Inside LabourStart

Belarus campaign: We have been informed that a new campaign will be launched shortly and we will then be able to close down our long-running current campaign, which has 10,210 supporters. It is currently our largest campaign.

Kazakhstan campaign: As our comrade Erzhan Elshibayev is still on trial, the unions have asked us to keep this long-running campaign live for a time, and we are doing so.

Myanmar campaign: The campaign has grown somewhat to 5,596 supporters and appears in nearly two dozen languages with more on the way.

Conference 2023: The first mailing (a simple ‘save the date’) went out on Thursday. Translators were sent the text today so the news can be shared much more widely. We are already seeing signs of interest in the conference.

Canadian campaigns: We have two campaigns running but growth has been hindered by the fact that following our transition from Mailchimp to Mailjet, our Canadian segment of the English mailing list has gotten much smaller. We are looking into way to fix this. Here are the two campaigns with the number of supporters –

• Canada: Union-busting Puts Public Safety at Risk! – 91
• Canada: End the Actors Lockout! – 803

Donations: September has, so far, been a good month for our fund-raising, as we took in £10,490.27.

The main news this week was the launch of our Myanmar campaign at the request of the global unions. IUF did a mailing to promote the campaign and BWI posted on their website about it. After just six days online, the campaign has 4,710 supporters and appears in 19 languages, with more on the way.

Many of those 4,710 people asked to be added to our mailing list, but nearly all of them were already subscribed. Our current subscribers are not sharing our campaigns with others in a big way, and without the active involvement of unions, the lists will not grow. We were unable to update the English list yet due to a problem with the file we submitted, but for the biggest six lists other than English, we only picked up 18 new subscribers this week.

We launched two new Canadian campaigns this week but ran into a couple of problems mailing to the Canadians on our English list. First and most important, the mailing was blocked. We have now figured out why, and the mailing went out successfully yesterday. The other problem is that Canadian segment is much smaller than we thought it would be, probably due to a problem when we exported our lists from Mailchimp to Mailjet a few months ago. We are investigating why that happened and will try to restore the list segment to its previous size.

Finally, we continued to raise more money this week, partly due to a mention of our needs in the mailings that went out to support the Myanmar campaign. Since I last reported, we have taken in £1,915.37 into our PayPal account, with other money also arriving as cheques and bank transfers. We are probably over £6,000 in donations since the beginning of September and we expect more to come through (including a substantial donation from a Canadian union).

Cihan Erdal: Good news – our comrade who had been jailed in Turkey and was the subject of a major LabourStart campaign is now back in Canada. We have shared this news very widely.

USA: We have reached out to unions which are organising workers at Amazon and Starbucks in the hope of helping them with LabourStart campaigns. We are hopeful that at least one of these
will result in a campaign shortly.

Polish campaign: Solidarnosc informed us that the campaign we were planning on is no longer needed, as the workers have won.  As we were informed, “the strike is over and the union leader is back to work.”

Myanmar campaign: We have a call today with BWI following a decision by the Council of Global Unions to revive the LabourStart campaign demanding recognition of the national unity government instead of the military dictatorship.

Fundraising: Last week I reported that we had raised just under £2,800. Today, that number is £3,709, a gain of about £910 this week. Mailings have yet to go out (not yet translated) into German, Russian, Ukrainian, Norwegian, Danish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Esperanto and other languages.  I appeal to comrades to help with these translations — thank you!

Fundraising: As we do a couple of times a year, last week we sent out a fundraising appeal to our readers.  Nearly all the donations came in via PayPal and these totalled £2,796.73 so far.  As there were around 120 donors, the average donation was £23.30.  The appeal went out in ten languages – Belarusian, Chinese, English, Finnish, Georgian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, and Spanish.  We’ll be following up today with the other languages, trying to get translations done.

Belarus: Support for the campaign has slowed down to a trickle, with just 17 new supporters this week, as we wait for the union to decide on next steps.

Poland: Solidarnosc reached out about a possible campaign and we are in discussions about it.

Ukraine: Following up on our recent campaign, we were contacted by a group of trade unionists who have doing solidarity work in a number of countries and who had launched their own campaign on change.org.  We had a Zoom call this week to discuss joint work in the future.

Telegram: Using all our social media accounts (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) we reached out to encourage people to follow our public feed on Telegram, which had just 119 followers.  The result was a gain of just one new follower, which does say something about the limits of those social media accounts — and possibly how few trade unionists are using Telegram.

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.

 

Mailing Lists:

The top 10:

English: 74055-73493

French: 7483-7457

German: 5796

Spanish: 5498-5428

Turkish: 4169-4161

Korean: 3311-3308

Italian: 3088-3074

Russian: 2686-2668

Norwegian: 2140-2121

Romanian:  1771

Dutch: 1476

 

The others:

Arabic:  821

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 899

Creole:  11

Czech: 60-63

Danish: 92

Esperanto: 180-178

Farsi:  207

Finnish:  465

Georgian:  135

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  293-289

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  178

Indonesian:  460

Japanese: 398-386

Lithuanian:  63

Malaysian: 21

Polish: 842-837

Portuguese: 1287

Punjabi:  2

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 947

Tagalog: 159

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 487-313

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive and Interns:  12

LabourStart Correspondents:  662

LabourStart Translators:  87

Africa Caucus:  63

 

Flickr:

Members:  837

Photos:  9885-10303 (cull of off-topic photos)

 

Telegram:

LabourStart channel:  120-122

 

Facebook Pages/Groups:

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

LabourStart.org page likes:  13577-13553

LabourStart.org page follows: 14499

Global Labour News and Information: 9025-9011

LabourStart UK likes:  page unavailable

LabourStart UK follows:  page unavailable

LabourStart Francophone: 590 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart Brasil:  503-502

LabourStart Turkce:  2102-2101

LabourStart TV likes: 444-443

LabourStart TV follows:  455

LabourStart Israel: CLOSED (last post 2018)

 

LinkedIn:

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

Group: 2576-2559

Page: 209-188

 

Twitter:

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

The Portuguese-language feed passed the 10,000 followers mark last month.  It is expected that the Spanish-language and Australian feeds will do so before the end of September.

 

Global English: 37743-36978

Canada English: 22073-21291

Portuguese: 10217-9606

Global Spanish: 9918-9097

Australia: 9362-9031

USA: 5441-5453

Canada French: 3113-3109

Russian: 46

Hebrew:  48 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 508-507 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 335-337 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 350 (last tweet 2015)

French: 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)

South Asia (English): 21 NEW and not yet active.

 

 

Yes, we’re opening this week’s blog post with lyrics from George Gershwin’s masterpiece, Summertime.

Many global unions (and others) tend to shut down in August, particularly in the northern hemisphere, and as a result we’ve not gotten any campaign proposals recently. This will almost certainly change in the next week or so as people return to their offices. In the meanwhile …

This week we shut down the Ukraine campaign following President Zelensky’s decision not to veto the anti-union law. We announced this in a mass mailing early in the week, together with the good news from Castorama in Poland, where workers have won a major court battle (we had a campaign on this a couple of years back).

The Belarus campaign finally broke the 10,000 barrier – and today has 10,175 supporters.

Our mailing lists grew by just 66 last week – this is due to not having a new campaign, which would lead to a boost in new subscribers.  This should change soon.

To-do list: From 107 at the beginning of August the list is now down to 60 as we clear up many older tasks, mostly dealing with back-end of the website. We hope to shortly bring this number down to 50.

Ukraine campaign: Some good news and bad news. The good news is that the campaign was a relatively large one for us — in the end, we got 7,090 supporters. The bad news is that President Zelensky ignored our appeal and signed the anti-union bill into law. The campaign will be suspended today.

Poland: Just some good news this time. We’ve heard from UNI Europe that “4 of 10 dismissed union leaders [have been] reinstated at Castorama/Poland”. The LabourStart campaign closed some time ago, but we made a real contribution to that victory.

Global Solidarity Conference 2023: We held the first (online) meeting of the global steering committee and have agreed on next steps. The conference will be held in Tbilisi, Georgia next spring and we plan to announce the actual date very soon.

Mailing lists: Following the growth of our Ukraine campaign, we’ve picked up 437 new subscribers to our lists — including 137 new ones for the Ukrainian list. Last week, we added 440 new names to our lists.

Our home page: The technical issues now appear to have been fixed following the corruption of our database last month.

To-do list: We’ve made more progress in reducing the backlog of tasks this month. We started with 107 at the beginning of this month and are today down to just 66. We hope to be around 56 by the end of this month – a much more manageable number.

 

Ukraine campaign: Following our launch in English last Tuesday, the campaign quickly grew to 5,785 supporters and currently appears in 15 languages with more to come. SumOfUs.org helped by encouraging people who support their petition to also support ours (this is a first, and good news). At our suggestion, they cleared their campaign and text with the unions. The unions in Ukraine are helping to build support, and the campaign also benefitted from a re-tweet by the popular British writer and journalist Paul Mason. We received a small number of hostile messages accusing us, on the one side, of being pro-Putin for daring the criticise the Ukrainian government during war-time, and on the other — for being pro-Zelensky and … well, you can imagine the rest.

Kazakhstan campaign: We are running this for a bit longer as the case remains in the courts. We will do a followup mailing today to our list about this.

Iran campaign: We closed the campaign, announcing that one of the two labour rights defenders has been released. This too will be covered in today’s mailing.

Global Solidarity Conference 2023: We’ve scheduled a first meeting of the joint local and international steering committee for later this week. We hope to be able to announce dates shortly.

Mailing lists: Our lists have grown as we add more campaign supporters; last week, we picked up 440 new subscribers, most of them in English but also 37 new subscribers to our Ukrainian list.

Home page: I fixed a long-standing software issue with links to the second country (if there is one) for a news story.

Other software issues: Our programmer has returned and resumed work on fixing our database; she will also be available to help with other projects.

T-shirts:I had a long conversation with No Sweat in the UK and we’re exploring the possibility of doing a second t-shirt very soon. Last year’s campaign was quite successful.

Facebook: Our Group (Global Labour News & Information) has come under attack by spammers – though there is no reason to believe that we’ve been singled out. We’ve been deleting the offensive posts and blocking the spammers, have resumed vetting people who try to join the group, and have posted a pinned message to the group explaining what’s going on.

To-do list: As promised, the list of often longstanding items has been dropping steadily throughout August, from 107 to 75 today. I hope to have this list below 60 by the end of the month.

We’re back to weekly updates.

Campaigns: We launched a new campaign on Friday in support of Ukrainian trade unions.  We’ll be keeping our Kazakhstan campaign live for a bit longer as we wait for news from the union.

T-shirts: We’ve scheduled a call with an organisation in the UK that does union-made t-shirts as a possible new way to produce our shirts this year.

Global Solidarity Conference 2023: This week we’ll be writing to the members of the steering group to schedule a first meeting (on Zoom).

Our to-do list:  We’ve had a very long to-do list for some time now, and it was 104 a week ago.  It is now down to just 83 and I hope to continue to reduce it throughout August, aiming to reach 60 by the end of the month.

Software issues: The programmer who assisted us recently is back from holiday this week so we should be able to move forward with more fixes and improvements to the website.

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.

 

Mailing Lists:

The top 10:

English: 73493

French: 7457

German: 5796-5766

Spanish: 5428

Turkish: 4161

Korean: 3308

Italian: 3074

Russian: 2668

Norwegian: 2121

Romanian:  1771

Dutch: 1476

The others:

Arabic:  821

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 899

Creole:  11

Czech: 63

Danish: 92

Esperanto: 178

Farsi:  207

Finnish:  465

Georgian:  135

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  289

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  178

Indonesian:  460

Japanese: 386

Lithuanian:  63

Malaysian: 21

Polish: 837

Portuguese: 1287

Punjabi:  2

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 947

Tagalog: 159

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 313

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive and Interns:  12

LabourStart Correspondents:  662-659

LabourStart Translators:  87

Africa Caucus:  63

 

Flickr:

Members:  837-838

Photos:  10303-10297

 

Facebook Pages/Groups:

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

LabourStart.org page likes:  13553-13547

LabourStart.org page follows: 14499-14490

Global Labour News and Information: 9011-9013

LabourStart UK likes:  page unavailable-2032

LabourStart UK follows:  page unavailable-2096

LabourStart Francophone: 590 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart Brasil:  502

LabourStart Turkce:  2101-2104

LabourStart TV likes: 443-446

LabourStart TV follows:  455-460

LabourStart Israel: CLOSED (last post 2018)

 

LinkedIn:

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

Group: 2559-2545

Page: 188-123

 

Twitter:

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

Global English: 36978-36427

Canada English: 21291-20951

Portuguese: 9606-9193

Global Spanish: 9097-8940

Australia: 9031-8754

USA: 5453-5481

Canada French: 3109-3098

Russian: 46

Hebrew:  48 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 508-507 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 335-337 (last tweet 2016)

Indoesia: 350 (last tweet 2015)

French: 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)

South Asia (English): 21 NEW and not yet active.