Inside LabourStart

Podcasts: We released two more podcasts in the last few days. These were interviews with Sean Sweeney, coordinator of Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (TUED), and Joseph Ndiritu Karobia, General Secretary of the Public Transport Operators Union (PUTON) in Kenya. I think they’re both very good interviews and we’re promoting them widely. We have an interview scheduled for next week with a South Korean trade unionist and others in the pipeline.

Campaigns: After a ‘dry spell’ the number of new campaigns has increased. “Philippines: Tell DHL to stop union-busting” was launched today and we expect Hong Kong and Ukraine campaigns very shortly.

Climate: Our climate page went live this month.

Fundraising: We’ve begun a major fundraising effort for September to begin to rebuild our financial safety net. Without the support of our generous donors, both individuals and unions, LabourStart could not continue with our work.

What follows is a brief summary of highlights followed by the usual long list of numbers.

SUMMARY:

XTwitter feeds continue to decline.  Most or all of that can be attributed to our followers abandoning the platform for Bluesky, where our numbers continue to rise spectacularly despite no concerted effort being made to grow the accounts.

Our other numbers remain fairly stable.

THE NUMBERS:

The first number next to each item is the current total as of today; the second number is the total as of the last report. Where one number is provided it means that there has been no change since our last report.

Lists or accounts that have shrunk are in italics.  Lists or accounts which experienced growth are in bold.

STORIES POSTED TO OUR NEWS SITE IN THE LAST THREE MONTHS:

The decline over the northern hemisphere’s summer months is seasonal.  We can expect to return to 100+ news items posted each day in September.

May: 3169 (102 per day)

June: 2943 (98 per day)

July:  2674 (86 per day)

August:  2221 (72 per day)

MAILING LISTS:

The top 10:

English: 87853-87036

French: 7198-7187

Spanish: 5666-5651

German: 5640-5575

Turkish: 4974-4685

Korean: 3197

Italian: 2845

 Russian: 2682

Norwegian: 2040-2036

Romanian:  1730

Dutch: 1588-1587

The others:

Arabic:  768

Azerbaijani:  56

Belarusian:  299

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 978-971

Creole:  11

Czech: 58

Danish: 79

Esperanto: 194-191

Farsi:  164

Finnish:  442-439

Georgian:  218-181

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  262

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  176-174

Indonesian:  385

Japanese: 388

Lithuanian:  62

Malaysian: 20

Polish: 971-964

Portuguese: 1279-1276

Punjabi:  2

Serbian:  119-97

Sinhalese: 19-1

Slovak: 15

Swedish: 911-909

Tagalog: 183

Thai:  146-142

Ukrainian: 493

Vietnamese:  22-21

Internal:

Executive:  11-12

Interns and Past Interns:  16

LabourStart ACTIVE Correspondents: 644-628

LabourStart INACTIVE Correspondents:  853

LabourStart Translators:  109

Africa Caucus:  63

Media Contacts: 69

Donors:  972-961

BLUESKY:

No efforts were made to increase the number of followers for either account.  Despite this the global feed has more than doubled in the last four months.

Global:  42282-17557

 Canada English-language:  496-456

FLICKR:

Members:  837

Photos:  10383-10395

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  121-131

FACEBOOK PAGES/GROUPS:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

LabourStart.org page likes:  14k, details unavailable

Global Labour News and Information: 9284-9220

LabourStart UK likes:  2k-2.1k, details unavailable

LabourStart Francophone: 620 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 489

LabourStart Brasil:  552

LabourStart Turkce:  2k, details unavailable

LabourStart TV followers: 456

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Italia:  68

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Canada-English: 229

LabourStart Nepal:  7 (last post April 2017)

LabourStart Israel: CLOSED (last post 2018)

LINKEDIN:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Group: 2640

Page: 550-503

PODCASTS:

LabourStart is a member of the US-based Labor Radio / Podcast Network.

Rather than list each podcast and the numbers of times they have been downloaded we will report the five (5) podcasts that have been downloaded the most times to date.

1. 683-676 downloads: Interview with Mark Hancock, President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees re. the union’s recently-adopted “Montreal Declaration” which was drafted in response to US President Donald Trump’s threats against Canada.
2. 537-526 downloads: Interview with Paul Finch, President of the British Columbia General Employees Union (BCGEU) in Canada.
3. 514-494 downloads: USA: Interview with Shawna Bader-Blau from the Solidarity Center.
4. 480-452 downloads: Gen-Secs of two global union federations — Ambet Yuson from Building and Wood Workers’ International (BWI) and David Edwards from the Education International (EI) re. being blocked from entering Palestine.
5. 452-449 downloads: Interview with Carlos Ching-Hung Wang, the president of the China Steel Express Union (Taiwan).

X (TWITTER as-was):

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for these accounts.  If we wish to maintain our footprint we will have to start doing so again or the erosion of our numbers will continue.  Whether that is possible is another question given the current flight of users from the platform.

We experienced decline in all accounts except the Australian, which grew slightly.  Prior to the exodus to Bluesky all would have usually experienced slow growth without any effort on our part.  This is almost certainly the result of trade unionists closing their Twitter accounts and moving to other platforms (such as Bluesky or Mastodon).

Global English: 35107-35546

Canada English: 19958-20327

Global Portuguese: 9532-9698

Global Spanish: 9986-10109

Australia: 9005-9207

USA: 4448-4565

Canada French: 3014-3051

Russian: 47-50

Hebrew:  50 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 472 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 329 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 341 (last tweet 2015)

French: 205 (last tweet 2018)

German: 120 (last tweet 2018)

Japanese: 21 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

South Asia (English): 28 Placeholder and not yet active

Podcasts: We have revived our podcasts.  We released three podcasts in August so far and expect to do several more — we have been in touch with trade union leaders in Africa and Asia, arranging interviews.  All our podcasts are here.

Campaigns: Our Taiwan campaign has 3,022 supporters and appears in 13 languages.  We are hoping to grow this, especially in the Chinese and Tagalog versions.  We have already heard that the employer has been receiving our messages and is complaining to the union about this.  Good.

Climate crisis: We are getting more involved in this, including planning to do some work around COP31 and the People’s Climate Summit in Turkey in November.  In the run-up to that, we have begun tagging news stories on LabourStart as being relevant to the climate crisis and will soon be able to show a page, updated regularly, of these stories.  More details coming soon.

Canadian news page: The French version had a problem with outputting province names in French — this has now been fixed.

Global solidarity conference: We continue to discuss this with potential partners in three countries.  Nothing has been finalised yet.

News: Our volunteer correspondents posted 984 in the first 14 days of August.  This is a time when many unions take a holiday and union websites often feature very little news — so getting an average of over 70 stories a day is excellent work by our volunteers.

 

 

 

Since I last updated this blog, we’ve had a few bits of good news.

Turkey: Nearly all the trade union leaders whose release we have campaigned for are now released.  We have a wonderful statement of thanks from them, which we will shortly publicise widely.  This comes on the heels of our recent campaign in support of Turkish teachers at an Italian language school, which also contributed to a win.

Taiwan: For the first time in more than three months, we have been asked for help with a campaign. The campaign has just gone live and we are beginning translations and publicity today.  Here is the campaign — please share this widely.

Canada: We received a generous donation from the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) as well as our largest-ever donation from an individual.

Other campaigns: Just in the last two weeks, we have reached out to partners about campaigns in Serbia, Libya, Panama, Zimbabwe, Cambodia and more.  We expect one or more of those to go live.

News: In the first 23 days of July our volunteer correspondents posted 2,059 news stories to LabourStart —89 news stories per day, on average.

Podcasts: We are hoping to revive our regular broadcasts and have proposed interviews to several activists, tied into our campaigns and more.

Global Solidarity Conference: We are hoping to hold another Global Solidarity Conference in 2027 and are currently exploring options in Europe and North America.  More details once we have them.

Since this blog was last updated on 1 May 2026, we’ve been busy.  Here are some highlights:

Campaigns:

• We have two new campaigns coming very soon — one from Libya and one from Serbia.  More details soon.
• We launched a Georgia campaign in mid-May, but eventually suspended it after losing contact with the union there, which had done nothing to promote the campaign.
• We suggested a Bolivia campaign to two of the global union federations, but it didn’t happen. Neither one of them was interested.
• We suggested a Lithuanian truckers’ campaign to ETF, but they were not interested.
• We asked IndustriAll Europe about a campaign in support of striking workers at Tesla in Sweden; the local union seems not to be interested at the moment.  We wrote to them directly in late June and they promised to get back to us.
• We closed down three campaigns at the end of May — in Malaysia, Algeria and Turkey.  The last of these contributed to a big victory for the workers and their union.

Correspondents: We suggested to several people who wrote in that they might consider volunteering to be a correspondent.  We signed up one new correspondent from the UK.  And we sent a mass emailing to over 600 of our volunteer correspondents suggesting things they could do (including encouraging them to post).

Donations: PSI made a generous donation, as did BCGEU and UNIFOR in Canada.  We shared the good news from the Turkish teachers victory to several of our lists (including our donors, but not to our general English list) and raised a small amount of money.

Mailing list: We added 218 new subscribers, many of them for our Turkish list following the launch of our campaign in May.

Sorry that we’ve not done a regular update to this blog in May and June.

We will do so in the next few days.

The only excuse we have is that the LabourStart’s founding editor, Eric Lee, has been travelling extensively in the last few weeks and has only new returned to his desk in London.

Thanks for your patience!

What follows is a brief summary of highlights followed by the usual long list of numbers.

SUMMARY:

XTitter feeds continue to decline.  Most or all of that can be attributed to our followers abandoning the platform for Bluesky, where our numbers continue to rise despite no concerted effort being made to grow the accounts.

News stories posted per day dropped last month.  This is an annual event as many unions in the global north reduce services and activities during the traditional Christmas-New Year’s holiday period.

The recent surge in campaign requests accounts for the increases in our mailing lists.

Our other numbers remain fairly stable.

THE NUMBERS:

The first number next to each item is the current total as of today; the second number is the total as of the last report. Where one number is provided it means that there has been no change since our last report.

Lists or accounts that have shrunk are in italics.  Lists or accounts which experienced growth are in bold.

STORIES POSTED TO OUR NEWS SITE IN THE LAST THREE MONTHS:

February: 3013 (107 per day).

March: 3306 (106 per day)

April: 3219 (107 per day)

MAILING LISTS:

The top 10:

English: 87036-86401

 French: 7187-7170

 Spanish: 5651-5579

German: 5575

Turkish: 4685-4508

Korean: 3197

Italian: 2845-2835

 Russian: 2682

Norwegian: 2036-2025

Romanian:  1730

Dutch: 1587-1437

The others:

Arabic:  768

Azerbaijani:  56

Belarusian:  299

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 971-970

Creole:  11

Czech: 58

Danish: 79

Esperanto: 191-189

Farsi:  164

Finnish:  439

Georgian:  181-176

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  262-261

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  174

Indonesian:  385

Japanese: 388

Lithuanian:  62

Malaysian: 20

Polish: 964

Portuguese: 1276

Punjabi:  2

Serbian:  97

Sinhalese: 1

Slovak: 15

Swedish: 909

Tagalog: 183

Thai:  142

Ukrainian: 493

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive:  12

Interns and Past Interns:  16

LabourStart ACTIVE Correspondents: 628

LabourStart INACTIVE Correspondents:  853

LabourStart Translators:  109

Africa Caucus:  63

Media Contacts: 69

Donors:  961

BLUESKY:

No efforts were made to increase the number of followers for either account.

Global:  17557-17307

 Canada English-language:  456-438

FLICKR:

Members:  837

Photos:  10395-10403

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  131

FACEBOOK PAGES/GROUPS:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

LabourStart.org page likes:  14k, details unavailable

Global Labour News and Information: 9220-9175

LabourStart UK likes:  2k-2.1k, details unavailable

 LabourStart Francophone: 620 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 489

LabourStart Brasil:  552

LabourStart Turkce:  2k, details unavailable

LabourStart TV followers: 456-461

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Italia:  68

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Canada-English: 229-217

 LabourStart Nepal:  7 (last post April 2017)

LabourStart Israel: CLOSED (last post 2018)

LINKEDIN:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Group 2636-2645

 Page: 503-490

PODCASTS:

LabourStart is a member of the US-based Labor Radio / Podcast Network.

Rather than list each podcast and the numbers of times they have been downloaded we will report the five (5) podcasts that have been downloaded the most times to date.

1. 676 downloads: Interview with Mark Hancock, President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees re. the union’s recently-adopted “Montreal Declaration” which was drafted in response to US President Donald Trump’s threats against Canada.
2. 526 downloads: Interview with Paul Finch, President of the British Columbia General Employees Union (BCGEU) in Canada.
3. 494 downloads: USA: Interview with Shawna Bader-Blau from the Solidarity Center.
4. 452 downloads: Gen-Secs of two global union federations — Ambet Yuson from Building and Wood Workers’ International (BWI) and David Edwards from the Education International (EI) re. being blocked from entering Palestine.
5. 449 downloads: Interview with Carlos Ching-Hung Wang, the president of the China Steel Express Union (Taiwan).

X (TWITTER as-was):

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for these accounts.  If we wish to maintain our footprint we will have to start doing so again or the erosion of our numbers will continue.  Whether that is possible is another question given the current flight of users from the platform.

We experienced decline in all accounts except the Australian, which grew slightly.  Prior to the exodus to Bluesky all would have usually experienced slow growth without any effort on our part.  This is almost certainly the result of trade unionists closing their Twitter accounts and moving to other platforms (such as Bluesky or Mastodon).

Global English: 35546-35851

Canada English: 20327-20479

Global Portuguese: 9698-9757

Global Spanish: 10109-10214

 Australia: 9207-9297

USA: 4565-4584

Canada French: 3051-3058

Russian: 50

Hebrew:  50 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 472 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 329 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 341 (last tweet 2015)

French: 205 (last tweet 2018)

German: 120 (last tweet 2018)

Japanese: 21 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

South Asia (English): 28 Placeholder and not yet active.

 

 

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.