Inside LabourStart

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.

LabourStart’s Global Solidarity Conference in Toronto in May was still going on when we began discussions about where and when to hold the next one.  We have nothing firm to report just yet, but a heads up to all of you: we are hoping to hold it around November 2017 in Hong Kong.  More details when we have them.

Here are the number of supporters for each of our current campaigns, broken down by language:

(You may want to right-click on that image above and open it in a new tab to make it more legible.)

As you can see, we currently have 7 campaigns running, all of them launched during the last 3 months.  Only one of them, the Uzbekistan campaign, has gotten over 10,000 messages sent.  The second most successful campaign — and trailing far behind — is the Peru campaign, which over 7,500 messages sent.  All of the others lag significantly behind.

Some of this will be fixed as I complete some of the translations and mailings to our Spanish and German lists, which are quite large.  But we can expect a drop-off as we enter the summer months in the northern hemisphere.

We need to do some creative thinking about how we ramp up all our campaigns to be 10,000 supporters at least, and how we break our record, set nearly three years with this campaign, of almost 22,000 messages sent.