Aug
18
2015
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The last 16 days at LabourStart

Campaigns:

We closed our Hungarian campaign after three months. We also closed our Iran May Day campaign, noting that all the jailed trade unionists we mentioned have now been released.

We publicized on social media a USW campaign supporting striking steelworkers, an IndustriALL campaign and an ITF campaign supporting workers at the port of Beirut.

We answered a request for help from a farm workers union in Honduras; we may launch a campaign on this.

We proposed launching a campaign in support of striking workers in the National Gallery in London to their union and PSI.

We publicized Unite the Union’s campaign targetting Pizza Express (UK) with a dedicated mailing to our UK list, and publicity on our news pages and on social media – on our initiative.

We did a dedicated mailing to our Australian list to support the AMWU’s Asbestos campaign – at their request.

I will be attending the FES conference on global labour campaigning in October in Berlin.

I began work on the code for our campaign page to compel users to enter a country and email address (for some reason this no longer works and some have made submissions with this field blank).

Mailing list:

We added 89 new subscribers so far this month.

Our Swedish list is now considerably larger as we’ve migrated hundreds of Swedes who were on our English list – back in the days when we didn’t regularly campaign in Swedish. It has grown from 387 in early July to 1,245 today. (The Norwegian list remains considerably larger at 2,763.)

News:

We’re attempting to revive the Turkish home page; got one existing correspondent to commit to working on this.

We made a special effort to give comprehensive coverage of the London Underground strikes earlier this month, and promoted that coverage on social media.

Books:

We’re slowly reviving our partnership with unionized bookshop Powells.com. See our home page in English – with more to come.

Other:

We removed an old link (very prominent) from the top of our Working Women’s News page.

We contacted UNI about an application for membership from a Palestinian postal workers union.

Written by admin in: Campaigns,Mailing list,News database |
Aug
02
2015
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A quiet start to August

Our Turkey campaign (SF Leather/Mulberry) with well over 9,000 messages sent, is now our third largest current campaign, having displaced the Malaysia forestry workers’ campaign.  We’ve finally seen an increase in the number of supporters from Turkey itself, with 299 supporting the Turkish-language version of the campaign and another 120 people from Turkey supporting the English version.

In the next five days I expect to close two campaigns launched in early May — in support of workers in Hungary and Iran.  Both campaigns attracted fewer than 7,000 supporters each, while all the campaigns since then have been considerably larger.  Our current Iran campaign, for example, is 78% larger than the one we launched in May.

As a result of these campaigns, our mailing lists continue to grow. I just added 195 new supporters to our lists, with 144 of them going to the English list.

We publicized the IUF’s latest campaign (hotel workers in Myanmar) both through our Facebook page and group, and in a mass mailing.  Following our mailing, the number of supporters for that campaign has nearly doubled.

There had been a problem when we posted a link to one of our country news pages (e.g., Canada) on Facebook.  We had no control over the image that was shown, nor was the text particularly suitable.  These have now been fixed.

We’ve been approached by the Palestinian postal workers union who are asking for our help in getting connected internationally.  I’ve passed this on to UNI and we’ll explore helping them make links directly with postal workers unions in different countries.

Written by admin in: Campaigns,Mailing list,Social networks |

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