Inside LabourStart

I still have ambitions to revive Radio LabourStart, initially as a source of links to existing podcasts and radio broadcasts, and later with our own content.

The first stage was to clean up the existing page and ensure that it now shows fresh content — this is now complete.

I’m still in Canada attending LabourTech where I participated yesterday in a session on podcasting and was inspired to consider doing this again.

Stay tuned.

We’re liaising very closely with the international trade union movement on this one, and partner organizations like Amnesty International.  In fact, we had an hour-long conference call today to discuss.

The campaign is rapidly approaching 4,000 messages sent, and is now working in nine languages — including simplified and traditional Chinese, Farsi, Italian, Norwegian, Dutch, Russian, French and English. We have a partial translation into German.  Mailings have gone out in English, French, Norwegian, Russian and Italian so far.

Farzad Kamangar.

We learned about this yesterday evening (Sunday) and I want to use this page to update you on what we have done.

As you may recall, back in November 2008 we launched an online campaign appealing to the Iranian president to not execute this teacher trade unionist.  As we wrote then, “Kamangar, aged 33, was sentenced to death by the Iranian Revolutionary Court on 25 February 2008 after a trial which took place in secret, lasted only minutes, and failed to meet Iranian and international standards of fairness. His lawyer, Kahlil Bahramian, said: ‘Nothing in Kamangar’s judicial files and records demonstrates any links to the charges brought against him.’ Indeed, Kamangar was initially cleared of all charges during the investigation process. Education International, the International Trade Union Confederation, the International Transport Workers Federation, Amnesty International and LabourStart are appealing to the Iranian authorities to commute the death sentence and ensure his case is reviewed fairly.”

But he and several others have now been hanged.

• Sunday: Wrote to key players in the ITUC, TUC, Amnesty and elsewhere and exchanged emails with a number of them  about protests at Iranian embassies, etc.
• Monday: Added a large number of news stories, including one top story, to LabourStart today.
• Monday: Sent out a tweet, updated Facebook status and the wire on UnionBook with the news.
• Monday: Sent a reminder to the key players (see above) that LabourStart is ready and willing to launch an online campaign.
• Tuesday: Still no online campaign launched by ITUC, EI or Amnesty.  I write to all the relevant players yet again suggesting that one of them take responsibility to give LabourStart the details we need to launch an online campaign today.  The ITF and the British TUC strongly support this, but we’re waiting for the others.
• Tuesday: Our campaign goes live at 16:04 London time.  Publicity includes a mailing to our Facebook group (over 3,000 members), to the English language mailing list (over 55,000), and via Twitter, UnionBook, etc.  Our volunteer translators in a dozen languages are working on it…
• Tuesday: This may be a new record.  French campaign went live at 16:58, 54 minutes after the English one.
• Tuesday: After one hour, 114 messages sent.

Here is the video and here is the text of my notes in English. (The Turkish language version is here.)

Networked union communications: The LabourStart experience

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Now online, here.