Inside LabourStart

In the course of updating LabourStart news this morning I stumbled across the incredible story of 3,500 miners in Peru standing up to an American-owned company, blockading roads, confronting police and troops, risking their lives to save their jobs.

And it reminded me of how we gather news, and what we do with it, and why LabourStart’s news-gathering is so different from automated news aggregrators like Google News.

First of all, we can use human intelligence to follow a story by first searching on obvious terms like “strike”, but then focussing on the name of the town (La Oroya) and the company (Doe Run).  And we can tell what’s a credible news source (AFP) and choose to lead with that.  And we know to search immediately to see what the relevant global union federation (ICEM) is doing.  And when we see that it doesn’t have anything yet on its website, we can write to them to point this out.

There are already reports of some injuries in La Oroya, which can lead us to escalate our coverage, to try to get statements from other mining unions, to involve NGOs like Amnesty International, and if needed, to launch an online campaign.

These are just some of things that make our news coverage different because we’re activists and trade unionists with experience and knowledge — something that no press clipping service, however sophisticated, can offer.