Inside LabourStart

• When viewing a campaign now in a language other than English, you’ll see news from that campaign in the correct language  – and in English. This was requested by some of our translators, otherwise nothing was showing in the “latest news” box.  (Thanks, Lennon.)
• The pass-it-on code hadn’t been working on the new server; it has now been fixed. (Thanks, Kirill.)
• The “old” ICEM campaign (from June) has now been re-branded as an IndustriALL campaign.  (Thanks, Alex.)

Campaigns closing: We were able to close down 4 campaigns in this period – Bahrain, Mexico, Colombia and Thailand. None of them, unfortunately, was a complete win for us. And none were record-breakers in terms of the number of supporters. The number of supporters ranged from 5,533 to 8,525.

New campaigns: Kazahkstan and Turkey launched just one day apart.

Upcoming campaigns: We are still waiting to hear from the Korean Metal Workers Union and IndustriALL about a Ssangyong campaign.

Campaign “contract”: We agreed a text that is now shown on the page where unions request campaigns that spells out what we will do and what the union will do. Let’s hope it makes things clearer and easier, and encourages unions to do more to build the campaigns.

Campaign “cookies”: We’re now compliant with the European Union directive on cookies, I think. (See full report below.)

Campaign translations: We’ve sorted out the problem of both Arabic and Turkey in the last week – thanks very much to Erin, Molly, Eyup and Mohamed.

Campaigns – new server: Still tweaking things that don’t work as before. The list of current campaigns now works in languages other than English. There’s a problem with permissions for the file listing email addresses – hopefully to be fixed this week. The “my campaigns” link in mailings should now work for most languages. The good news is that we’re not getting tons of complaints that the server isn’t responding, nor is a campaign launch causing the old LabourStart server (with our news) to freeze up as it sometimes would in the past. And we’re not getting any threats from 1&1 Internet to shut us down. So all in all, a successful transition to our new eco-friendly server in Iceland.

Articles: My article on the launch of IndustriALL has now appeared in Italian on the website of FIOM-CGIL. Another article on the same subject has been accepted for publication by Solidarity in the UK.

FAQ: I reviewed and updated the FAQ page on LabourStart.

Brochure: I’ve gotten details of many graphic designers and we’ll soon get this thing printed. It should help us with fundraising with unions.

Donations: A raffle held at the National Union of Workers Officials’ Conference in Australia raised A$1,000 for us – a wonderful example of grassroots activity that I hope others will follow.

The ICEM (now IndustriALL) has given us permission to close the “Free Somyot” campaign after two months.

Headline news –

• 98,427 subscribers to our lists – we are only days away from reaching 100,000
• Growth of lists – especially English – is very slow, as partner unions fail to generate new supporters and we continue pushing campaigns at the same people month after month
• Twitter – over 500 new followers in the last two months
• Facebook page now only 101 ‘likes’ away from being bigger than Facebook group

Mailing lists (greater than 100)

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

English: 72,889 [72,726]
French: 5,701 [5,627]
Italian: 3,876 [3,883]
Spanish: 3,857 [3,775]
Norwegian: 2,424 [2,433]
German: 2,280 [2,195]
Russian: 1,738 [1,768]
Turkish: 1,280 [1,161]
Dutch: 736 [736]
Chinese: 488 [357]
Polish: 306 [306]
Portuguese: 247 [246]
Japanese: 209 [ 205]
Swedish: 196 [170]
Farsi 190 [188]
Finnish: 184 [184]
Danish: 158 [106]
Hebrew 155 [106]
Arabic: 140 [114]

And just below the radar:

Korean 93 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,190 [5,144]

Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,767 [4,775]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 4,666 [4,495]
Like LabourStart page (French): 201 [195]

Twitter followers –
English: 6,719 [6,414]

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: 693 [687]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 913 [890]

Website

Correspondents: 985 [978]

Unique visits to the site this month : 547,625 [630,351]
Peak day: 23,659 – 13 June
Page views this month: 1,206,879 [1,271,874]