Messages: Political Action—Agenda-Setting, Elections and Protests

Abstract

This chapter describes the predominant issues in the YouTube videos uploaded by Swedish trade unions and examines how these messages vary across the three union confederations. We particularly focus on three different forms of political activism: agenda-setting, electoral campaigns and protests. The results demonstrate that political activism does not form a significant part of the Swedish unions' YouTube videos, except during election time, which includes national elections and elections to the EU parliament. It is also shown that working-class unions with historical links to the Social Democratic Party are more politically active than other unions. Keywords Political messages • Agenda-setting • Electoral campaign • Protest By releasing the video 'How to get a raise in 47 seconds' only three days before International Women's Day, the Municipal Workers' Union made a clear political statement (Kommunal 2014, March 5). It has been claimed by scholars of trade union revitalization that this is the route forward: unions must increase their engagement in politics (Baccaro et al. 2003; Hamann and Kelly 2004). It is important not only for unions to engage in narrowly defined employment issues, but also for them to attempt to impact politics in general, since the interests of trade union members are broader than employment-related issues alone; the CHAPTER 3