Inside LabourStart

After just 24 hours, and with 297 downloads, it looks like this one will soon be our most popular.

Our previous record was 311.

And we’re getting ‘fan mail’ sent via BuzzSprout and email:

Nice to hear your voice, Eric, and well worth a listen. – Paul Booth

I appreciate the Labour Start Podcast on the striking workers at the port(s) in Taiwan. All of these struggles affect workers everywhere. I will share this. – New Westminster, BC

I liked it, and I appreciate everything that Eric does and how long he’s done it. For me, the short interview is fine, but it could have been longer. I’m in my car, and have more time to listen. The interview was a little unclear because I did not understand initially who the union represents. I understand now that they are crews who crew ocean-going ships, as opposed to dock workers or other workers in the maritime industry. – Dover, New Hampshire

Had a chance to listen to interview with union president, Carlos Ching-Hung Wang. It was short enough I could fit it in to my available time. Second language aided authentic feeling about it. Thanks. –  Ken Collier, North Bay, Ontario, Canada

Sounds like ‘fire and hire’ has hit Taiwan’s seafarers! It’s a low-down tactic wherever it is used! – United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Can you share addresses for the entities that Brother Carlos Ching-Hung Wong mentioned so that we can write to them? – Naperville, Illinois

Due to my absence on honeymoon, this report is delayed by about a week. It’s been a busy time for LabourStart.

Podcasts: We are resuming our podcasts, interviewing comrades in Belgium and Taiwan, linked to new campaigns we have launched (more below).

New campaigns: We launched a campaign in support of transport workers in Poland submitted by the European Transport Workers Federation. As Eric was absent during this period, Derek and Espen took up the slack and launched the campaign. Earlier in the month we launched a campaign in support of maritime workers in Taiwan, who are on strike. This campaign is our first in a very long time to appear in both Traditional and Simplified Chinese.  We are currently running eight (8) campaigns, which is nearly a record for us and which follows a long dry spell.  The largest of these is from India, with 4,714 supporters after less than four weeks online.

Languages: We now have a framework for campaigns in Tamil, and our first campaign running in that language.

Donations: The German education workers union GEW made a substantial donation as did the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) and IndustriAll Europe.  But our financial situation remains quite difficult for now.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew this month, with the English list picking up 326 new subscribers and the Chinese list getting 119, with smaller numbers for the other lists. We also did our first mailing on Mailjet using segmentation, targetting people who have not clicked on a link in our messages.

Labour News Network: We ook another step toward revitalising this little-used part of our website — we published Espen’s report on South Sudan here.

Interns: Four of our former interns showed an interest in continuing to work with each other and with us. Next month we’ll try to organise an online meetup of all the interns we’ve had over the last 12 years.

We missed last week’s update because I was getting married.  We will probably miss next week’s too, as I’ll be on my honeymoon.  But for now, here’s a short update of the highlights from the last two weeks:

New campaign: We launched a major new campaign in support of garment workers in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.  After less than two days online, the campaign had over 3,000 supporters which is very fast growth for us.  (The fact that it is no longer August and union offices have re-opened may have helped.)  The campaign appears in eight languages — includind Indonesian and Serbian — with more in the pipeline.  We are expecting this campaign to also appear in Tamil and are awaiting translation; this will be our first campaign in that language.  We’re also hoping to get a podcast interview done for this campaign next week and are waiting to hear back from our partners.  We currently have 6 active campaigns online.

Translators: For the first time, we had an online meetup of our Translators.  About 12 came, nearly all of them active translators, and of those there were three translators for German, which had been until recently a problematic language for us (no consistent translation).  It was a very good meeting and it will not be the last time we meet as a group.

Interns: We also reached out this week to the 16 individuals who we have identified so far (there may be a few more) who have been LabourStart interns since 2012.  A couple have already responded positively and this is a very welcome development.

Finances: Finally, this week we were able to report on a worsening financial situation for LabourStart, and we reached out to our union partners as well as the more than 700 people who regularly donate.   (Our donors’ mailing list is something very new for us.)  Even though we have not yet reached out to our public mailing lists about this, this week we raised £2,430 and received pledges totalling another £1,688, so well over £4,000 in just 7 days.  But that level of donations has to continue for a little while in order to restore some stablity and to ensure that we meet our spending commitments — which was not the case in early September.

While we sort out a new mailing service our monthly numbers report will be on hold. When the transition is complete we’ll return to regular reports on the mailing lists and social media accounts.

Our news feed on Telegram.

New campaign coming: It looks like we have a new campaign coming very soon, this time from India. It will join the five campaigns we’ve launched in the last six weeks.

Telegram: We’re making a push to grow our number of followers on Telegram, and have widely shared that fact across social media.

Translators: We’re planning an online meeting of all LabourStart’s volunteer translators. You’ve all been sent a link to our Doodle poll so that we can agree the best time to meet — please fill that in if you’ve not yet done so. We’ve just added new volunteers for Bahasa and Serbian language translations.

Podcasts: We’ve added three new features to our podcasts — Fanmail (which allows listeners to send us feedback), Podroll (which allows us to add a list of our podcasting friends), and Dynamic content, which you can hear at the end of every podcast we’ve produced so far.

Home page bug: For a few days, clicking on almost anything on the right side of the home page would take you to our donations page. Contrary to popular belief, this was not intentional and has now been fixed.

Mailing lists: We added new subscribers from our various campaigns to 10 of our lists — the largest group was for the new Serbian language list.

News: In the first 22 days of August, our volunteer correspondents posted on average almost 92 stories per day. The most active correspondents this month were Derek, Eric, Pat, Kyle, and Roy.

LabourStart correspondents meeting, August 2024.

Correspondents: We had the first meeting of LabourStart correspondents in a very long time. We had participants from nearly all continents, most of them veteran correspondents, but a couple of brand new ones as well. We will convene these meetings quarterly from now on.

Mailings: We did our first A/B testing of a mass mailing for a very long time, in a mailing promoting the podcasts and campaigns in support of workers at Liberty Steel (Czechia) and Yura (Serbia).

Mailing lists: These grew by 42 this week (last week we added 129). Growth will continue to be slow because it is August and many of our supporters are on holiday, with many union offices closed.

Podcasts: We did a second interview this summer with Judith Kirton-Darling of IndustriAll Europe on the subject of the Liberty Steel campaign (Czechia).

News: In the first half of August (15 days), our volunteer correspondents posted 1,440 news stories — not bad considering how many union websites are closed for the month, with websites not being updated. Our most active correspondents in August were Derek, Eric, Patrick, Kyle, and Pat.

Campaigns: No new campaigns were launched this week and all campaigns are showing slow growth — probably because it’s August and many people are on holiday. I have reminded some of our campaign partners that it is very important to mobilise support in their countries for campaigns that they have requested — which unfortunately does not always happen.

Serbia: In addition to all the usual campaign stuff, I wrote my weekly column for Solidarity on this subject and shared it widely.

Mailing lists: Our lists continue to grow as campaign supporters are added. This week we picked up 129 new subscribers to the list, 70 of them for the English list.

Finances: We now have our first mailing list of donors, featuring people who donated to LabourStart in May and June this year. We will soon begin regular updates to that list.

Correspondents: All correspondents have now been invited to an online meetup on 13 August.

News: Our correspondents have posted 807 news stories in the first 8 days of August, which is extraordinary, considering that so many union websites are not updated this month. The most active correspondents this month have been Derek, Eric, Patrick, Kyle and Pat.

New campaign – Czechia: At the request of IndustriALL and IndustriAll Europe, we launched this campaign on 31.7. By today, it already had 1,721 supporters.

Serbia campaign and podcast: This campaign now appears in quite a few languages and we interviewed a comrade there, sharing this as our podcast. With 3,215 supporters after less than two weeks online, this is already our second largest online campaign. We’ve picked up almost 900 new supporters in the last seven days.

Campaign submission form: The form broke a few months ago — people were submitting campaigns and they were not reaching us. We’ve now migrated the form over to Jotform and this seems to work quite well — and it’s free.

Mailing lists: We finally closed down the Mailchimp account, having migrated all our lists back to Mailjet.

Correspondents: We’ve invited all correspondents to an online meetup later this month; this weekend, we’ll confirm the day and time.

News: On the first day of August our volunteer correspondents posted a whopping 133 news stories. The most active correspondents were Derek, Eric, Roy, Patrick and Pat. Who says August is a quiet month?

Congress of the Education International: We’ve offered complete coverage of this based on stories posted on their website, and publicised this fact widely across social media.

We missed last week’s update, so this report covers the last 14 days.

Campaigns: After a prolonged drought, we now have 4 live campaigns in support of workers in China, Eswatini, Georgia and Serbia. Here are the campaigns and their current total numbers of supporters:

• Georgia: Support striking workers at Evolution Gaming – 1,891
• Serbia: Yura must stop union-busting and negotiate – 2,326
• Eswatini: Recognise the teachers union, respect workers’ rights – 2,611
• China: Release jailed journalists and media workers now – 3,334

The translators have been very busy and most of the campaigns are appearing all the languages. There is a bit of a backlog as many of the translators don’t post the campaigns themselves, and as we transition to a new mailing list system (see below) only one of us is sending out the mailings at the moment.

Two of the campaigns were proposed by unions on the ground and we managed to get the support of European and global union federations.

Other campaigns are also in the pipeline.

In addition, we’ve discovered a new problem with our campaign submission form meaning that for the moment, we’re asking unions to manually submit their campaigns.

Also, the message appearing on our home page when there are no campaigns somehow continue to show for a few days even after campaigns began appearing there again — this has now been fixed.

Mailing lists: As a cost-cutting measure, we are moving from MailChimp to Mailjet, and have already begun doing mailings from the new system. We have migrated 27 of our lists and will migrate the remaining 14 lists this weekend, closing down the MailChimp account early next week. This should save LabourStart something on the order of £8,000 per year.

News: In the first 25 days of July, 38 of our volunteer correspondents posted 2,505 news stories — this is a slight improvement compared to what I reported two weeks ago. The most active correspondents in July have been Derek, Patrick, Eric, Kyle and Pat. Next week we will be writing to all correspondents suggesting an online meetup to discuss what’s happening at LabourStart — and to offer help and support to those (the vast majority) who have not been posting news.

Campaigns: We launched our first new campaign since April – China: Release jailed journalists and media workers now. Two more campaigns are in the pipeline, in Serbia and Georgia, and we have reached out to help a union in Bangladesh as well.

Podcasts: We released another podcast this week — an interview with David Edwards, the general secretary of the Education International. Meanwhile, last week’s interview, with Judith Kirton-Darling of IndustriAll Europe, has had more downloads than the previous six podcasts we released.

Mailing lists: After a series of false starts, we have started migrating our lists away from the very expensive MailChimp to MailJet, which we have used before. So far, the process seems relatively painless.  This should save us a considerable amount of money.

T-shirts: While we are unlikely to have t-shirts available in time for the Labour Day holiday in North America, we have made contact with a unionised workers’ coop in the US which can create an online store for us to sell not only t-shirts, but other union swag as well (hats, mugs, etc.) This could help us improve our finances in the future.

News: In the first 12 days of July, our volunteer correspondents posted 1,200 news stories — exactly 100 stories per day. The most active correspondents were Derek Blackadder, Eric Lee, Patrick Craven, Kyle Webster, and Pat Bulmer.