Inside LabourStart

I’ll be travelling from tomorrow (8.1) through next Friday (15.1), back at my desk on 16.1. While I expect to have email access most of that time, please do try to keep correspondence to a minimum.  Thanks.

A very happy new year to all LabourStart’s correspondents and readers.

The next update of this page will be on Monday, 4 January.

I’ve sent out a reminder to our translators in Norwegian, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Polish and Italian, as I now do every week – but this time pointing them to this page rather than Posterous, which is incomplete.  Some of the mailing lists have been relatively inactive — the most recent mailings went out as follows:

• Polish – 13 July
• German – 31 July
• Spanish – 14 September
• Dutch – 5 October
• Italian – 12 October
• Norwegian – 20 October
• French – 21 October
• English – 23 October

203 trade unionists have signed up to our group on Flickr and have submitted 182 photos for judging.  In another 12 hours, we’ll stop the submissions and tomorrow we’ll ask the judges to select a shortlist of five, and then we’ll begin the voting.

Last year, this resulted in several positive things and they’re worth remembering:

• We highlighted the great work of labour photographers – contributing in our own small way to encouraging our movement to generate its own content (photos, texts, etc), which is part of a broader project to reinvigorate the international trade union movement and its culture.
• We showed off many great struggles, reminders to everyone that unions can be dynamic and exciting organizations engaged in great battles.
• We raised LabourStart’s profile, meeting new people along the way, and we grew our mailing list by several hundred names.
• We managed to get one great photo (last year’s winner) onto the front cover of Amnesty International’s trade union magazine in the UK, in the glossy full-colour magazine of the Education International, and elsewhere.  The photo was very widely distributed on the web.

It’s worth remembering that the idea for this competition came from Mac Urata of the ITF and has been run largely by Derek Blackadder; they both deserve our thanks.  I think this year is going to be another success and hope that we get even more votes cast than we did last year.

Two participants at our recent conference in Washington asked for a short text they could circulate making the case for people becoming LabourStart correspondents.  Here’s what I’ve written today — feel free to use as is, or modify, and circulate.

Why become a LabourStart correspondent

LabourStart, the news and campaigning website of the international trade union movement, publishes links to some 90,000 union news stories every year.

Those links are added to LabourStart’s database by a network of nearly 700 volunteer correspondents who monitor union websites as well as mainstream news sources and identify union news stories.

In addition to appearing on LabourStart’s website (including the brand new US Edition at http://www.laborstart.us), many of those stories appear on union websites around the world, as LabourStart syndicates its news.  Over 200 union websites in the USA take the LabourStart news service, as do 560 other unions around the globe.

To ensure that news from your union — at national, regional or even local level — makes it to LabourStart, you should consider becoming a volunteer correspondent.

It’s easy to sign up – just fill in the form at http://www.labourstart.org/newcorrespondents.shtml

No Sweat Apparel which has long been a LabourStart partner is attempting to liquidate stock.  They have a quantity of logo-free t-shirts made from organic cotton, produced by union members in Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank.  They’re offering these for sale at $5 each and I’ve asked them how many they have, as I would consider buying the whole lot for LabourStart and then selling them.  I’ll let you know what happens next.

Update 3.9: They’ll get back to us after their sale to let us know what’s available.  I was thinking of taking the logo-free t-shirts and having our logo printed on them after we’ve gotten them.

The following may be of some use to you in gaining the support of your union (locally, regionally or nationally) for LabourStart. I was asked to draft it for a Union here in Canada and thought it might be (a) helpful, and (b) a trigger to some of us formally asking our Unions to support our work here on LabourStart.

If you do use it it would be great to hear back from you on the results.  It has been drafted using the traditional form for such things, but can be easily converted into plain language if your Union allows or preferrs a more accessible format for motions.

——————————————————

Whereas we live and work in a globalized world defined by corporations and not by working people;

And Whereas global solidarityis more important now than it has ever been in the history of our Union,

And Whereas LabourStart.org works to connect and inform workers the world over about all our struggles,

And Whereas while we have many experiences we can share with our sisters and brothers around the world, we also have a great deal to learn from others as we all face the same threats to the existence of good, secure, healthy jobs;

And Whereas LabourStart works, without regard to national borders, union affiliation or sector of employment to build global solidarity between workers and to assist them in their struggles by mobilizing workers around the world,

Be It Therefore Resolved That our Union place a link to LabourStart on our website.

Be It Further Resolved That our Union’s website carry the relevant LabourStart newswires

Be It Further Resolved That our Union designate a member or staff person as our LabourStart Correspondent to ensure that news from and about our Union reaches the world.

And Be It Finally Resolved That our Union donate the sum of ________ to LabourStart to allow it to continue its work.

With over 80 items on my LabourStart and UnionBook to-do lists, I’m trying to do as many as possible this week and today will list them as I cross them off the list.  As a result, this entry will cover a number of different areas.  Here goes:

• Hindi & Bengali editions: Sent the file to Mahesh that needs to be translated in order to launch these.
• Recruiting new correspondents: Wrote to all 2,000 members of our Facebook group inviting them to sign up.
• Radio LabourStart: Wrote to Derek about relaunching this using podcasts.
• Work with ILCA: Wrote to Mariya Strauss about ways we can work together, including participation in each others’ conferences and ILCA members becoming LabourStart correspondents.
• Portuguese edition: Wrote to our 4 correspondents (2 in Brazil, 2 in Portugal) asking for their help to revive this and to recruit new correspondents.
• Multilingual campaigns: Wrote to our translators in Spanish, Dutch and Italian to ask for their preferred logins so that they can update campaigns directly without emailing me.   This will speed up campaign launches.

LabourStart senior correspondent Oskar van Rijswijk (Netherlands) often comes up with the coolest tools.  He found Twitter for us, for example.  More recently, he strongly recommended that we check out Posterous.  I’ve had some time today to check this out and can see that even with the first few steps, we’ve got a solution to several problems.

Here’s what I’ve done:

1. I added the Posterous email address to our English language mailing list.  (That took about a second.)
2. Then I sent out three test messages to Posterous by email – including our two most recent posts to our mailing list.
3. All 3 were automatically posted to our LabourStart Posterous web page, which means that this becomes an easy-to-find repository of our mailings, both for archival use and for our translators.
4. In addition, all 3 were automatically routed as Tweets — initially to my own Twitter account, but in future, to LabourStart’s.

We have the potential to do more — such as posting to Facebook, Flickr, blogs, etc.

At the moment, there’s no additional work needed — every mass mailing we do from now on gets routed through Posterous, appears on our blog there, and is Tweeted.

Having used Twitter on an iPod Touch for several weeks now, I can see how this can be seen as the fastest way of getting information out — especially useful for campaigns and breaking news.  Which is why I devoted today’s mailing to LabourStart’s list in English to Twitter.  Basically, I want our list of Twitter followers to grow, and to grow very quickly.  It’s taken us nearly 9 months to double in size, but I think with this mailing, we may see a big surge in new signups.  Here is how our Twitter following has grown over the last year:

26 August 2009 1,200
1 July 2009 1,127
15 May 2009: 1,000
13 May 2009: 992
27 March 2009: 834
26 November 2008: 593
25 October 2008: 575

By way of comparison, here are some current numbers of Twitter followers (as of 26 August 2009):

• AFL-CIO (USA) 1,815
• LabourStart (Global) 1,200
• UNISON (UK) 881
• DGB (Germany) 588
• IG Metall (Germany) 225
• UNI (Global) 220
• CFDT (France) 157
• Education International (Global) 54
• ITUC (Global) 46
• ITF (Global) 16

One last thing — according to Twitterholic, we make the top 35,000 Twitterers.  That’s not good enough.