Mar
30
2012
1

Victory!

Our campaign “New Zealand: Support locked-out port workers” is being closed after just seven days.

And the reason – well, read this text from the ITF:

The news out of Auckland today is positive with the lockout notice from Ports of Auckland Limited withdrawn so that wharfies can head back to work in the port where they belong.

Following an Employment Court hearing, management has called a halt to the contracting out plans which would have seen 300 workers made redundant and they are set to return to the negotiating table with the Maritime Union of New Zealand.

This is a major victory for Auckland workers and for the trade union community around the world. Your international solidarity has played a huge role in bringing about this positive step forward and on behalf of MUNZ and Auckland wharfies ITF dockers’ section secretary Frank Leys has this message: “This dispute has reached beyond the borders of the docking industry. There’s been action and support from seafarers, aviation workers, truck drivers, railwaystaff. This is about mass casualisation, the contracting out of an entire workforce, and it struck a chord with workers all over the world who are fighting every day to protect their jobs. International solidarity has been shown by union rank and file, the people on the ground who are doing the work which keeps our world moving, they got behind the workers in Auckland and that’s played a huge part in securing this victory. It’s a giant step for the trade union movement, not just in New Zealand, but around the world as well.”

For more details on the decision and reaction from the ITF visit: http://www.itfglobal.org/press-area/index.cfm/pressdetail/7255

It’s also the time to say that although today the battle at Auckland has been won, we will not be able to claim victory in the war until a fair and substantive collective agreement is signed for workers and their job security is guaranteed. Auckland workers may need to call on you again for your support in the future and we have every confidence that you will deliver then just as you have now.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Mar
30
2012
6

Weekly round-up, 26-30.3.12

What I’ve been up to these last five days …

I’ve made serious improvements to the script that shows who is posting news to LabourStart. It now shows the correspondent’s full name and country, and totals for the day and month, making it much more useful I think. And I’ve made this more accessible – but only to correspondents who have logged in, who will see a link to it.

We learn from this that about 91 correspondents have been active in March, and they have collectively posted 4,491 news links to our database — an average of 49 each this month, and an average for all correspondents of nearly 150 news stories per day, every day. At this rate, we’re publishing over 50,000 news stories every year.

Yesterday, I met with Shane Enright, the trade union coordinator for Amnesty International, and we discussed joint work. Today, for example, Shane will be promoting our Iran campaign to the more than 11,000 names on Amnesty’s UK trade union mailing list.

I have begun adding papers submitted by the participants from the Middle East and North Africa to our 2011 conference page. These were sent to us by the Solidarity Center, and are in English, French and Arabic.

I did some initial work on an RSS news feed for Europe at the request of a British trade unionist — but it’s still buggy and needs to be fixed.

I worked on the mycampaigns.cgi script, which shows you which campaigns you’ve signed up and which you’ve missed – on the language editions. There are still character encoding problems which I will fix very soon.

The Hebrew edition of LabourStart needed to be fixed up after years of neglect, so I did such things as add links to all our campaigns in Hebrew, translated the names of countries when we’re displaying news, and made sure that all the text which had been in English (including a link to sign up to the mailing list) is now in Hebrew. I’ve also been posting Hebrew news every day (other correspondents have also posted) and am looking for news in Hebrew that’s not only from Israel — which is not easy to do. (Israeli media are, understandably, focussed almost entirely on domestic and regional news.)

I followed up with the Education International on the Bahrain campaign, which has been running for two months and is considerably less successful (in terms of support) than the Iran campaign. I always do these follow-ups two months after a campaign is launched.

I completed the publicity for the ITF’s New Zealand port lockout campaign which at one point looked like it was heading for 10,000 supporters, but has since slowed down and as of this morning has only 6,834 supporters.

I intensified efforts to continue building our largest campaign ever – the one in support of Abdolreza Ghanbari in Iran — which has now reached 15,883, growth of less than 1,000 in the last week. I hope that the Amnesty mailing today (see above) will make a difference.

I discovered that LabourStart is blocked in Iran, and was curious to see which other sites were blocked — and which were not. See the results here.

Mar
26
2012
0

When the threat of a LabourStart campaign is enough

Well, not really.  We were in the process of creating a campaign in support of locked-out Kenyan flower workers when word reached us that the employer has backed down.  Full details were posted by the union on UnionBook, and they have thanked us for our efforts.  If only all our campaigns worked this way!

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Mar
26
2012
0

LabourStart is blocked in Iran

Probably not a big surprise to anyone, but here’s how we found this out:

Click on the image to test this yourself.

I did a quick check on some other sites.

Blocked: Amnesty International, Justice for Iranian Workers, IASWI (workers-iran.org), Human Rights Watch

Not blocked: ITUC, Global-Unions.org, IUF, UNI Global Union, Education International, ITF

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Mar
26
2012
6

Iran: Ramping up the pressure to stop the execution of Abdolreza Ghanbari

Abdolreza Ghanbari

Abdolreza Ghanbari - could be executed any day now

It’s been nearly three weeks since we launched the campaign to save the life of jailed Iranian teacher trade unionist Abdolreza Ghanbari.

It’s vital that we not let this campaign slip off our radar even as we work on new ones – because this one is literally a matter of life or death.

A number of us have been taking additional steps to ramp up the pressure and grow the campaign in recent days.

Let us know what you’ve done in the comments to this blog post.

Here’s what I did today:

  • Noting that we did mailings to 13 different language lists (sometimes more than once), I saw that the Turkish campaign was live, but no mailing done – so I wrote to four of contacts in Turkey in the hope of getting this out to our list of 800 addresses there.
  • I followed up with the German teachers union which has promoted the campaign, but not in the way I had hoped.
  • I wrote to the American Federation of Teachers – whose international affairs director spoke at the 2010 LabourStart conference in Washington.
  • I followed up with a number of our contacts among the Iranian emigre community, as well as inside Iran, to build support for the Farsi language version of the campaign.
  • I wrote to all those 526 LabourStart correspondents who didn’t open my last message, from 9 days ago, about the campaign.
  • I located Amnesty International’s most recent statement about the case, made it a top LabourStart news story, and promoted it via UnionBook, Facebook, and Twitter as well.
Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Mar
25
2012
1

Weekly roundup, 16.3-25.3

Some of the things I’ve been working on over the last 9 days …

Brussels on Thursday: I already sent out a report to a number of you about my visit on Thursday to Brussels where I met with senior staff at the International Trade Union Confederation, the European Trade Union Confederation and the Education International.

Campaigns – closing: I closed the Fiat campaign, which did very well for us and got us a very large number of new Italian subscribers to our list.  We’ve gotten a report from the union (FIOM) which I’ll share with you.  I then closed down the Kazakhstan campaign (which we launched following the massacre of strikers in December) but have yet to receive a report on its impact.  It’s been something like 6 months now that we’ve consistently run campaigns in support of those strikers, generating thousands of messages.

Campaigns – starting: On Monday, I launched the Colombia campaign at the request of PSI and Unison.   On Friday, at the request of the ITF, we launched a campaign in support of locked-out New Zealand port workers.  On Saturday, I did work on our next campaign – in support of 800 locked out flower workers in Kenya.  Yes, I know — three campaigns in five days puts a strain on everyone, especially our translators.  We need to begin thinking of way to control this — a team of people who reviews campaigns and can tell a global union federation – sorry, no, not now.  I find it hard to do this by myself …

Campaigns – improvements to tracking, etc: I’ve made it easier to see archived and closed campaigns, and have moved the totals for reach active campaign up to the top of the page (right side), as previously we’d need to scroll all the way to the bottom to see these summaries.  This was needed as we started getting campaigns with more than 15,000 messages sent, making it harder to see the whole list and the summaries.  You can see an example of this here.

Coming up in the next few days: Complete setup of Kenya campaign. Publicity for this and the ITF New Zealand campaign.  Review of the Bahrain campaign after two months online.  Complete translations of mycampaign.cgi (which shows people which campaigns they’ve signed up to) into different languages.  Add to 2011 conference website some documents now sent to us by the Solidarity Center.  Create an RSS news feed for Europe, as requested by a British trade union official.  Meet with Amnesty International – on Thursday – to discuss joint actions.  Etc etc.

Written by admin in: 2011 conference,Campaigns |
Mar
23
2012
0

Campaign Participant ‘Sourcing’ – What Have We Learned?

I’ve been tracking my Twitter, FB and mail responses. Mostly anyway.

But even just for the few times I have remembered to tag the links I put out there it has been clear that e-mail is best response-wise, Twitter better than Facebook and FB rather dreadful.

Written by derek in: Campaigns,Uncategorized | Tags: ,
Mar
23
2012
0

New campaigns being launched today

We have to launch two campaigns today – the first has just gone live.  It’s in support of locked-out port workers in Auckland, New Zealand.  Please make sure to sign up and spread the word.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Mar
20
2012
0

First new campaign in nearly 2 weeks – Colombia

With the way things have been going around here lately (such as running 12 campaigns simultaneously), a two-week breather between campaigns is a good thing.  That barely gives us time to complete the translations of the campaign and the mass mailings.  Once again, we’re doing a campaign together with Public Services International focussing on Latin America – this time on Colombia.  I hope that this time, unlike our previous experience, we will get a good response from members of public sector unions around the world.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Mar
19
2012
4

Archived campaigns – once again, we can see the stats

I’ve been able to integrate both the current and archived campaigns into a single page so that now, once again, we’re able to view statistics for the 250 or so campaigns we’ve waged in the last decade.  Click here to see what I mean.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |

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