Inside LabourStart

One of the odd things we used to notice was that sometimes, especially at the start of a campaign, the number of people who seem to be recommending the campaign on Facebook (which we displayed) exceeds the number who actually sign up to the campaign.

This may have to do with the fact that the ‘recommend on Facebook’ button appears higher on the page and is therefore somehow more prominent.

So some people have probably been clicking on it, as one might do with an article on a website, not realizing that they haven’t actually supported the campaign yet.

Today, I’ve removed this from the page.

You get another chance to share on Facebook after sending off your message, and I think most people have figured out by now how to share a link on Facebook anyway.

Let’s see if this leads to even a small growth in the number of campaign supporters.

We’ve launched a campaign at the request of UE today.  Some publicity today, much more tomorrow.

And this one (UK only) launched in support of outsourced workers at the University of London.

Campaigns: As reported below, we closed two big campaigns this week. I also posted below a summary of the results of our recent Philippines campaign – written by the union there. We had a meeting in the LabourStart office with a representative of cleaners in London and are looking forward to creating a UK-only campaign for them in the next few days. Edd and I have both been working on creating a mobile-friendly version of our campaigns and hope to have results in a few days.

Events: We’ve gone live with this new module – see details below. It’s just one more service we offer to the international labour movement and one more reason to visit LabourStart every day.

Publicity: To our surprise, there was a full page in Neues Deutschland about LabourStart this week. This could not have come at a better time as we strive to raise our profile in Germany.

Books: Sales of the Global Labour Movement book rose by just 44 this week, up to 224. The first book (Campaigning online) was doing better at this point. This week, I plugged the book yet again to 12,000 trade unionists on our UK list, but got a minimal response. We’ve now sorted out a Kindle edition of this book and will begin publicizing it. Last week, we arranged for ‘extended distribution’ of both titles, meaning they should be available in many local bookstores and shops other than Amazon. Meanwhile, it turns out that CreateSpace has been very poor about payments to us — we’ve raised this with them and they’re invesigating. The total sales of both titles should have earned us over £720 — but we’d only received about £211 of that so far.

Fundraising: The head of Geneva-based charity that promotes human rights in the workplace visited our offices last week and we discussed a number of areas of possible joint work and funding. I followed this up with a detailed proposal on Friday.

Correspondents: Edd has identified 128 active correspondents who are not on our mailing list. We’ll be following up, trying to make sure that we can email to all correspondents. In addition, he’s written to all UK correspondents to encourage them to be more active, and to tag their stories by region (Scotland, Wales, etc).

We’ve gotten permission from IndustriALL to close down two campaigns, one of which is one of the largest we’ve ever done.

The Bangladesh campaign got 14,306 messages sent and appeared in 14 languages.  Though it didn’t reach the 17,214 messages sent in the June 2012 campaign around the case of the Iranian teacher Ghanbari, it ran for just 26 days — and most important, it lead to a major win.  (Mailing is going out today to our lists.)

The Mexico campaign was part of our contribution to IndustriALL’s global week of action in February and resulted in 9,578 messages sent in 15 languages.  The struggle at PKC continues and the union will let us know if a new campaign is needed in the next few weeks.

From today, all senior correspondents can add events which appear on our front pages.

To do so, when you login you should see this:

Click on that to add an event.

To see all the events that have been added so far, click here.

This is an early version of the events module.  In future we will make it fully multilingual and will open it to non-senior correspondents as well.  It will also eventually have a better way to modify records — at the moment, if you need to make a change you’ll need to delete and then re-add the event.  You can do this from the page where you add an event — see here:

Please do try to add an event and let me know how it goes.  Don’t hesitate to ask if something isn’t clear or if you have any suggestions for improvement.

I always ask unions to tell us what effect our campaign had on the ground.  I don’t always get answers and when I do, they’re often quite … brief.  But the KMU in the Philippines, which we have supported a number of times with campaigns, has sent us a report on the most recent one and have agreed for me to share it with all of you.  It makes for interesting reading.

LabourStart campaign in the Philippines: Summary

The struggle against the systematic attacks on the Philippine trade-union movement continues. One of the most prominent recent forms of these attacks is the filing of trumped-up charges against four leaders of the Kilusang Mayo Uno.

The campaign activities against this attack include giving radio interviews, sending of petition letters to judges, and holding forum in unions and community organizations. The campaign kicked off with the online petition hosted by Labourstart.

The impacts of the LabourStart campaign:

(1) It helped us spread, locally and abroad, the news about the latest attack on workers’ rights in the Philippines.

(2) Locally, it served as part of the activities calling against trade-union repression.

(3) In teaching workers on how to sign up to Labourstart, we were able to give the union members and the general public an idea about attacks on workers’ rights in different countries. In explaining the Labourstart campaign, we also gave a background on the global financial crisis, how it is affecting workers, and how workers are mounting different protests to counter the attacks.

(4) We were able to teach workers the importance of utilizing and maximizing social media in launching campaigns.

The 4,451 signatures mean a lot of support for the accused KMU leaders and for the rest of KMU. Many workers were surprised to know the number of signatures that can be gathered.

Weaknesses:

We encountered some difficulty in holding the online campaign. At first, we relied on sending text messages to union members and friendly organizations, as well as on forwarding the petition via email. In the Philippines, this yielded just a few signatures, mostly of leaders of unions, federations and workers’ institutions.

We then set-up a workers’ committee to help gather more signatures. The committee set up a sign-up booth in different workers’ forum and actions before Labor Day. We explained what LabourStart is and how to sign-up online. This is a positive initiative given that most workers still don’t have email addresses.

So the weaknesses are: (1) Not knowing union members’ use of the Internet – how frequent, through what sites, etc. (2) Relying on electronic means at first in trying to spread awareness about the petition, and (3) Late attempt to overcome the previous weaknesses by coming out with a manifesto.

We learned that if we are going to hold online campaigns again, these should be coupled with actual legwork and face-to-face information drives.

… if the weather is good (like today), you can join me for a walk along the Lee Valley.  Here’s a sample, just 10 minutes walk from the office:

The headline says it all, really.

Here’s the link to the online edition.

This was something we tried many years ago under the name ‘Global Labour Calendar’ – it didn’t work then, but today with our very active country pages, we should now be able to serve the labour movement with an online calendar of events.

You can see the first examples by looking at the upper left column on the Canada and UK pages.

There’s a lot more work to do – especially creating a user-friendly interface so people can add events – but we should have a lot more of this done in the next few days.

Campaigns: The Bangladesh campaign is one of our very largest, with over 14,000 messages sent — we got a big boost from the British TUC which did an image that went viral and brought a lot of attention the campaign. We will probably close this soon as IndustriALL and UNI have made a lot of progress this week.

The Hong Kong campaign closed and we’ve asked about closing the Mexico campaign after three months — waiting to hear from IndustriALL about that one. We asked the RMT in the UK if we could close the “Justice for the 33” campaign and have been asked to continue to run with it for another month or so.

In addition to publicizing our own campaigns, we were asked to do mailings and promote Amnesty International’s new campaign in support of releasing jailed Bahraini teacher Mahdi, which we did. We also did a special promotion on Fiji for the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the ITUC.

On the technical side, we fixed some of the German text, got an Indonesian ActNOW newswire working, and have made more progress on the new campaigns database which will make our translators’ job considerably easier.

News home pages: Edd’s been working on some of the more complex language home pages which have not yet been moved over to the new format (Dutch, Polish); Eric will be completing work on the French version in the next few days. We fixed a lot of things on the country pages this week, including how campaigns appear (now showing the photo from the most recent campaign and horizontal lines to separate them); news stories that appear in the top 10 don’t repeat in the stories below; when a state/province/region appears in the headline (e.g., England), it now appears in a different colour (as it does in the list of stories); there’s now an ad for the new book on all the country pages in English; the “for more info” link now appears again on all stories where there’s something in that field.

Book 2: Sales are going well; we’ve sold 180 copies — 156 of them this week. We’ll begin work on a Kindle edition this week. Matt H. has volunteered to work on a German edition of this (and the previous book).

Berlin/Vancouver 2014: Edd’s been in touch with some German comrades and we’re making slow and steady progress. Derek is talking to comrades in Canada about a global solidarity conference there as well.

Mailing list: We had a problem with the latest version of our Sendy software — it was screwing up character encoding. This was now fixed.

CloudFlare: The adoption of CloudFlare, which we pay to ensure that our site is accessible everywhere at an improved speed, and which will keep us going even if we go offline for a while, has caused some teething pains. One of them was a delay in seeing the new photo of the day, which Derek has been posting. This has now been fixed.

Today in Labour History: I noticed that the word ‘more’ would appear even when there was no more; this has now been fixed. We have a lot more stories in the database now and a big thanks to Andy for translating so many of them into French.

Fund-raising: The ITF has pledged to donate something, and we’re expecting a donation from the RMT as well, which voted at its conference last year to support LabourStart. In addition, we’ve put in requests for grants for specific purposes to two UK-based charities — the Lipman-Miliband Trust and the Edge Fund.