Inside LabourStart

Africa: Work continues on preparing for our first-ever online meeting of correspondents. We have a tool that will allow our intern to compile a current list of all correspondents for the more than 50 African nations.  It turns out that we have 30 volunteer correspondents in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Nigeria with others scattered across the continent, and it will be good to meet them all — even if the meeting is on Zoom.

Brazil: With the agreement of PSI, we are closing down this campaign after many months.

Colombia: We have been asked to keep this campaign live for a while longer.

Jordan: We had an online meeting with the Education International to discuss next steps in this campaign. These will include online events in English and Arabic and a major effort to ramp up support for the Arabic version of the campaign.

Newswires: We have begun the process of repair, having fixed the Dutch and Norwegian newswires. Many more will be done in the coming days.

Pakistan: We have been asked to keep this campaign live for a while longer; there has apparently been some progress on the ground and the campaign is having an effect.

T-shirts: We did a second mass mailing to promote the t-shirts with Working Class History.  We’ll shortly share the results  — when we get them.

UnionDues podcast: This went live on 30 November. According to their website, it has been downloaded more than 200 times. We gave this podcast extensive publicity, including a mass mailing to our English list. (Our own counter shows just under 500 people clicked on our version of the link to the podcast.)

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 which experienced growth are in bold.

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

Mailing Lists:

The top 10:

English: 75323-75384

French: 7758-7756

German: 5818-5817

Spanish: 5440-5545

Turkish: 4233

Korean: 3299

Italian: 3211-3215

Russian: 2703

Norwegian: 2202-2212

Dutch: 1536-1531

The others:

Arabic:  822-823

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 946

Creole:  11

Czech: 63

Danish: 96

Esperanto: 175

Farsi:  209

Finnish:  487

Georgian:  138

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  307-309

Hindi:  34

Hungarian:  188

Indonesian:  433

Japanese: 393

Malaysian: 6

Polish: 849-861

Portuguese: 1339-1341

Punjabi:  2

Romanian:  1772

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 982

Tagalog: 159

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 306

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive:  12

LabourStart Correspondents:  656

LabourStart Translators:  88

Flickr:

836 members.

10217-10204 photos.

Facebook Pages/Groups:

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

LabourStart.org page likes:  13545-13544

LabourStart.org page follows: 14461-14456

Global Labour News and Information: 8905-8902

LabourStart UK likes:  2044-2045

LabourStart UK follows:  2101

LabourStart Francophone: 590

LabourStart Brasil:  505-504

LabourStart Turkce:  2116-2122

LabourStart TV likes: 448-451

LabourStart TV follows:  460

LabourStart Israel: NOT FOUND-149

LinkedIn:

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

Group: 2418-2405 members.

Page: 96-93 follows.

Twitter:

Sporadic efforts were made to grow the Global English-language, Canadian English-language and Australian feeds.  No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for other accounts.

Global English: 29326-28644

Canada English: 17328-17001

Global Spanish: 5905-5859

USA: 5548-5557

Australia: 6053-5436

Portuguese: 5318-5257

Canada French: 3115-3112

Russian: 46

Hebrew:  42

Italian: 507-506 (last tweet June 2019)

Swedish: 337-339  (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 350-349 (last tweet 2015)

French: 225 (last tweet 2018)

German: 120 (last tweet 2018)

Japanese: 21 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

Amazon: We shared a link to all LabourStart’s coverage of struggles at Amazon on Black Friday (today).

Germany: Apparently, our Twitter feed came under attack from some far-right accounts.

Jordan: One month after the launch of the campaign we asked Education International about possible next steps, including a webinar

Norway: IndustriEnergi voted at its congress to make a very generous donation to LabourStart.
We have fixed the Norwegian newswire but now need to get the word out about changes that need to be made.

Sweden: We had a very good discussion with LO about cooperation in future.

UK: We did a mailing to our UK list (about 9,600 people) in supporting of striking couriers in Sheffield.
The Union Dues podcast has been finalised and will be released next week. As it’s all about LabourStart, we’ll share it widely.

Africa: We are discussing holding our first ever African regional meeting of LabourStart correspondents. More details soon.

Algeria: We did a second mailing to our English list today. The campaign has 4,774 supporters, but we expect this to above 5,000 today.

Nigeria: We are continuing publicity for the Yoruba versions of our campaigns, two of which have already been translated.

Sweden: We closed down our Zalando’s campaign today and informed the union there. The campaign had about 3,500 supporters, though the Swedish version only had 2.

UK: Eric was interviewed for the labour podcast “Union Dues” – it will be aired in another couple of weeks and we’ll publicise it widely.

T-shirts: We did a mailing to our German list. Sales of the dna-merch shirts have not been as high as we would have liked (they are only a fraction of what we sold last year). We will continue the marketing and are in discussions with our friends about what we can do to improve this.

This was a relatively quiet week for us, as Eric was on holiday with family for part of the time.

Algeria: This campaign goes live and after just a day or so, had 3,200 supporters.  It currently appears in 4 languages with many more on the way.

Sweden: We began publicity for this campaign on Thursday with a mailing to the English list. As of 10:30 GMT, the campaign has 722 supporters.

Mailing lists: Grew this week by 103 names.

T-shirt of the Month: We began to publicise this wonderful new project from Working Class History and dna merch in Germany. We did extensive publicity across social media and a mass mailing, and will know results in early December. Feedback was almost entirely positive.  We expect to do publicity in German soon (dna merch is based in Germany).

Algeria: Expect a new campaign shortly — we’ve been given a heads up from IndustriALL.

Jordan: Our new campaign has taken off and already has more supporters (6,020) than our two most recent camopaigns. That’s the good news; the bad news is that a court has ruled against the union.

Nigeria: Our first campaign in the Yoruba language has now gone live and we have begun publicising it.  So far, no one has signed up to the campaign.

Sudan: We shared widely Eric’s column about the role of unions in the fight for democracy and against the military coup.

Donations: We received a very generous — and unexpected — donation from Education International.

Mailing lists: We picked up another 133 subscribers this week; this is more than triple what we added last week.

T-shirts: We’re about to embark on a join effort with DNA Merch in Germany to sell workers’ history themed t-shirts on a monthly basis.

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 which experienced growth are in bold.

We continue to see the effects of the EU’s GDPR.  While several mailing lists continue to decline we are in fact adding as many new addresses to those lists as we have done historically when we have a new campaign running.

Mailing Lists:

The top 10:

English: 75384-75153

French: 7756-7753

German: 5817-5812

Spanish: 5545-5189

Turkish: 4233

Korean: 3299

Italian: 3215-3216

Russian: 2703

Norwegian: 2212-2202

Dutch: 1531-1522

The others:

Arabic:  823

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 946-949

Creole:  11

Czech: 63-64

Danish: 96

Esperanto: 175-173

Farsi:  209-212

Finnish:  487-489

Georgian:  138

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  309-306

Hindi:  34

Hungarian:  188

Indonesian:  433

Japanese: 393

Malaysian: 6

Polish: 861

Portuguese: 1341

Punjabi:  2

Romanian:  1772

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 982

Tagalog: 159

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 306

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive:  12

LabourStart Correspondents:  656

LabourStart Translators:  88-87

Flickr:

836-835members. 

10204-10165 photos.

Facebook Pages/Groups:

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

LabourStart.org page likes:  13544-13539

LabourStart.org page follows: 14456-14437

Global Labour News and Information: 8902-8909

LabourStart UK:  2045

LabourStart Francophone: 590-589

LabourStart Brasil:  504

LabourStart Turkce:  2122-2124

LabourStart TV: 451

LabourStart Israel: 149

LinkedIn:

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

Group: 2405-2394 members.

Page: 93-91 follows.

Twitter:

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

Global English: 28644-28277

Canada English: 17001-16777

Global Spanish: 5859-5840

USA: 5557-5561

Australia: 5436-5432

Portuguese: 5257-5237

Canada French: 3112-3080

Russian: 46

Hebrew:  42

Italian: 506-498 (last tweet June 2019)

Swedish: 339-340  (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 349 (last tweet 2015)

French: 225-226 (last tweet 2018)

German: 120 (last tweet 2018)

Japanese: 21 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

Jordan: We launched a major new campaign in partnership with the Education International and the support of the ITUC. The campaign had 2,802 supporters after one day online.

Nigeria: We are shortly expecting our first campaign to be translated into Yoruba, and we will publicise that fact widely — we’re to be first global union website campaigning in an indigenous African language. Yoruba, by the way, has about 50 million speakers.

Sudan: We’ve had a lot of coverage of workers’ responses to the military coup, and shared this widely across social media on Wednesday.

Sweden: We’ve had a soft launch for the Zalando campaign now that SAC has begun to promote it, and we will do much more in the coming days.

Zimbabwe: We have a new correspondent who has begun posting news.

Labour newswire: We’ve begun to fix some long term problems here. With the help of a webmaster of a local trade union (scroll to the bottom of the page) in the state of Washington (USA), we managed to fix the state and provincial newswires for the whole world. We’ll fix this on the website and announce, and move on to fix any others that have stopped working.

Mailing lists: These continue to grow slowly. Before the launch of the Jordan campaign, we were able to add just 43 new subscribers to our lists.

Iran campaign: We received a translation of the mailing into Farsi from IndustriALL, and have sent this out to our Farsi list.

Italian edition: We changed one of the permanent links on the home page.

Italy: Eric’s article on the attack on CGIL was shared very widely across social media, including by leading figures on the British Left and Labour Party.

Myanmar campaign: We created a special petition format to allow campaign supporters’ names to be delivered to the credentials committee of the UN General Assembly, at the request of BWI.

Polish: For some time now we have been adding daily news from one of the two Polish national trade union centres (OPZZ) to our Polish-language news page. From this week, we are also adding news from Solidarnosc.  Our campaigns are appearing in Polish, though we still need to sort out regular mailings to our Polish list.

Puerto Rico: We held a webinar in Spanish with English translation in support of the campaign. Despite technical glitches, and thanks to Euan’s efforts at PSI, the webinar had good attendance, especially from Latin America. DSA’s publication, Democratic Left, is running a major piece on the campaign with a link.  With 7,610 supporters, it is our second largest current campaign.

Turkey: At long last, the article about Cihan Erdal and co-authored by Peter Tatchell and Eric Lee, appeared in print in the British daily Morning Star. It was widely shared online.

Interns: We have begun work with a second intern, Bunmi, from York University in Toronto. Our other intern, Cam, has been working on an updated version of our online campaigns book, discovering some good victories that we should publicise.

Italy: The attack on the CGIL headquarters last week by fascist thugs dominates our home page these past few days. We have shared many news stories across social media as well, in English and Italian, and have reached out to global unions regarding a possible campaign (with no positive response so far). Eric also devoted his weekly column for Solidarity to this subject.

Iran: We now have a version of the campaign running in Farsi, thanks to IndustriALL. A followup mailing to the English list last week helped, and the campaign now has 5,308 supporters – a gain of nearly 1,000.

Puerto Rico: Together with UTIER and PSI, we’ll be hosting a live event in support of the campaign later this week. With 7,411 supporters, this is one of our largest recent campaigns.

Sweden: We now have a translation into Swedish of the campaign, which will shortly go live.

UK: We’ve been invited to appear on the ‘Union Dues‘ podcast next month.

Donations: We received a very generous donation from the nurses union in Canada, bringing our total donations this year from Canada to over $20,000.

Interns: We have two new interns from York University in Canada and will be meeting them for the first time today (on Zoom, of course).

Mailing lists: Our largest lists grew by just 81 new subscribers this week.

World Day for Decent Work: We revived our WDDW page from last year, tagged 14 news stories to appear there, and shared this widely across social media.