Giving Compass' Take:
- Sanjay Pinto and Beth Gutelius write about how workers have empowered themselves through digital organizing on online platforms during COVID-19.
- How might digital organizing platforms exclude workers without access to the right technology? What can we do to encourage productive digital organizing that is inclusive of everyone?
- Learn about the importance of creating safe spaces on online platforms during the pandemic.
What is Giving Compass?
We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us.
Search our Guide to Good
Start searching for your way to change the world.
In response to the pandemic, workers both employed and unemployed have used digital platforms and tools to magnify their voices and meet their needs. They have launched online petition campaigns to demand safer workplaces. Worker centers, unions, and other economic justice groups are broadcasting Facebook and Instagram live events to share information about programs that support workers, offering online training to navigate state unemployment insurance systems, and sending out text blasts asking workers to take direct action.
Digital platforms have also helped workers share information about the problems they’re confronting, mobilize different forms of support and mutual aid, and make demands of employers and policy makers. Such engagement occurs not only within the channels created by established worker justice organizations, including unions and worker centers, but also among informal networks of workers who have common concerns. Online platforms are connecting people to steadier work, for example, and enabling employers to pay in to benefits funds for workers who have been shut out of government-sponsored and regulated systems.
These uses of digital tools are not new. For example, activists used Facebook and Twitter to coordinate protests during the Arab Spring uprisings in the early 2010s. In the worker justice arena, online engagement using social media platforms that mobilize and organize workers, like Facebook and customized platforms like Coworker, has contributed to impressive actions and campaigns, including teacher strikes in the United States, strikes of Ryanair workers in Europe. In many ways, COVID-19 has amplified and accelerated the digital efforts that have already been in motion. In a time of social distancing, people have increasingly relied upon digital tools to support collective action across different sectors, just as they have for a broad spectrum of other social interactions.
Read the full article about digital organizing platforms by Sanjay Pinto and Beth Gutelius at Stanford Social Innovation Review.