Digital Democracy and Trade Unionism

Abstract

The chapter addresses the issue of digital democracy and trade unionism, particularly unions in the field of “precarious employment” mainly in the (to a great extent) globalized tertiary sector of the economy. These unions are considered “new” due to their network modes of horizontal organizing and their use of civil disobedience mobilizing compared to those of “older” and “traditional” unions that were characterized by bureaucratic structures and conventional repertoires of action (collective bargaining and strikes). In this chapter, the authors present the cases of four such unions from the banking and telecommunications sector and from the wide fields of publishing and translating. In order to evaluate the factors that determine their uses of the Internet and the social media, the authors analyze the unions' digital strategies through a) static or dynamic and interactive usage of digital media and b) technocratic or agitating rhetoric of uploaded texts and informative material.