Inside LabourStart

Meet John and Eda.

LabourStart has hired two new interns.  I asked them to say a few words about themselves.

Edanur Yazici:

“I’m very excited to be joining the LabourStart team. I have been an active member of a small union, the IWW for some time and I am currently serving as a local branch officer. I look forward to be able to put the skills I have gained there to good use at LabourStart. My academic background is in Politics and I have a fair bit of experience in various grassroots campaigning organisations and movements.”

John Millington:

“I am proud to be working with LabourStart. I am a former national newspaper journalist, health campaigner and currently a union activist. I am looking forward to using my skills and seven years experience to promote workers’ rights throughout the world.”

RadioArticolo1 is an online radio station of the Italian national trade union centre CGIL.  According to the Wikipedia article, CGIL with its 5.5 million members is “the biggest trade union in Europe“.  That’s debatable, but it’s certainly one of the important ones, and one we’ve worked with before on campaigns, especially with their metal workers union.

Thanks to the efforts of our comrades Silvana and Andrea, RadioArticolo1 is keen to have a regular LabourStart program, and they’re starting with an interview with me.  Once it goes live, I’ll share the link — the program will be in Italian — and let’s hope this strengthens our work in Italy and our relationship with CGIL and the Italian labour movement.

LabourStart has five working subdomains – we used to have more, but our internet hosting company screwed these up, so I’ve rebuilt some of the essential ones.

As you can see from the list below, we can use these to point to our global editions in a particular language (e.g., Esperanto), or to a particular country (e.g., the UK), or a country in a specific language (e.g., Brazilian news in Portuguese). Here they are:

• brasil.labourstart.org
• ca.labourstart.org
• eo.labourstart.org
• oz.labourstart.org
• uk.labourstart.org

Would it be useful to create more of these?  They need to be done one at a time, but they could be useful especially when creating offline materials (these are shorter addresses to remember).

So for example, do we want no.labourstart.org in addition to http://www.labourstart.org/news/index.php?langcode=no ?

This message is going out today to our UK mailing list:

LabourStart is hiring!

Once again, we’re hiring an intern — to be paid the London Living Wage — and starting in October.

Everything you need to know is here:

http://www.labourstart.org/intern.shtml

Please pay special attention to these details:

• This internship is available only to residents of the UK as it requires a presence in London.
• And please, do not phone — we are only responding to emails.

No, not the Olympics.  But Euan Gibb has been hard at work for the last year promoting LabourStart to Brazilian trade unionists and he’s produced an impressive report on what’s been accomplished so far.

Click here to read the report:

LabourStart 1-Year Report – Brasil-1

Where else would trade unionists go to learn about this story?

I was very happy to discover this news story on LabourStart today.  

I know that our volunteer correspondents trawl the net every day and find over 200 labour news stories every day, which is amazing.  Many of them are already familiar to people who follow the news, but we add value by offering comprehensive coverage of stories that otherwise get little play.

But this story is exactly the sort of thing our readers won’t normally come across, that’s not being talked about on the traditional left and labour websites, and yet is the classic example of a labour news story.

Thanks to our correspondent Andrew Casey for finding it!

LabourStart editor Eric Lee will be travelling (to Philadelphia, for the Democratic National Convention) from today and will return to London on 31 July.  He’ll have email the entire time he’s on the road, but people should refrain from contacting him except in urgent cases.  Thanks for understanding.

The terrorist attack yesterday in Nice has so far triggered one trade union response that I could find on the web, here.

I imagine that as the day goes along, there will be more.

Please do help us find union statements condemning the attack, particularly from global and European federations.

And let’s post them to LabourStart as we’ve done in the past, all too many times, when this has happened before.

Last week I was having some difficulty uploading files to our server (based in Iceland) which hosts labourstartcampaigns.net.

Our provider changed our login details — but what I didn’t realize at the time was that this also affected every script (programme) on our campaigns website.

So some of you may have noticed one or two things not working, relating to our database of campaign supporters (for example, scripts showing how many supporters each campaign has).  This has now been fixed, and every script now has the correct login details.

Tomorrow (Thursday, 14 July) we’ll launch a new campaign and it’s a first for us.

Without revealing too much at the moment, it’s our first campaign with the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ).

We’re looking forward very much to working with the IFJ in the future and this promises to be a very positive partnership with them.