Apr
28
2018
0

Toward £5,000 – our annual fundraising campaign gets off to a good start

Fundraising: We’ve taken in just under £4,400 (including one substantial donation by a global union federation), and in the next few hours expect to take in more as we’ve just done a followup mailing to our English list. People have been extremely generous and we really appreciate the great response. Translations of the appeal have gone out to ten of our mailing lists — thanks to our volunteer translators in Italian, Tagalog, Spanish, Turkish, Hungarian, Portuguese, Czech, Japanese, and Thai. With luck, we will be over £5,000 by the end of the day today.

Mailing lists: Despite having no new campaigns for some time, we added 98 new subscribers this week to our mailing lists (mostly Arabic, but some for our English, Russian, Hebrew and Japanese lists too).

Georgia: Eric Lee was in Tbilisi most of last week, and was invited by the Georgian Trade Union Confederation to meet its younger activists, including those responsible for social media. One of them was already a LabourStart correspondent. The meeting lasted for more than an hour, and focussed on news, campaigns, and our global solidarity conferences, and was very productive. In addition, we met with a representative a smaller, independent union and the Solidarity Center as well.

Iran: Our campaign in support of jailed teacher trade unionist Esmail Abdi has now been running for more than three months. We’ve asked the Education International if it’s now time to suspend the campaign. If we do that, we’re down to just one live campaign (Turkey).

Kazakhstan: In November last year we were approached by the Norwegian union behind the Arthur Svensson International Prize for Trade Union Rights (which LabourStart was awarded in 2016) and were asked to nominate a union deserving of the award. After a consultation among members of our executive, we recommended that the brave independent trade unionists of Kazakhstan be awarded the prize this year. We were delighted to learn this week that our suggestion was accepted and our friends in Kazakhstan will receive this vital recognition — and financial support.

Panama: We’ve been approached by a global union federation to launch a campaign in support of workers in Panama and we hope to have something live in a day or two.

Philippines: We sign up a new correspondent from the KMU union.

Thailand: We did our first mailing to our Thai language mailing list in four years, and another today as we renew our connection the labour movement in this country.

Apr
19
2018
1

It’s that time of year again: LabourStart launches its annual appeal for funds

Annual fundraising appeal: Every year around May Day we do our appeal to readers for support. This year, we’re highlighting the fact that it’s LabourStart’s 20th anniversary.

The appeal went out to the English list on Tuesday, 17.4, and was followed by mailings to our lists in Portuguese, Hungarian, Spanish, Tagalog and Turkish. We hope for translations soon to other languages. We also posted the full text today on Facebook and a shortened version on Twitter.

The initial result after 48 hours is that we’ve raised $2,583.15 (£1,820). Last year we took in £8,000 in the first 8 days of our appeal, so we’ll need to work hard to match that. We have also begun circulating an appeal to our major global union backers and to unions in Canada.

Campaigns: We are now down to just two live campaigns. If you have any thoughts about campaigns we should be launching, please do get in touch. It is particularly important to find campaigns with partners who can play a role in promoting the campaign and bringing in new supporters.

Algeria: We closed our campaign at the request of our union partners, but just days later PSI launched what seems to be quite a similar effort using change.org as its platform. After two days online, it has collected 84 supporters. PSI was one of the four partners on the previous LabourStart campaign, which closed with over 10,000 supporters.

Brazil: We’re waiting to hear from our global union partners; we have offered LabourStart as a platform in the fight to free Lula.

Georgia: At the request of the GTUC, we closed the campaign to change the labour law. We’ve confirmed meetings with the trade union leaders, including youth leaders, during Eric Lee’s visit to Georgia next week.

Turkey: We posted reminders about this important campaign on social media this week; our numbers here have stalled at 7,795, but this week a Russian language version went live, with a mailing.

Written by admin in: Campaigns,Fund-raising |
Apr
09
2018
0

A busy week: Updates for Algeria, Brazil, Georgia, Iran, North America, Turkey, Ukraine, UK, and the USA

Our stall at the Labor Notes conference in Chicago this weekend.

Algeria: Our campaign in support of the independent energy workers union has been extended by a month at the request of the global union federations. It has reached 9,925 messages sent, making it the largest currently-running LabourStart campaign. I encourage all of you to help us get that number up past the 10,000 mark in the next few days.

Brazil: We collected and publicised widely the many statements by international unions condemning the arrest of former president Lula.

Georgia: Three Georgian news stories this week got special attention on LabourStart and wide promotion by us on social media – the mining disaster in Tkibuli in which six workers died, a hunger strike by port workers in Batumi, and the court decision in support of Rustavi Azot workers, who were the subject of a recent LabourStart campaign. Our 8-week old campaign supporting the Georgian unions’ call for a new labour law is up to 6,070 supporters. Eric will be travelling to Georgia in another 13 days and will meet with trade union leaders then.

Global: We continued doing weekly promotions on social media aimed at attracting new, individual subscriptions to the English mailing list. We also began preparing for our annual fundraising appeals, both to individuals and to major union donors.

Iran: Our campaign demanding the release of Esmail Abdi, which is getting close to the 3-month mark, has now reached 8,356 messages sent. This is the most recent of several campaigns we’ve run demanding his freedom, and is our second most popular current campaign.

North America: We had a strong presence at the Labor Notes conference in Chicago organised and led by Derek, who drove from Ontario. We also promoted this effort in a mass mailing to our US and Canadian lists, and with a dedicated website. We had a fully kitted-out stall, distributed flyers, sold books, and signed up new supporters.

Turkey: We signed up a new volunteer correspondent, who works for a well-regarded project called Solidarity TV. Meanwhile, our current campaign targetting Roy Robson is up to 7,670 supporters and is running in 16 languages.

UK: We designed and printed 1,000 full-colour leaflets for distribution at upcoming events, including this week’s Unions 21 conference in London, with a link to a dedicated website very similar to the one we did for Labor Notes – this will be template for other ‘welcome to LabourStart’ websites as needed.

Ukraine: We responded to an appeal by metal workers, urging them to get in touch with IndustriALL.

USA: At the request of a union webmaster in Michigan, we finally completed the creation of RSS news feeds for all 50 US states, updated automatically every 30 minutes.

Apr
02
2018
0

Catching up after nearly a month …

Winners of the Ron Todd Foundation awards in London last month.

First of all, apologies for the delay in this update. I was travelling for two weeks in mid March and am just now catching up.

Campaigns:
We’ve been asked to keep our Algeria campaign, which has now been running for more than three months, live for a bit longer, and have done so. In the last five days, we’ve added only 2 new supporters. We need 77 more supporters to bring the total up to 10,000.
We received a campaign request from one of the global union federations, but they’ve not followed up yet.
We also suggested a campaign to a national trade union centre and are currently discussing it with them.
We launched our first campaign in years in the Thai language, with a mailing coming soon as well.

Conferences:
We’ll have a strong presence at the upcoming Labor Notes conference in Chicago, and will leaflet the Unions 21 conference in London later this month.
We were also invited to speak at a British trade union event in June, but there’s a scheduling conflict.

News:
We fixed a problem with country names on the Ukrainian page.
If the language you work with is still showing English names of countries and you can help with translations, let us know.

Mailings:
We sent out a mailing to the entire English list about the West Virginia teachers’s strike — the second in our series of “explainers”.
Our mailing lists grew by 427 in the last month; there were large numbers of new subscribers to our Turkish and Arabic lists this time.

Women workers:
We now have the women workers page working in all languages. If you’re willing to help, please let me know and you’ll be sent a short text to translate.
We wrote to all correspondents in the run-up to International Women’s Day urging them to post stories and tag them correctly.

Awards:
On 10 March we received the “socialism of the heart” award from the Ron Todd Foundation in London.  Other winners included the McDonald’s workers who held the first strike at the restaurant chain in the UK.

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