Inside LabourStart

No, these are not related.

Yesterday, I closed down the Taiwan YFO campaign which had been running for more than four months.  Today I’ll ask about shutting down the Algeria campaign which has now run for three months, and in another two days I’ll try to shut down the China Foxconn campaign, which will have been running for three months.  So by the weekend, we should be down to seven campaigns (down from ten) which is still quite a few.

At the same time, UnionBook is likely to reach 1,000 members by the weekend.  We picked up 409 new members on Tuesday and Wednesday and are about 140 short of the goal of 1,000.

We’re now well over 700 members.  I continue to process them one at a time.  There are 7 who are on hold as they have not given us the name of their union (some wrote ‘none’, others repeated their country name or workplace).  In all cases, I email them and ask what their connection is to the labour movement.  This morning alone I had to spend 40 minutes processing the members who came in overnight, so it might be getting close to time to share the admin chores here …

A week into the launch of the Ning-based version of UnionBook and I think it’s time to tell the 70,000 or so people on the LabourStart list.

At the moment we have 442 users on the new UnionBook; they have set up 32 groups, posted 242 photos and 29 videos, 13 events and 32 blog entries.

According to the ‘advanced search’, which can lag a week behind the actual data, here’s the breakdown by country (not a complete list):

1. USA 107
2. UK 89
3. Canada 74
4. Australia 41
5. Norway 17
6. Israel 11
7. Ireland 9
8. Belgium 8
9. Indonesia 6
10. New Zealand 6
11. Finland 6
12. France 5
13. Italy 3
14. Sweden 3
15. Switzerland 3
16. Germany 2
17. Spain 2
18. India 2
19. Brazil 1
20. Taiwan 1

It’s the largest strike in African history and we need to do all we can to ensure that LabourStart’s coverage is comprehensive and up-to-date.  Andrew and I have posted many articles so far, and today I’ll be writing to our key South African correspondents to ensure that they’re fully involved.  Meanwhile, using UnionBook, Facebook, Twitter and Linked in, I’ve drawn people’s attention to our South African news page.  This short URL is what we should promote: http://tinyurl.com/3a348wa

We’ve gone up from 45 members yesterday to 177 today.  And those members have invited another 343 to join.  And we still haven’t invited the nearly 5,000 people who currently use UnionBook, nor the LabourStart mailing lists (70,000).  All the feedback so far is positive, and the one big issue we need to resolve (waiting to hear from Ning support about this) is how members can configure their language.

Yesterday we had 7 members; today we have 45.  That followed a mass mailing to about 700 LabourStart correspondents (more than 5% of them signed up to the new UnionBook within 24 hours).  Those members have been sending out invitations, and there are now more than 70 invitees who may also be signing up.  Meanwhile, this morning I took a number of steps to to expand the membership of the new UnionBook:

1. Updated my Facebook status to encourage people to join
2. Sent out a message to the LabourStart group on Facebook (3,562 members)
3. Posted a tweet as LabourStart (2,363 followers)
4. Sent out a message to the UnionBook group on Facebook (707 members)
5. Sent out a message to the LabourStart group on LinkedIn (193 members)
6. Posted a site-wide message on UnionBook (old version)

We’ve got the first 7 people using it and responses so far are positive.  Today I invited 100 times that number — the entire list of LabourStart correspondents — to be our beta-testers.  We have 28 more days to decide if we like this thing …

For the next 30 days we’ll be testing this. If you’re interested in being one of the beta testers, click on the Sign up link in the upper right corner.  To learn more about what’s going on, read this blog post.

I have written to all concerned parties — this campaign has been running now for more than 3 months and should be suspended.

I’ve just returned from a 14-day visit to Georgia which while a vacation also gave me an opportunity to meet with Georgian trade unionists.

I had three meetings in the Tbilisi headquarters of the 250,000 member Georgian Trade Union Confederation (GTUC).  The first two were with leading figures of the union and lasted some four hours.  We discussed among other things the GTUC designating a correspondent; the launch of LabourStart in the Georgian language; the translation of campaigns into Georgian; the launch of a Georgian language mailing lists; and the possible launch of campaigns on behalf of the GTUC where appropriate.  The third and final meeting was with the executive of the newly formed journalists union where I made a presentation and took questions.  The local representative of the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center took part in the last of these.