Inside LabourStart

Mailing Lists:

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

We continue see the impact of the General Data Protection Regulation though the effect appears to be reduced over time.  Shrinking lists are in Italics.  Lists experiencing significant growth are in bold.

The top 10:

English: 73,527- 73,336

French: 7,720-7,117

German: 5,844- 5,841

Spanish: 5,141- 5,124

Turkish: 4,222- 4,216

Korean: 3,399- 3,400

Italian: 3,326- 3,329

Russian: 2,630- 2,631

Norwegian: 2,558- 2,263

Dutch: 1,472- 1,475

The others:

Swedish: 1,036- 1,036

Chinese: 984- 985

Portuguese: 1,258-1,006

Polish: 863-863

Japanese: 404-405

Ukrainian: 277-277

Hebrew: 243-243

Hungarian: 192-184

Tagalog: 161-162

Esperanto: 160-157

Danish: 104-104

Czech: 66-66

Slovakian: 15-15

Flickr:

834 members, No change.  10,218 photos.

Facebook Pages/Groups:

LabourStart.org page: 14,148-13,440.

LabourStart UK:  2145-2087.

LabourStart Franco: 592-no change.

LabourStart TV: 431-no change

LinkedIn: 2150-2137.

Twitter:

During this period we have made occasional efforts to build the Spanish-language, Portuguese-language, English-language Canadia and Australian accounts. All the major feeds experienced growth starting when the COVID-19 crisis hit.  Accounts experiencing significant increases are in bold.

English: 25,265-24,939

Canada English: 13,729-13,063

USA: 5,669-5,662

Australia: 4,872-4,991

Spanish: 4,432-4,040

Canada French: 2,612-2,545-

Portuguese: 3,176-2,913-

Italian: 517 (last tweet June 2019)

Swedish: 361 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 350 (last tweet 2015)

French: 227 (last tweet 2018)

German: 126 (last tweet 2018)

Russian: 42-40 (last tweet November 2019)

Japanese: 20 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

Despite the summer heat, the pandemic and lockdown, the last three weeks have been quite busy for us, with new campaigns — and a new intern.

New campaigns: We launched two new campaigns — for Zimbabwe and Turkey. The Turkey campaign, launched with in partnership with Deriteks and IndustriALL, appears in 14 languages and has 5,799 supporters. The Zimbabwe campaign, in partnership with Public Services International (PSI) and the Zimbabwean Nurses Association (ZINA) also appears in 14 languages and has 5,918 supporters. These campaigns appear alongside eight other active campaigns — the most campaigns we have ever run at the same time.

Our older campaigns: All have been given a boost by repeated posts across social media in the last couple of weeks.

Campaign translations: We did a comprehensive review and found that of the top 10 languages (other than English), we had complete sets of translations for just five campaigns. We followed up with key translators and activists about the other languages, but with limited success.  Our biggest problem is with Korean — we have a large mailing list, but no active volunteer translators.

Mailing lists: We imported 440 new subscribers who supported our campaigns, most of them to the English list.

Intern: LabourStart has now hired its sixth intern since October 2012 — Nathanael Cheng. Nate has just graduated from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, is currently based near Philadelphia in the US, and he began work for us during the last week of July.

The first volume, published in 2014.

Dan Gallin book: We’ve made a lot of progress on this book this month, and hope to have most of the work done in August. This is the second volume of essays; the first (Solidarity) we published in 2014.

Global Labour University: I met for an hour (online) with a dozen trade unionists from Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, Liberia, Korea, India, Brazil, Germany, and Canada. We had a very good, productive conversation.

Our new home page: We’re rewritten some of the code for the Spanish page so that it will show many more news stories at the bottom of the page — and will consider doing the same for other languages as we roll these out. We also fixed a problem with top news stories not appearing on the bottom of the page in English and French editions. Because we have 10 active campaigns and on our new home page we show images for each campaign, this was taking up too much of the page (and pushing the news too far down). Instead we’re now limiting this to just the five latest campaigns. We’ll have a ‘more campaigns’ link in all languages, as we already do in English.

IONOS: Our web hosting company caused a major problem for us when they upgraded to a new version of Linux. No one could add news — as was reported by two of our more active correspondents in the UK. We managed to quickly fix the code which allows our software to keep running, but we will need to attentive in case anything else is broken too.

Since 1 June, we’ve been busy.

Brazil: We launched a campaign in support of Santander workers at the request of UNI Global Union — one of five campaigns we launched in the last month. It is our most successful campaign ever in the Portuguese language, with more than 1,000 supporters in the first few days. It is also on track to be our largest current campaign, with 7,162 supporters and still counting.

Czech Republic: We launched a campaign in support of Ryanair workers at the request of the European Transport Workers Federation. It is also picking up a larger number of supporters than usual and today has 6,603 supporters.

India: We launched a campaign at the request of a number of global unions including the ITUC to protest the new attacks on workers’ rights.  It has 4,456 supporters today.

Kyrgyzstan: We’ve publicised the arrest of a trade union leader and are exploring the launch of a new campaign.

Malaysia: We launched a campaign in support of hospital workers, which has also now been translated into the Malay language.  The campaign has 3,618 supporters.

Mexico: We raised the possibility of doing a campaign in support of a jailed labour lawyer and are still waiting to hear if there is interest.

Palestine: We are in discussions about the launch of new campaign.

Peru: We launched a new campaign to urge Falabella (a Chilean multinational home retailer) to reinstate 22 workers who have been dismissed for asking for better protection against Covid-19, at the request of UNI.  This campaign has 6,055 supporters

Philippines: We shared the IUF campaign in support of Coca-Cola workers widely through mass mailings, our website and social media.

Poland: We are awaiting to hear back from UNI about suspending our campaign here, which has been live for some six months already.

USA: We sent out a mailing to our English list in support of a campaign by farm workers union FLOC.

Campaigns: We noticed that we were having a problem with our script that shows campaigns — it was taking very long to load campaigns. We fixed this by removing the live counter, and later replacing this with one that is updated manually a few times a day. Loading speeds are now much faster, and this is probably contributing to increased support for our campaigns.

Correspondents: Now that we have completely cleared the email backlog from the last few months (yes — inbox zero at last), there are no longer any individuals waiting to become LabourStart correspondents. A total of 43 new correspondents signed up in the first half of 2020, and of these 10 have already posted news.

Country names: This has been an issue for some time as quite a few countries have changed their names in the last few years (most recently, North Macedonia and eSwatini); we have developed a work plan to solve this issue across both our news and campaigns platforms.

Donations: The European Transport Workers Federation has made a generous donation.

Global Labour University: We have been approached to make a presentation about LabourStart to their students later this month.

Health & Safety: We have new Health & Safety news pages in many languages and these have been promoted across the net. We’ve encouraged all correspondents to make use of this, posting and tagging health & safety news.

Interns: We are working with the Industrial and Labour Relations school at Cornell University about getting interns and they are enthusiastic to work with us on this.

LinkedIn: Our Group there continues to grow, despite the fact that we do nothing to promote it, and we picked up over 60 new members this month. Most of what we post to Facebook and Twitter is also posted here.

Mailing lists: We imported 1,107 new subscribers during the last two weeks (and two more imports in early June as well), with large groups joining the English and Portuguese lists.

We haven’t updated the figures on our mailing lists for nearly a year — apologies for that! — so here goes.

The news is not very good.

In the lists below, the first number is from today (3 July 2020) and the second is from a year ago (31 July 2019).

The only lists which have grown are Polish (+183), Portuguese (+140) and Danish (+23). All the other lists have suffered declines. This occurs when the number of people whose addresses change (causing bounces) or who unsubscribe exceeds the number of new subscribers being added (from those people who are supporting our campaigns). The largest single loss is 3,051 in the English list.

The top 10:

English: 73,336 – 76,387
French: 7,717 – 8,277
German: 5,841 – 5,940
Spanish: 5,124 – 5,164
Turkish: 4,216 – 4,266
Korean: 3,400 – 3,742
Italian: 3,329 – 3,563
Russian: 2,631 – 2,694
Norwegian: 2,263 – 2,481
Dutch: 1,475 – 1,597

The others:

Swedish: 1,036 – 1,080
Chinese: 985 – 1,026
Portuguese: 1,006 – 866
Polish: 863 – 680
Japanese: 405 – 421
Ukrainian: 277 – 296
Hebrew: 243 – 251
Hungarian: 184 – 185
Tagalog: 162 – 175
Esperanto: 157 – 175
Danish: 104 – 81
Czech: 66 – 71
Slovakian: 15 – 15

These lists — which are not currently in use — will shortly be migrated to Sendy:

Arabic: 954
Finnish: 532
Indonesian: 394
Farsi: 218
Georgian: 217
Thai: 154
Greek: 57
Romanian: 39
Hindi: 37
Vietnamese: 25
Bulgarian: 18
Creole: 12
Sinhalese: 1

1 July vs 1 June 2020 Numbers

Flickr:

834 members, No change.  10,210 photos.

Facebook Pages/Groups:

LabourStart.org page: 13,440-14,133 likes.

LabourStart UK:  2087-no data.

LabourStart Franco: 592-no data.

LabourStart TV:  431-no data.

LinkedIn:

2137-2087.

Twitter:

During this period we have made occasional efforts to build the Spanish-language, Portuguese-language and Australian accounts. All the major feeds experienced growth starting when the COVID-19 crisis hit.  Accounts experiencing significant increases are in bold.

English: 24,939-24,364

Canada English: 13,063-12,394

USA: 5,662-5,609

Australia: 4,991-4,344

Spanish: 4,040-3,674

Canada French: 2,545-2,429

Portuguese: 2,913-2,132

Italian: 517 (last tweet June 2019)

Swedish: 361 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 350 (last tweet 2015)

French: 227 (last tweet 2018)

German: 126 (last tweet 2018)

Russian: 42-40 (last tweet November 2019)

Japanese: 20 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

1 June vs 1 May 2020 Numbers

Flickr:

834 members, 10,210 photos. No Data for May.

Facebook Page:

14,133-no data from May.

LinkedIn:

2,077.  No data for May.

Twitter:

During this period we have not made any concerted efforts to build the accounts. All the major feeds experienced growth starting when the COVID-19 crisis hit.  Accounts experiencing significant increases are in bold.


English: 24,364-23,798
Canada English: 12,394-11,706
USA: 5,609-5,526
Australia: 4,344-4,227
Spanish: 3,674-3,493
Canada French: 2,429-2,277
Portuguese: 2,132-1,816
Italian: 517 (last tweet June 2019)
Swedish: 361 (last tweet 2016)
Indonesia: 350 (last tweet 2015)
French: 227 (last tweet 2018)
German: 126 (last tweet 2018)
Russian: 40
Japanese: 20 (last tweet 2012)
Dutch: 12
Arabic: 7

Mikalaj Valadzko.

Belarus: We launched a new campaign to protest the sacking of a union activist. It had over 5,300 supporters in the first week, appearing in 18 languages. This is the first campaign we’ve translated into Belarusian.

Cambodia: The biggest news in the last 12 days is the victory of our Cambodia campaign. Our sister Soy Sros was released from jail. IndustriALL, which sponsored the campaign, released a video featuring their general secretary, Valter Sanches, explicitly naming the LabourStart campaign.

India: We have raised the possibility of an online campaign with our global union partners.

Philippines: We closed the campaign, which had 9,044 supporters, in all 18 languages after six months. Unfortunately, it did not achieve the results we were hoping for.

Campaigns: We’re aware that the show campaign script is rendering pages very slowly and have taken the first steps to speed this up. We’ll do more work on this this week, as we cannot have long wait times to load these pages – we will lose people if we do.

LabourStart.tv: We had some issues with the domain name (again!) not working; IONOS support eventually took care of this.

Mailing list issues: Two of our recent mailings to the English list experienced some issues completing; I have posted a support request to Sendy.

Belarus: We will be launching a campaign shortly together with IndustriALL.

Mrs. Soy Sros, president of the CUMW local union at Superl Cambodia.

Cambodia: We launched our first new campaign in months in support of a sacked woman trade union leader. This is likely to be our first campaign to appear in the Khmer language.

Canada: We did a mailing to our list in support of a UFCW campaign.

Iran: LabourStart has been invited to play a part in the upcoming international day of solidarity with Iranian political prisoners; we will submit a video.

Myanmar: A campaign has been proposed; we are currently in discussions about how to move forward on this.

About LabourStart: This page — which we now link to prominently on campaigns — has now been updated and improved.

Events: We have stopped using this feature on LabourStart as no one was adding new events.

LabourStart.tv: We’ve revived this, and now have the labourstart.tv domain name again. For many of the videos, we now have embedded them onto the page, so you don’t have to leave LabourStart to view them. (As a result, the page looks much more interesting.) Correspondents have been encouraged to tag videos to appear here, and that part of the link submission page has been highlighted to make this easier. There’s also now a prominent graphic link to labourstart.tv on our home page.

Website design: We have migrated several more of our languages to the new home page; right now 26 languages use the new page and we have only 9 left to convert, which will take place in the next few days.

During this period we have not made any concerted efforts to build the accounts. All the major feeds experienced growth starting when the COVID-19 crisis hit.

Just eyeballing it, the Portuguese feed, which carries almost exclusively stories from Brazil and Portugal, seems to have experienced the greatest proportional growth.

Note also the dormant accounts. If anyone is interested in assuming responsibility for any of them please let us know.

Our global feed in English remains one of the largest union-friendly Twitter accounts around.

English: 23,798- 22,578

Canada English: 11,706-10,547

USA: 5,526-4,822

Australia: 4,227-3,986

Spanish: 3,493-2,177

Canada French: 2,277-2,155

Portuguese: 1,816-1,397

Italian: 517-516 (last tweet June 2019)

Swedish: 361-364 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 350-354 (last tweet 2015)

French: 227-230 (last tweet 2018)

German: 126-122 (last tweet 2018)

Russian: 40-34

Japanese: 20-19 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12-12

Arabic: 7-7

Our 12 hour live broadcast showcasing videos produced by trade unions around the world on May Day was a huge success.

This event exceeded all our expectations.  We were able to show nearly 200 videos over the course the day, despite two system crashes.  Those videos varied in quality, as we expected, but many were outstanding and LabourStart will be sharing these over the next few days through our website and across social media.  I expect that many others – especially our global union partners – will do the same.

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.

Vimeo, which livestreamed the event for us, reported that during the first 6.5 hours (before we crashed), we had 46,865 views of the video stream.  The number of viewers may be less than that, in case some people stopped viewing and later came back and started up again.  Still, the numbers are much higher than we expected.

We had an indication that this was the case because of the very large number of ‘likes’ the videos were getting, especially during that first half of the broadcast.

Thank you to everyone who helped — and long live May Day!