Inside LabourStart

I spent much of the last two weeks travelling — to Istanbul, Geneva and Brussels — so this will have to be a relatively short report as I have much to catch up on.  Apologies if you’re waiting for an answer to an email — I’m struggling to catch up on that.

Campaigns: We launched new ones for Fiji (26 January) and Aeroflot (17 January). The latter, with just under 12,000 messages sent, is our largest current campaign.

Mailing lists: These continue to grow quite well.  The English list now stands at 85,419; the French list is up to 7,215.  The German list is poised to replace the Italian one as our fourth largest list, as it’s now up to 4,072, just 75 fewer than the Italian one.  That German list was around 2,500 a year ago, so it’s grown spectacularly. We’re migrating most of the lists back to MailChimp due to continuing software issues with Sendy.

Berlin 2014: We have 316 people signed up now (this includes some duplicates).  The organizing committee continues to meet and a lot of progress has been made, including on fundraising.  I continue with monthly mailings to all those who signed up — a mailing went out today.  We’ll be holding the meeting for UK participants on 20 February at the TUC.

Books: We have all the content for the next book (Dan Gallin) and I met with Dan in Geneva in order to discuss and to pick up some photos of him.  Andy has finished a translation of our second book (the global labour movement) into French.  Our fifth book, which we could publish in June, would be a collection of papers and speeches from our Berlin conference.

Turkey: I wrote a number of articles about the KESK trial I attended last week.  I’ll publicize these later today from my personal blog.