Taking the pulse: Exploring Bluesky users’ perception of workers’ rights and climate change on International Workers Day

Climate change is affecting workers and shaping labor trends. According to the International Labor Organization and the World Economic Forum, an estimated 2.4 billion workers are vulnerable to health risks exacerbated by climate change, which represents about 70 percent of the planet’s active workforce. How segments of the public view climate change, worker rights, and their intersection is critical to consider, given that public trends can shape political will. Given the ubiquity of social media, we focus on online publics. Specifically, we focus on a lesser-studied platform: Bluesky users. This is a relatively new social media platform, one which those who often eschew other platforms occupy. Less is also known about audiences who use this platform, and even less about how they view labor issues and climate change. Here, we use audience topic modeling and sentiment analysis to explore what Bluesky publics think about climate change and labor. That is, we select a key day in the labor movement: May Day 2025, a historic day devoted to celebrating labor. We examined 9,697 posts on May Day to identify the main themes and views expressed by Bluesky users. We discovered that more posts discussed climate change as a stand-alone topic (79 percent) than workers as a stand-alone topic (18 percent) on this day. Ironically, when we looked at posts about worker themes and climate change together, these were some of the least mentioned terms (2 percent). This suggests that while Bluesky users were thinking about these issues separately, a tiny percentage were considering both these issues. This finding has implications for labor and climate advocates, particularly those who work at the intersection of these two issues.