Inside LabourStart

This report covers the last two weeks — and we can start off with some very good news.

Our three-week long campaign in support of the workers at MetroWear in the Philippines, who make clothing for Lululemon, ended in a major victory. 3,933 people supported our campaign, which appeared in 12 languages, and we shared a detailed account, written by the union, of the victory widely on our news pages and by email to our list. A significant number of our supporters then made donations to LabourStart after the win.

We’re been struggling for some time to get regular, timely translations of our campaigns and mailings in French, but following an appeal to subscribers to our new Facebook channel, we’ve picked up two new volunteers who translated the Azerbaijan campaign and mailing. As a result, after just two days, that campaign had 437 more supporters.

That Facebook channel is also the reason why we just picked up seven new volunteer correspondents from the USA, Tunisia, Liberia, Panama, Belarus, New Zealand and Australia.

We did our first podcast interview for a while — this time with Shawna Bader-Blau, from the Solidarity Center. This had a considerably larger audience than most of our podcasts and was well received — though we did get a small number of hostile responses as well.

In a mailing to our Canadian supporters, we encouraged them to back a campaign launched by the Ontario Federation of Labour focussing on the struggle of Jay Naidoo, one of the most important figures in the South African labour movement, to remain in Canada.

Finally, we’ve embarked on major changes to both our campaigns and our newswires and expect to be able to announce significant improvements to both in coming days.

 

 

 

 

What follows is a brief summary of highlights followed by the usual long list of numbers.

SUMMARY:

We continue to see changes in the mailing lists as the problems that resulted from several mailing service provider changes are corrected but growth has returned.

XTwitter feeds continue to decline.  Most or all of that can be attributed to our followers abandoning the platform for Bluesky and perhaps Mastodon.

Our other numbers remain fairly stable.

THE NUMBERS:

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

Lists or accounts that have shrunk are in italics.  Lists or accounts which experienced growth are in bold.

STORIES POSTED TO OUR NEWS SITE IN THE LAST MONTH:

3017-3034 (100 per day)

MAILING LISTS:

The lists are being rebuilt after some technical hiccups so the numbers can be expected to fluctuate considerably over the next month or two.

 

The top 10:

English: 85750-85126

French: 7121-7089

 Spanish: 5571-5566

German: 5556-5522

Turkish: 4505-4503

Korean: 3197

Italian: 2828

Russian: 2682-2677

Norwegian: 2019-2003

Romanian:  1730

Dutch: 1437

The others:

Arabic:  768-770

Azerbaijani:  56 (new list)

Belarusian:  299

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 970-965

Creole:  11

Czech: 58

Danish: 79

Esperanto: 189-187

Farsi:  164

Finnish:  439

Georgian:  176

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  261-270

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  174-172

Indonesian:  385

Japanese: 388-382

Lithuanian:  62

Malaysian: 20

Polish: 964

Portuguese: 1276-1274

Punjabi:  2

Serbian:  97

Sinhalese: 1

Slovak: 15

Swedish: 909

Tagalog: 183

Thai:  142

Ukrainian: 493

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive:  12

Interns and Past Interns:  15

LabourStart Correspondents:  625-611

LabourStart Translators:  106-104

Africa Caucus:  63

Media Contacts: 69

Donors:  961-885

BLUESKY:

No efforts were made to increase the number of followers for either account.

Global:  17093-15301

Canada English-language:  419-353.

FLICKR:

Members:  837-838

Photos:  10411-10351

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  128-133

FACEBOOK PAGES/GROUPS:

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

LabourStart.org page likes:  14k, details unavailable

Global Labour News and Information: 9171-9.2k

LabourStart UK likes:  2.1k, details unavailable

LabourStart Francophone: 620 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 489

LabourStart Brasil:  552

LabourStart Turkce:  2k, details unavailable

LabourStart TV likes: 465

LabourStart TV follows:  455

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Italia:  68

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Canada-English: 203-191

LabourStart Nepal:  7 (last post April 2017)

LabourStart Israel: CLOSED (last post 2018)

LINKEDIN:

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

Group: 2640

Page: 447-322

PODCASTS:

LabourStart is a member of the US-based Labor Radio / Podcast Network.

Rather than list each podcast and the numbers of times they have been downloaded we will report the three (3) podcasts that have been downloaded the most times to date.

1. 653-533 downloads: Interview with Mark Hancock, President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees re. the union’s recently-adopted “Montreal Declaration” which was drafted in response to US President Donald Trump’s threats against Canada.
2. 427-424 downloads: Interview with Carlos Ching-Hung Wang, the president of the China Steel Express Union (Taiwan).
3. 366 downloads: Belarus: Interview with Liza Merliak, exiled trade unionist

X (TWITTER as-was):

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for these accounts.  If we wish to maintain our footprint we will have to start doing so again or the erosion of our numbers will continue.  Whether that is possible is another question given the current flight of users from the platform.

We experienced decline in all accounts except the Australian, which grew slightly.  Prior to the exodus to Bluesky all would have usually experienced slow growth without any effort on our part.  This is almost certainly the result of trade unionists closing their Twitter accounts and moving to other platforms (such as Bluesky or Mastodon).

Global English: 36303

Canada English: 20594-20202

Global Portuguese: 9847-9925

Global Spanish: 10214-10247

Australia: 9349-9422

USA: 4610-4683

Canada French: 3076-3101

Russian: 50

Hebrew:  50 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 508 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 329last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 341 (last tweet 2015)

French: 224 (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)

South Asia (English): 28 Placeholder and not yet active.

 

Lululemon – Philippines campaign: This campaign, launched a week ago, had 1,791 supporters; this is now up to 3,328 supporters, and the campaign appears in 9 languages.  A Tagalog version has been promised.  Because Lululemon is originally a Canadian company, we did a dedicated mailing earlier in the week to our Canadian subscribers, as well as a followup mailing to our English list yesterday.  We’ve already done two full rounds of publicity across all social networks including Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Blue Sky, WhatsApp and Telegram.

New campaigns: We had a good call with BWI earlier this week to discuss possible campaigns together.

News: Our volunteer correspondents posted, 1,881 news stories in the first 19 days of June, just under 100 stories per day.

New correspondents: Thanks to our new ‘Inside LabourStart’ channel on Facebook (186 members), we’ve received 6 new correspondent applications this week – from Australia, Belarus, Liberia, New Zealand, Panama and Tunisia.

Podcasts: We promoted both of our recent interviews with Canadian labour leaders to our Canadian list.  And we scheduled our next podcast interview for next week – stay tuned!

Mailing lists: We added 188 new subscribers to our lists this week, most of them to the English list.

International strike report: We publicised this comprehensive study of strikes across 11 countries to the more than 80,000 people on our English list.  124 of them downloaded the report, and the webinar had about 15 participants.  These are poor results, and reflect a pattern:  People on our mailing list seem happy to sign up to support campaigns, but are less likely to download documents, buy stuff, or attend online events.

Svensson prize ceremony: We publicised the links to videos of this ceremony, which will help raise awareness about the struggle for free trade unions in Belarus.  This seems to have generated just 37 new views of the videos, while 730 of the subscribers clicked on the link to support the current campaign (see above).

International Union Rights: We sold 3 more subscriptions yesterday through the mailing to our English list.

 

Stop union busting at Lululemon in the Philippines: This campaign went live this week. As of this morning, it has 1,791 supporters.

International strike report: We’ve shared this report widely and have scheduled a public Zoom call to discuss it on Saturday.

New campaigns: We have a call scheduled with BWI to discuss possible new campaigns on Saudi Arabia and Panama.

Podcasts: We finally did the full publicity for the interview with Alberta’s trade union leader Gil McGowan. We also reached out to the Solidarity Center about an interview, which had been agreed in principle.

Facebook: Our “Inside LabourStart” Facebook channel now has 171 members; last week it had 41; our first post there was seen by 634 people.

As I was travelling for two weeks, this report covers a three-week period.

Germany: Postcards advertising LabourStart were printed and distributed by our friends at the teachers’ union GEW conference.

Panama: We reached out to BWI asking if they wanted help with a campaign on Panama.

Philippines: A campaign has been submitted and will go live shortly.

Turkey Telus / TikTok campaign: We are closing this down after 3 months. It was not a win for the workers, but the solidarity was important nonetheless.

USA: We had a Zoom call with staff at the Solidarity Center to discuss cooperation, including a Zoom interview with their director.

Research on strikes worldwide: We’ve teamed up with a group of researchers and activists from the Labour Studies Collective (Emek Çal??malar? Toplulu?u) in Turkey who’ve been compiling annual reports on strikes, including interviews with strikers. We’ll launch their latest report together next week, inviting our whole English list to attend.

Mailing lists: We’ve had ongoing issues with right-to-left languages (Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew) and are once again setting up those lists with a separate (and free) service that can handle them.

Facebook Channel: We launched an “Inside LabourStart” channel which allows us to broadcast short messages. In the first 24 hours online, with no publicity, it already picked up 41 followers.

Global Solidarity in the Age of Trump: That was the title we gave to talk I presented at the Bread and Roses art gallery in Tel Aviv on 27 May. The event was organised by Ma’an, the independent trade union we have worked with before.

New correspondents: We added one each from Iran and Nigeria, and two more from the Asia Pacific region.

 

 

News: In the first 15 days of May, our volunteer correspondents posted 1,499 news stories — almost exactly 100 per day. Thanks to our 12 most productive correspondents this month – Derek, Eric, Patrick, Pat, Espen, Francisco, Kyle, Mick, Ivan, Silvana, Roy and Warren.

Interns: We selected 3 interns from the 14 who applied from the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations. They will begin work at the end of August, one of them on a full-time basis and the other two part-time.

Campaigns: We received updates from our union partners on two of the four current campaigns, which we will share. A third has been promised to us. Meanwhile, we received an update to a Ryanair campaign we launched back in 2020.

International Union Rights: We did a mailing to promote subscriptions to this important journal and sold a number. Details are here.

Canada: Pat Bulmer interviewed the head of the Alberta Federation of Labour, Gil McGowan. It’s a long but interesting podcast. Listen here.

Italy: At the request of comrades from the Italian unions, we sent out a long and detailed message to our Italian list about a union-backed referendum taking place in early June.

Saudi Arabia: We participated in an online event launching two reports on dangers facing migrant workers in the run-up to the 2034 FIFA World Cup. We gave extensive publicity to the reports and reached out to BWI about a possible campaign; we have a call scheduled for next week.

USA: We have a call scheduled for today with the Solidarity Center – we offered to help in any way we can as Trump’s cuts have had a disastrous impact on their important work in many countries.

Interns: We have now completed interviewing all 6 candidate interns from the Cornell ILR school; we will select 2 of them for fall internships next week.  Thanks to Penny and Derek for helping to interview all the candidates.

Campaigns: We reached out to our partners on the 4 active campaigns asking for updates that we can share. We’ve gotten two positive responses so far. This is important and we don’t always do this.

Problem with reaching LabourStart from Google in the USA: Two intern candidates pointed this out, possibly after searching Google for “LaborStart”. We think we identified the problem and have fixed it, but if anyone still has difficulty, please let us know.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew by 44 this week, with the largest number for the Azerbaijani list. But most of those are people already on our Turkish list, so we probably shouldn’t have them on both lists.

Canada: We had a good meeting with the International Solidarity committee of the BCGEU.  Thanks to Derek and Pat for playing an active part in this.

USA: We reached out to the UFW offering help with a campaign, but have not yet heard back. The Solidarity Center did get back to us with a response to our offer to help them.

 

This week we were able to focus on two major events on the labour calendar around the world: International Workers’ Memorial Day and May Day. Our coverage of both events was exemplary, with hundreds of stories posted.

In the run up to May Day, Eric was invited to be on a panel with Iranian emigre activists focussing on workers’ struggles in the Islamic Republic. Here is what he said.

We created a shortlist of six students from Cornell University who have applied to be interns this coming fall. We will interview them all next week. Thanks to Derek, Penny and Isabel for helping to review all the applicant submissions.

And a special thanks to Isabel who has now completed her second internship with LabourStart.

Our mailing lists continue to grow, picking up 159 new subscribers this week — mostly for the English list.

And finally, we signed up one new correspondent from the USA and have just received an application from another one, in Nigeria.

Azerbaijan campaign: This now appears in 11 languages with more on the way, and has 2,876 supporters. That number will grow as mailings in the additional languages go out, and following a reminder message to the English list going out later today. This is our first campaign to appear in Azeri and we now have a (small) mailing list for the first time in that language. We got some wonderful publicity about the campaign on this important news site covering the South Caucasus region: International labour movement launches campaign to free detained labour activists in Azerbaijan

Turkey (teachers) campaign: This appears in 13 languages and already has 3,265 supporters which is expected to grow significantly for the same reasons mentioned above.

Alamo Cinema campaign: The union sent us this – “Labourstart proved to be a helpful ally during our strike and we appreciate the work they do and they support they give.” We will share this with our supporters today.

Iran: Yesterday Eric Lee spoke on a panel on a dissident, pro-democracy Iranian TV channel (broadcasting from outside the country). Among other participants in the event was teacher trade unionist Esmail Abdi, who was subject of more than one LabourStart campaign following his arrests.

Interns: Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labour Relations has found 14 students to apply to be a LabourStart correspondent this fall. We have reviewed the applications and created a shortlist of six and will begin interviews next week.

Podcasts: We interviewed US trade unionist Debbie Goldman who has written a book, Disconnected, about organising call centre workers in the US. That interview already has a significant number of downloads even though we haven’t really done a lot of publicity yet. Our podcast page on Buzzsprout now features a significantly longer “podroll” than before. If anyone wants to suggest other union podcasts to include here, please let us know.

USA: We wrote to the Solidarity Center, which has brought legal action against the Trump administration for cutting off their funds, offering to help in any way we can, and reminding them how helpful the Solidarity Center was with our most recent Global Solidarity Conference in Tbilisi.

Donors: We have just under 1,000 people on our new donors’ mailing list, and are regularly sending them updates which are NOT appeals for more money. One of these updates went out earlier this week.

 

It’s been a busy week.

Azerbaijan campaign: This has now gone live in English and Azerbaijani versions. We will send it out for translation into more languages on Monday.

Belarus campaign: LabourStart activists participated in the ITUC-hosted webinar to mark the global day of action. We reached out to all participants and managed to get commitments from several to boost awareness of the campaign. We also got translations done into Polish and Romanian. This is our largest current campaign with 4,374 supporters.

New York City Alamo campaign: This ended in a victory for the workers, which we shared on our news page, across social media and in a mass mailing. Our campaign has now been shut down.

Nike campaign: We closed this down after Global Labor Justice gave us permission to do so. The results of the campaign were somewhat disappointing.

Turkey – teachers campaign: This campaign also went live this week, in English and translations have now begun coming in.

Turkey – Telus/TikTok campaign: We did a dedicated mailing to our Canadian list (Telus is a Canadian company).

Older campaigns: We’ve closed down all the remaining campaigns from 2024. In most cases, unfortunately, the campaign partners did not respond to our messages, so we don’t know the results of our effort.

Ukraine: There are reports that some FPU leaders are under house arrest. We reached out to learn more, but there is almost nothing in English online.

Dutch LabourStart: We had a 30 minute call with one of our few remaining active correspondents in the Netherlands and discussed reviving our Dutch language page.

News: There was a small problem – when a story was tagged with two countries, and given a higher priority, that wasn’t taken into account on the second country’s page. This has now been fixed. We’ve also removed links to sign up to our mailing list (which could only be found on the state/province news pages.) Nearly everyone who joins our list does so by signing up to a campaign.

Interns: Cornell University has sent on details of 14 prospective interns.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew again this week by 100 — 89 of them for the English list.

Podcasts: We’re arranging an interview with a former union official in the US who has written a book about call centre workers.