Inside LabourStart

I’ve just returned from the joint European Metalworkers Federation – International Metalworkers Federation communicators conference in Frankfurt.  Trade union communicators from every continent participated, and I had the chance to talk with activists from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the USA.

My only formal role was to participate in a panel discussion of new media with colleagues from the IAM (North America) and CNM-CUT (Brazil). I was very impressed with the latter — a website rich in content, including lots of video.

But a key part of this conference, as with any event of this kind, is what happens in between sessions, in the corridors, during the coffee breaks, at dinner.  Obviously you get to exchange a lot of business cards and talk about ways to work together.  But as I listened to the various panels and talked informally with people, I had a few thoughts about online campaigning.

Here is the main one:

It became clear, especially when discussing the IMF’s efforts to mobilize its own affiliate unions to support important global campaigns, that the message was not always getting through.  In some cases, the trade unionists present urged the IMF to simply send copies of any solidarity requests to an additional person — in other words, to consider supplementing the copy sent to the International Department of a union with one to the Communications Department.

I think the problem runs deeper than that.  Because as I heard this discussion, I thought that in a sense, this is no different from how a global union operated a century ago.  Back in 1909, if the IMF (which already existed) had a solidarity request, it would send it by post (or perhaps telegraph) to the office of an affiliate union, and if they were lucky, that affiliate union might respond.

But in 2009, we can do so much more — the new technology allows us to do so much more.

Instead of sending out a couple of hundred requests to union offices — or rather, in addition to doing so — a global union like the IMF can now reach union members directly in their tens of thousands, through email.  Campaigns become, by definition, larger and their velocity (the speed at which messages reach the target) increases as there are no delays in union offices.

But more than that, as we’ve learned with LabourStart, when you send out regular emailings to an activist list, over time that has an educational effect.  People who previously knew little about unions outside their own country — in many cases, outside their own workplace — over time learn about heroic struggles in Korea and horrific persecution in Iran, about two-faced companies that are nice to workers where unions are powerful (Europe) but nasty in countries with weak unions, and most important: about how the issues we face in our workplace and our country are the same as those faced by workers on the other side of the world.

The IMF’s general secretary opened the conference by speaking frankly about the need to raise the profile of this global union and this is where we come in.  Because LabourStart, and LabourStart alone, has built a global network of union activists across all sectors who can be informed and mobilized — a network that exists to serve the global union federations and others.  Because of LabourStart, tens of thousands of workers who never heard of federations like the IMF, IUF, ITF, ICEM, PSI, UNI, BWI or the Education International have now heard of them, and participate regularly in their campaigns.

And we’ve had this success, and have built this network, because we take advantage of tools that did not exist in 1909.

We should never underestimate the importance of what we are doing, or the unique role we play.  If LabourStart did not exist, it would need to be invented.  It has become indispensable for the international trade union movement and we should be proud of what we’ve done so far, and look forward to doing much more in the future.

I’m heading off to Frankfurt today for this where I’ll be presenting this.  The IMF is very involved in the Vale campaign, so this should be a great opportunity to deepen our connections with many key unions in this sector.

It’s been a while since the last update on our progress, so here’s a quick one with not, yet anyway, a lot of content.

Partly because of a strike at McMaster University we’ve not yet set a date.  But that should happen in the next week as it settled last Tuesday.  It looks very affordable, assuming we can do some effective, but not huge, fundraising.  We’ll get preferred rates at the uni by virtue of our being sponsored by the Labour Studies programme.

The only remaing, and the biggest and most frustrating, hurdle is setting a date.  We need a few days for our draft agenda (details to come), but in order to get some discounts on meeting rooms we need to have a few people stay in residence rooms, which means they must be empty of students, but there are other conference already booked for the inter-session period, plus we don’t want to conflict with the ITUC conference or the two major Canadian unions-and-tech conferences (CALM and LabourTech) or any major union conferences and conventions… you get the idea.

But we’re within spitting distance of having a date.  Then starts the fundraising and the detailed planning, so check in here regularly.

The Twitter survey we did last month has proven to be incredibly useful. Many, many people were involved in it, we learned a lot and shared what we learned with a very large number of people.  I’m even using the survey as the basis for my monthly column in Labour Research magazine and a talk I’m giving to the International Metalworkers Federation this coming week in Frankfurt.

We’re now paying an annual fee to Survey Monkey that allows us to do regular, large-scale surveys and I think that doing one a month is a good idea, for a while.  I want to do one in the next couple of days and would like to know what all of you think would be good survey topics — and specific questions, if possible.  Please use the comments here — and not emails to me — to make suggestions, so that we can all see them.  Thanks.

The president of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions was, thankfully, released and there’s no need at the moment for a global campaign.  All those of us who were involved in discussions about how to respond (including the ITUC and Amnesty International) have now stood down.

Instead, LabourStart was able to rapidly react to the IUF’s appeal for support for locked-out tea workers in West Bengal.  The result of our mailing was a jump from 607 messages sent to 3,024 — in 17 hours.  Well done!

1&1 Internet finally fixed the problem – no explanation, and four days overdue.  The result is that newswires are updated every 15 minutes, and the numbers of supporters showing on campaign pages are now accurate.  I was doing this manually throughout the day for the last few days, as it was important to keep the new local newswires up to date and to show the rapid growth of the Vale campaign.

The first few websites to adopt our local state/province newswires are now live — and I think this looks great.  For example, in the greater Washington, D.C. area Capital Air Lodge 1759 (a part of the International Association of Machinists – IAM) is running our DC newswire on their website. In Toronto, ACTRA, which represents over 15,000 acting, stunt and background professionals, is using our Ontario newswire on their site.  We’ve also had expressions of interest from unions in Illinois, Massachusetts, Kansas and England.  We need to keep promoting this — I think eventually we can have a very large number of local unions using very local newswires.

The Vale campaign is both our newest and our largest active campaign (by far).  There has been a huge surge in support from trade unionists in North America in the last 24 hours.  At present, we have 4,354 supporters for this campaign, as follows:

• English 3,957 (1,555 from Canada alone)
• Norwegian 129
• Portuguese 120
• French 113
• German 18
• Dutch 16
• Russian 1

This number is not currently showing on the campaign page as our web hosting company, 1&1 Internet, has still not fixed the problem of cron (see earlier postings).  I’ll be contacting them again this morning to press them yet again to resolve this issue.

I discovered yesterday when setting up the Illinois labour newswire that it seemed to not be updating.  Then I realized that none of the newswires had been generated since 05:16 London time on Saturday.

I contacted our Internet service provider, 1&1, to complain that “cron” — the system command that instructs it to perform certain tasks at certain times — had obviously stopped working.  I’ve received two emails from 1&1 since then and they’ve not yet solved the problem.  This morning I’ve written to complain how long it is taking them.

I think they need to re-boot the server and I guess they’re reluctant to do this as it will bring down many sites, but they have no choice.

Unfortunately, it’s a Sunday and they work with a smaller staff today and will respond less quickly than we’d like.  The main effect of all this is that our newswires are not being updated — this is bad, but it’s not like our site is down or anything like that.

I’ve just announced to our list that we will offer customized labour newswires for states, provinces and regions in the USA, Canada, UK, Australia, South Africa and India.  The first one was done for our friends in Kansas and you can see it here.  It will be interesting to see if this leads to a greater takeup of the newswires – let’s hope so.