Collection of YouTube Metadata

Our metadata was downloaded using a specifc programme that makes it possible to scrape publicly available information on YouTube. The data used in the large-N dataset was downloaded in January 2017, and the EU data was downloaded in September 2017. Compared with Twitter and Facebook, YouTube has been less examined by researchers; thus, previous research has not developed a best-practice scraping procedure for YouTube. The programme we used, *youtube-dl* (see https:// rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/), has been used by a number of other studies (Botta et al. 2016; Bougrine et al. 2017; Tomàs-Buliart et al. 2010; Schwemmer and Ziewiecki 2018). After entering a predetermined list of channel names and felds of information (e.g. titles, number of views, etc.) to be downloaded, the metadata is retrieved. We were interested in the videos themselves, as well as in related metadata such as the unique video identifcation number, video title, description provided by the uploader, number of views, number of likes, number of dislikes, number of comments, length of the video and time-point of uploading the video.

Metadata is partly generated through YouTube and YouTube users (e.g. number of views, date of upload); however, some of the metadata is created by the owner of the account. In particular, the title and descriptions are important features of videos, since these felds (together with tags) are used to make the video visible to viewers via various search engines.

We downloaded all the videos and their metadata on 31 January 2017 and thus received everything uploaded to that date by the unions that was still available online. While downloaded videos were archived separately, the metadata can easily be stored in a comma-separated format and analysed with the help of different software (we mainly used Stata 15 and WordStat 8).

#### *Detecting Channel Names*

The frst step in collecting the metadata was to identify the channels we wanted to download. Identifying the channel names of the trade union confederations from the EU, Norway and Switzerland, as well as for the Swedish trade unions, was done manually. For the dataset on the European trade union confederations, we started out with a list of all trade union confederations in Europe and then used the search function in YouTube to detect channels that were owned by these organizations. In some cases, using the YouTube search engine generated a large number of results or yielded results that were unclear regarding whether the channels were really owned by the organizations. As a result, we had to cross-check that the channels were in fact accounts created by the confederations; this was done by looking at the web pages of the confederations. The results from our search activities were compiled into a list of confederation names and channels (Table A6). The number of videos uploaded to these channels and the related statistics are described in Chapter 1, Table 1.1.

To identify the channel names of the Swedish trade unions and the three confederations, we followed a similar process. A list of all the Swedish trade unions and their YouTube channels is presented in Table A7. An alternative search method would have been to browse the web pages of the unions for links to their YouTube channels. However, only looking for the channels through web pages would have resulted in missing data: frst, not all unions have links to their social media channels on their web pages; second, temporal channels, such as those associated with specifc campaigns, are not always advertised on the web pages; and third, channels managed by sub-organizations to the unions (e.g. youth organizations or specifc youth channels) would also have been overlooked. By using the YouTube search engine, we believe that we captured everything that Swedish unions had uploaded and that was available in January 2017. We created an account on YouTube for the project (DigiFacket) and subscribed to all the unions' channels in order to keep track of changes.

#### Coding the Large-N Data

Before the retrieved metadata for the Swedish trade unions was analysed, the content of the titles and descriptions of the 4535 videos was coded using a simple version of computer-aided content analysis (CATA). This method is commonly used within the feld of media studies; thanks to digitalization and the development of big data techniques, CATA has quickly become an important method for analysing large sets of texts (Neuendorf 2017; Drisko and Maschi 2015).

The coding was derived from our theoretical questions about the possible audiences of the trade unions (Chapter 2) and the degree of political activism (Chapter 3). The frst question refers to groups that unions would be interested in reaching, given that unions would pursue revitalization strategies, and the second question refers to which types of political activism might have been used for trade union revitalization. It turned out to be very diffcult to make an accurate coding of political activism, thus, after careful considerations we excluded the CATAanalyses of political activism from the book and instead, we used word clouds.

Thus, we apply different analytical approaches in the two chapters. In accordance with CATA (Neuendorf 2017), Chapter 2 has a deductive approach in which we predefne the theoretical categories we are interested in. In Chapter 3, we use an inductive approach through the use of word clouds (Chandrasegaran et al. 2017), where the software helps us defne categories by counting the most-used words.

In Chapter 2, we examine the audiences of the videos. Audiences of messages posted on social media can be examined in a number of ways: one can ask the producer of the message what audience they had in mind, one can carry out surveys with social media consumers or one can try to theoretically establish what audience *should be* interested in the messages judging from the content of the videos. While surveys have become a common procedure to capture the audiences of social media campaigns (for an overview, see Boulianne 2015), we chose to capture the audiences of trade unions' videos by analysing the titles and descriptions of the videos, controlling the coding and watching the videos (see further the section about the small-N sample). We use a deductive method in which we take our point of departure from the literature on trade union revitalization. This literature has listed a number of audiences that unions *would want to reach*, so we examined whether the videos were targeting these particular audiences. The following audiences were derived from the literature as particularly interesting for unions to reach: **existing members** (above all to strengthen internal democracy), **potential members** in general, **young people**, people with a **foreign background** and people with **precarious employment contracts**. As we discuss in Chapter 2, the three last categories have been very diffcult to organize in unions in the past.

In order to categorize a video as targeting a specifc audience, we listed words that were likely to attract the attention of these groups. These word lists (see Table A1) were tested several times by coding, watching the videos and adjusting the codes. For example, it is likely that a video that refers to 'summer job' or 'traineeship' in its title or


**Table A1** Audience categories used in Chapter 2 and keywords used for coding (in Swedish)

*Note* The remaining 2323 (51%) videos were targeting the general public

description will appeal to youth; it is also likely that youth constitute the group that would search for information about summer jobs and traineeship on YouTube. Similarly, updates about ongoing collective bargaining are more likely to be picked up by those who already are members of a union, and who are interested in how ongoing negotiations are preceding. Although these categories are not mutually exclusive, they give us a general idea about the audiences the Swedish trade unions are targeting, without actually asking the viewers themselves.

In Chapter 3, we adopted an inductive method instead of relying on predefned theoretical categories. The word cloud analysis was done in four specifc steps:



#### **Table A2** List of substitutions


The exclusions and substitution of certain words, described in steps one and two above, and the generation of word clouds were done using the programme WordStat8.

#### Coding the Small-N Sample of Videos (Small-N Dataset)

The small-N sample consists of 624 videos that were selected out of the large-N sample via a stratifed random-selection process. The aim was to choose 20% of the videos that were shorter than 15 minutes from trade unions belonging to each confederation; the length limit was set because longer videos are mainly about seminars, workshops and congresses, and these were not our primary interest. As the Saco unions had many videos lasting more than 20 minutes (25% of their videos), we ended up with a distribution in which the LO affliates had 335 videos, the TCO affliates had 185 videos and the Saco-affliated unions had only 104 videos (see description in Table 1.3 of the book). The videos in the sample cover the period of April 2007 to March 2016.

A research assistant watched all of these videos and applied a predefned coding scheme for coding the videos; the visual, audio and text information of each video was used in the coding process. The codebook (see Table A12) included various variables that were used in Chapters 2 and 3, along with some additional information. We coded twelve possible **addressees** of the unions' messages: employers, the general public, an international audience, other unions, people with a foreign background, people with a specifc occupation (e.g. plumber or teacher), politicians, potential members, precarious workers, union members, women and youth. Detecting the addressees of the videos was not always easy, as many of the videos appeared to target multiple audiences. When this was the case, we coded two addressees and ranked them as the 'main' and 'secondary' identifable addressed actors.

The result of determining audiences through human-performed coding was as follows:


Only three videos in our sample addressed employers, and the remaining videos targeted other or unidentifed groups. None of the videos addressed other unions.

Of the 624 examined videos, about 10% were ads or (professional) movie-like videos, the majority (44%) were interviews with various actors, such as union chairmen, activists or politicians, and the rest were reports on different events (14%) or typical communicative videos that presented different facts or the unions' opinions on specifc issues (30%).

#### In-Depth Qualitative Analysis of Videos

In Chapter 4, we perform a qualitative analysis of videos from six trade unions. In order to obtain a suitable sample of organizations, we used the following criteria: the organizations should represent different social classes (in practice, this meant choosing trade unions from the LO, the TCO and Saco), they should be fairly large and they should represent different sectors (i.e. both public and private sector). We made this selection because unions in the same sector sometimes cooperate across class borders, such as in collective bargaining; for example, IF Metall, Unionen and Sweden Engineers are all part of an institutionalized cooperation named *Facken inom industrin* (*Unions within the industrial sector*). Initially, we assumed that such cooperation could affect image management; however, that was not found to be the case. As the analysis in Chapter 4 reveals, similarities were greater between unions belonging to the same confederation than between unions within the same sector.

Following these criteria, we selected the six unions listed in Table A3.


**Table A3** Selected unions

For each of the unions selected, we downloaded 10–12 videos for analysis. We selected the videos strategically, as the large number of videos containing information about seminars and congresses made a random sample unsuitable. We needed videos in which the unions would engage in image management, and in which organizational identities would be displayed. Thus, most of the selected videos were videos containing information about the union, what the union stands for, and commercials. The analysed videos are listed in Table A13.

The qualitative analysis was performed in the following way. For each video, a short summary of the main narrative of the video was written down. These descriptions included the colours used, the visual appearance of the actors in the video and the setting in which the video was shot. This procedure made it necessary for us to watch each video several times.

In order to capture the self-image of the organizations, we focused on how the unions described themselves, their members and other organizations, using the questions presented in Table A4. This analysis model builds on the work of Jansson (2012).


**Table A4** Operationalization of unions' self-images


**Table A5** Features of the unions' self-image

We make a distinction between two different revitalization dimensions in the unions' self-images: individualism versus collectivism and inclusiveness versus exclusiveness. In order to decide which dimensions were the most predominant in a certain union, we used the summaries of each video. In most of the videos, it was not particularly diffcult to decide whether individualism or collectivism was the predominant trait, and the same was true for the second dimension (inclusiveness vs. exclusiveness). Next, we compiled the most common traits for each union in our sample. Table A5 displays the results.

#### Additional Tables

In the rest of this appendix, we provide tables listing YouTube channels, word frequencies and YouTube videos that we have analysed (Tables A6, A7, A8, A9, A10, A11, A12 and A13).


**Table A6** Names and YouTube channels of the trade union confederations in the EU, Switzerland and Norway


#### **Table A6** (continued)


**Table A6** (continued)


**Table A6** (continued)


#### **Table A6** (continued)


**Table A7**List of Swedish trade unions and the names of their YouTube channels


**Table A7**




Appendix 137



**Table A7**

(continued)

*Source* Membership numbers were collected from Medlingsinstitutet (2018), pp. 222–223


**Table A8** Word frequency in the titles and descriptions of all videos


**Table A9** Word frequency in the titles and descriptions of all LO videos

*Note* Word frequency in titles and descriptions is for all LO videos *after* exclusion and substitution; 1809 videos in total; 64% of words were excluded


**Table A10** Word frequency in the titles and descriptions of all TCO videos

*Note* Word frequency in titles and descriptions is for all TCO videos after exclusion and substitution; 1347 videos in total; 63% of words were excluded


**Table A11** Word frequency in the titles and descriptions of all Saco videos

*Note* Word frequency in titles and descriptions is for all Saco videos after exclusion and substitution; 1379 videos in total; 56% of words were excluded


**Table A12** Codebook for small-N dataset



146 Appendix



148 Appendix





**Table A13** (continued)


**Table A13**(continued)


Appendix 153


**Table A13**(continued)



#### References


# Index

#### **A**

Activists, 2, 3, 65, 84, 114, 125 Addressee, 22, 46, 50, 69, 124, 146 Agenda-setting, 56, 59, 60, 64, 69–71 Akademikerförbundet SSR/Union for Professionals, 88, 91, 95–99, 125, 127, 137 Almedalen, 62, 64, 65, 69, 71, 122, 123, 140–143 Amalgamation, 13, 88, 110 unions, 83 Association of Civil Engineers, 88 Asylum-seekers, 39 Audience, 8, 9, 16–20, 22, 23, 31, 32, 34, 37, 38, 46, 47, 49, 50, 62, 65, 69, 72, 113, 119–121, 124, 146

#### **B**

Boycott, 57, 60 Building Workers' Union (Byggnads), 22, 48, 71, 133 Business unionism, 56

#### **C**

"Catch-all", 83, 85, 95, 96, 100 Centre-right government, 11, 59, 62, 63, 65, 66, 86, 91, 92 Chairman/chairperson, 2, 11, 31, 57, 61, 71, 79, 87, 88, 95, 98, 140 Chile, 68 Civilekonomerna, 22, 137 Class, 11, 13, 17, 18, 24, 35, 36, 83, 85, 90–92, 98, 100, 125, 126 Collective agreement, 22, 39, 44, 61, 63, 69, 96, 122, 123, 144, 147, 148 Collective bargaining, 11, 23, 37, 47, 49, 57, 61, 96, 98, 121, 122, 125 Content analysis, 7, 19–21, 36, 37, 39, 46, 48, 69, 111, 119 Crisis, trade union, 5, 12, 17 Cutbacks, 65, 71, 92

#### **D**

Demonstration, 2, 57, 59, 60, 65, 69, 72, 89, 107

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 157 J. Jansson and K. Uba, *Trade Unions on YouTube*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24914-4

DigiFacket, 89, 119 Distributed discourse, 32

#### **E**

Eisenstein, Sergei, 9 Election, 4, 6, 11, 22, 44, 56, 57, 59, 62, 64, 67–69, 73, 92, 110, 122, 123, 140–143 EU 2009, 67, 68 EU 2014, 67 Sweden 2006, 11, 122 Sweden 2010, 68 Sweden 2014, 68 Election campaign, 56, 57, 62, 64, 66–71, 73, 110 Europe, 5, 15, 59, 108, 118 European Parliament, 67, 141 European Union (EU), 14, 16, 36, 57, 68, 117, 118, 128, 141–143 Exclusive collectivism, 85, 91, 96, 127 Exclusive individualism, 85, 127

#### **F**

Facebook, 2, 7–10, 18, 33, 113, 118 Fackförbundet ST, 41, 135 France, 14, 60, 129

#### **G**

Gender equality, 22, 90, 94, 147 General Motors, 72 Germany, 9, 11, 129 Globalization, 5, 36, 59 Great Recession of 2008, 59, 72 GS-Facket, 43

#### **H**

Handelsanställdas förbund/Handels/ Commercial Employees' Union, 42, 48, 133

Hochbaum, Werner, 9 "How to get a raise (be a man)", 2 HRF/Hotell- och restaurangfacket, 134

#### **I**

IF Metall/Metal Workers' Union, 9, 68, 71, 72, 87, 89–93, 98, 100, 125, 127, 133 Image management, 17, 80, 81, 83, 88, 110, 125, 126 Inclusive collectivism, 85, 127 Inclusive individualism, 85, 96, 100, 127 Industrial action, 5, 9 Information and Communication Technology (ICT), 3, 6, 16, 32, 33, 107 Instagram, 2, 18 Interest-group, 56 Internal democracy, 24, 32, 33, 38, 44, 47, 49, 63, 109, 113, 120, 121 International Women's Day/March 8, 55, 57 Italy, 14, 60, 130

#### **L**

Landsorganisationen (LO), 12–14, 17–20, 22, 24, 35, 36, 39, 41, 42, 44, 46, 47, 50, 58–60, 63–68, 73, 91, 110, 125, 129, 132–134, 141 Lärarförbundet/Swedish Teachers' Union, 70, 71, 135 Lärarnas Riksförbund/National Union of Teachers, 72, 137 Large-N, 117, 118, 124 Laval, 39 "Like a Swede", 43

LO-affliates, 19, 40–42, 44, 48, 49, 58, 59, 62, 64, 66, 68, 70–72, 86, 91, 92, 95, 124, 125

#### **M**

May Day, 60 Membership recruitment, 18, 39, 43, 44, 95, 100 young people, immigrants, 17 Membership, trade union Sweden, 11, 13 Metadata, 19, 20, 23, 36, 37, 41, 60, 66, 67, 69, 111–113, 117–119 Michels, Robert, 32 Middle class, 13, 65, 84, 92, 100, 108–111, 113 Migration, 39 Moderate Party, 59, 65, 149 Municipal workers' union – Kommunal, 1, 55, 86 MySpace, 2

#### **N**

Neoliberal, 59 Nordmark, Eva, 11 Nordström, Annelie, 2, 31, 79, 80 Norway, 14, 117, 118, 128, 131

#### **O**

Olson, Mancur, 84, 111 Organizing model, 5, 34

#### **P**

Party members, 59 Personalized politics, 84 Poland, 14, 131 Political agenda, 56, 57, 62, 65, 69–71, 73, 110

Precarious employment, 23, 34, 36–43, 47, 48, 108, 121, 124 Prime minister, 122 Protest, 2, 22, 56, 57, 59, 60, 65, 69, 70, 72, 73, 109, 110, 144

#### **R**

Racist comments, 19 Radical right, 39, 59, 71 Reinfeldt, Fredrik, 66, 122 Revitalization, 3–8, 10, 13–18, 20, 24, 32, 35, 44, 47, 49, 50, 55, 80, 81, 83, 84, 109–111, 113, 114, 120, 127

#### **S**

SAAB, 72 Saco, 12–14, 20–22, 25, 36, 40–44, 47, 48, 50, 59, 60, 62–71, 73, 109, 110, 123–125, 132, 136–139, 143 Saco affliates, 86 Selective incentives, 84, 85, 95, 98, 100, 111 Self-image, 7, 16, 18, 20, 23, 24, 80– 83, 85, 86, 90, 92, 93, 95–97, 99, 100, 110, 126, 127 Seminar, 21, 23, 44, 61, 62, 69, 95, 97, 124, 126, 140 Sexist comments, 19 Small-N, 120, 124, 144 Social Democratic Party, 11, 18, 58, 59, 62, 71, 73, 87, 141, 149 party board, 58 Social movement, 2, 3, 6, 8, 32, 59, 72, 80, 84, 95, 107, 109, 111, 112 Social movement unionism, 56 Solidarity, 4, 7, 10, 22, 43, 113, 131, 144 Soviet Union, 9

Spain, 14, 60, 132 Strike, 9, 10, 57, 59, 60 Survey, 4, 13, 20, 37, 60, 120 Sveriges ingenjörer/Sweden's Engineers/Swedish Association of Graduate Engineers, 72, 88, 96–98, 137 Sweden Democrats, 39, 59, 91, 92, 149 Swedish protest database, 60 Swedish Society of College Engineers, 88 Swedish Union of Clerical and Technical Employees in Industry/ Sif/Svenska industritjänstemannaförbundet, 88 Swedish Union of Commercial Salaried Employees/HTF/ Tjänstemannaförbundet HTF, 88 Switzerland, 14, 117, 118, 128, 132

#### **T**

Target, 4, 14, 23, 24, 32, 33, 35–40, 42–50, 69, 72, 92, 109, 112, 113, 120, 121, 124, 125, 146 TCO-affliates, 13, 40, 41, 44, 64, 70, 71, 86, 87, 95, 96, 124, 125 Tjänstemännens centralorganisation (TCO), 12, 13, 17, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 35, 36, 41–44, 47, 50, 59, 60, 62–71, 73, 86, 98, 123, 125, 132, 134, 135 Toys 'R' Us, 60 Trade union confederation/confederation, 11–14, 17, 19–21, 23, 25, 35, 40–44, 47–49, 57, 59, 62, 63, 65–67, 70, 71, 73, 86, 96, 109, 117–119, 123–125, 128, 130, 131, 133 Transport, 36, 43 Twitter, 2, 4, 9, 10, 18, 118

#### **U**

Unemployment insurance, 11, 13, 22, 38, 65, 99, 147 Union density, 3, 5, 10, 12, 36, 87, 88, 108 Unionen, 41, 87, 88, 92–96, 98, 110, 111, 125, 134 Union of Pharmacy Employees/ Sveriges farmaceuter, 88, 138 UNISON, 11 United Kingdom (UK), 11, 14, 132 Upper-middle class, 12–14, 17, 18, 35, 36, 40, 44, 46, 50, 59, 64, 73, 96, 100, 108–110, 113

#### **V**

Vårdförbundet, 47, 135 Ver.di, 11 Visby, 62 Vision, 41, 80, 87, 88, 92–98, 110, 111, 125, 127, 135

#### **W**

Web 1.0, 3, 6 Web 2.0, 2, 4, 6, 7 White-collar (workers), 12, 13, 17, 18, 24, 35, 36, 87, 92, 96, 100, 108, 111, 113 Women, 2, 14, 31, 32, 34, 35, 46, 57, 80, 81, 88, 90, 94, 124, 146 Word cloud, 61–64, 67, 70, 120, 121, 123 Working-class, 9, 12, 13, 17, 18, 24, 35, 36, 58, 71, 73, 89, 92, 100, 108–111, 113 World Federation of Occupational Therapists (WFOT), 68