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The labor movement has moved to TikTok



Union organizing from the factory floor TikTok and YouTube, where the next generation of workers in cafes and fast-food restaurants are harnessing the power of social media to fight for better working conditions and higher wages.

The country’s union membership continued its decades-long decline in 2021, falling by half a percentage point to 10.3% of the workforce. The AFL-CIO, once the largest trade union federation boasting nearly 20 million members, has now had 12.3 million members.

Baristas, warehouse workers, and fast-food workers are coping with the decline by organizing smaller unions with little help from large groups of workers. Instead, these union startups rely on social media to gain traction and grow their memberships.

To find out where America’s labor movement is going, visit Twitter, Instagram or TikTokwhere short video clips show a workers’ movement in full swing.

video clips TikTok He caught layoffs of Taco Bell employees in Kansas City, Missouri, and employees at a South Carolina pizza restaurant who went on strike demanding higher wages. Trader Joe’s in Hadley, Massachusetts, became the company’s first unionized store. A video clip informed viewers about the union breakthrough in Massachusetts in August. Another short video shows Trader Joe’s workers in Boulder, Colorado, handing out flyers to unionize.

Most of the videos were aired by Faiz Shakir, who ran the 2020 presidential campaign of socialist and pro-union independent Senator Bernard Sanders. Mr. Shakir currently runs the non-profit More Perfect Union, which he describes as a video journalism and advocacy platform focused on the problems faced by American workers and their efforts to unionize.

More Perfect Union is funded by liberal philanthropists, including George Soros.

“We built this with the thesis of giving stories of the working class, the working class and the working class,” Mr. Shakir, 42, told the Washington Times. “We basically let people tell their stories. We are not scripting anyone. Or we find stories of workers trying to build power for themselves in their workplaces.”

Mr Shakir launched the platform in February 2021. Since its launch, videos of the workers it has posted TikTokTwitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram garnered more than 108 million views and 736 million views, helping to rekindle the labor movement in America.

“In the year and a half since we started, people have grown inspired by each other like a forest fire in a way that I can’t really imagine,” Şakir said.

He said the media platform helped spread union efforts within Starbucks by encouraging workers at other stores to organize with the power of social media.

The first Starbucks syndicate was formed in Buffalo in December. Workers there frequently posted video content after inviting Mr. Shakir to make the effort. TikTok and other platforms.

In early September, 233 Starbucks stores voted to unionize, and 214 received certification.

“We are on the ground floor of the Starbucks organization and have been ever since,” said Mr. Shakir. Its platform has announced efforts to unionize its Apple store in Towson, Maryland, Trader Joe’s, REI and other retail outlets.

Saying that the workers turned to him instead of the big unions, Şakir said, “Because they feel like we are trying to tell their own story rather than a national union story.”

National unions have no intention of disappearing. AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler told reporters in Washington on Thursday that she aims to expand the nation’s largest union to 1 million members through a new program called the Center for Transformational Organisation.

“Our main goal is to organize one million new workers,” Ms. Schuler told reporters at the Christian Science Monitor news agency breakfast. This is where we get out of our silos and build a movement that takes on very specific goals together, especially in non-converged areas of the economy like the Amazon, the clean energy economy.”

Mr. Shakir has been working with Amazon workers for over a year to help expand their efforts to organize warehouse labor.

The first videos and tweets posted by Mr Shakir outlined the working conditions at a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, and attempts by Amazon executives to prevent workers there from unionizing.

“These workers, mostly Black, organizing for better working conditions are in Bessemer, AL,” Mr. Skakir said in February 2021.

Warehouse workers narrowly voted against unionizing twice. Amazon has since been accused of illegally interfering in the election, but denies it.

Mr Shakir tweeted screenshots of anti-union signs posted on warehouse toilet stalls and posted a video accusing Amazon of forcing workers to anti-union meetings. He tweeted that Amazon management “texted them up to 5 times a day, posted messages in bathrooms, even changed traffic light patterns in ways that hurt union organizing.”

Meanwhile, Starbucks unions have yet to exercise bargaining power with company executives.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said in June that he would never negotiate with Starbucks Workers United, rejecting the company’s new benefits and raises to union employees that it provides to non-union stores.

“Federal law prohibits us from promising new wages and benefits at stores involved in union organizing,” Mr. Schultz said during an earnings call. “According to the law, we cannot make unilateral changes in unionized stores.”

Casey Moore, a Starbucks barista and member of Starbucks Workers United in Buffalo, New York, told The Times: TikTok and Twitter is helping workers fight for a contract.

“Social media has changed the game quite a bit,” Ms Moore said.

Starbucks union workers frequently post pro-union content and have used social media to promote Labor Day “sip-ins” and other events to reinforce their cause.

The company’s efforts to crack down on unions are shared on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTokThis damaged the liberal image Starbucks had developed and angered some customers.

“I don’t think Starbucks knows what to do with us,” Ms. Moore said. “We just blast it on social media. And it not only informs workers about what’s going on, it also exposes it to the public.”





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