Social media can influence workplace policies by amplifying worker voices, but fail to drive meaningful workplace improvement when workers lack support from labor unions or civil society organizations, according to new research by Duanyi Yang, assistant professor at the ILR School.
Yang and her co-author, Tingting Zhang (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), studied the recent anti-996 movement, an online social drive that opposed the widespread practice of demanding long hours - 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week - in the Chinese tech industry. They found that while social media raised public awareness and increased state-run media coverage of overtime issues, the lack of substantial grassroots mobilization supported by associational powers, resulted in a lack of strength to drive meaningful organizational change.
"Using social media actually achieved some intermediary success," Yang said. "Workers' voices on social media helped raise public awareness and spurred increased coverage by state-run media on overtime issues. This momentum ultimately contributed to a landmark ruling by China's Supreme People's Court against exploitative labor practices. What was most surprising is that, in an authoritarian state, one doesn't typically expect such a direct response to workers' concerns.
"But we also found that the online voice did not really transform the organizations' practice over time."
In the paper, "Voice without Representation: Worker Voice in China's Networked Public Sphere," forthcoming in the ILR Review, Yang and Zhang used three data sources - social media data, interviews, and articles from China's state-affiliated news outlets - to identify the sources of power and the limitations of worker voice on social media in the case of the anti-996 movement.
From the social media data, they found there was rapid dissemination of information on social media, which garnered significant public attention, particularly following negative events, but that participation dropped to almost nothing when there were no critical events or new talking points.
Their interviews confirmed that the influence of social media tended to wane unless sustained by continuous news or significant events.
