Inside LabourStart

We spoke too soon – in Kyrgyzstan, the government has had a change of heart and has passed anti-union laws. We are just about to launch a campaign demanding that the president veto that law.

In other news …

Canada: We’ve done a mailing to our entire global list encouraging submissions to CLIFF, the labour film festival. We received a very generous donation from a Canadian union. And we also launched a new Canada-only campaign.

Israel: We continued with building our mailing list and social media following, writing directly to the more than 500 Hebrew speakers who supported our campaign – which now has just under 7,500 supporters.

Myanmar: We have given extensive publicity to two union fundraisers, organised by DSA in the US, and BWI.

Pakistan: We did more followup mailings to promote our campaign, also to our English, German and French lists.  The campaign has over 7,000 supporters.

Home page: A problem emerged with the ‘more stories’ for country link not working; this has now been fixed.

Interns: We participated in Cornell University’s Social Justice Career Fair and interviewed a number of participants. Three of these were short-listed, they were interviewed, and we took a decision to hire one, who will begin work in June. Our intern Amos, who is studying at the Global Labour University in Berlin, completed his internship with us.

Labour News Network: We have revived this tool which allows LabourStart correspondents to post news stories that have not appeared elsewhere on the web. This is now being beta-tested. More details coming soon.

Mailing list: We added 366 new subscribers from the new campaign supporters, mostly to the English list but also with significant growth for the Dutch list.

May Day: We are working on two events online — a panel discussion focussing on jailed trade union activists around the world, and a possible world premiere online of a major new film about working people (more details soon).

RSS newswires: We have been alerted to the fact that these are broken; we will aim to fix them ASAP.

The first number next to each item is the current total as of today; the second number is the total as of the first day of last month.  Where one number is provided it means that there has been no change since last month.

Lists or accounts that have shrunk are in Italics.  Lists or accounts experiencing significant growth are in bold.

We continue to see the effects of the EU’s GDPR.

Mailing Lists:

The top 10:

English: 74774-74628

French: 7728-7715

German: 5844-5825

Spanish: 5155

Turkish: 4228-4279

Korean: 3294-3317

Italian: 3238-3270

Russian: 2723-2715

Norwegian: 2254-2257

Dutch: 1520-1460

The Others:

Arabic:  817

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 963-964

Creole:  11

Czech: 65

Danish: 99

Esperanto: 165

Farsi:  212

Finnish:  490-517

Georgian:  138-142

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  307

Hindi:  35

Hungarian:  190-191

Indonesian:  433

Japanese: 395-402

Malaysian: 6

Polish: 860-857

Portuguese: 1309-1313

Punjabi:  2

Romanian:  39

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 1002-1012

Tagalog: 159

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 306

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive:  12

LabourStart Correspondents:  627-643

LabourStart Translators:  87-86

Flickr:

834 members.

10160-10129 photos.

Facebook Pages/Groups:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

LabourStart.org page likes:  13519-13514

LabourStart.org page follows: 14422-14391

Global Labour News and Information: 8861

LabourStart UK:  2131

LabourStart Francophone: 593-591

LabourStart Brasil:  507-551

LabourStart Turkce:  2171-2149

LabourStart TV: 465-452 follows.

LinkedIn:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Group: 2320-2286 members.

Page: 61-56 follows.

Twitter:

The Global Anglophone, Australian, Global Spanish and Global Portuguese accounts received some attention.  No other concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Global English: 27311-26878

Canada English: 15518-15104

Global Spanish: 5639-5402

USA: 5622

Australia: 5104-4951

Portuguese: 4781-4631

Canada French: 2752-2759

Italian: 504-505 (last tweet June 2019)

Swedish: 349 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 350 (last tweet 2015)

French: 229 (last tweet 2018)

German: 122 (last tweet 2018)

Russian: 44-43 (reactivated March 2021)

Hebrew:  23-17 (new last month)

Japanese: 20 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

The top news for us this month was the victories we had in two of our current campaigns — in Kyrgyzstan and Algeria. In the former, the government has withdrawn proposed changes to the labour laws. In the latter, the two women union activists who were jailed have been released. We spread the news of these two wonderful victories widely.

Myanmar: We are in discussions with global unions about a possible campaign.

Norway: We’ve received several generous donations from Norwegian unions this month.

Pakistan: We launched a campaign against union-busting at Metro A.G. in Pakistan, sponsored by UNI Commerce. This campaign features many new languages for us, including Urdu. As of today, it has 5,420 supporters.

Thailand: We have a new volunteer translator for Thai.

USA: We reached out to offer our help to the union organising Amazon workers in the USA.

Correspondents: We held the second correspondents’ meeting on Zoom.

Deliveroo workers: At the request of the ITF, we shared links to their online global campaign to support unionisation at Deliveroo.

International Women’s Day: We posted a lot of news stories, and wrote to all correspondents to encourage them to do so as well, and posted across social media.

Interns: We participated in Cornell University’s career fair for students interested in social justice, speaking with about a half dozen students in individual, short interviews. We will almost certainly hire one of them.

Labour News Network: Work is nearly complete on this project — it will allow correspondents to post news stories which do not currently appear anywhere else on the web. This issue was raised during one of our recent Zoom meetings with the LabourStart community of correspondents and translators.

The first number next to each item is the current total as of today; the second number is the total as of the first day of last month.  Where one number is provided it means that there has been no change since last month.

Lists or accounts that have shrunk are in Italics.  Lists or accounts experiencing significant growth are in bold.

We continue to see the effects of the EU’s GDPR.  Our lists are growing again but not at the rate that was common for most of our lists prior to its implementation.

Mailing Lists:

The top 10:

English: 74628-74596

French: 7715-7635

German: 5825-5783

Spanish: 5155-5119

Turkish: 4279-4277

Korean: 3317

Italian: 3270-3265

Russian: 2715-2708

Norwegian: 2257-2260

Dutch: 1460-1445

The others:

Arabic:  817-819

Belarusian:  288-287

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 964

Creole:  11

Czech: 65-64

Danish: 99-101

Esperanto: 165-162

Farsi:  212

Finnish:  517-516

Georgian:  142-138

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  307-241

Hindi:  35

Hungarian:  191-192

Indonesian:  433-432

Japanese: 402

Polish: 860-857

Portuguese: 1313-1310

Punjabi:  2

Romanian:  39

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 1012

Tagalog: 159

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 306-317

Vietnamese:  21-24

LabourStart Correspondents:  643

LabourStart Translators:  86-83

Flickr:

834-835 members. 

10129-10095 photos.

Facebook Pages/Groups:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

LabourStart.org page likes:  13514-13501

LabourStart.org page follows: 14391-14368

Global Labour News and Information: 8861-8864

LabourStart UK:  2131-2134

LabourStart Francophone: 591

LabourStart Brasil:  551

LabourStart Turkce:  2149-2198

LabourStart TV: 452-447 follows.

LinkedIn:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Group: 2286-2282 members.

Page: 56-49 follows.

Twitter:

The Global Spanish- and Portuguese-language accounts received some attention this month. No other concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Global English: 26878-26608

Canada English: 15104-14908

USA: 5622-5631

Australia: 4951

Global Spanish: 5402-4940

Portuguese: 4631-4358

Canada French: 2759-2765

Italian: 505-504 (last tweet June 2019)

Swedish: 349-348 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 350 (last tweet 2015)

French: 229-228 (last tweet 2018)

German: 122-126 (last tweet 2018)

Russian: 43 (last tweet November 2019)

Japanese: 20 (last tweet 2012)

Hebrew:  17 (new this month)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

A quick update on the highlights of the last two weeks at LabourStart:

Hong Kong: We have raised the possibility of a campaign with a number of people are hopeful that one can be launched.

Israel: Our campaign supporting workers at the food delivery company 10bis has taken off; it is already one of our larger current campaigns, and has the support of more than 500 people for the Hebrew language version. Most of those people are new to LabourStart and are being added to our list. In addition, we now have a new Twitter account in Hebrew.

Kyrgyzstan: We closed our campaign – and learned that the we’ve had a victory; the government has decided to postpone the adoption of the new anti-union labour law.

Pakistan: We will shortly be launching a new campaign at the request of UNI. Among other things, it will be our first campaign ever in the Urdu language.

Correspondents: We’ve invited all correspondents to another Zoom meeting to take place in March.

Campaigns:

Next week we will launch a campaign in support of an organising campaign in Israel, at the request of the Histadrut.
We launched a campaign at the request of the ITF and ETF targetting FedEx-TNT in Europe; after a week online it is in 12 languages and has 4,465 supporters.

We also launched a campaign in support of a union under pressure in Kazakhstan which has 6,293 supporters.
At the request of PSI we launched a campaign in support of jailed women activists in Algeria, which now has 8,062 supporters.
Our largest current campaign is in support of the teachers union in Jordan — it has 9,491 supporters and appears in 24 languages. I hope that campaign will exceed 10,000 supporters.
We also closed a number of the older campaigns.

Correspondents: We signed up new correspondents in the USA and Vanuatu this month.

Finland: A number of new translators volunteered and our campaigns began appearing in Finnish again.

Interns: Amos Netzer from the Global Labour University began working for us this week. We had the first-ever meeting of all 3 LabourStart interns this week as well. We will be participating in the Cornell ILR Career Fair next month. In addition, Derek has reached out to some Canadian labour studies departments to sound out the possibility of Canadian interns.

Mailing lists: I imported 918 new subscribers this month. We now have a Malaysian language list.

Poland: A number of new translators volunteered and our campaigns began appearing in Polish again.

Publicity: Eric was interviewed by Davar, the online newspaper of the Histadrut. The interview appeared in Hebrew and English.

Translators: With more than 80 volunteer translators, we called a meeting of them in mid-February. About 20% of them participated, and we ‘met’ a number of them for the first time.

Turkey: We did publicity to our list promoting a new book on the international labour movement in Turkish, written by Kivanc.

The first number next to each item is the current total as of today; the second number is the total as of the first day of last month.  Where one number is provided it means that there has been no change since last month.

Lists or accounts that have shrunk are in Italics.  Lists or accounts experiencing significant growth are in bold.

We continue to see the effects of the EU’s GDPR.

Mailing Lists:

The top 10:

English: 74596-74133

French: 7635-7613

German: 5783-5781

Spanish: 5119-5106

Turkish: 4277-4271

Korean: 3317

Italian: 3265-3289

Russian: 2708-2677

Norwegian: 2260-2258

Dutch: 1445-1434

The others:

Arabic:  819-736

Belarusian:  287

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 964-967

Creole:  11

Czech: 64

Danish: 101

Esperanto: 162-161

Farsi:  212

Finnish:  516

Georgian:  138

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  241-240

Hindi:  35

Hungarian:  192-191

Indonesian:  432

Japanese: 402-404

Polish: 857-862

Portuguese: 1310-1303

Punjabi:  2

Romanian:  39

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 1012-1013

Tagalog: 159

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 317-304

Vietnamese:  21-24

LabourStart Correspondents:  643-637

LabourStart Translators:  83-74

Flickr:

835-833 members.

10095-10089 photos.

Facebook Pages/Groups:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

LabourStart.org page likes:  13501-13458

LabourStart.org page follows: 14368-14305

Global Labour News and Information: 8864-8865

LabourStart UK:  2134-2133

LabourStart Francophone: 591

LabourStart Brasil:  551-509

LabourStart Turkce:  2198-2176

LabourStart TV: 447-459 follows.

LinkedIn:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Group: 2282-2253 members.

Page: 49-35 follows.

Twitter:

The Global Portuguese-language account received some attention this month No other concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Global English: 26608-26663

Canada English: 14908-14863

USA: 5631-5630

Australia: 4951-4957

Global Spanish: 4940

Portuguese: 4358-4153

Canada French: 2765-2783

Italian: 504 (last tweet June 2019)

Swedish: 348-349 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 350 (last tweet 2015)

French: 228 – 229 (last tweet 2018)

German: 122-126 (last tweet 2018)

Russian: 43 (last tweet November 2019)

Japanese: 20 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

Jordan teachers campaign: This is now our largest current campaign, with over 8,500 supporters this morning. The campaign appears in a record 20 languages with several more on the way. This is more than 1,000 more than our second largest campaign. If we continue to work on this, this may be our first campaign in a long time to reach 10,000 supporters.

Our mailing lists continue to grow thanks to new campaign supporters signing up. In the last three weeks, we gained 843 new subscribers, most of them for the English list.

Reviving dormant languages: We’ve had some success in the last few weeks getting our campaigns and mailings translated into languages for which we did not have regular translations in recent years. These include Vietnamese, Arabic, Korean, Georgian, and Polish.

Donations: We received generous donations this month from IUF and PSI.

The first number next to each item is the current total as of today; the second number is the total as of the first day of last month.  Where one number is provided it means that there has been no change since last month.

Lists or accounts that have shrunk are in Italics.  Lists or accounts experiencing significant growth are in bold.

We continue to see the effects of the EU’s GDPR.

Mailing Lists:

The top 10:

English: 74133 – 74224

French: 7613 – 7622

German: 5781 – 5797

Spanish: 5106 – 5098

Turkish: 4271 – 4274

Korean: 3317

Italian: 3289

Russian: 2677 – 2678

Norwegian: 2258 – 2261

Dutch: 1434 – 1437

The others:

Arabic:  736

Belarusian:  287

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 967 – 972

Creole:  11

Czech: 64

Danish: 101

Esperanto: 161

Farsi:  212

Finnish:  516

Georgian:  138

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  240

Hindi:  35

Hungarian:  191 – 193

Indonesian:  432

Japanese: 404

Polish: 862

Portuguese: 1303 – 1304

Punjabi:  2

Romanian:  39

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 1013 – 1018

Tagalog: 159

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 304 – 306

Vietnamese:  24

LabourStart Correspondents:  637 – 641

LabourStart Translators:  74 – 72

Flickr:

833 members.

10289 – 10279 photos.

Facebook Pages and Groups:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

LabourStart.org page likes:  13458 – 13445

LabourStart.org page follows: 14305 – 14273

Global Labour News and Information: 8865 – 8869

LabourStart UK:  2133 – 2068

LabourStart Franco: 591 – 589

LabourStart Brasil:  550 – 509

LabourStart Turkce:  2176 – 2209

LabourStart TV: 459 – 445 follows.

LinkedIn:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Group: 2253 – 2225 members.

Page: 35 follows.

Twitter:

The Global English-, Spanish- and Portuguese-language accounts received some attention this month No other concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Global English: 26663 – 26309

Canada English: 14863 – 14669

USA: 5630 – 5623

Australia: 4957 – 4962

Global Spanish: 4940 – 4648

Portuguese: 4153 – 4066

Canada French: 2783 – 2271

Italian: 504 – 503 (last tweet June 2019)

Swedish: 349 – 351 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 350 (last tweet 2015)

French: 228 – 229 (last tweet 2018)

German: 126 (last tweet 2018)

Russian: 43 – 42 (last tweet November 2019)

Japanese: 20 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

As 2020 draws to an end, I wanted to pause for a moment and review some of the things we were able to accomplish under the most difficult circumstances during this terrible year.

According to our statistics, our volunteer correspondents around the world posted 56,040 news stories to our site this year.  That’s an average of 154 news stories every day of the year.

A new labour news story every 9 minutes.

When I look at the mainstream media news sites, I barely see a hint of all this news.  Working people and our unions rarely make headlines.

Even some union websites feature hardly any updated news.  Some major union websites go weeks without a single update.

But not LabourStart.

If you don’t glance at our site for a week, you’ve missed 1,000 news stories.

In addition to our news, this year we ran 24 campaigns in support of workers and their unions.

Those campaigns focussed on struggles in Belarus, Brazil, Cambodia, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Germany, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Myanmar, Peru, Turkey, Ukraine and Zimbabwe.

Some of these campaigns resulted in victories for the workers.

We’ve helped get trade unionists released from jail, companies to sit down and negotiate with workers’ representatives, and workers reinstated after being wrongfully sacked.

Thanks to the efforts of our volunteer translators, these campaigns often appear in many languages — and as a result are much larger and more effective than campaigns that appear only in English or a handful of major languages.

We are strong believers in linguistic diversity and equality, and we believe that workers everywhere should be encouraged to participate in global solidarity campaigns, regardless of what language they speak.

And finally, we were able to coordinate — for the first time — a virtual May Day event that spanned the globe.

This online event exceeded all our expectations.  We were able to show nearly 200 videos over the course of 11 hours.  Those videos varied in quality, as we expected, but many were outstanding and we shared these after May Day on our website and across social media.

Our audience came from all over the world and the feedback in the comments on Facebook was exceptionally positive.  Many trade unionists saw this as a unique opportunity to make contact with friends they don’t normally get the chance to see, and to greet one another over huge distances.

Over 100,000 trade unionists participated in the event online.

Looking back at 2020, it was a terrible year for everyone, and especially for working people.

But unions rose to meet the challenge by organising, fighting and resisting.

And LabourStart has been there to help.

Next year can only be better and we hope to fill our website with stories of working people winning the fight for social justice, strengthening our unions, and building back better.

I wish you and your families a happy New Year.

Solidarity forever!

Eric Lee

P.S. Please share this message with your friends, family and fellow union members.