Social media has become a major force in modern labor organizing.
Pull out your phone. Scroll your feed. Somewhere in there, mixed in with the vacation selfies and the sports highlights, is a post about why your job sucks. Impossible workload, clueless managers, pay that can't keep up with rent. It's got 40,000 likes from people who feel like they know exactly what the poster is talking about because they're living it too.
Unions and the whole labor movement have been building a social media machine for the better part of the last decade. It didn't start slick. It started informally, with workers finding each other in public and private Facebook groups and Reddit, swapping stories about their problems, and realizing they weren't alone. COVID dumped rocket fuel on the whole thing. Complaining to the boss or in the break room didn’t do any good, so they did it online instead, and it started something.
Where It Started: Workers Find Each Other
Something else was happening at the same time. Reddit. Specifically, r/union, and r/antiwork, which aren’t private at all. They are chat groups where people share every gripe, every piece of advice, every kind of "don't do what I did.”
If you're a barista trying to unionize Starbucks, you can find a play-by-play from the Amazon worker who already did it. You're a nurse, a pharmacist, a warehouse worker, somebody's mapped that road ahead of you. And if you're a prospective hire searching for your future employer's name, guess what pops up before the careers page?
Put the two together, and you've got a one-two punch. Facebook built collective rage across stores, plants, and warehouses. Reddit built a permanent public repository of complaints. People started to talk and to organize.
Where It Went: The Campaign Becomes the Content
Then the floodgates opened.
Starbucks Workers United didn’t have a formal plan to use social media to publicize their union drive, but it became a main driver almost by accident. The TikTok account for Starbucks Workers United became a main pillar of the union drive in its early days, along with Zoom calls and text chats.
A barista gets fired, co-workers film the walkout, post it, and get 21 million views. The woman running the account spelled it out: TikTok is a tool, just like strikes are. The content and the campaign weren't separate things anymore.
Where It Is Now: Leadership as Media Operation
It's not just the worker bees anymore. Union presidents have become social media savvy as well.
Shawn Fain ran the 2023 UAW strike communications through Facebook Live. During the 2023 UAW Stand Up Strike, Fain used weekly Facebook Lives to update members on bargaining, announce strike expansions, and deliver messages directly to the rank and file, bypassing traditional media entirely. In one live, he told members: "We're done waiting until Fridays to escalate our strike." The announcements were timed, dramatic, and built for social sharing. Each one was a content event.
Sean O’Brien spoke at the RNC in '24 as the first Teamsters president ever to do it, and made more Fox News appearances than most Republicans. Then he went all in on social media. O'Brien launched a podcast, “Better Bad Ideas," a weekly podcast that debuted January 15, 2025, with its own TikTok and Instagram presence @BetterBadIdeas. He also reaches out to Teamsters members and potential members on Twitter/X and Instagram. As the 2026 Teamster election has heated up, the Teamster United OZ Slate has run a full-court press on Facebook, leveraging member groups to leverage support and badmouth opposing slates.
The Layer Most Practitioners Miss: The Influencer Infrastructure
But the real threat, the one people on the employer side haven't fully mapped yet, is the one that doesn't look like organizing at all.
A nurse with a few million followers posts comedy sketches about crazy shifts and shows up on picket lines. A pharmacist turns her TikTok following into a union. Guy on a Starbucks subreddit breaks down dues vs. benefits in a way that makes you wonder why you'd ever say no. You know why they've got credibility? Because they're not selling anything. They're just real, and they're there every day, and your people trust them.
What You Do With This
Here's what you do with all this. You look hard at the conversations your employees are already having with people they listen to, and you ask yourself what your voice sounds like next to all that. You can't lurk in their DMs. You can't shut down their apps. What you can do is take a long look at what you're putting into the world to compete for their trust. Because the day you see the petition is about a year too late. The real work started in a Facebook group you never knew existed, and it hasn't stopped since.
What's In Their Feed is an ongoing LRI Ink series examining how the labor movement uses social media as an organizing tool and what that means for employer-side HR and labor relations practitioners. We will be running it periodically, covering different aspects, including influencers, campaigns, and union presidents who have figured out that social media isn't just a new way to pass out flyers.
