Inside LabourStart

Campaigns: No new campaigns were added in the last 7 days — but we’ve seen tremendous support for the two most recent ones (Kazakhstan and Korea).

The Korea railway workers campaign is our second largest current campaign with 11,295 supporters – it will take another 3,262 to make it number 1, which is unlikely to happen. Still, we picked up 2,522 new supporters in the last 24 hours (that’s right — more than 100 per hour), so you never know.

Our next new campaign is scheduled for launch in the new year (in support of USW members in Canada at Crown Holdings – will replace the current campaign.)

We’ve been talking with the Georgian Trade Union Confederation (GTUC) about getting our campaigns up in the Georgian language and they’re keen to help.

One new feature of campaigns is I now do a mailing one week after campaign launch to the people who signed up. This is a one-off (they’re not necessarily on our mailing list) and I use it to update them on what’s happening, to thank them, and to encourage them to spread the word (with details on how to do this with Twitter, Facebook, emails, etc). These messages have a VERY high open rate and they are read, so I will do them for all future campaigns.  The next step is to see if we can do this in additional languages.

Mailing lists: I did a full report on the huge growth of our bigger mailing lists — nearly 16,000 new subscribers to the top 10 lists since January. See below for details.

Berlin 2014: The number of registrants has gone up by 26 this week, most of those coming from the UK and Germany. At the moment we have 223 registrants, 49 of them from Germany and 33 from the UK. The registration form is now available in Dutch — as well as English, German, and Russian. Tom and Eric will visit Berlin on 11 January to meet with the organizing committee, which is doing fantastic work on the ground. There’s now an ad with a link to the conference website on all LabourStart home pages in all languages. We now have a way to modify information submitted by registrants. People who live in Berlin and can offer “solidarity housing” now have the option to do so from the registration page. (About half the people who’ve signed up are requesting this, but many of those are people who I do not expect to attend the conference.) We’ve now made some block bookings at a local hotel and hostel — if you’ve not yet booked, please do so soon.