Inside LabourStart

Podcasts: After a three month gap we are renewing our podcast series. We interviewed Paul Finch of the BCGEU in Canada — who is currently leading a major strike. In the first 12 hours online, the podcast was downloaded 250 times, which is excellent. We’re reaching out now to future interviewees. We’ve added donation and subcription options using Buzzsprout to encourage people to donate to LabourStart.

Turkey campaign: We launched a campaign against union-busting at Digel. It very quickly grew to more than 4,100 supporters in just four days, and translations currently appear in 13 languages with more on the way.

Sri Lanka campaign: This campaign has just 2,250 supporters, despite repeated reminders to lists and publicity across social media. It appears in 14 languages with more on the way.

Mailing lists: Our English list grew by 391 this week as we included campaign supporters. The other five lists we updated included just 27 new subscribers. For the first time, we have a mailing list in Sinhala.

News: Our volunteer correspondents have posted 2,937 news stories in the first 25 days of September, an average of over 117 per day, or one every 12 minutes.

Donations: For the first time, we’ve had a donation from the Canadian Labour Congress.

Belarus: Following the release of two jailed union leaders, we have now closed down our campaign. We expect to shortly interview Liza for our podcast series.

Belgium: Eric Lee will be travelling to Brussels in two weeks for meetings with senior figures in the global and European trade union movement.

Canada: We’ve had discussions with the BCGEU, currently on strike, about ways in which we can help, including a podcast interview with their president.

Sri Lanka: Our campaign in support of NEXT workers went live on Monday and has just under 2,000 supporters. It’s available in 12 languages, including Sinhala and Tamil.

Turkey: We expect to launch a new campaign in support of textile workers fighting against union-busting, possibly today.

Belarus: Some very good news – a couple of top trade union leaders and many other political prisoners have been released from jail. We’re shared the news widely on LabourStart and across social media and will probably be closing the campaign very soon.

Fundraising: Our September fundraiser took in £2,820.84 so far. Reminder mailings have not yet gone out.

New campaigns: We are about to launch new campaigns in support of clothing workers in Sri Lanka and Turkey.

Instagram: With the help of our new intern Joanne we are reviving this page, which has over 750 followers.

News: In the first 11 days of September, our volunteer correspondents posted 1,244 news stories, averaging over 113 per day.

Philippines Kawasaki campaign: The number of supporters jumps from 3,944 to over 5,000 this week, as campaign reminders go out and the campaign now appears in 18 languages. At the request of the union, we added a link to a GoFundMe page for the strikers, which doubles in one week from C$554 to C$1,129.

Korean language: We have translated the Kawasaki campaign and mass mailing, with additional text in the mailing to explain our long absence, thanks to translations done by our new intern, Joanne. A followup mailing is going out on Tuesday. One of our goals is to identify active supporters and get new translators for when we no longer have an intern.

LabourStart Executive: Two new members have joined — Mac Urata (Japan) and Lennon Wong (Taiwan).

Correspondents: We have a number of new correspondents, including one from Pakistan.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew by 244 this week, with 209 of those on the English list.

Fundraising: We did our annual Labo(u)r Day appeal, raising £1,764 in the first 3 days online. £1,510 of that came in the first 24 hours. The appeal then went out in 5 more languages, with more on the way.

Equal Times: We have heard that this online magazine, created by the ITUC in 2012, is shutting down. We’ve written to confirm and to offer our help — maybe LabourStart can play a role here.

 

August is almost over and with it the end of the long summer holidays that have largely shut down parts of the global trade union movement.

We expect a surge in activity from early next week, right after the Labo(u)r Day holiday in the US and Canada.

We’ll kick off next week with a major fundraising appeal focussing on recent victories that our campaigns helped contribute to, including in the Philippines and Turkey. (And we’ll probably also mention reports we’ve gotten about the effect of our recent campaign in Azerbaijan as well.)

And despite it being a relatively slow month for labour news, our volunteer correspondents posted 2,600 news stories in the first 28 days of the month, or 93 per day on average.

Philippines Kawasaki campaign: The campaign has been translated into nearly 20 languages with more on the way. After a week online, it has 3,994 supporters.

After one week online, we did a followup mailing to our 80,878 subscribers to the English list. We also re-shared the campaign across social media, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Blue Sky, X, WhatsApp and Telegram.

We checked our internal sources to make sure that messages are being delivered to the employer.

And, at the request of the union, we added a link to donate to their fund — it appears on the campaign page.

Interns: The first of our Cornell ILR interns, Joanne, started work this week. The second, Dylan, will begin work on Monday.

 

Sorry that we missed one week, so this covers the last 14 days.

Philippines Kawasaki campaign: This went live today with over 1,400 supporters in the first few hours and translations into four languages — including the highly relevant Tagalog and Japanese.

Sri Lanka Next campaign: We had a call last week to discuss the possibility of doing this and are waiting to hear back from partners before taking the next steps.

Turkey teachers campaign: This was a win. We will share the full statement we received from the union via the Education International in another week or so.

Interns: The first of our two interns from Cornell University will begin work on Monday. The second should start about a week later.

Campaigns: We now have a big and prominent link for our supporters to share our campaigns on WhatsApp. We hope that this will help a lot in regions where the instant messaging app is more used than email.

Donations: BWI made another very generous donation to us.

This report covers three weeks as I was away on holiday for one of those weeks.

Azerbaijan campaign: This campaign was closed after more than three months online. Here is what the union told us: “The campaign received widespread attention, going viral in the news and drawing significant public interest. It even reached state-level awareness, Sara Rahimova was questioned about it during her interrogation while in detention this past April.”

Turkey campaign: We closed down our campaign in support of teachers and are waiting for an update from the union.

Canada: Derek made a presentation (by Zoom) about LabourStart to a group of 14 – 18 year-olds at a trade union summer camp in New Brunswick. We also contributed to a campaign by the Ontario Federation of Labour to help convince the Canadian government to allow prominent South African trade union leader Jay Naidoo to remain in the country.

Interns: We’ve heard from a couple of our new interns, who will begin work at the end of this month.

Serbia: We’ve heard from the Union of Free Trade Unions of Serbia (SSSS) and are looking into ways to support them. More details soon.

Sri Lanka: We are in discussions about ways to help workers at a factory that has been closed. More details soon.

Donations: We’ve received a generous donation from PSI.  We are still waiting to hear back from two other global unions.

We missed a week, so this is a report on the last 15 days of activity.

New campaign – Georgia: We’ve launched a campaign in solidarity with striking miners in western Georgia. See it here.

New volunteer translators needed: We’re delighted to have new volunteer translators for Arabic and French and we hope that soon our campaigns and mass mailings will once again be available in these languages. We still need volunteers for the following languages: Dutch, Farsi, Finnish, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, and Tagalog. Can you help?

Podcasts: We’ve not done enough of these interviews this year, and now the team at LabourStart has come up with a fairly long list of people to invite. We will begin reaching out in August and expect to see the number of podcast interviews grow.  If you have any suggestions for who we should interview, or if you’re prepared to help interview people, please contact us.

News: Our volunteer correspondents posted 1,711 news stories in the first 18 days of July — and average of one news story every 15 minutes, every single day.  If you’re a LabourStart correspondent and have been inactive, or forgotten how to post or your logins, please do get in touch!

This report covers the last two weeks — and we can start off with some very good news.

Our three-week long campaign in support of the workers at MetroWear in the Philippines, who make clothing for Lululemon, ended in a major victory. 3,933 people supported our campaign, which appeared in 12 languages, and we shared a detailed account, written by the union, of the victory widely on our news pages and by email to our list. A significant number of our supporters then made donations to LabourStart after the win.

We’re been struggling for some time to get regular, timely translations of our campaigns and mailings in French, but following an appeal to subscribers to our new Facebook channel, we’ve picked up two new volunteers who translated the Azerbaijan campaign and mailing. As a result, after just two days, that campaign had 437 more supporters.

That Facebook channel is also the reason why we just picked up seven new volunteer correspondents from the USA, Tunisia, Liberia, Panama, Belarus, New Zealand and Australia.

We did our first podcast interview for a while — this time with Shawna Bader-Blau, from the Solidarity Center. This had a considerably larger audience than most of our podcasts and was well received — though we did get a small number of hostile responses as well.

In a mailing to our Canadian supporters, we encouraged them to back a campaign launched by the Ontario Federation of Labour focussing on the struggle of Jay Naidoo, one of the most important figures in the South African labour movement, to remain in Canada.

Finally, we’ve embarked on major changes to both our campaigns and our newswires and expect to be able to announce significant improvements to both in coming days.

 

 

 

 

What follows is a brief summary of highlights followed by the usual long list of numbers.

SUMMARY:

We continue to see changes in the mailing lists as the problems that resulted from several mailing service provider changes are corrected but growth has returned.

XTwitter feeds continue to decline.  Most or all of that can be attributed to our followers abandoning the platform for Bluesky and perhaps Mastodon.

Our other numbers remain fairly stable.

THE NUMBERS:

The first number next to each item is the current total as of today; the second number is the total as of the last report. Where one number is provided it means that there has been no change since our last report.

Lists or accounts that have shrunk are in italics.  Lists or accounts which experienced growth are in bold.

STORIES POSTED TO OUR NEWS SITE IN THE LAST MONTH:

3017-3034 (100 per day)

MAILING LISTS:

The lists are being rebuilt after some technical hiccups so the numbers can be expected to fluctuate considerably over the next month or two.

 

The top 10:

English: 85750-85126

French: 7121-7089

 Spanish: 5571-5566

German: 5556-5522

Turkish: 4505-4503

Korean: 3197

Italian: 2828

Russian: 2682-2677

Norwegian: 2019-2003

Romanian:  1730

Dutch: 1437

The others:

Arabic:  768-770

Azerbaijani:  56 (new list)

Belarusian:  299

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 970-965

Creole:  11

Czech: 58

Danish: 79

Esperanto: 189-187

Farsi:  164

Finnish:  439

Georgian:  176

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  261-270

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  174-172

Indonesian:  385

Japanese: 388-382

Lithuanian:  62

Malaysian: 20

Polish: 964

Portuguese: 1276-1274

Punjabi:  2

Serbian:  97

Sinhalese: 1

Slovak: 15

Swedish: 909

Tagalog: 183

Thai:  142

Ukrainian: 493

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive:  12

Interns and Past Interns:  15

LabourStart Correspondents:  625-611

LabourStart Translators:  106-104

Africa Caucus:  63

Media Contacts: 69

Donors:  961-885

BLUESKY:

No efforts were made to increase the number of followers for either account.

Global:  17093-15301

Canada English-language:  419-353.

FLICKR:

Members:  837-838

Photos:  10411-10351

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  128-133

FACEBOOK PAGES/GROUPS:

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

LabourStart.org page likes:  14k, details unavailable

Global Labour News and Information: 9171-9.2k

LabourStart UK likes:  2.1k, details unavailable

LabourStart Francophone: 620 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 489

LabourStart Brasil:  552

LabourStart Turkce:  2k, details unavailable

LabourStart TV likes: 465

LabourStart TV follows:  455

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Italia:  68

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Canada-English: 203-191

LabourStart Nepal:  7 (last post April 2017)

LabourStart Israel: CLOSED (last post 2018)

LINKEDIN:

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

Group: 2640

Page: 447-322

PODCASTS:

LabourStart is a member of the US-based Labor Radio / Podcast Network.

Rather than list each podcast and the numbers of times they have been downloaded we will report the three (3) podcasts that have been downloaded the most times to date.

1. 653-533 downloads: Interview with Mark Hancock, President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees re. the union’s recently-adopted “Montreal Declaration” which was drafted in response to US President Donald Trump’s threats against Canada.
2. 427-424 downloads: Interview with Carlos Ching-Hung Wang, the president of the China Steel Express Union (Taiwan).
3. 366 downloads: Belarus: Interview with Liza Merliak, exiled trade unionist

X (TWITTER as-was):

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for these accounts.  If we wish to maintain our footprint we will have to start doing so again or the erosion of our numbers will continue.  Whether that is possible is another question given the current flight of users from the platform.

We experienced decline in all accounts except the Australian, which grew slightly.  Prior to the exodus to Bluesky all would have usually experienced slow growth without any effort on our part.  This is almost certainly the result of trade unionists closing their Twitter accounts and moving to other platforms (such as Bluesky or Mastodon).

Global English: 36303

Canada English: 20594-20202

Global Portuguese: 9847-9925

Global Spanish: 10214-10247

Australia: 9349-9422

USA: 4610-4683

Canada French: 3076-3101

Russian: 50

Hebrew:  50 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 508 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 329last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 341 (last tweet 2015)

French: 224 (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): 28 Placeholder and not yet active.