May
21
2013
0

Events – update

From today, all senior correspondents can add events which appear on our front pages.

To do so, when you login you should see this:

addanevent

 

Click on that to add an event.

To see all the events that have been added so far, click here.

This is an early version of the events module.  In future we will make it fully multilingual and will open it to non-senior correspondents as well.  It will also eventually have a better way to modify records — at the moment, if you need to make a change you’ll need to delete and then re-add the event.  You can do this from the page where you add an event — see here:

 

deleteevent

Please do try to add an event and let me know how it goes.  Don’t hesitate to ask if something isn’t clear or if you have any suggestions for improvement.

Written by admin in: Events |
May
17
2013
2

An honest, thoughtful account of one LabourStart campaign — on the ground

I always ask unions to tell us what effect our campaign had on the ground.  I don’t always get answers and when I do, they’re often quite … brief.  But the KMU in the Philippines, which we have supported a number of times with campaigns, has sent us a report on the most recent one and have agreed for me to share it with all of you.  It makes for interesting reading.


LabourStart campaign in the Philippines: Summary

The struggle against the systematic attacks on the Philippine trade-union movement continues. One of the most prominent recent forms of these attacks is the filing of trumped-up charges against four leaders of the Kilusang Mayo Uno.

The campaign activities against this attack include giving radio interviews, sending of petition letters to judges, and holding forum in unions and community organizations. The campaign kicked off with the online petition hosted by Labourstart.

The impacts of the LabourStart campaign:

(1) It helped us spread, locally and abroad, the news about the latest attack on workers’ rights in the Philippines.

(2) Locally, it served as part of the activities calling against trade-union repression.

(3) In teaching workers on how to sign up to Labourstart, we were able to give the union members and the general public an idea about attacks on workers’ rights in different countries. In explaining the Labourstart campaign, we also gave a background on the global financial crisis, how it is affecting workers, and how workers are mounting different protests to counter the attacks.

(4) We were able to teach workers the importance of utilizing and maximizing social media in launching campaigns.

The 4,451 signatures mean a lot of support for the accused KMU leaders and for the rest of KMU. Many workers were surprised to know the number of signatures that can be gathered.

Weaknesses:

We encountered some difficulty in holding the online campaign. At first, we relied on sending text messages to union members and friendly organizations, as well as on forwarding the petition via email. In the Philippines, this yielded just a few signatures, mostly of leaders of unions, federations and workers’ institutions.

We then set-up a workers’ committee to help gather more signatures. The committee set up a sign-up booth in different workers’ forum and actions before Labor Day. We explained what LabourStart is and how to sign-up online. This is a positive initiative given that most workers still don’t have email addresses.

So the weaknesses are: (1) Not knowing union members’ use of the Internet – how frequent, through what sites, etc. (2) Relying on electronic means at first in trying to spread awareness about the petition, and (3) Late attempt to overcome the previous weaknesses by coming out with a manifesto.

We learned that if we are going to hold online campaigns again, these should be coupled with actual legwork and face-to-face information drives.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
May
16
2013
1

When you visit the LabourStart HQ in London …

… if the weather is good (like today), you can join me for a walk along the Lee Valley.  Here’s a sample, just 10 minutes walk from the office:

leevalley

Written by admin in: Uncategorized |
May
16
2013
0
May
15
2013
0

Events!

calendarThis was something we tried many years ago under the name ‘Global Labour Calendar’ – it didn’t work then, but today with our very active country pages, we should now be able to serve the labour movement with an online calendar of events.

You can see the first examples by looking at the upper left column on the Canada and UK pages.

There’s a lot more work to do – especially creating a user-friendly interface so people can add events – but we should have a lot more of this done in the next few days.

Written by admin in: Events |
May
14
2013
0

The week in review – 7.5 – 14.5

Campaigns: The Bangladesh campaign is one of our very largest, with over 14,000 messages sent — we got a big boost from the British TUC which did an image that went viral and brought a lot of attention the campaign. We will probably close this soon as IndustriALL and UNI have made a lot of progress this week.

The Hong Kong campaign closed and we’ve asked about closing the Mexico campaign after three months — waiting to hear from IndustriALL about that one. We asked the RMT in the UK if we could close the “Justice for the 33” campaign and have been asked to continue to run with it for another month or so.

In addition to publicizing our own campaigns, we were asked to do mailings and promote Amnesty International’s new campaign in support of releasing jailed Bahraini teacher Mahdi, which we did. We also did a special promotion on Fiji for the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the ITUC.

On the technical side, we fixed some of the German text, got an Indonesian ActNOW newswire working, and have made more progress on the new campaigns database which will make our translators’ job considerably easier.

News home pages: Edd’s been working on some of the more complex language home pages which have not yet been moved over to the new format (Dutch, Polish); Eric will be completing work on the French version in the next few days. We fixed a lot of things on the country pages this week, including how campaigns appear (now showing the photo from the most recent campaign and horizontal lines to separate them); news stories that appear in the top 10 don’t repeat in the stories below; when a state/province/region appears in the headline (e.g., England), it now appears in a different colour (as it does in the list of stories); there’s now an ad for the new book on all the country pages in English; the “for more info” link now appears again on all stories where there’s something in that field.

Book 2: Sales are going well; we’ve sold 180 copies — 156 of them this week. We’ll begin work on a Kindle edition this week. Matt H. has volunteered to work on a German edition of this (and the previous book).

Berlin/Vancouver 2014: Edd’s been in touch with some German comrades and we’re making slow and steady progress. Derek is talking to comrades in Canada about a global solidarity conference there as well.

Mailing list: We had a problem with the latest version of our Sendy software — it was screwing up character encoding. This was now fixed.

CloudFlare: The adoption of CloudFlare, which we pay to ensure that our site is accessible everywhere at an improved speed, and which will keep us going even if we go offline for a while, has caused some teething pains. One of them was a delay in seeing the new photo of the day, which Derek has been posting. This has now been fixed.

Today in Labour History: I noticed that the word ‘more’ would appear even when there was no more; this has now been fixed. We have a lot more stories in the database now and a big thanks to Andy for translating so many of them into French.

Fund-raising: The ITF has pledged to donate something, and we’re expecting a donation from the RMT as well, which voted at its conference last year to support LabourStart. In addition, we’ve put in requests for grants for specific purposes to two UK-based charities — the Lipman-Miliband Trust and the Edge Fund.

 

May
13
2013
1
May
06
2013
1

The week in review – 30.4 – 6.5

May Day Party: Considering that this was the first time we’ve tried a real-world fundraiser, it has to be considered a success. The party was held on Saturday night at the Bread & Roses pub in Clapham, south London. David Cockroft, the outgoing general secretary of the ITF, spoke, as did Kirill Buketov of the IUF. (Cockroft’s speech was videoed and we’ll make it available when we have it.) In addition, we had speakers from the “3 Cosas” campaign organizing London cleaners and the RMT “Justice for the 33” campaign, and two entertainers — Dave Thorpe and The Ruby Kid. There were about 45 people there, and we raised £300 for LabourStart. Next year, let’s have LabourStart May Day fundraisers in a dozen cities around the world – start planning yours today.

Books 1, 2 and 3: The global labour movement – an introduction has now been published, we have 100 copies here in London, and today we’ll begin publicity. My personal goal is to sell more copies of this than book 1 (Campaigning online and winning) — we’ve distributed about 769 of those, of which 725 are actual sales. Andy has begun work on a French translation already. We already have plans for a third book — selected essays by former IUF general secretary Dan Gallin. One of those essays almost went into Book 2, but we felt it was more suited to a collection of Dan’s writings, which he’s agreed we can publish. His articles have appeared in book form in French and Russian, but not yet English. We’re putting in a request for financial support to do this to the Lipman-Miliband foundation.

Campaigns: We closed the KMU Philippines campaign after more than 3 months online. The Bangladesh campaign is already one of our largest with 10,649 messages sent as of this morning. We’re about to close down the last remaining UK-only campaign for the RMT. I’ve made steady progress on the transition to a MySQL database for campaigns – we can now show campaigns and add new ones, and we can migrate all campaigns from the old system. As I’ve mentioned before, this will not only lead to a more robust and secure system, but it will be MUCH easier for translators to do their work. It’s a big project and should take a couple more weeks to complete, including thorough testing.

LabourStart country pages: We’ve made a lot of improvements to the LabourStart Canada page and have much more work to do on others, such as the UK page.

Today in Labour History: Edd and others are working very hard to ensure that there’s something every day on the main global page and something every month for each of the key countries. This is an ongoing project and every LabourStart correspondent is invited to help out.

May
02
2013
1

LabourStart in Numbers – April 2013

Some highlights:

  • Mailing lists growing quickly (100 or more new subscribers this month) include English, French, and Chinese.
  • Big growth on social networks (100 or more new ones this month) are our Facebook page and group in English and our Twitter feed in English.

The numbers in brackets are for the previous month. Strong gains are highlighted in bold.

Mailing lists

English: 78,105 [76,648]
French: 6,044 [5,868]
Spanish: 4,535 [4,462]
Italian: 3,914 [3,888]
Turkish: 3,208 [3,116]
German: 2,847 [2,798]
Norwegian: 2,390 [2,369]
Russian: 1,922 [1,951]
Dutch: 882 [885]
Chinese: 817 [717]
Finnish: 536 [548]
Polish: 314 [318]
Arabic: 299 [267]
Japanese: 262 [240]
Portuguese: 242 [246]
Tagalog: 228 [205]
Farsi: 213 [207]
Hebrew: 211 [209]
Swedish: 179 [183]
Korean 154 [150]
Danish: 144 [144]
Indonesian: 126 [116]
Czech: 89 [96]

Social networks

Twitter followers –
English: 9,177 [8,881]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 6,596 [6,387]
Members of LabourStart group: 5,102 [4,925]
Like LabourStart page (French): 305 [294]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 102 [96]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 70 [0] – new page launched this month

UnionBook –
Members: 5,507 [5,481]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,272 [1,233]

Union group on Flickr: 721 [720]

Website

Correspondents: 633 [624]

May
01
2013
0

Strong unions and solidarity are what Bangladeshi garment workers need right now

I don’t always post here links to articles I’ve written, but because this one is about a LabourStart campaign and the reaction to it, I thought I’d share it with you.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |

Powered by WordPress | Aeros Theme | TheBuckmaker.com WordPress Themes