The link between the Wagner Act and social media
Today I decided to learn about the Wagner act like what I did with the Stamp Act. You may think that this newsletter is about laws but it’s about learning things about learning American culture, and politics and mainly about the hegemony of American technology with its ranges of tech products and services that are shaping cultures and people around the world. it just happens that learning about the laws of given entities helps better understand the hows and whys of their actual and maybe future behavior. I first thought of learning about the … act as it’s related to women's rights but this topic is so important that I decided to address it in future threats when I will be more comfortable writing and my English more elaborated to better address it because I’m very concerned about the places women should have in our society. This concern led me to write about women I discovered online with a medium publication series I called the greyio experiment which was about contributing to the effort of promoting diversity by simply writing and sharing online. if you are interested to know more about this series of medium articles mostly about female software engineers and entrepreneurs you can look here.
as I said last time when I was detailing the end goal of this newsletter and the methods I will use to write it, I will always try to get quantitative facts about the topics I will be going into because I am somehow metric-driven and because I believe that most of the concerns of our society can be explained with numbers and we have now many ways for getting statistical facts about many things with platforms like google trends or Ngram which I will start with addressing this topic about Wagner Act and social media.
Learning about the Wagner Act, the first thing I did was to see the shape and trend of the curve of the term Wagner Act in Ngram book viewer. here is the chart I got
Let’s recall that google books Ngram viewer provides the trend of terms found in books.
When looking at this chart, the thing that caught my attention was that the curve of this term was made of 3 waves of peaks, one in 1938, another in 1977, and the last in 2002. I thought that it was important to try to learn why the Wagner Act was increasingly cited in books during the years 1938, 1977, and 2022.
for the year 1938, I think that it’s because the Wagner act was enacted in 1935 there was a need for more information about it. As it is often the case when a new concept arises people write about it because they know that there are curious people like me who will want to learn about it. I think that that’s this fact that made the peak of citations of the Wagner act higher in 1938. But here I am making simple assumptions that might not be true but I hope that you will forgive me if you are sure that I am wrong because learners often make mistakes what’s important is to learn from these mistakes then if you can correct me don’t hesitate, please.
for the year 1977, I am calling the rise of concerns of coal mines and industrial workers as being the reason why there was an increasing number of citations of the term Wagner act in books because between 1940-1977 was almost the period that we use to call the thirty glorious (in french: trentes glorieuses). This period was a period of huge industrialization of our economy with the need for reconstruction of many things that were destroyed during the second world war. This period also is a period when there were many voices about work conditions in industrial plants raising. I have collected historical data about strikes in the U.S. and here is the chart that I think could illustrate what I am advancing here. Again I am not sure that I am right with my interpretation but I let you see the chart and get to your own conclusions.
For the year 2000, I prefer to say I don’t know rather than advancing some interpretation like saying that the peak was due to the dot-com bubble or the financial crisis that happened in 2002. If you have a clue then I am eager to hear from you but what the Wagner actually is about?
The Wagner Act, officially National Labor Relations Act (1935) is the most important piece of labour legislation enacted in the United States in the 20th century. Its main purpose was to establish the legal right of most workers (notably excepting agricultural and domestic workers) to organize or join labour unions and to bargain collectively with their employers. (Britannica)
This explanation from Britannica is clear enough for me to know that the Wagner act is a law that provides workers with a framework that helps them have negotiating power in front of employers and it does this by providing them the right to form labor unions and that’s why I think that the Wagner act is somehow related to social media because it allows workers to connect for the matters that concern them. That’s what I will to details in the following chapter because I used to think that social media is about technology with things like Facebook, Twitter, and the new one that is post.news but I came to learn that the concept of social media is more than that.
with today’s high peak layoffs in many industries mainly the tech industry, the topic of the Wagner act is of interest because this act allowed workers to make collective bargaining which is the process of negotiation between representatives of workers and employers for not only agreements about hiring wages but also about hiring practices, layoffs, promotions, job functions, working conditions and hours, worker discipline and termination, as well as benefit programs.
the Wagner act in itself can be seen as a tentative to engineer connections meaning to build a tool and framework that could allow people to connect and form groups for getting the scale that would allow them to have the required power that could weigh in their relationship with employers. This makes me remind myself, I hope you also, that social media isn’t only about technology because we could use judiciary and administrative tools to create social media if like me you think that any kind of ways that allow people to connect and talk is in a sense a social media platform. With this view of social media, you could see that even physical places like restaurants and bars are by themselves social media. it just happens that we often don’t see social media like that if we do we would see the constitution of all countries as the implementation of rules for the creation of a social media platform. yes, I think countries are social media platforms and all kinds of public and private organizations are also. The Wagner act provides workers the legal power to create their own social media because with this view of social media any labor organization is in itself a platform of connections like all digital social media platforms.
as this substack thread is about learning the Wagner act and trying to highlight the link between this act and social media, I thought that it was interesting to see what the impact of people getting access to more mediatic tools and the tension between workers and employers that could be represented by statistical facts about strikes and work stoppages. My first opinion before looking at the data was that the more we got access to mediatic tools like Radio, TV, landlines, smartphones, and the internet, the less tension happened between workers and employers, and the less we were participating in strikes and other social gatherings and movements.
I then looked for data about historical work stoppages in the U.S. and collected data about the adoption of some mediatic tools for the purpose of crossing them in order to see if I could get some patterns. Here are some charts of my learning quest
I had no means of collecting other data and building other charts but I have learned that we got less involved in strikes and the tension between workers and employers smoothed when more mediatic tools like landlines, radio, TV, and lastly the internet came along. I think that this is because with such tools we got more information and were more connected. Also because most of the events that happen were reported on the same day on TV and radio and as human beings hold inside them a bit of laziness instead of going to this event that could be this strike we say ourselves let just stay home and see what they will say about it on TV or on Radio or I will call my friend Seth who will likely go and he will tell me what’s were going on. Again this is something I learned along the way learning about the Wagner Act but all these are simple assumptions made by a learner then they are to be taken with a grain of salt.
The laziness I was talking about in the subsequent paragraph caught me because I telling myself that I have learned enough about the Wagner act meaning I have written enough for you to read. That’s not true. But please let me be a bit lazy today and end my learning journey here. Next time I will try to do more and next time will likely be about women’s rights but let me recall you before I leave the classroom that if you want you can read these articles about women in tech I have published on my medium blog.
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PS: The data of these charts have been sourced from the Bureau of Labor and from our world in data. Two data sources worth considering for stories based on quantitative facts.