Inside LabourStart

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.

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.

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.

May Day Party: Considering that this was the first time we’ve tried a real-world fundraiser, it has to be considered a success. The party was held on Saturday night at the Bread & Roses pub in Clapham, south London. David Cockroft, the outgoing general secretary of the ITF, spoke, as did Kirill Buketov of the IUF. (Cockroft’s speech was videoed and we’ll make it available when we have it.) In addition, we had speakers from the “3 Cosas” campaign organizing London cleaners and the RMT “Justice for the 33″ campaign, and two entertainers — Dave Thorpe and The Ruby Kid. There were about 45 people there, and we raised £300 for LabourStart. Next year, let’s have LabourStart May Day fundraisers in a dozen cities around the world – start planning yours today.

Books 1, 2 and 3: The global labour movement – an introduction has now been published, we have 100 copies here in London, and today we’ll begin publicity. My personal goal is to sell more copies of this than book 1 (Campaigning online and winning) — we’ve distributed about 769 of those, of which 725 are actual sales. Andy has begun work on a French translation already. We already have plans for a third book — selected essays by former IUF general secretary Dan Gallin. One of those essays almost went into Book 2, but we felt it was more suited to a collection of Dan’s writings, which he’s agreed we can publish. His articles have appeared in book form in French and Russian, but not yet English. We’re putting in a request for financial support to do this to the Lipman-Miliband foundation.

Campaigns: We closed the KMU Philippines campaign after more than 3 months online. The Bangladesh campaign is already one of our largest with 10,649 messages sent as of this morning. We’re about to close down the last remaining UK-only campaign for the RMT. I’ve made steady progress on the transition to a MySQL database for campaigns – we can now show campaigns and add new ones, and we can migrate all campaigns from the old system. As I’ve mentioned before, this will not only lead to a more robust and secure system, but it will be MUCH easier for translators to do their work. It’s a big project and should take a couple more weeks to complete, including thorough testing.

LabourStart country pages: We’ve made a lot of improvements to the LabourStart Canada page and have much more work to do on others, such as the UK page.

Today in Labour History: Edd and others are working very hard to ensure that there’s something every day on the main global page and something every month for each of the key countries. This is an ongoing project and every LabourStart correspondent is invited to help out.

I don’t always post here links to articles I’ve written, but because this one is about a LabourStart campaign and the reaction to it, I thought I’d share it with you.

The Global Labour Movement – An Introduction: We’ve now completed the work on this, awaiting delivery of 100 copies to sell at our book launch on 4th May in London. Andy has been sent the text for possible translation into French.  You can order copies already – here.

Campaigning Online and Winning: We distributed 769 copies so far, of which 44 were free copies and 725 were sales. (77 were in French and 692 in English).

Campaigns – new: On Friday, 26 April, we launched an urgent action campaign at the request of IndustriALL in response to the disastrous building collapse in Bangladesh. I’ve added some text about the campaign to the Wikipedia entry and hope to continue to use Wikipedia in future to publicize our campaigns.

Campaigns – closed: We closed the Korea campaign. Still waiting to hear from the KGEU about what effect, if any, it had.

Campaigns – overhaul: I’ve successfully migrated our campaigns from the old, flat ASCII (text) database to a relational database using MySQL. Now I’m working on correcting the script that shows campaigns to show this one instead.

News – by country: I’ve changed the sort order so the most recent stories now appear first.

News – posting: Now when you modify a news story posted by someone else (senior correspondents only) it will not change the name of the correspondent who originally posted the story.

2014 LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference in Berlin: Edd has begun work on this.

May Day party in London (Saturday, 4th May): We’re up to 227 yes/maybe. Edd and I visited the venue last week.

The Global Labour Movement – An Introduction: We completed work on this book which is now with CreateSpace. We’ll soon be approving the proof and will begin selling the book by May Day.

New site design: This is now working in 24 of our 29 languages. It’s also working for all country pages in English as well as the state/province pages.

CloudFlare teething problems: It turned out that we really needed to tell CloudFlare about all our sub-domains, even the ones that they are not handling with their proxy servers. Once that was done, everything seems to have settled down.

Campaigns – new: At the request of the ITF, we launched a second campaign within a week, this time in support of workers in the Port of Vancouver, Washington. With 8,457 supporters, it’s already larger than the Hong Kong campaign (8,235).

Campaigns – renewed: The ITUC asked us to give the Turkey campaign another big push. We did. It went up from 11,098 to 12,549 in the last five days.  The KMU also asked us to reopen their campaign for a few more days and we’ve done so.

Campaigns – closed: At the request of the RMT, we’ve closed the Churchill’s campaign, which the workers have won, and the Bakerloo campaign as well. I’ll be closing the Korea campaign tomorrow, after 3 months online. It’s had 10,540 supporters.

Campaigns – overhaul: There is a VERY long list of things to do here, and I’ll be trying to make some progress every day on the list. Starting with the migration of our old flat database to a proper MySQL database. This should make the campaigns work faster, be more stable, easier for translators to do their work, etc.

May Day party in London: We have over 215 people who either say they are coming or may be coming; this is very good. We’ll have entertainers and guest speakers from a couple of London disputes, as well as the general secretary of the ITF. Details here.

Fundraising: I put in a proposal to a UK-based funding group which supports social change, the Edge Fund . We won’t know until July if our application is successful.

As I may have already mentioned, people at the recent e-Campaigning Forum talked up Reddit as a way to bring traffic to websites.

It costs nothing, so why not?

Basically, when creating a campaign (or translating one), make sure to go to Reddit’s ‘labor’ section, login (you should create an account for yourself first), and add the link to the campaign.

After you’ve done so, Reddit will show a “shortlink” that will look like this: http://redd.it/1bih7f

Modify the campaign and in the “Reddit_URL” field, paste in that shortlink.

You’ll know you’ve done it correctly if the Reddit icon then appears on your campaign, underneath the Facebook and Google ones on the right side of the page.

The ITUC has asked us to give the Turkey campaign another push as 15 women trade unionists appear in court today.  I’ve amended the campaign page in English, French and Spanish and publicized this on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Reddit and UnionBook.  I’ll do a mass mailing in a few minutes as well.  We’re currently at 11,098 supporters – let’s see if we can grow that to 20,000, which would be a record for us.