From Corporatism to Social Media Unionism? Formal and Informal Trade Union Activism for Promoting Equal Pay

Our paper contributes to scholarship on the future of trade unions as social movements and how equal pay can be promoted in the era of neo-liberalism and right-wing politics. A key question in our paper is how demands for equal pay are put forward, both inside and outside of trade unions, in the Finnish tripartite corporatist setting, which has not been successful in delivering equal pay for undervalued female-dominated occupations. Recently, Finnish trade unions were forced to make historically bad collective agreements that cut salaries in the female-dominated public sector. Thus, there is a growing dissatisfaction towards trade unions. Our analysis highlights two attempts to raise nurse’s wages; the 2007 industrial action organised by The Union of Health and Social Care Professionals in Finland, and a Facebook-based campaign for raising nurse’s wages, which was organized by grass-root nurses outside unions. We provide a new analytical understanding of social media as an emerging form for putting forward wage earners ‘rights by introducing the concept of “social media unionism (SoMe-unionism)”. SoMe-unionism reflects the growing dissatisfaction towards the traditional channels of policy-making in trade unions and in corporatist cooperation. Our paper examines both formal/ informal and traditional/emerging forms of trade unionism in promoting equal pay. What does the rise of social media unionism signal about the current state of the corporatist system? Does the SoMe-unionism complement or dismantle traditional trade unionism? The data used are key actor interviews both in nurses´ trade unions and social media activists and social media discussions and texts. Our theoretical framework is multi-disciplinary and draws from political and organizational science, sociology and gender studies.