Inside LabourStart

Pictured: LabourStart editor Eric Lee with leaders of the Malaysian Trades Union Congress last week in Kuala Lumpur.

Malaysia: LabourStart editor Eric Lee spent several days in Malaysia, working together with the Ethical Trading Initiative on a new project they have started on migrant labour. We met with leaders of Malaysian unions, including the Malaysian Trades Union Congress, a number of pro-labour NGOs, a social democratic MP, activists from the Malaysian Socialist Party, and representatives of the global union federations BWI and IndustriALL in the country.

Pakistan campaign: At the request of the ITF, we launched a campaign in supported of 8 sacked dock workers in Karachi. After about a week online, it had just over 5,200 supporters and appeared in 13 languages.

Philippines campaign: At the request of BWI, we launched a campaign against the giant transnational company Holcim. After less than a week online, it had over 4,700 supporters and appeared in 14 languages.

Email service provider: Our current provider is MailChimp and it’s quite expensive. We are currently exploring alternatives, and have migrated some of our lists over to Sendy, a much less costly solution, using a hosting service in Belgium that specialises in this.

Telegram: Following the revelations about hacking that targetted WhatsApp — and specifically targetted activists — we set up a public LabourStart channel on the more secure Telegram platform, a closed private group for members of our Executive, and will soon announce a public discussion group using Telegram as well.

Arthur Svensson prize: LabourStart, which won this prestigious Norwegian trade union award in 2016, has been invited back to Oslo for a ceremony in June to honour the current recipient.

Bangladesh: We promoted a story about the Bangladesh Accord (IndustriALL) as a top global labour news story, and across social media.

Belgium: The transport workers union got in touch and interview Eric Lee for their online and print magazine.

Iran: We publicised as a top global news story, and across social media, the arrest of Mokhtar Asadi, a teacher in Iranian Kurdistan. We also shared the IUF’s story about Amnesty International and Iran on social media, and as a top global news story.

Jordan: We launched a campaign at the request of the ITUC and Solidarity Center. After less than two weeks online, the campaign appears in 15 languages, and has 5,270 supporters.

Kazakhstan: We closed one of our campaigns after three months online. We are still waiting for a report from the campaign sponsors.

Namibia: We made the mine strike story a top global news story.

Nigeria: We gave extensive publicity to an ITUC news story about Nigeria.

North Korea: We made a story about 150,000 forced labourers into top global labour news story and shared it widely on social media.

South Korea: Victory in our campaign together with the KPTU, who wrote to thank us. We publicised the victory across social media and with a mailing to our English list (the campaign was only translated into a few languages in the few days it was online).

Thailand: We closed one of our campaigns after three months online. We are still waiting for a report from the campaign sponsors.

Ukraine: We shared the story of the Ukrainian miners’ protest underground as a top global news story and across social media.

USA: We posted a story about a big retail strike in New England across social media.

Venezuela: We promoted the PSI statement as a stop global news story and across social media.

Zimbabwe: We posted widely about the detention of the ITUC Africa secretary general and his subsequent release.

Correspondents: We added new correspondents from Italy, the USA, Russia, and Guyana. We also posted on social media an appeal for people to signup to be correspondent (producing no results). We published online the guidelines for correspondents in Italian. We’ve received a translation of the interface for correspondence in Spanish but it needs some more work.

Mailing lists: We posted an appeal to recruit new subscribers across social media. We added 674 new campaign supporters to the lists; there was considerable growth to our Thai list this time.

Women: We wrote to all correspondents about International Women’s Day – as I did last year, using almost the same text.

Highlights:

• Thanks to GDPR, almost all the mailing lists are shrinking in size. The only ones to grow in the last quarter are Korean, Russian, Hungarian, and Esperanto.
• On social media, the big news is the spectacular growth of our revived Twitter feed in Spanish – thanks to Derek’s hard work. LabourStart’s Spanish speaking correspondents, translators and supporters are invited to help keep this growth going.
• Traffic to the main news site was relatively stable, with just under 400,000 visitors this quarter.

In the list below, the first number is the current total, the second one is our previous total.

Mailing lists

The top 10:

English: 79,891 – 80,850
French: 8,531 – 8,610
German: 6,065 – 6,103
Spanish: 5,228 – 5,356
Turkish: 4,243 – 4,260
Korean: 3,791 – 3,740
Italian: 3,663 – 3,719
Russian: 2,725 – 2,450
Norwegian: 2,553 – 2,603
Dutch: 1,638 – 1,669

The others:

Swedish: 1,098 – 1,179
Chinese: 1,037 – 1,043
Arabic: 957 – 957
Portuguese: 849 – 859
Polish: 713 – 798
Finnish: 538 – 562
Japanese: 446 – 446
Indonesian: 395 – 395
Hebrew: 257 – 262
Ukrainian: 247 – 254
Farsi: 218 – 232
Georgian: 217 – 217
Tagalog: 203 – 203
Esperanto: 179 – 177
Hungarian: 178 – 159
Danish: 83 – 86
Czech: 71 – 72
Thai: 64 – 64
Greek: 57 – 57
Romanian: 41 – 41
Hindi: 37 – 37
Vietnamese: 25 – 25
Bulgarian: 18 – 18
Slovakian: 15 – 15
Creole: 12 – 12
Sinhalese: 1 – 1

Facebook

Like LabourStart.org page (English): 12,835 – 12,698
Members of LabourStart group (Global Labour News and Information): 8,629 – 8,899
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 2,314 – 2,365
Like LabourStart UK page: 2,075 – 2,088
Like LabourStart page (French): 581 – 575
Like LabourStart page (German): 495 – 493
Friends of LabourStart Brasil: 468 – 450
LabourStart TV: 404 – 405
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 157 – 157
Members of LabourStart Vostok (Russian): 111 – 126

Twitter

English: 21,374 – 20,878
Canada English: 9,578 – 9,549
USA: 3,584 – 3,586
Australia: 3,075 – 2,863
Canada French: 1,956 – 1,939
Spanish: 1,200 – 70
Italian: 516 – 525
Swedish: 364 – 366
Indonesia: 354 – 353
Portuguese: 321 – 307
French: 235 – 236
German: 123 – 94
Russian: 34 – 31
Japanese: 19 – 19
Dutch: 12 – 12
Arabic: 7 – 7

Linked In

LabourStart group: 2,119 – 2,088

Flickr

Union group on Flickr: 834 – 831

Website traffic to the main news website

Visitors 391,616 – 399,164

Top countries (by sessions):

USA 39% – 38%
UK 13% – 12%
France 5%
India 5% – 6%
Canada 4% – 4%

Correspondents: 905 – 900

I’ve chased up with correspondents and translators about our new language editions (Tamil, Georgian, Ukrainian, Serbian and Hindi) none of which have gone live yet.  I’ve noted also a ‘Plan B’ in each case where we continue to get no responses from our comrades.  It’s important that all the languages we list have fresh content and we need to identify people who can help consistently with each one.

Next Friday I’m off to Istanbul to speak at a trade union conference on new media – my second visit to Turkey this year as a guest of the unions.

All our recent campaigns have now been published in Turkish thanks to a team effort lead by a new comrade, Deniz.

The front page of Turkish LabourStart now features our campaigns in that language – it used to show only the English ones.

We asked BWI for permission to shut down the Cambodian construction workers’ campaign, which is now 3 months old.  Of course we’ve asked what the result of the campaign has been so that we can report back to our readers.

I’ve begun intensifying our use of Facebook Causes and have now emailed everyone in our largest cause, the one supporting the jailed Vietnamese union activists.

The campaigns software has been fixed – now when you send off a message and see the page asking you to do more, clicking on the link to show all current campaigns takes you directly to your language (instead of to an old page that showed a bunch of flags and languages).

We launched a second Colombian campaign this week at the request of Justice for Colombia, an NGO backed by the British TUC.  JFC has promised to promote the campaign on their website and to their lists.

I wrote a followup email to the comrade who has agreed to coordinate the team of German volunteer translators as none of our recent campaigns or emailings have gone out in that language – even though we have volunteers ready to do so.

I’ve made a number of suggestions to Andrew regarding work towards our conference in Sydney which is only one year away. These include regular phone calls, a closed group on UnionBook, and following up with our correspondents in the region.

We expect to launch a Finnish version of our campaigns starting with the Nokia one (of course) but have not gotten a correctly formatted version of the file we need yet from the metal workers.

I’ve been invited to speak at two union training events in the UK in the near future on the subject of online campaigning and social networks — one is for the UCU (academics union) in Leeds; the other will be a series of events for TSSA.

I’ll be in Geneva all this week doing some work for the IMF and IUF.

I should have access to email, but please only contact me in case of emergency.

Here are the totals with the changes since the end of August in brackets:

Mailing lists – subscribers: 68,694 [-163]
LabourStart’s English language mailing list: 57,911 [-39]
Absolute unique visitors according to Google: 22,997 [-7,156]
UnionBook 2.0 – members: 1,792 [+600]
Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 3,669 [+57]
Twitter – followers: 2,526 [+112]
Correspondents: 812 [+9]
Union group on Flickr: 574 [+10]
LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 201 [+2]

Some highlights from the mailing lists — the other large groups are:

Norwegian 2,716 [no change]
French 2,168 [+6]
Spanish 1,211 [+2]
German 801 [+3]
Italian 518 [no change]
Russian 445 [+4]
Turkish 453 [+18]
Polish 305 [+1]
Portuguese 238 [no change]
Dutch 233 [+3]
Swedish 230 [+1]
Chinese 183 [+2]
Danish 162 [no change]

As part of my effort to review all the languages we currently work in, to identify problems and so on, I’ve written software that allows us to see who has posted news in a particular language this year.  Here are some examples:

• Norwegian
• French
• English
• Russian
• Finnish
• Chinese

We’ve not had a working French language campaigns newswire for weeks (maybe months).  Now fixed – see it here.  Thanks for everyone’s patience with this.

We’ve shown the ad ‘Facebook is for scabs’ 1,416,224 times in the last week at a cost to us of $379.61.  446 people have clicked through to visit UnionBook as a result.  In the last 10 days, 254 people have signed up to join UnionBook, which now has 1,614 members.  (At the current rate, we’ll reach 2,000 members in another two weeks.) I intend to continue running the ad for a few more days at least.

I’d love to hear your views on this – either as comments here or as emails to me.

Back in May, at LabourTech Canada, I was enthused by the idea of doing podcasts.

My first podcast went live at the end of that month, and overall I’ve now done a dozen of them.

When I publicize a podcast to LabourStart’s mailing list, I’ll get between 200 to 700 listeners.  But if I don’t mention it in a mass mailing, and just publicize using the web, Facebook, Twitter, iTunes, etc, I can get as few as 75 listeners.

I’m not sure I want to use the LabourStart mass mailing every time I do a podcast, and not sure there’s any real interest in my continuing to do them.

What do you think?