Inside LabourStart

LabourStart is about to start appearing in Czech.

(Thanks to Marek Canek, our new correspondent in the Czech Republic.)

The red pins are generated from a file, linked to our active campaigns.

See here.

As of this morning, we’ve had expressions of interest in the 2010 LabourStart conference from about 25 people.  This morning I did the following to publicize it:

• Facebook: Posting to the wall in the LabourStart group.
• Facebook: Mailing to the 2,000+ members of that group.
• UnionBook: Story permanently appears on top of the home page after you’ve logged in.
• LabourStart: Text appears above the news, highlighted in yellow.

The next step is a mailing to our lists.

Barely two hours after writing to our correspondents (but not to our general list), we’ve had 52 views of our proposal, 11 people have voted (it’s now rated 4.5 – Excellent)

Here are the comments posted so far (these are wonderful to read):

(more…)

We keep getting asked to promote workers’ rights campaigns and we keep having to say yes — that’s the nature of our business.  There’s already a queue forming and even as I write these words, we’ve got another appeal coming in from 12,000 workers in Turkey.  Today’s mass mailing — the second this week — has an update about the Sun International dispute which I’ve published on UnionBook as the union (SACCAWU) doesn’t update its website; appeals from the Clean Clothes Campaign and American Rights at Work for their Triumph International and T-Mobile campaigns; and finally a plug for the book, Click Clack Moo, which is a perfect Christmas gift our supporters can buy for their kids.

Today’s mailing makes much greater use of rich text formatting, with small images next to each story, and the images themselves can be clicked on.

One of the problems people have pointed out is that when we announce a group on UnionBook (e.g., the support group for Vale Inco), if you’re not logged in or don’t have an account, there’s no link to join the group and no explanation that you need to be a logged in user to join groups.  (Facebook, of course, does this.)

I’ve just written to the people that sorted out our spam problem to ask them to cost fixing this — because when we launch campaigns, it would be good to launch UnionBook groups at the same time — a way to get people to login and newcomers to sign up for the first time.

We don’t often get requests for help from South African unions, so this is a great opportunity for us.  The new campaign is live here.

One of our readers pointed out to me recently that search was not working properly on the UK page.  I found the problem — which also affected the US, Canada and Australia pages — and have now fixed it.  Search is now working correctly on all these sites.

I’ve created new newswires for India and Pakistan at the request of the IUF’s Asia Pacific region.  You can see them here.

I’ve put in another application, this time for US$50,000, to the Knight News Challenge. Last year, in spite of the phenomenal number of positive comments our bid received, we got nowhere with this, so I’m not optimistic.  Nevertheless, I’d appreciate if some of would add your supportive comments here.