Inside LabourStart

It’s been a very busy month — with some good news to report (see especially Malaysia and Turkey) and three new campaigns this month (Canada, Hungary, Iran). Here’s a quick summary of what we’ve been up to in the run-up to Christmas …

Bangladesh: We do a mailing to our English list to promote an IUF campaign in this country.

Belarus: We had some issues with our news page in Belarusian, but have resolved most of these.

Brazil: We publicise widely the story of a complaint global unions are making to the ILO.

Canada: At the request of the postal workers union (CUPW) we launch a global campaign supporting their struggle. As of today it has 6,588 supporters.
Earlier in the month, we do one mailing to our Canadian list.

China: We give extensive publicity to a Human Rights Watch report on China.

Europe: We gave extensive coverage — and not for the first time — of Amazon workers strikes in Spain and Germany.

Germany: We continue attempts to revive our dormant Twitter account with regular postings and following many more trade union and other Twitter feeds; we’ve seen some growth.
Meanwhile, our German translators have become active again and we did our first mailing in German in three months.

Global: We give extensive publicity to the ITUC congress and its “worst boss” poll.

Hungary: At the request of the Hungarian Trade Union Confederation we launch a campaign on 18 December; within 24 hours it nearly reaches 5,000 supporters.

India: An e-newsletter called ‘Life of Labour’ sums up the best sources of workers’ news online and writes this: “Labourstart is an international online news aggregator, with the tagline ‘Where trade unionists start their day on the net’. It’s run through volunteer correspondents from across the world. It shares links to news on workers and worker related developments published in over 20 languages, while also running online campaigns of various trade unions and international federations of workers’ organisations. It has been providing this service for over two decades.”

Iran: We launch a new campaign in support of jailed teachers at the request of the Education International; the campaign currently has 6,983 supporters. We closed the Mohammed Habibi campaign; it had 10,855 supporters and appeared in 20 languages.
We also share a story about Iran arresting steel workers on social media.
We promoted widely an IUF story on Iran as well.

Kazakhstan: We continued posting new translations of our campaign. It had 7,704 supporters by today.

Korea: We shared a mass street demo story widely on social media.

Malaysia: We heard back from BWI global union about a campaign we ran more than two years ago. Here’s part of what they told us: “I know that Labourstart covered it on the website, but I just wanted to get in touch again and extend personal thanks to you for your assistance on the long-running Sabah Forest Industries (SFI) dispute. The successful secret ballot outcome has been a huge confidence booster for the union; it was previously down to just one site and struggling for dear life to hold on. They have now won secret ballots in a few other sites and are actively recruiting in quite a few more; in short, they’ve been able to turn the corner and are now growing stronger and stronger! I know that international support has been a major factor in keeping them going. SFI is still proving to be a battle (the company is teetering on financial meltdown and the buyers are playing games) but there is a newfound vitality.”

Myanmar: We gave extensive coverage to the IUF’s story about the hotel workers’ protest camp.

Norway: We share news about the Svensson Prize (which is accepting nominees for next year’s award) with our English and Norwegian mailing lists.

Poland: We’ve resumed translations of campaigns and have done our first mailings to our Polish list since January 2016 — nearly three years.

Sweden: We have 7 new translators and our campaigns are doing well, and our list is growing again.

Thailand: We continued posting new translations of our Mitsubishi Electric campaign. It had 7,384 supporters by today.

Turkey: Following our campaign, we were able to announce a victory for the Istanbul airport workers. A special mailing was sent out to all our lists about this. It included this statement from the union: “The first hearing of workers, who staged a protest against their bad working conditions and occupational murders in the construction of the New Airport in ?stanbul was held on December 5th. The hearing was held in the dining hall of the courthouse due to the low capacity of the courtrooms. The court ruled that workers shall be released on probation. The next hearing will be on March 20, 2019. Özgür Karabulut, President of Progressive Union of Construction Workers is free now. He will be able to witness the birth of his daughter. And he will be back in his duties in the workers’ movement. There will be a long-term struggle for improving the OHS conditions of airport workers. Thanks to all sisters and brothers who supported our campaign for their freedom and who contributed visibility of working conditions at Istanbul Airport.”

UK: At the request of the TUC and the journalists’ union (NUJ) we publicise a campaign of theirs to our UK mailing list and our UK Facebook page.
We give extensive publicity to the Uber workers court victory – a win for all workers in the ‘gig economy’.

Ukraine: We gave extensive publicity to a story about a miners’ struggle.

News database: We’ve contacted our hosting company about expanding the size of our database, as our news database is constantly growing and we keep reaching our limits.
We fixed a problem for some languages where stories tagged as top global priorities were not appearing anywhere.
We fixed a problem which would happen when a correspondent would change their default country or language.

Working women: We’ve developed a prototype of a fully multilingual version of our news page. It will go live soon.