Inside LabourStart

New campaign – Turkey: We launched a new campaign at the request of DISK. As of this writing, it has 2,835 supporters and appears in 12 languages with more coming.

Victory in the Netherlands: We learned that Pawel Rudzki was reinstated and compensated after a long, hard fight — a big win for him and his union, the FNV, which thanked us for our help with a campaign last year.

Newsletter: Our weekly mailing (usually on Thursdays) is increasingly a newsletter, with photos and short articles. We’ve also been using it to show how LabourStart has been engaged with ongoing struggles in Turkey (KESK trial) and Eswatini (repression of the teachers union), as well as more direct campaigns hosted today on LabourStart.

Iran: At the request of Free Them Now I recorded a solidarity video for May Day.

Georgia: During my week-long visit to Georgia, I travelled with union activists to meet manganese miners in Chiatura and chemical workers in Rustavi (where we had a LabourStart campaign about 9 years ago). Both are places that we may well be called upon to launch campaigns this year. In Tbilisi, I met with the leadership of the newly-formed Movement for Social Democracy, who are very involved in labour issues.

Sorry for the lack of updates to this blog, but I’ve been travelling. Here’s a brief summary of what we’ve been up to for the last 4 weeks.

Mailings: We did two mailings in the last two months with a new, more attractive two-column format. Let us know what you think.

Georgia: I will be spending a week in Georgia and have scheduled meetings with leading trade unionists and two trips outside the capital to meet with workers on strike.

Podcasts: After a long gap, we’ve resumed posting. This week we did an interview with Stirling Smith about workers and excessive heat.

New campaigns: We have a new campaign for Turkey on the way.

Solidarity statements: We’ve been asked by a union in Bangladesh for a statement of solidarity to mark the anniversary of the Rana Plaza disaster. We’ve also been invited by ‘Free Them Now’ for a solidarity video statement to be broadcast to Iran on May Day.

T-shirts: We sold nearly as many shirts as we did in 2024 — 118 instead of 120, snd raised some money for our work.

Algeria campaign: Our newest campaign, launched on 25 February, now has 3,785 supporters and appears in 14 languages.  Please share this widely.

New campaigns:  We have possible new campaigns coming up from Taiwan (migrant workers) and Canada (artificial intelligence).  Stay tuned!

Campaign followup: We were asked by EPSU to do a special mailing to people who supported a campaign from a couple of years ago — and were able to do this.

News: Our volunteer correspondents have posted 2,203 news stories so far in March, averaging more than 110 per day.

T-shirts: As promised, on 11 March we launched another May Day t-shirt with the slogan ‘Workers rights are human rights’. We’ve sold several dozen of these but must sell many more.  Make sure to order yours before 31 March, which is when the campaign ends.

Mailing lists:  Our lists continue to grow.  We added 247 new subscribers yesterday and 165 of those were for our Turkish list.

Our latest campaign.

New campaign: We launched a new campaign together with PSI and IUF in support of a jailed Algerian trade unionist. Translations are pouring in and the campaign has 2,641 supporters — this will grow.

Internationalization: We continue to reach out to our supporters and subscribers trying to maximise the number of languages our campaigns and news appear in. This week, we wrote to our Vietnamese list. Recently followed up with our very large Romanian list, but with no luck so far. We reached out to our Dutch list and received a number of new volunteer translators as a result.  Each week, we pick a new language to revitalise.

International Women’s Day: Thanks to the work of our active correspondents, we ran a very large number of articles marking IWD around the world, promoting this effort across social media.

Donations: The Canadian union BCGEU has once again given us a very generous donation. PSI has also made a very generous pledge.

Campaign page: We made a number of small changes to improve the display of our campaigns and will continue to do so.

FNV campaign: We closed down this campaign after more than three months online; we have not yet heard back from the union.

Having learned of the experiences of the BWI and Education International delegations that were denied access to Palestine (by the Israeli authorities), we reached out to the general secretaries, David Edwards and Ambet Yuson, who both agreed to be interviewed.  We interviewed them together and shared the recording widely — this became one our most popular podcasts, with more listeners even than our recent Minneapolis podcast.  Meanwhile, the Histadrut shared with us their statement on what happened, which we posted to our news page.

We continue our efforts to get more translators and correspondents, reviving our campaigns and mailing lists in languages which have gone dormant.  In the last two weeks, we reached out to our Polish and Romanian supporters, and managed to get a Polish mailing translated for the first time in a long time.  (Our Polish list is quite large – nearly 1,000 subscribers.)

Our mailing lists continue to grow, as we picked up 112 new subscribers during this period, despite not having launched a new campaign.

Coming soon: we will try to reinvigorate our Dutch language campaigns and mailing list this coming week — and probably Arabic the following week..  In another ten days or so, we’ll launch our May Day 2026 t-shirt fundraiser.

Campaigns: Our two new campaigns have taken off. The campaign in support of Malaysian workers making products for Apple has 4,465 supporters. Our campaign backing Turkish teachers had 3,537 supporters. Both can reach 5,000 supporters if we all push them to members of our unions.

Translators: Each week we’ve reached out to a different mailing list for a different language and each time, we’ve managed to recruit at least on new correspondent or translator to help revive LabourStart’s presence in that language. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve recruited new members of teams for Finnish, Swedish, Danish, Japanese and now — Korean.

Correspondents: In addition, we’ve recruited new correspondents in Germany and Nigeria.

Mailing lists: We’re testing a new signup form on our home page for people to join our mailing lists. Nearly everyone who does, does so by supporting one of our campaigns, but we’ve been asked to offer this option too. This week, we added 335 new subscribers to our lists, with large groups for the English and Turkish lists.

Donations: We received generous donations from BCGFEU (Canada) and IUF.

T-shirts: We’re getting ready to launch another t-shirt fundraising campaign, probably timed so people will have the shirts for May Day. We’ve just confirmed that the t-shirts are union-made. More details soon.

Small fixes: There had been a problem on our home page with the link for states and provinces; this is now fixed.

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.