Inside LabourStart

The main news this week was the launch of our Myanmar campaign at the request of the global unions. IUF did a mailing to promote the campaign and BWI posted on their website about it. After just six days online, the campaign has 4,710 supporters and appears in 19 languages, with more on the way.

Many of those 4,710 people asked to be added to our mailing list, but nearly all of them were already subscribed. Our current subscribers are not sharing our campaigns with others in a big way, and without the active involvement of unions, the lists will not grow. We were unable to update the English list yet due to a problem with the file we submitted, but for the biggest six lists other than English, we only picked up 18 new subscribers this week.

We launched two new Canadian campaigns this week but ran into a couple of problems mailing to the Canadians on our English list. First and most important, the mailing was blocked. We have now figured out why, and the mailing went out successfully yesterday. The other problem is that Canadian segment is much smaller than we thought it would be, probably due to a problem when we exported our lists from Mailchimp to Mailjet a few months ago. We are investigating why that happened and will try to restore the list segment to its previous size.

Finally, we continued to raise more money this week, partly due to a mention of our needs in the mailings that went out to support the Myanmar campaign. Since I last reported, we have taken in £1,915.37 into our PayPal account, with other money also arriving as cheques and bank transfers. We are probably over £6,000 in donations since the beginning of September and we expect more to come through (including a substantial donation from a Canadian union).

Cihan Erdal: Good news – our comrade who had been jailed in Turkey and was the subject of a major LabourStart campaign is now back in Canada. We have shared this news very widely.

USA: We have reached out to unions which are organising workers at Amazon and Starbucks in the hope of helping them with LabourStart campaigns. We are hopeful that at least one of these
will result in a campaign shortly.

Polish campaign: Solidarnosc informed us that the campaign we were planning on is no longer needed, as the workers have won.  As we were informed, “the strike is over and the union leader is back to work.”

Myanmar campaign: We have a call today with BWI following a decision by the Council of Global Unions to revive the LabourStart campaign demanding recognition of the national unity government instead of the military dictatorship.

Fundraising: Last week I reported that we had raised just under £2,800. Today, that number is £3,709, a gain of about £910 this week. Mailings have yet to go out (not yet translated) into German, Russian, Ukrainian, Norwegian, Danish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Esperanto and other languages.  I appeal to comrades to help with these translations — thank you!

Fundraising: As we do a couple of times a year, last week we sent out a fundraising appeal to our readers.  Nearly all the donations came in via PayPal and these totalled £2,796.73 so far.  As there were around 120 donors, the average donation was £23.30.  The appeal went out in ten languages – Belarusian, Chinese, English, Finnish, Georgian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, and Spanish.  We’ll be following up today with the other languages, trying to get translations done.

Belarus: Support for the campaign has slowed down to a trickle, with just 17 new supporters this week, as we wait for the union to decide on next steps.

Poland: Solidarnosc reached out about a possible campaign and we are in discussions about it.

Ukraine: Following up on our recent campaign, we were contacted by a group of trade unionists who have doing solidarity work in a number of countries and who had launched their own campaign on change.org.  We had a Zoom call this week to discuss joint work in the future.

Telegram: Using all our social media accounts (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) we reached out to encourage people to follow our public feed on Telegram, which had just 119 followers.  The result was a gain of just one new follower, which does say something about the limits of those social media accounts — and possibly how few trade unionists are using Telegram.

Because we’re very late with this report, it will be very brief — but should give you a good idea of what LabourStart has been up to in the last four months. Regular updates will resume from next week.

Campaigns

• We closed the IUF’s Cambodia Nagaworld campaign – it was a win.  We also closed the Lithuania and Colombia campaigns – which we could not declare as victories.
• We launched a campaign in support of Borjomi water workers in Georgia – and closed it after a couple of days – this was a big win for the workers.  Eric got to spend a day with the strikers during his visit to Georgia in May, where he also met with the Georgian union leadership.
• In early May, we launched a new campaign in support of jailed union leaders in Belarus – with the help of GLU students.  It is currently our largest campaign, with over 9,700 supporters.
• We also launched a new campaign on Iran, with the support of the IUF.
• And we also launched a campaign in support of a jailed trade unionist in Kazakhstan.
• We launched our first campaign in Armenian, now that the interface has been translated into that language.

Global Solidarity Conference 2023

Discussions begin with the Georgian Trade Union Confederation about holding a conference in Tbilisi in early 2023.

Fundraising

We sent out a fundraising appeal at the beginning of April. We raised over £2,000 in the first 24 hours, and more funds over the course of the following months.

Home page

Due to changes made by our web hosts, IONOS, many records became corrupted and character encoding on our home page broke on 1 July. Following that, we had problems with our jobs page, our photo of the week and our link to Radio Labour. Most of this has now been fixed, and work on this should be completed by 10 August.

Interns

Our three GLU interns finished their work at the end of March.  We were lucky to have Jessica, Malaika and Zubair working with us — albeit for just a few weeks — and thank them for their efforts.

Labour News Network

This was improved with a new banner and with several items posted to it.

Mailing lists

We migrated from Mailchimp to Mailjet in May, saving a lot of money.

May Day

• We organised a recorded May Day event with the participation of many trade unions from around the globe.
• There were 649 views of the video as of 2 May, and 500 more since then.
• We shared many of the individual videos across social media in May.

Social media

• A new Twitter account was created – https://twitter.com/LabourSouthAsia
• Our YouTube channel was revived to accommodate the May Day videos.

UK

• Invited by the TUC, Eric spoke with campaigns and communications staffers from several unions on a Zoom call.
• We participated for the first time in the Tolpuddle festival – Derek and Eric spoke in one session, LabourStart had a stall, we gave out hundreds of leaflets, and distributed some copies of our book on migrant workers.

ILO: We gave extensive publicity on LabourStart’s home page and across social media to some key developments at the meeting of the ILO Governing Body last week — including the passage of a resolution on Ukraine and Russia, and the election of a new, union-backed Director General.

GLU conference: At the request of the Global Labour University we have helped to promote their annual conference with a mass mailing to our list. It appears that nearly 500 people from our list clicked through to learn more about or register for the conference.

Interns: Tomorrow marks the final day at work for our three interns from the Global Labour University – Jessica, Malaika and Zubair. We cannot thank them enough for all that they did during their time with us.

Donations: We received a generous donation from Industriall Europe.

T-shirts: We promoted the latest Working Class History t-shirt of the month across our social media accounts.

ITUC and ETUC leaders at a rally in solidarity with Ukraine.

Ukraine: LabourStart continues to be the main source of news on the trade union response to the war in Ukraine.

We had the opportunity in the last week to highlight statements from the Nordic trade unions, Solidarnosc (Poland) and KVPU (Ukraine) which criticised the continued membership of the pro-Putin Russian trade union centre FNPR in the ITUC.

We also shared today a long statement from the European Trade Union Confederation which also severely criticised FNPR.

Earlier, we published statements from two Russian national trade union centres, FNPR and KTR.

Jordan: Our planned webinar for last Friday (organised with the Education International) has been postponed. But EI remains interested in doing more webinars with us, so watch this space.

Donations: We’ve received a generous donation from BWI.

Coming up: In the next few weeks we will be holding our annual spring fundraiser and also preparing for a major online event to mark May Day – International Workers’ Day.

Elizabeth Tang from the IDWF.

International Women’s Day: Our webinar run jointly with the International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF) was a success. About 300 people participated in the event on Zoom and Facebook. The event was recorded and we shared the link today (https://vimeo.com/686778630).

Jordan: Working together with the Education International, we will be hosting a webinar next Friday, 18.3 in English and Arabic. We will be reopening our campaign in support of the Jordanian Teachers’ Association which was suspended a while back.

UK: We were invited to speak to the London/South East TUC about LabourStart this week — and also got the chance to speak with a group of fisherman from Namibia who were on the call.

Donations: IndustriALL has made a very generous donation.

Campaigns: We expect to launch campaigns shortly in support of workers in Colombia, Lithuania and Turkey. Details soon.

Algeria: With the agreement of IndustriALL we have now closed this campaign. Unfortunately, our comrade Ramzi is still in jail. The struggle continues.

Cambodia: We wrote to dozens of our translators in six languages — resulting in three more translations. But we still have nothing in Japanese, Arabic and Swedish, which is a problem. The campaign continues to grow — now in 22 languages with 12,355 supporters. But growth has slowed.

Iran: At the request of some comrades, we shared statements from Iranian workers’ organisations about expelling Iran from the ILO with senior figures in the global unions.

Jordan: Next month we will host (and promote) a major global webinar in support of Jordan’s embattled teachers’ union. We will reactivate the online campaign before then.

Fund raising: Two unions in Norway made generous donations last week.

Interns: Our three new interns will start their work on Wednesday next week.

Mailing lists: Our mailing lists continue to grow due to the Cambodia campaign – we picked up 223 new subscribers this week, and doubled the size of our small Hindi language list.

Internationalisation: We made a number of improvements to the Russian language home page, adding corrections to the language and replacing the occasional English phrase with the Russian equivalent.

Working Class History T-shirts: We discussed next steps with our friends at DNA-Merch and received payment for the few shirts we sold.

Cambodia: Our campaign had more than 10,000 supporters by mid-day — our largest campaign in several years. One result of this has been a big increase in the size of our mailing lists. Another is that the company has been forced to make a rare public pronouncement insisting that they are not busting unions (they are).

Colombia: We have a draft campaign in the works, probably to go live next week. The previous campaign is now closed.

Latin America: We have plans to hold an online regional meeting of LabourStart correspondents – details coming soon.

Thailand: We had a long online chat with the Solidarity Centre staff there to discuss cooperation, including future campaigns together.

Donations: We received a very generous donation from the BC Government Employees union in Canada.

Interns: We will be having five interns from the Global Labour University and are currently planning their projects.

T-shirts: We did an unprecedented second mass mailing promoting the Rosa Luxemburg shirts. With fingers crossed, we hope to have helped sell a few. We should have an update next week.

Cambodia: We launched a major new campaign with the support of the IUF. As of right now, the campaign has 4,700 supporters and appears in ten languages.

Donations: PSI has made another generous donation to LabourStart.

Interns: We interviewed five potential interns from the Global Labour University and have decided to take them all. They will begin work in mid-February for about six weeks.

Our next book: Good progress is being made on our next book, an updated version of our ‘Campaigning Online and Winning’ book from several years ago.

T-shirts: We continued with weekly publicity across social media and next week we’ll include a reminder in the mass mailing as well. This month’s shirt featuring Rosa Luxemburg should prove more popular than the previous ones, we think.