Inside LabourStart

A very busy couple of weeks …

Concerned with what is happening in Greenland, we shared widely an interview with the leader of the territory’s trade unions. We wrote to them twice, only getting a form response the first time. Our friends in the Danish unions have agreed to help us make contact. We are keen to interview a trade union leader from Greenland and are open to the possibility of a solidarity campaign if they want one.

Meanwhile, we launched two new campaigns yesterday, the first in several weeks. We’re supporting teachers in Turkey and electrical workers making products for Apple in Malaysia.

We also recorded and shared two podcasts — our first of the year — with the IFJ (to discuss the killing of journalists around the world) and a trade union leader in Minneapolis about what’s going on there. (Today is a day of action there in which unions are playing a key role.)

We received generous donations from two global union federations (BWI and IndustriALL) and a pledge from EFFAT, the European food workers federation.

We also mailed to most of our lists appealing for funds, and many of our supporters came through again this year.

We closed several of our older campaigns, some of which have resulted in significant wins for the workers. These include Lesotho, Guatemala and Serbia. We’ll be sharing more details with our supporters soon.

As we do every few months, we followed up with new correspondents who have signed up in the last year. Only 1 in 3 new correspondents have posted a news story. We offered to help anyone who didn’t understand what to do.

We picked up one new volunteer from Denmark as part of our weekly outreach to recruit correspondents and translators. In the first 3 weeks of the new year, we have picked up new volunteers from Denmark, Sweden and Finland, and have begun again mailings to the Swedish and Finnish lists. Next week, we’ll turn to Poland.

LabourStart has been invited to participate in a major global solidarity event organised by a Canadian union in British Columbia. Our Canadian coordinator, Pat Bulmer, will be representing us there.

It’s a new year and a new opportunity to apologise for not updating this blog for four weeks (maybe this one three weeks late). We’ve had a busy season …

Donations: We’ve received very generous donations from IndustriAll Europe and EPSU (the European public sector workers’ union) and expect further ones in the days to come. Next week we will reach out to all our supporters in all languages.

New correspondents: We picked up new correspondents in Belgium and the Philippines.

Campaigns: A week before Christmas we did a special mailing to our English list encouraging people to support all 7 of our current campaigns and our latest podcast. We closed down our Sri Lanka campaign but received a detailed report on the impact the campaign had. The same is the case with the Kawasaki campaign in the Philippines. We closed down our Turkey campaign as well.

Podcasts: We recorded a second “60 seconds on …” Christmas shopping and unions.

Trademark: LabourStart is now our registered trademark — after using it for nearly 28 years.

New podcasts: We released interviews with Pawel Rudzki (Netherlands) and Yiran Zhang (USA) in the last couple of weeks. And, a new podcast series, which we started four days ago.

60 seconds on …: Our newest podcast idea picked up 250 downloads in the first 24 hours online. It generated a lot of positive feedback. Here’s a sample:

– “Very helpful – will share.” (UK)
– “Good.” (Denmark)
– “Glad to see the good work continues and expands.” – Dan La Botz  (USA).
– “Congratulations for all these actions you undertake. Keep going.” – Mark Vanderveken.
– “Stand together in Solidarity! He stood up for us! Now we stand up for him! Free this man!!!” (Vancouver, Canada)
-“The podcast is a good idea!” (Israel)
-“I liked the voicemail – keep it up.” – Iain MacLean (UK).

New campaigns: We’ve had a request for a new campaign in Turkey and another one in the Philippines. Details coming soon.

“Which campaigns have I supported?”: This script was last used a long time ago, but it’s an excellent way for our subscribers to see which campaigns they’ve supported and which ones they’ve missed. We revived this for English and Norwegian mailings this week and it has resulted in a boost for some of the older campaigns.

New correspondents: We picked up another new correspondent in Nigeria this week.

Mailing lists: We added 33 new subscribers a week ago (half of them in Dutch).

Donations: We picked up a number of new donations, including a very generous one from a Canadian union.

New way to donate: We’ve added a new way to donate to our account at Zempler Bank — the information appears on our regular donations page in English. We need alternatives to PayPal, which is problematic for many of our supporters.

Podcasts: We recorded a new one last week with Amalie from the Norwegian union Styrke who spoke with us about the Svensson Foundation international prize for trade union rights.  Today we’re interviewing Pawel Rudzki from the Netherlands, subject of a current LabourStart campaign.  And next week our intern Joanne is interviewing one of the Cornell ILR faculty.  So we’re managing to maintain our planned one podcast per week.

Publicising campaigns: In addition to all the other things we do when a campaign is launched, I have also begun devoting my fortnightly column for the British newspaper Solidarity to our current campaigns and sharing that widely.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew by 353 this week, the largest group coming into the Dutch language list.  This is due to the fact that the campaign in support of Pawel has now picked up 451 supporters for the Dutch-language version of our campaign.  This far exceeds the support we’re getting from local unions for our other campaigns, and is a very healthy development.

Adding news: There was a noticeable slow-down in how our system functioned last week, but this was fixed by shrinking the size of our news database.

“Which campaigns have I supported?”: We’ve located and will use again in all our regular mailings this wonderful little link that shows people which campaigns they’ve missed.  Look for it in our next mailing.

Donations: We received generous donations from the European Transport Workers Federation and UNIFOR in Canada, as well as from individuals last week.

Interns: Unfortunately, this year we will not receive interns from the Global Labour University as we have in previous years.

Correspondents: We picked up one new correspondent from Nigeria.

Turkey/Türkiye: We’ve made the switchover to Turkey’s new official name.  The hard part was ensuring that a search of our database using either spelling would show all news stories, and that has been tested and works well.

We launched a new campaign in the Netherlands at the request of FNV. It demands justice for union activist Pawel Rudzki and already has 2,392 supporters after just one day online.

In Guatemala, we’ve launched a new campaign at the request of PSI, demanding an end to the persecution of union leader Lesbia Xiomara Conde Pacheco.

We also reached out to the Starbucks workers union in the USA to offer our help with a campaign, but have not yet heard back.

On Thursday this week we had a meeting of LabourStart correspondents with participants from North America, South America, Europe, and Asia.

We signed up a new correspondent from Somalia this week.

Our country news pages have been improved and we will soon implement the same changes to our state/province pages.

We’ve had a handful of cases of duplicate posting of news stories. This should not happen and we think we know what went wrong.

Our next podcast interview, which should go live next week, will be about the Arthur Svensson prize for international trade union rights. Should be an interesting one.

Correspondents’ meeting: We’ve agreed a date and time for a meeting of LabourStart correspondents online, and all correspondents have been notified. If you are a LabourStart correspondent and did not hear from us, please email us ASAP.

Serbia campaign:

• Eric Lee’s article “Serbia: Echoes of Ronald Reagan as air traffic controllers come under attack” is published and shared widely.
• The message promoting the campaign went out to our Chinese, Hebrew and Hungarian lists this week.
• Support for the campaign grows, reaching 4,775 today, making it our second largest current campaign.

Mailing lists: Our lists continue to grow – we picked up 304 new subscribers this week, mostly for our English list.

Our home page: Our home page in more than 30 languages has now been significantly improved, as access to all news stories is now much easier than before (see the middle column.)

We went live in a big way this week with our new Serbia campaign and it shot up to 3,174 supporters after just a week online. There was an initial surge of support thanks to the ETF. We expect many more to sign up as the translations go live and we do our followup to the English list as well.

Our Lesotho campaign continued to grow, but at a much slower pace, picking up just 137 new supporters this week.

One of the global unions is exploring the possibility of another Serbia campaign soon. When I pointed out that this would be our third Serbia campaign in less than a year, I was told why that was happening.

Ranko and Igor from the Serbian air traffic controllers union.

We recorded and released another podcast today, having interviewed the two Serbian union leaders who were recently sacked after leading a successful strike. We expect this podcast, like the campaign itself, to pick up lots of interest in the coming days.

Meanwhile our new home page, which includes the prominent positioning of today’s news, has moved from being just on the English page to another 20 languages. Soon all our language sites will be using it. This is leading to the discovery of many small issues with those pages which are being systematically fixed.

I did promise last week not to get all obsessive about our numbers, but couldn’t resist sharing this one: the labourstart.org website (not including the campaigns) had 100,763 visitors in October, and the month isn’t over yet.

Last week we reported on the launch of our Lesotho campaign, which had 1,317 supporters and was appearing in three languages.  Today, that campaign has more than doubled in size, to 2,854 supporters, and appears in 11 languages.  In addition, we recorded a podcast interview with the General Secretary of UNITE yesterday.

Today we are launching a new campaign in support of the air traffic controllers union in Serbia, whose leaders have been unfairly sacked from their jobs.  That campaign has been launched at the request of the European Transport Workers Federation.

Last weekend, all of our campaigns were briefly offline as our hosting company migrated to new servers.

We’ve done some work a new home page for LabourStart.  Initially in English only, and not yet live, the main change is that news stories that used to be hidden at the bottom of the page are now right on top, where everyone can see them, in the middle column of the page.

We’ve heard from the Global Labour University and expect to soon begin interviewing prospective interns for the spring of 2026.

Our mailing lists continue to grow.  This week, we picked up 205 more subscribers to the English list and 149 for the Turkish list — these are supporters of our new campaigns who have opted-in to be on our lists.

And finally, I won’t do this regularly but … after initially reporting on our stats last week, I thought I’d have another look.  It looks like LabourStart (not counting the campaigns — just the news pages) had 24,107 visitors this week.

Lesotho campaign: We went live this week with our new campaign in support of workers at Quantum Apparel.  After less than 24 hours online, the campaign had 1,317 supporters and translations have already started coming in — with French and Chinese first.

Correspondents: We picked up three new correspondents this week from Bangladesh, Malaysia and Pakistan.  We wrote to all our new correspondents who have not yet posted news, offering help, as we do every three months or so.  The good news is the majority of new correspondents are posting news.

Korea: We reached out to our Korean language mailing list to try to recruit helpers to translate our campaigns and mailings, and to post news.

Interns: The Global Labour University has reached out to us to take on another intern in 2026 and we are likely to do so.

Stats: Finally, we checked how many visitors our main website has had since the beginning of the year (this does not include visitors to the campaigns site, which is hosted separately).  The total is a healthy 579,245.

Brussels: Eric Lee spent three days in Brussels meeting with leaders and staffers at global and European trade union federations.  These included the ITUC, ETUC, Education International, International Federation of Journalists, IndustriAll Europe, EPSU, EFBWW, EFFAT and Equal Times (which is closing down in November after 13 years).

Among things discussed in all those meetings was cooperation on posting news (each global and European federation was asked to have its own volunteer LabourStart correspondent).  We also talked about possible campaigns and podcasts.  Several of the people liked the idea of using LabourStart podcasts as a shared platform.

We also discussed with ITUC and ETUC where and when their next congresses will take place (probably in Vienna and Barcelona in 2027) and how we can be involved.  In 2014, we piggy-backed on an ITUC congress in Berlin, which contributed to it being LabourStart’s largest global solidarity conference ever.

Podcasts: Though we didn’t release a new podcast last week, we discussed a number of upcoming possibilities including Gaza and Belarus.  Interestingly, while the number of downloads of our newest podcast (Chris Garlock) grew by a modest 24, the number of downloads of the BCGEU’s Paul Finch nearly doubled, from 250 to 455.

Campaigns: We have another new campaign which should go live today — in support of garment workers in Lesotho.  Stay tuned.