Inside LabourStart

This is huge – I don’t have to explain why.  Please do what you can to help.

It’s great that so many LabourStart campaigns these days get 5,000 messages or more sent.  But there’s a big gap between what happens to our campaigns in certain key European languages (English, French, Spanish, Norwegian and Italian) and all the rest.

And in some cases, we have campaigns running that don’t have a single supporter.

I’ll be writing to our translators today to try to figure out with them what we can do — because there’s no point in translating campaigns that no one knows about.

Here are the current campaigns with zero (0) supporters – the number in brackets is the size of our mailing list for that language:

• Chinese (simplified) [357]: Colombia,
• Farsi [188]: Iraq, Turkey, Algeria
• Hebrew [153]: Colombia,
• Korean [93]: Bahrain,
• Vietnamese [12]: UK, Iraq, Algeria

Note that mailings did not go out in most cases to the lists.

Any correspondents with any suggestions about how to deal with the issue are invited to post comments below.

Some of the things I’ve been working on for the last week:

Campaigns:

• Closed two campaigns (Kamal Abbas – Egypt, Abdolreza Ghanbari – Iran) without clear results yet.  Both cases continue.  The Ghanbari campaign set a new standard for us, and with over 17,000 messages sent it was our biggest campaign ever.  As Derek Blackadder points out in the comments, this means our next goal has to be 20,000.
• We also launched new campaigns this week in support of oil workers in Egypt and public sector workers in Algeria; both campaigns have gotten off to a slow start.
• We expect new campaigns to be launched shortly in support of workers in Korea, Kenya and possibly Turkey and Spain.
• The campaign counter is now fixed, though not yet fully automated (we’re unable to use ‘cron’ on the new server, for those of you who understand these things.)  I also tweaked a few more things the resulted from the move to our new campaigns server, such as ensuring that ‘ActNOW’ links that appear next to news stories point directly to the new site.  I fixed the campaigns script so you should no longer be able to choose ‘Select your country’ as your country (as many people have done).

Mailing lists: We are very close to 100,000 names.  When we cross this threshold, we’ll need to raise an additional £1,600 a year.  We’re going to attempt to grow the Danish and Swedish lists, and to find volunteer translators to help with mailings to these lists and campaigns.  (This is currently covered by Espen who does it in Norwegian, but it would be better to have versions in all three Scandinavian languages.)

ILO: We’ve gotten no further news from the ITUC and GUFs about the employer attempt to block discussion of workers’ rights at this year’s International Labour Conference. We have told all that we’re ready and willing to do an online campaign on a moment’s notice.

Writing: I had articles published this week in both Solidarity and the Morning Star about the case of US politician John Edwards.

Office: I’ve begun looking for an office for LabourStart as I will be moving house by late September and will no longer be able to work from home.  At the moment we’re budgetting about £600 per month (£7,200 a year), which will either get us a very small office or possibly a studio apartment.

Intern: I looked into what it would cost to hire an intern at the London Living Wage; I think this and an office are the next two steps toward professionalizing LabourStart even more and expanding our capacity.  At £8.30 per hour, and calculating a 35 hour week, that would be an additional £15,100 per year we’d need to raise.

Donations: We received £1,100 in the last week from two British unions (CWU – £1,000; Napo – £100), £126 from the OECTA in Canada and a number of individual donors (£222).

We are now able to show totals for a campaign in all languages again – this was a considerable task on the new server, but it’s now working fine. The totals for our current campaigns in all languages are as follows:

• 8,508 Bahrain: Free jailed trade union leader Mahdi ‘Issa Mahdi Abu Dheeb
• 6,535 Colombia: End harassment of trade unionists
• 5,541 UK: First employer lock-out in over 50 years
• 4,612 Turkey: New law aims to ban strikes in aviation sector
• 4,397 Mexico: Human rights defender kidnapped and tortured
• 4,187 Thailand: Free Somyot
• 2,379 Iraq: End harassment of oil union activists
• 2,079 Algeria: Union leaders on hunger strike since 6 May

Note that a number of campaigns which have been running for some time now are struggling to get past the 5,000 mark (e.g., Thailand and Mexico). These campaigns are considerably smaller than the ones we have run recently. The Turkey, Iraq and Algeria campaigns are all quite new.

Our campaign to stop the execution of Iranian teacher trade unionist Abdolreza Ghanbari has now closed after three months.

With 17,214 messages sent to Iran, it was the largest campaign we have ever waged.

We’ve asked the Education International for a summary of the effect the campaign had.  One of the striking things about this campaign was the very high response in languages other than English.

We had just under 5,000 messages sent in other languages, with the largest groups being French (1,951), Spanish (904), Italian (483), Russian (477) and German (470).

Yes, that’s two campaigns in as many days.  It’s a busy time, and I think some GUFs and others are very focussed on using the International Labour Conference which takes place in Geneva every June.  I guess we should always expect more campaigns at this time of year.  Please make sure you sign up here and spread the word.

News broke last night that employers were going to block all discussion of workers’ rights violations for the first time ever at the International Labour Conference which is held every year in Geneva. Here is what LabourStart is doing about it:

• Last night, news stories were posted to the website – given a top global priority.
• Emails were exchanged with figures in a couple of the global union federations about the possibility of a campaign.
• Links to statements by the ITUC and 3 GUFs were posted by me to UnionBook, and automatically to Twitter and my Facebook status.
• LabourStart’s own Twitter feed gets 4 postings, one after the other, to our 6,437 followers.  Re-tweeting begins immediately, with the British TUC doing the first.
• On Facebook, links were posted to the LabourStart page (4,516 likes).
• I also changed theFacebook banner graphic to now look like this.
• Marc Belanger has produced an excellent broadcast for Radio Labour devoted solely to this – I’m now giving that some extra publicity as well.

More soon …

After three months, I closed down the Kamal Abbas (Egypt) campaign today. The campaign generated 7,448 messages to the Egyptian authorities. I am waiting to hear from our partners (the ITUC) what effect the campaign had on the ground.
Today we also launched a new campaign at the request of the ICEM and the Solidarity Center to support oil workers in Iraq.

It’s now been a week since we moved our campaigns over to the new environmentally-friendly server in Iceland. At the same time, we launched a major new campaign online (in support of Hava-Is, the Turkish aviation workers union). The good news is the dog that didn’t bark in the night: we had a total of zero (0) complaints from people that the link to the campaign did not work. We saw no noticeable freeze-up of the LabourStart site when a campaign went live. And 1&1 Internet will no longer threaten to shut us down every time we have a controversial campaign.

There are still many things that need to be fixed, but a lot of them were fixed this week. Most of the home pages now show current lists of all campaigns. Campaigns are showing totals of supporters (though this has to be better automated, and we should return to showing the totals for all languages). Latest news about the campaigns is still not working on the campaign page — though the ActNOW link is showing on the news pages. So, still some work to be done here.

We’ll be launching a new campaign today in support of oil workers in Iraq and have additional campaigns in the pipeline form Algeria, Korea and Kenya.

We also promoted a couple of campaigns (Thailand, Indonesia) which were not hosted on LabourStart; the Indonesian one resulted in a swift victory.

I had articles published in In These Times (USA), Our Times (Canada) and Tribune (UK) about the IUF’s recent “We are the 53 campaign” which won a sudden and very important victory last week. I was also interviewed for a new union solidarity initiative in North West England, for their newsletter.

Sydney conference: Andrew Casey was in London last week, so we had the chance to catch up and plan things. Andrew’s now using Basecamp, which is where we’re putting all the documents, discussion and so on regarding the conference. At the moment, things look good.

Headline news –

• Turkish list grows by nearly 50% following the campaign in support of aviation workers union Hava-Is
• All mailing lists now just a month away from breaking through the 100,000 barrier (only 2,462 to go)
• Social networks – FB page growing (up 134), group stagnating; 215 more Twitter followers in English; another 144 join UnionBook; LinkedIn group to reach 1,000 by mid-summer – with no effort by us …
• We are a month or two away from having 1,000 correspondents

Mailing lists (greater than 100)

Total for all lists: 97,538 [95,921]

English: 72,726 [71,816]
French: 5,627 [5,387]
Italian: 3,883 [3,877]
Spanish: 3,775 [3,707]
Norwegian: 2,424 [2,433]
German: 2,195 [2,160]
Russian: 1,768 [1,767]
Turkish: 1,161 [801]
Dutch: 736 [734]
Chinese: 357 [357]
Polish: 306 [305]
Portuguese: 246 [246]
Japanese: 205 [ 205]
Farsi 188 [193]
Finnish: 184 [184]
Swedish: 170 [171]
Arabic: 114 [114]
Hebrew 106 [100]
Danish: 106 [106]

And just below the radar:

Korean 93 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,144 [5,100]

Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,775 [4,766]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 4,495 [4,361]
Like LabourStart page (French): 195 [180]

Twitter followers –
English: 6,414 [6,199]

The following numbers will be updated next month, unless someone wants to do this now …
French: 110 [104]
Japanese: 25 [24]
Spanish: 20 [18]
Norwegian: 9 [8]
Italian: 8 [6]
German: 7 [8]
Turkish: 6 [5]
Portuguese: 4 [5]
Russian: 4 [5]
Dutch: 2 [2]

Union group on Flickr: 687 [682]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 890 [842]

Website

Correspondents: 978 [972] – 4 pending

Unique visits to the site this month : 630,351 [590,196]
Peak day: 24,828 – 21.5.12
Page views this month: 1,271,874 [1,289,430]