Inside LabourStart

August is generally a slow month for the international trade union movement, and this is reflected in the lack of new campaigns. Here is what’s happened to our existing campaigns this month — the number in brackets is the total from 17 days ago. Note very significant gains for the Russian and XPO campaigns.

Russia: Union-busting at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology – 9,050 [8,278] +772
Norway: Sekkingstad and Sund, stop union busting! – 7,449 [7,408] +41
XPO: Time to talk about your behaviour – 7,406 [7,155] +251
Korea: Oracle workers on strike – 7,272 [7,223] +49
France: Rail unions fight against privatisation – 7,188 [7,156] +32
USA: Time for Wendt to negotiate with the union – 6,755 [6,743] +12
Australia: Exxon Mobil – time for a fair deal for your workers – 6,412 [6,377] +35

In other news this month …

Brazil: It seems like we are about to launch a campaign here — stay tuned.

Europe: We boosted coverage of the Ryanair strike both on our news pages and on social media.

France: We asked the ITF for permission to close our French railway workers’ campaign, now running for more than three months. As you can see above, very few new supporters are signing up.

Germany: We promoted a story on social media about the youth section of the trade union federation DGB reiterating their opposition of boycotts of Israel.

Indonesia: We promoted the IUF’s Bali campaign in a mailing to LabourStart’s English list, and throughout social networks.

Iran: We publicised a new story about repression targetting teacher trade unionists.

Israel: We widely publicised a story about a big nurses strike across the country.

Kenya: We promoted a story about a tear gas attack on striking hospital workers on our news page and on social networks.

Romania: We gave extensive publicity to an IFJ story about attacks on journalists.

South Africa: We gave prominence to a story about the AMCU threatening to shut down the platinum mining business.

Sri Lanka: We’ve been approached by a global union federation and are about to launch a campaign targetting an employer in this country.

USA: We promoted widely a Boston Globe story about the increasing use of lockouts by employers. We also promoted the story about unions winning the referendum in Missouri, defeating a “right to work” (for less) law.

Campaigns: We discovered a problem with the code that made some of our pages appear to be security risks for users; now fixed.  It looks like we are about to launch two new campaigns — details above.

Donations: We received a generous donation from the steelworkers in Canada.

Mailing list: We promoted signups to our mailing list on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We added 34 new subscribers to our lists. We also completed posting translations of texts so that when people support one of our campaigns in any language, but fail to check the box to sign up to our mailing list, they receive a reminder on the landing page.

Publicity: At the request of the International Centre for Trade Union Rights (ICTUR), we submitted an article on online campaigning for their quarterly journal International Union Rights.

Social networks: We did a mailing to our English list encouraging people to sign up to our pages on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. As a result, we picked up 181 new likes on Facebook and 141 new followers on Twitter. Our group on LinkedIn, oddly, seems have gotten smaller.