May
29
2014
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Update on LabourStart books

The Dan Gallin book is available on Amazon’s Canada site, but with a wait time of 3-5 weeks.  I’ve written to CreateSpace to raise this issue with them.  Meanwhile, I did a mailing to 12,000 Canadians today to tell them that they could order the book there — and also via Amazon Canada, on Kindle as well.

Our next book, Global Crisis, Global Solidarity, is beginning to take shape.  We will be asking all those who made presentations at our conference in Berlin to submit their texts, then we’ll make a selection, edit them and publish.  My target is to get a book ready by the end of August.

I’ve done an inventory of book sales since we began about 18 months ago.  We’ve sold 2,799 books so far.  Here are the totals for all, including Kindle sales:

  • Campaigning Online and Winning – 1,136
  • The Global Labour Movement – 823
  • Firefox OS for Activists – 390
  • Solidarity – Dan Gallin – 276
  • Campaigning – French – 97
  • Global labour – French – 77
Written by admin in: Publications |
May
28
2014
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The month in review – 25 April – 28 May

lsberlinpanel

Conference:

The most important thing that happened this month was, of course, the LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference that took place last weekend in Berlin.  We’re preparing a report on that right now, so nothing further to say here.

Books:

We published our 6th book — Solidarity, the Selected Essays of Dan Gallin. Sales are approaching 300 copies after little more than two weeks. A Kindle edition will go live later this week.

Work has already begun on our next book — Global Crisis, Global Solidarity — a collection of articles and speeches from our conference.

Campaigns:

We launched four campaigns in the last month:

  • Germany: Solidarity with strikers at Autogrill – now closed
  • Philippines: Stop union-busting at NXP Semiconductors – still active
  • Indonesia: Support strikers at one of the world’s largest paper mills – still active
  • Turkey: For the right to celebrate May Day in Taksim Square – now closed

There is now a live running total showing for active campaigns — there is no need to do anything to show this.

The mycampaigns.cgi script — which is what we link to at the bottom of our mass mailings in English — was broken, but has now been fixed. It’s an important way to encourage people to support our other campaigns.

Finally, the display of news stories on campaign pages has also now been fixed.

Office:

As we anticipate the closure of the Lee Valley Technopark, we are currently looking for new, inexpensive offices in London.

Labour News Network:

This has now been revived. See here for details.

Publicity:

We have a new and growing list of 239 media contacts and have been doing regular mailings to them. We mailed 6 times to them in the last month. Every campaign launch now includes a press release from us.

Before the Berlin conference we printed out full-colour flyers advertising LabourStart in English, German and Russian. These were distributed at May Day events in London and Berlin, and many copies were taken away from our Berlin conference.  We also printed and distributed widely postcards advertising Dan Gallin’s new book.

We had stalls displaying our books and other publications at the 3rd World Congress of the International Trade Union Confederation in Berlin earlier this month, at the DGB (German national trade union centre) congress, and at May Day in Berlin.

Written by admin in: 2014 conference,Campaigns,Publications |
May
15
2014
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What our Berlin conference is about – in 500 words

I was asked recently to do a 500 word piece for the British website Union News about our Berlin conference.

Here is the result — it shows you my thinking about what our Global Solidarity Conference is all about:

http://union-news.co.uk/2014/05/confronting-difficult-challenges-facing-international-labour-movement/

Written by admin in: 2014 conference |
May
15
2014
1

We come to the rescue of Turkish unions – and revive an important part of LabourStart

lnnI had an email message yesterday from our comrades in Turkey reporting on the deaths of hundreds of miners in Soma, which they posted to their union website in English.  I immediately made it a top global labour news story on LabourStart — and then learned from them that their website had been hacked and their statement was no longer available.

With a general strike looming in Turkey, I asked them to send me the text of their statement — and then I built (from scratch) a new version of our Labour News Network which you can see here:

http://labournewsnetwork.wordpress.com/

This allowed our readers around the world to see the Turkish unions’ statement, even though their own website was down.

The Labour News Network is something we tried some years back as a way to offer unions a way to post content to LabourStart even if they have no website.  It could be particularly useful for reports from the field — e.g., in future worker-correspondents could post reports, including photos and videos, directly from the field.

This is something we can discuss in Berlin and afterwards …

Written by admin in: Labour News Network |
May
12
2014
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Our campaigns are down – we know and are working on it

Update: Our campaigns are back online.


Our domain name for campaigns (labourstartcampaigns.net) seems to have expired, causing an error message when anyone or anything tries to access our campaigns.  I’ve reported this to the company which hosts the site and which is responsible for the domain.  Fingers crossed, this will be sorted shortly.  Meanwhile, I’m having to answer all the emails coming in reporting this …  Very bad timing!

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
May
10
2014
0

LabourStart’s 4th, and most ambitious, book is published

I am very pleased to announce that today, LabourStart has published our fourth book — Solidarity: Selected Essays by Dan Gallin.  

These essays span a period of nearly six decades and cover a very wide range of subjects.

The book is 262 pages long and is selling from CreateSpace for just $11.99.

It will soon be available from Amazon and other websites around the world.

A Kindle edition will also become available in the next few days.

We have shipped hundreds of copies to Berlin where we will sell them at both the ITUC World Congress and LabourStart’s own Global Solidarity Conference which opens in less than two weeks.

Gallin himself will attend that event and we’ll hold a book launch there.

More details soon.

Written by admin in: Publications |
May
09
2014
0

New campaign launched to protest union-busting in the Philippines

2298This campaign, which came to us from IndustriALL and the local union the Philippines, is going live today.

Please do what you can to spread the word.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
May
02
2014
0

Another new campaign: Indonesian paper workers

2285

This just launched this afternoon: http://www.labourstartcampaigns.net/show_campaign.cgi?c=2285

There have been some issues with the campaign counter, and this caused a delay of an hour or two in launching the campaign, as well as taking our campaigns offline for several minutes.  All campaigns should now be online but there are still issues with the counter.  (I’ll explain when it’s all fixed.)

 

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
May
02
2014
1

LabourStart in Numbers – April 2014

My comments this time appear below, at appropriate points in the long lists of numbers.

Mailing lists [with 200 or more subscribers]

The most spectacular gain this month has been to our German mailing list — which grew by 850 subscribers net. This is substantially greater than the total growth for all other lists combined. At this rate, German will become our third largest list sometime this month.  A year ago, this list had just over 2,000 subscribers.

English: 85,670 [85,432] +238
French: 7,801 [7,707] +94
Spanish: 5,131 [5,106] +25
German: 5,069 [4,219] +850
Italian: 4,115 [4,110] +5
Turkish: 3,440 [3,253] +187
Norwegian: 2,878 [2,907]
Russian: 2,524 [2,525]
Korean: 2,122 [2,122]
Dutch: 1,349 [1,391]
Chinese: 1,073 [1,073]
Finnish: 609 [624]
Japanese: 494 [494]
Arabic: 390 [381] +9
Portuguese: 351 [338] +13
Polish: 269 [269]
Indonesian: 265 [262] +3
Tagalog: 254 [254]
Hebrew: 243 [250]
Farsi: 242 [242]

Social networks

Twitter followers

The big news here is the launch of our LabourStart Indonesia twitter feed — an initiative by our new correspondent, Pete Moss, who covers Indonesian news.  And the main English Twitter feed continues to grow at a healthy pace, and is just under 12,000 followers.  (The ITUC has 5,407 followers; the ILO has 29,885 — we’re in the middle.)

English: 11,995 [11,816]
Canada English: 3,067 [2,957]
Canada French: 432 [416]
French: 209 [205]
USA: 252 [209]
Spanish: 66 [67]
German: 48 [45]
Indonesia: 26 [new]
Japanese: 23 [23]
Russian: 17 [16]
Portuguese: 7 [7]

Facebook

What’s interesting here is that 3 times as many people joined our Group than liked our Page in English this month. There’s obviously a dynamic to Group growth that our page on Facebook is missing. It’s very important therefore to always post new campaigns, etc to both the Page and the Group.

Like LabourStart.org page (English): 8,633 [8,546]
Members of LabourStart group: 7,511 [7,268]
Like LabourStart page (French): 418 [409]
Like LabourStart page (German): 315 [301]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 134 [131]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 105 [105]

UnionBook

Now really stagnant, the question is — do we spin this off somehow? Maybe someone could be persuaded to buy it from us?

Members: 5,760 [5,750]

LinkedIn

LabourStart group: 1,625 [1,605]

Flickr

A small gain this month as we asked our worker-photographers to submit May Day photos and join the group. Still, when you email 90,000+ people and that leads to a gain of just 26, it’s not that impressive.  (Our LinkedIn group, which we do absolutely nothing to promote, grew by  nearly as much.)

Union group on Flickr: 774 [748]

Website

Correspondents: 703 [699]

Website traffic

LabourStart.org (1&1 statistics)

Total visits: 638,835 [635,661]

LabourStart.org (Clicky)

Total visitors: 40,845 [40,645]

Where they come from:

Sweden continues to bring us hundreds of visitors every month — even though we still don’t have a proper news page or active correspondents in that language. Something to work on.  The other popular news pages here (English, German, Norwegian, French and Indonesian) are all updated regularly.

USA – 9,419 [8,525]
Canada – 7,245 [8,140]
UK – 5,478 [4,809]
Australia – 2,670 [2,618]
Germany – 1,671 [1,526]
Norway – 1,562 [2,132]
France – 871 [820]
Sweden – 784 [888]
Indonesia – 760 [1,252]
Belgium — 718 [–]

Their operating systems:

Windows – 68.9% [68.2%]
Mobile – 13.8% [15.6%] (iOS – 7.2% [7.3%]; Android – 4.7% [5.6%])
Mac – 15.4% [14.8%]
Linux – 1.9% [1.4%]

LabourStartCampaigns.net (Clicky)

Total visitors: 33,523 [29,094]

Where they come from:

Good to see Turkey back in the top 5, no doubt due to our having just launched two campaigns relating to Turkey. Note also huge gains in German traffic to our campaigns, up six-fold in two months.  Also note increased traffic for every single one of our top ten languages.

Canada – 4,980 [6,464]
UK – 4,679 [3,965]
USA – 4,343 [4,087]
Germany – 3,292 [1,236]
Turkey — 1,805 [–]
Australia – 1,450 [1,349]
France – 1,224 [1,152]
Belgium – 1,186 [1,030]
Spain – 1,153 [1,038]
Italy – 884 [750]

Their operating systems:

Nearly one in five people who support our online campaigns now do so using a smartphone or tablet — watch this number grow month on month.

Windows – 68.5% [68.4%]
Mobile – 18.8% [18.6%] (iOS – 9.8% [10.1%]; Android – 7.7% [6.9%])
Mac – 10.6% [11.1%]
Linux – 2.1% [1.8%]

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