As part of my PhD project, I am currently working on a study to analyze how people tweet about labour strikes in factories. I decided to focus my study on Insonesian factories, as Indonesia shows a high emergence of factories as well as social media use.

Many international brands are supplied by factories in Indonesia, consumers often do not know much about the conditions under which products are produced. In a recent study on factories in Indonesia we found that many supplier factories in Indonesia are represented on Foursquare. This indicates that the manufacturing industry is already reflected – to some extent – on social media.

In a next step, I want to analyze, whether problems with working conditions are apparent in online data. However, first of all, it is hard to define what a “problem” actually is. I decided to particularly look at labor strike events, because these are events were workers themselves stand-up in order to raise public awareness for circumstances they find problematic in form of a protest.

This diagram shows the increase of Tweets during a labour strike in an Adidas Factory on the island Batam mentioning the brand or the island.

I repeatedly observed peaks in the amount of Tweets mentioning a factory name or city at the time of the event of a labour-strike.

Some of the questions I want to address next are:

• Who are the people tweeting about strikes? (media, workers, workers unions?)
• What are the topics discussed before | during | after a strike?
• Are there certain phases that can be observed across several strike events?
• Which language(s) are used? (dialects, formal, informal)

In the middle of November I get the chance to travel to Indonesia to the International Conference on Data and Software Engineering 2014 in Bandung and I will stay about four weeks in Indonesia. I am looking forward to listen to the opinions of Indonesian researchers.