Jul
01
2009

Some updates from June

Campaigns: Launched a campaign in support of workers at Paul Yu in the Philippines at the request of the Labor Party there (now with 1,209 supporters, in 7 langauges).  Received a request for assistance raising money for strikers from the IMF and am currently following through on this.   Launched campaign in support of striking Stella D’oro workers in New York at the request of the BCTGM, via the IUF (930 supporters in 7 languages).  Launched a campaign in support of South African union shop stewards suspended for calling safety strikes, at the request of the ICEM (with 445 supporters in 3 languages; will be publicized to our list tomorrow).

UnionBook: Integrated The Wire with Twitter, so posts to one are automatically posted to the other.  Continued work on getting Twitter integrated with Facebook as well so that this can be an easy and elegant way to update one’s status across a number of social networks — starting with a post to UnionBook.  Continued work on the mail-to-groups feature which works, but needs to be fully secured against spammers.Added the ability to include any RSS feed, including your blog, in your home page and profile.  There are now 3,147 registered users who have validated their accounts.

Languages: Continued work on problems with conversion of upper case Norwegian characters in our RSS feed — they don’t convert from Unicode to the old Western European character set known as iso-8859-1.  Fixed all the pages displaying our newswires so that the characters now render correctly.

Regional RSS newswires: Sorted out the Caribbean one.

LabourStart Canada: Sorted out ca.labourstart.org to work like oz.labourstart.org.

Global labour calendar: Did quite a bit of work getting this ready for prime time.

Books of the week: Promoted several from UCS including a book of labour quotations and a biography of Eugene V. Debs in June. In this quarter (April – June), 194 orders for books were placed through our UCS affiliated bookshop with sales totalling $7,779 (our share of that, $778, equals £475).  In the previous quarter, only 9 orders had been placed and we sold $746 worth of books (our share of that, $74.60, equals £45).  This is a 1000% increase due to the promotion of books of the week most weeks.  In the same quarter, we also sold 41 copies of Steve Early’s book directly through the publisher, for a total of $1,031.  Our share of that was was $294 (£179).  So our total book sales for the quarter is probably a record for us — $8,810.

Our Twitter feed: Now part of the union Twibe.  We currently have 1,127 followers and automatically post all top news headlines, each new campaign as it is launched, and our book of the week.

August conference: Sorted out with the AFL-CIO a hotel people can stay in at a decent price.  Created a group in Gmail for all those registered so far.  Arranged housing with local trade unionists for some of us.  Details on who is attending and the agenda so far on featured on the conference blog — click on the tab above.

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