Oct
08
2015

Berlin conference on transnational campaigning by unions

I’ve just returned from a three-day visit to Berlin, where I was invited to represent LabourStart (together with Gisela) at a conference on transnational campaigning for trade unions organized by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES).

bwiberlinOn the final day of the conference, the FES sponsored an event to commemorate the World Day for Decent Work, focussing on the various campaigns conducted by the ITUC and global unions on mega sport events, like the football World Cup and the Olympics.  Tos Anonuevo from BWI, the global union for construction workers, gave a major presentation, and one of his slides (pictured to the left) entitled “Generating support, creating alliances” featured LabourStart right in the center.

We were not in the center of the conference, however, but that didn’t mean that LabourStart didn’t come up again and again.  For example:

  • The opening presentation by the ITUC’s Tim Noonan specifically noted LabourStart’s role in supporting the ITUC’s campaigns.
  • IndustriALL’s Adam Lee mentioned how his global union sees LabourStart as one of its partners.
  • A representative of Solidarnosc from Poland came over to say how pleased his union is with our current campaign in support of workers in the port of Gdansk.  When I apologized for the relatively low level of support, he said that it was about 50% larger than they had hoped for.
  • In a workshop on UNI’s campaign targetting Prosegur, the third largest private security company in the world, LabourStart came up several times. Benjamin Parton reported that one of the only two occasions when the company did want to speak with UNI was because of one of our campaigns.  The Spanish-based company, which predominantly works in Latin America, was particularly concerned about the thousands of messages we generated from “First World” countries.

On another note, we were not the only campaigning organization there, and while other groups sometimes have larger mailing lists (and budgets) than we do, it turns out that we can sometimes be considerably more effective.

One such group did a recent campaign for one of the global union federations who were very pleased with the results.  But it turned out that despite having a mailing list 45 times as large as ours, their campaign was only 3 times the size of one of our larger ones.  To put it another way, our mailing list — which is filled with trade unionists who have a genuine interest in labour rights — routinely produces a return rate of 10%, while this organization struggled to get 1% of its supporters to back the union campaign.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |

3 Comments »

  • Thanks for that and to both of you for going. I’ll do a mailing to the Canadians on those campaigns this weekend.

    Comment | October 8, 2015
  • Have we ever sat down with all the GUFS and the ITUC and other major partners, pointed-out the different in our take-up rate versus the bigger but less focused campaigning sites and made a pitch for a concerted effort to build our list? Not through campaigning even, just a simple transfer?

    Comment | October 15, 2015
  • admin

    Short answer: no. But this is something that should be raised from time to time.

    Comment | October 16, 2015

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