Inside LabourStart

First of all, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of you.

This report is the first in 19 days. This is due to my being on vacation for most of that time.

December has not been an especially quiet period for LabourStart.

Our Campaigns:

The Algeria campaign, supported by the IUF, IndustriALL, PSI and the ITUC was launched on 18 December in the run-up to the Christmas holiday, so we expected a lower take-up than usual. Nevertheless, it has already gotten 5,360 supporters, appears in 5 languages, and there are a number of translations waiting to be posted (which we hope to get online later today).

In addition we are in the process of launching a Fiji campaign at the request of the ITF, but are waiting for good target email addresses before launching a full publicity effort.

At the request of the Clean Clothes Campaign, we re-opened the Chung Fai campaign.

Earlier in the month, we discovered problems in our campaigns with long messages which were causing bounces, so we have needed to break these up into shorter paragraphs.

Other organisations’ campaigns:

We helped Amnesty International promote their campaign in support of jailed Iranian trade unionist Esmail Abdi, who has been the focus of more than one LabourStart campaign. That campaign had just 1,648 supporters when we started our publicity, and we helped to double that within one day.

New translators:

We have a new translator for our Dutch campaigns, and will be getting help on Polish and Arabic in the new year.

Mailing lists:

We’ve experienced significant growth this month, adding 632 new addresses to our lists.