If I said the words, “My money don’t jiggle jiggle, it folds”, what’s your first reaction?
If you said, I have no idea what you’re talking about, then this post is for you.
But the rest of you know what I’m talking about and are probably humming it right now — it’s part of a viral TikTok video that has over 40 million views to it with countless more views with people dancing to it. Words can’t do it justice, but basically, according to Mashable, it is “an auto tuned clip of British-American journalist Louis Theroux on Chicken Shop Date with Amelia Dimoldenberg, a YouTube series where Dimoldenberg conducts charmingly awkward interviews that resemble a first date.”
40 million (!) on an auto-tuned clip of a journalist, you say?
Right? And yet, for those that haven’t heard of it, that’s really the point. There is a whole new online world out there that isn’t using the conventional means to communicate with people.
In fact, unions have discovered that TikTok is an up and coming vehicle for organizing and communicating with Gen-Z workers.
Wired recently issued a post on this very subject titled “A TikTok Army is Coming for Union Busters”. It recounts how the app is being used to target Starbucks and now Amazon in union organizing efforts.
Here’s the quote from one of the organizers:
“What I’m hoping is that we created a new generation of organizers who understand digital tactics and social media algorithms better than most past organizers… Now we have this knowledge of how to run campaigns successfully, how to get people out to vote, how to go beyond views and actually make a tangible difference. And now, we’re all real organizers. Digital organizing is legitimate organizing.”
34th Street magazine has a good companion article about one of the first Starbucks in the nation to unionize — right on the edge of the Penn campus.
Which takes me back to the bill recently passed in the General Assembly which would ban so-called “captive audience” meetings by employers. Putting aside the legality of such a bill, an unintended consequence of the bill is that it may speed up the demise of the use of these meetings and force employers to adapt.
That’s probably a good thing for employers that do not necessarily think a union would be the best thing for their workplace. As such, employers must begin to understand that unions are now adapting their strategies for modern-day technology; employers need to do the same.
And that means Twitter, Instagram and TikTok are all important social media tools for employers to understand.
You may not care if your money goes “jiggle jiggle”, but making sure you know that it does may help you become aware of a union-organizing campaign and figure out how you want to address it.