Inside LabourStart

Campaigns:

We closed two campaigns last week – the very short Bangladesh campaign which did flood the labour minister with messages and for which the ITUC was grateful, and the Mitsui Vancouver port campaign, which had run for the full three months.  We launched two new campaigns together with the ITF and IndustriALL on India and the Philippines.  Meanwhile, our newly-globalized Canada campaign is well above 9,000 messages sent.

Books:

We’re proceeding at a good clip with the research and writing of our third book this year.  More details at the end of August.

Sales of the first book (campaigns) rose substantially from just 7 sold in July to 32 (including 15 distributed at the Global Labour Institute summer school).  Sales of the second book (global labour movement) rose in July from 11 to 31, also including 15 at the GLI event.

2014 Conferences:

There’s been a draft paper written about the Vancouver (Canada) conference to be held in the fall of 2014.  And a small organizing committee is to meet in August in Berlin to make further plans for the May 2014 conference there.

Fundraising:

Unite the Union, Britain’s largest, made a substantial donation, as pledged.  The total amount donated to LabourStart in July is £3,549.

Internationalization:

We now have campaigns in Hindi — something we’ve been planning for 5 years and now finally realized.

We’ve also decided to focus much more on the languages where we already have substantial mailing lists, but for which we do not always have translations of campaigns and mailings.  The top five language priorities for us are English, French, Spanish, Italian and Turkish.  We’re working to make sure that the top 10 languages, all of which have mailing lists of 1,000 or more, are translated for each campaign, and a mailing done each time.  (The other five languages — also very high priorities for us — are German, Norwegian, Russian, Dutch and Chinese.)

Meetings in the real world:

Edd attended the GLI summer school and wrote up an account (see below).
Eric had a meeting with Elizabeth Tang, head of the International Domestic Workers Network and we discussed many potential areas of cooperation.