Social Media Can Amplify Worker Voice, but Fades Over Time

Social media can influence workplace policies by amplifying worker voice 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 in 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 organization’s 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.

“In interviews, workers told us that after negative events, social media voice attracted some government attention, and within a few days, employers would make changes and cancel the overtime requirement, but maybe a month or two months later, the requirements went back into effect,” Yang said. 

“So, we found that the coalition of power built by social media was actually short-lived, and social media users only reacted to negative events. Online debates on the legitimacy of overtime practices failed to build a lasting consensus in support of workers. And even though the government responded to workers’ demands on social media, they really lack the incentive to enforce the overtime labor law due to what we call ‘the state and capital alliance,’ meaning the state wants the tech firms to stay in their locality, rather than to strictly enforce a labor law and risk the firm fleeing to a city that doesn’t enforce labor laws.” 

Yang added that the lack of a “coordinator,” or any sort of grassroot organization ultimately led to the failure of the anti-996 movement. 

“A lot of workers were participating in this movement online, but since no one was translating their online grievances into offline action, they ultimately could not find success.”

The anti-996 movement stood in stark contrast to successful cases internationally, including the Fight for $15, in which labor unions and civil society organizations often served as de facto orchestrators, leveraging their established role in representing workers’ interests. Those entities provided institutional protections which allowed them to bridge online voice and offline action. 

In China, however, the lack of institutional protections for labor organizing resulted in the absence of supportive social actors, such as civil society organizations, labor unions, or workplace activists, thereby severely curtailing the viability of transforming online voice into tangible workplace changes.