Sep
26
2018
3

10,000 supporters and still growing …

 

Mohamed Habibi.

Our campaign in support of jailed Iranian teacher trade unionist Mohammed Habibi has now broken through the 10,000 barrier and as of this morning, we have 10,258 signed up.

This is largely due to the translation into German which came in this week. The fact that we have reached 10,000 — and it’s been a while since we had a campaign this big — was publicised widely on social media.

In an attempt to boost support for what is clearly a campaign that has captured the imagination of trade unionists, we wrote to our volunteer translators in five major languages in which the campaign has not yet appeared — Dutch, Farsi, Finnish, Swedish, and Korean. The Dutch version was swiftly translated; but our Finnish translator no longer has the time. We haven’t heard back yet from the others.

So we wrote to the 459 Finns on our English language mailing list to ask for volunteers, and 4 people stepped forward. We hope the two active campaigns (Iran, Russia) will appear very soon in Finnish, as our Finnish language mailing list has not been active for seven months — and we have over 600 people on that list.

In other news …

eSwatini (formerly Swaziland): We shared the ITUC statement on anti-union repression widely on social media.

France: With the approval of the ITF, we closed our campaign in support of railway workers last week; the campaign had 7,201 supporters and was online longer than most, for just over 4 months.

Global: We promoted the ITUC story about the October 7 World Day for Decent Work as a top global news story and to social media – but cannot post, for some reason, to our main Facebook page at the moment.

Russia: Our campaign in support of Professor Maxim Balashov continues — it’s one of only two active campaigns at the moment — and currently has 9,307 supporters. With some further pushes from us, this too can be a 10,000 supporter campaign.

Somalia: We’re following up with our contact here, with suggestions how to build a new trade union movement in the country, starting with contacts with global unions.

Donations: We received cheques recently from two branches of a major British trade union. Also, both the Education International and IndustriALL have pledged donations this week.

Mailing lists: We added just 5 new subscribers to our German list this week. We publicised the MailChimp signup form on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, as we do regularly.

Sep
20
2018
0

We’re down to just 3 active campaigns, as XPO campaign closes

Global: We closed the XPO campaign which ran for 3 months; it had 7,522 supporters. We don’t know what effect, if any, our campaign had; we’ve asked the ITF for an update.

Somalia: We met with a Somali trade unionist returning to his country after many years of activism in the Canadian labour movement; he’s asked for our help and we’ve offered to put him in touch with people and organisations that can be helpful.

Turkey: We gave extensive publicity to the IUF’s Cargill campaign on social media. We also gave extensive publicity to the ITUC statement on recent anti-union activity in the country.

Campaigns: We reviewed which translations are missing and followed up with key translators. At least one of our campaigns will rise to more than 10,000 supporters if we can get a German translation done.

Finances: IndustriALL has generously offered to donate again.

Mailing lists: We imported another 36 new subscribers, supporters of our recent campaigns – most of them in English.

Written by admin in: Campaigns,Fund-raising,Mailing list |
Sep
14
2018
1

Major new campaign on Iran launched – and other news for the last 3 weeks …

Campaigns update:

Here is what’s happened to our existing campaigns this month — the number in brackets is the total from 23 days ago:

Russia: Union-busting at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology – 9,099 [9,050] +49
Iran: Free Mohammed Habibi 8,796 [0] +8,796 [new campaign]
XPO: Time to talk about your behaviour – 7,493 [7,406] +87
France: Rail unions fight against privatisation – 7,200 [7,188] +12

At the moment it looks like the Iran campaign will soon become our largest, and with boosts from some new translations and followups, it could exceed 10,000 supporters — the first time in a while that one of our campaigns has done that well.

In other developments in the last three weeks:

Australia: After 3 months, we closed the Exxon Mobil campaign – it had 6,434 supporters. We picked up ten new correspondents from Australia this month – a big welcome to all of you. Our Australian Twitter feed has run into some trouble; we are trying to fix this.

Canada: At the request of unions, we’ve publicised a few union jobs to our mailing list. We also did a dedicated Labour Day mailing.

France: We’re pressing the unions there through the ITF to find out if we can suspend our long-running campaign in support of railway workers.

Iran: We launched a major new campaign at the request of the Education International in support of a jailed teacher trade unionist, Mohammed Habibi. It already appears in 16 languages, but we’re hoping for more. If you can help with translations into any of these 10 languages — Arabic, Dutch, Farsi, Finnish, Georgian, German, Indonesian, Korean, Polish, or Swedish — please get in touch with me [ericlee@labourstart.org].

Korea: UNI gave us permission to close the three-month old campaign in support of Oracle workers.

Norway: At the request of the NNN union, we suspended our campaign.

Switzerland: Eric has been invited to attend a Global Labour Institute event taking place at the end of this month, at the IUF in Geneva.

UK: At the request of the TUC, we posted a job to our mailing list and social media.

USA: We closed the Wendt campaign after three months with the permission of BWI.

Mailing lists: We added 185 new addresses from campaign supporters.

New website design: We held another meeting with our London designers to discuss next steps for our website.

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