Inside LabourStart

Indonesia campaign: We launched a campaign in support of Indonesian dockworkers together with the ITF. Initially take-up was quite slow, but the campaign is now up to speed and growing quickly. For the first time in many months, I include in the mailing a link to show readers which campaigns they have not yet supported. This should lead to more signatories to the existing campaigns, none of which have broken through the 10,000 barrier yet.

Canada campaign: We launched a campaign at the request of a group of unions at Toronto’s Pearson airport. At the moment this is a Canada-only campaign, but we may globalise in the next few days.

Egypt campaign: We did a followup mailing today to the more than 70,000 people who didn’t open the previous message; this is now standard operating procedure for us for all campaigns a week or so after we launch them. It would be useful to do something similar for the non-English campaigns as well, particularly for our larger lists.

Colombia campaign: As with Egypt, a mailing went out last week to the people on the English list who don’t seem to have opened the earlier message. This added about 1,200 new supporters to the campaign.

Cambodia campaign: This is our largest current campaign — by far — with over 8,200 messages sent. It appears in an unprecedented 18 languages. We are due to close it in about three weeks — but it would be great to see if we could raise the numbers here to 10,000 in the remaining days.

Mailing lists: Thanks to our newest campaigns we added 538 new subscribers to the lists. We had a problem with the Indonesian list, which was boosted by some 6,000 new subscribers earlier this year. It seems that many of these may not be valid addresses, no doubt added by enthusiastic supporters, and MailChimp is demanding that these addresses all be re-certified.

Outgoing mail: As we are now sending most messages directly from the 1&1 server, we’ve run into the problem that some spam blockers reject these messages. I’ve made a formal support request to 1&1 to sort this out.

Books: Work has begun on a second volume of Dan Gallin’s writings. We still need to sort out payments from Amazon and its CreateSpace subsidiary which remain problematic.