Inside LabourStart

Lululemon – Philippines campaign: This campaign, launched a week ago, had 1,791 supporters; this is now up to 3,328 supporters, and the campaign appears in 9 languages.  A Tagalog version has been promised.  Because Lululemon is originally a Canadian company, we did a dedicated mailing earlier in the week to our Canadian subscribers, as well as a followup mailing to our English list yesterday.  We’ve already done two full rounds of publicity across all social networks including Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Blue Sky, WhatsApp and Telegram.

New campaigns: We had a good call with BWI earlier this week to discuss possible campaigns together.

News: Our volunteer correspondents posted, 1,881 news stories in the first 19 days of June, just under 100 stories per day.

New correspondents: Thanks to our new ‘Inside LabourStart’ channel on Facebook (186 members), we’ve received 6 new correspondent applications this week – from Australia, Belarus, Liberia, New Zealand, Panama and Tunisia.

Podcasts: We promoted both of our recent interviews with Canadian labour leaders to our Canadian list.  And we scheduled our next podcast interview for next week – stay tuned!

Mailing lists: We added 188 new subscribers to our lists this week, most of them to the English list.

International strike report: We publicised this comprehensive study of strikes across 11 countries to the more than 80,000 people on our English list.  124 of them downloaded the report, and the webinar had about 15 participants.  These are poor results, and reflect a pattern:  People on our mailing list seem happy to sign up to support campaigns, but are less likely to download documents, buy stuff, or attend online events.

Svensson prize ceremony: We publicised the links to videos of this ceremony, which will help raise awareness about the struggle for free trade unions in Belarus.  This seems to have generated just 37 new views of the videos, while 730 of the subscribers clicked on the link to support the current campaign (see above).

International Union Rights: We sold 3 more subscriptions yesterday through the mailing to our English list.

 

Stop union busting at Lululemon in the Philippines: This campaign went live this week. As of this morning, it has 1,791 supporters.

International strike report: We’ve shared this report widely and have scheduled a public Zoom call to discuss it on Saturday.

New campaigns: We have a call scheduled with BWI to discuss possible new campaigns on Saudi Arabia and Panama.

Podcasts: We finally did the full publicity for the interview with Alberta’s trade union leader Gil McGowan. We also reached out to the Solidarity Center about an interview, which had been agreed in principle.

Facebook: Our “Inside LabourStart” Facebook channel now has 171 members; last week it had 41; our first post there was seen by 634 people.

As I was travelling for two weeks, this report covers a three-week period.

Germany: Postcards advertising LabourStart were printed and distributed by our friends at the teachers’ union GEW conference.

Panama: We reached out to BWI asking if they wanted help with a campaign on Panama.

Philippines: A campaign has been submitted and will go live shortly.

Turkey Telus / TikTok campaign: We are closing this down after 3 months. It was not a win for the workers, but the solidarity was important nonetheless.

USA: We had a Zoom call with staff at the Solidarity Center to discuss cooperation, including a Zoom interview with their director.

Research on strikes worldwide: We’ve teamed up with a group of researchers and activists from the Labour Studies Collective (Emek Çal??malar? Toplulu?u) in Turkey who’ve been compiling annual reports on strikes, including interviews with strikers. We’ll launch their latest report together next week, inviting our whole English list to attend.

Mailing lists: We’ve had ongoing issues with right-to-left languages (Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew) and are once again setting up those lists with a separate (and free) service that can handle them.

Facebook Channel: We launched an “Inside LabourStart” channel which allows us to broadcast short messages. In the first 24 hours online, with no publicity, it already picked up 41 followers.

Global Solidarity in the Age of Trump: That was the title we gave to talk I presented at the Bread and Roses art gallery in Tel Aviv on 27 May. The event was organised by Ma’an, the independent trade union we have worked with before.

New correspondents: We added one each from Iran and Nigeria, and two more from the Asia Pacific region.

 

 

News: In the first 15 days of May, our volunteer correspondents posted 1,499 news stories — almost exactly 100 per day. Thanks to our 12 most productive correspondents this month – Derek, Eric, Patrick, Pat, Espen, Francisco, Kyle, Mick, Ivan, Silvana, Roy and Warren.

Interns: We selected 3 interns from the 14 who applied from the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations. They will begin work at the end of August, one of them on a full-time basis and the other two part-time.

Campaigns: We received updates from our union partners on two of the four current campaigns, which we will share. A third has been promised to us. Meanwhile, we received an update to a Ryanair campaign we launched back in 2020.

International Union Rights: We did a mailing to promote subscriptions to this important journal and sold a number. Details are here.

Canada: Pat Bulmer interviewed the head of the Alberta Federation of Labour, Gil McGowan. It’s a long but interesting podcast. Listen here.

Italy: At the request of comrades from the Italian unions, we sent out a long and detailed message to our Italian list about a union-backed referendum taking place in early June.

Saudi Arabia: We participated in an online event launching two reports on dangers facing migrant workers in the run-up to the 2034 FIFA World Cup. We gave extensive publicity to the reports and reached out to BWI about a possible campaign; we have a call scheduled for next week.

USA: We have a call scheduled for today with the Solidarity Center – we offered to help in any way we can as Trump’s cuts have had a disastrous impact on their important work in many countries.

Interns: We have now completed interviewing all 6 candidate interns from the Cornell ILR school; we will select 2 of them for fall internships next week.  Thanks to Penny and Derek for helping to interview all the candidates.

Campaigns: We reached out to our partners on the 4 active campaigns asking for updates that we can share. We’ve gotten two positive responses so far. This is important and we don’t always do this.

Problem with reaching LabourStart from Google in the USA: Two intern candidates pointed this out, possibly after searching Google for “LaborStart”. We think we identified the problem and have fixed it, but if anyone still has difficulty, please let us know.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew by 44 this week, with the largest number for the Azerbaijani list. But most of those are people already on our Turkish list, so we probably shouldn’t have them on both lists.

Canada: We had a good meeting with the International Solidarity committee of the BCGEU.  Thanks to Derek and Pat for playing an active part in this.

USA: We reached out to the UFW offering help with a campaign, but have not yet heard back. The Solidarity Center did get back to us with a response to our offer to help them.

 

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

SUMMARY:

Our new podcast service is picking up and we have passed the 5,000 downloads mark.  Older episodes continue to see new downloads, suggesting that the word is still getting out about the series.  This despite no concerted push to get the word out in the last month.

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

Last December we started reporting on the global English-language Bluesky account which was created mid-month.  Currently we have just two Blusky accounts:  The global account and an English-language Canadian news feed are active now but if the site continues to grow others will be added.

The two Bluesky accounts are managed in much different ways.  Sporadic efforts were made the increase the followers of the global accounts which now stands at 15,301, up from 13.2k.  The Canadian English-language account went from 297 to 353.

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:

2927 (105 per day)-3237 (104 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.

Due to a technical problem I was unable to update our list numbers this month.

The top 10:

English: 84862

French: 7075

German: 5511

Spanish: 5553

Turkish: 4460

Korean: 3197

Italian: 2824

Russian: 2677

Norwegian: 1996

Romanian:  1730

Dutch: 1437

The others:

Arabic:  763

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 964

Creole:  11

Czech: 58

Danish: 79

Esperanto: 187

Farsi:  164

Finnish:  439

Georgian:  176

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  270

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  172

Indonesian:  385

Japanese: 382

Lithuanian:  62

Malaysian: 20

Polish: 964

Portuguese: 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:  611

LabourStart Translators:  104

Africa Caucus:  63

Media Contacts: 69

Donors:  885

FLICKR:

Members:  838

Photos:  10337-10338

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  135-136

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: 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: 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: 2634-2637

Page: 317-315

PODCASTS:

We passed the 5000 downloads mark in January.  By labour podcast standards this is considered more than reasonable given the effort required.

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

Our latest pod, an interview with Liza Merliak re. the situation in Belarus, was posted only a week ago and already has 191 downloads.

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. 423-420 downloads: Interview with Carlos Ching-Hung Wang, the president of the China Steel Express Union (Taiwan).
2. 320-318 downloads: Interview with Sally McManus, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU)
3. 302-301 downloads: Interview with Judith Kirton-Darling, General Secretary of IndustriAll Europe.

BLUESKY:

As an experiment we created a global news in English feed mid-November.  The account is growing far more quickly than any other of our social media accounts ever did.  A Canadian English-language feed was added in late December.

Our Mastodon experience, as with most people’s, was not great as the initial excitement wore off quite quickly.  That does not appear to be happening with Bluesky.

No concerted effort was made to grow either account last month.

Global English-language: 15301-13.2k

Canada-English-language: 353-297

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: 36431-3636639

Canada English: 20949-21170

Global Portuguese: 9956-9999

Global Spanish: 10265-10289

Australia: 9702-9637

USA: 4683-4708

Canada French: 3107-3119

Russian: 50-60

Hebrew:  50 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 508 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 329-330 (last 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.

 

Subscribe to this blog and get weekly updates from us. Fill in the box on the top right side of this page.

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

SUMMARY:

Our new podcast service is picking up and we have passed the 5,000 downloads mark.  Older episodes continue to see new downloads, suggesting that the word is still getting out about the series.  This despite no concerted push to get the word out in the last month.

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

Last December we started reporting on the global English-language Bluesky account which was created mid-month.  Currently we have just two Blusky accounts:  The global account and an English-language Canadian news feed are active now but if the site continues to grow others will be added.

The two Bluesky accounts are managed in much different ways.  Sporadic efforts were made the increase the followers of the global accounts which now stands at 13.2k, up from 9.4k.  The Canadian English-language account went from 104 to 297.

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

Flickr numbers are down slightly as the group was purged of appropriate content and contributors.

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:

3237 (104 per day)-2196 (71 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: 84862-84860

French: 7075

German: 5511

Spanish: 5553

Turkish: 4460

Korean: 3197

Italian: 2824

Russian: 2677

Norwegian: 1996

Romanian:  1730

Dutch: 1437

The others:

Arabic:  763

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 964

Creole:  11

Czech: 58

Danish: 79

Esperanto: 187

Farsi:  164

Finnish:  439

Georgian:  176

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  270

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  172

Indonesian:  385

Japanese: 382

Lithuanian:  62

Malaysian: 20

Polish: 964

Portuguese: 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:  611-608

LabourStart Translators:  104

Africa Caucus:  63

Media Contacts: 69

Donors:  885

FLICKR:

Members:  838-840

Photos:  10338-10354

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  136-132

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: 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: 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: 2637

Page: 315-316

PODCASTS:

We passed the 5000 downloads mark last month.  By labour podcast standards this is considered more than reasonable given the effort required.

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. 420-418 downloads: Interview with Carlos Ching-Hung Wang, the president of the China Steel Express Union (Taiwan).
2. 318 downloads: Interview with Sally McManus, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU)
3. 301-299 downloads: Interview with Judith Kirton-Darling, General Secretary of IndustriAll Europe.

BLUESKY:

As an experiment we created a global news in English feed mid-November.  The account is growing far more quickly than any other of our social media accounts ever did.  A Canadian English-language feed was added in late December.

Our Mastodon experience, as with most people’s, was not great as the initial excitement wore off quite quickly.  That does not appear to be happening with Bluesky.

No concerted effort was made to grow either account last month.

Global English-language: 13.2k-9.4k

Canada-English-language: 297-104

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.  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: 36639-37049

Canada English: 21170-21516

Global Portuguese: 9999-10086

Global Spanish: 10289-10373

Australia: 9637

USA: 4708-4744

Canada French: 3119-3189

Russian: 60-49

Hebrew:  50 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 508 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 329-330 (last 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.

This week we did a lot of work to raise awareness of some of our needs — and we’d like to share some of that with you. Here are ways you can help LabourStart this week:

Signup to be a volunteer correspondent. But — this is important — our form seems to have stopped working. Give us a couple of days to figure this out and fix it.

If you are already a correspondent, please make sure to continue posting news stories. So far this month, you’ve posted over 1,500 news stories. If you don’t remember how to post, or lost your user ID or password, email us and we’ll fix it.

Campaigns. It’s time to launch a new one. Any ideas? Any contacts to share?

Podcasting. We’re keen to resume our series of podcast interviews. Let us know if you can suggest people we should be talking to — making sure to provide contact details.

Subscribe to this blog and get weekly updates from us. Fill in the box on the top right side of this page.

Thanks — and see you next week!

I am changing the format of the monthly reports.  Each will now have a brief summary of highlights followed by the usual long list of numbers.

SUMMARY:

Our new podcast service is picking up and this month we passed the 5,000 downloads mark.  Older episodes continue to see new downloads, suggesting that the word is still getting out about the series.  This despite no concerted push to publicize it in the last month.

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

Last month we started reporting on the global English-language Bluesky account which was created mid-month.  Currently we have just two Blusky accounts:  The global account and an English-language Canadian news feed are active now but if the site continues to grow others will be added.

XTwitter feeds continue to decline.  Most or all of that can be attributed to progressives 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:

2196 (71 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: 84860-84800

French: 7075-7642

German: 5511-5503

Spanish: 5553-5979

Turkish: 4460-4367

Korean: 3197-3321

Italian: 2824-2819

Russian: 2677-2672

Norwegian: 1996

Romanian:  1730

Dutch: 1437-1536

 

The others:

Arabic:  763

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 964

Creole:  11

Czech: 58

Danish: 79

Esperanto: 187

Farsi:  164

Finnish:  439-438

Georgian:  176

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  270

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  172-169

Indonesian:  385

Japanese: 382

Lithuanian:  62

Malaysian: 20

Polish: 964

Portuguese: 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:  608

LabourStart Translators:  104

Africa Caucus:  63

Media Contacts: 69-51

Donors:  885

 

FLICKR:

Members:  840

Photos:  10354-10366 after cull of inappropriate contributions.

 

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  132-131

 

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: 9.2k-9188

LabourStart UK likes:  2.1k-2k, details unavailable

LabourStart Francophone: 620-607 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 489-495

LabourStart Brasil:  552-550

LabourStart Turkce:  2k, details unavailable

LabourStart TV likes: 465-462

LabourStart TV follows:  455

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Italia:  68

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Canada-English: 191-188

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: 2637-2636

Page: 316-318

 

PODCASTS:

We passed the 5000 downloads mark last month.  By labour podcast standards this is considered more than reasonable given the effort required.

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. 418 downloads: Interview with Carlos Ching-Hung Wang, the president of the China Steel Express Union (Taiwan).
2. 318 downloads: Interview with Sally McManus, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU)
3. 299 downloads: Interview with Judith Kirton-Darling, General Secretary of IndustriAll Europe.

 

BLUESKY:

As an experiment we created a global news in English feed mid-November.  The account is growing far more quickly than any other of our social media accounts ever did.  A Canadian English-language feed was added in late December.

Our Mastodon experience, as with most people’s, was not great as the initial excitement wore off quite quickly.  That does not appear to be happening with Bluesky.

No concerted effort was made to grow either account last month.

Global English-language: 9.4k-5.9k, details unavailable.

Canada-English-language 104

 

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.  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: 37049-37321

Canada English: 21516-21637

Global Portuguese: 10086-10131

Global Spanish: 10373-10835

Australia: 9637-9695

USA: 4744-4805

Canada French: 3189-3199

Russian: 49

Hebrew:  50 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 508 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 329-330 (last 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.

We missed last week’s update because I was getting married.  We will probably miss next week’s too, as I’ll be on my honeymoon.  But for now, here’s a short update of the highlights from the last two weeks:

New campaign: We launched a major new campaign in support of garment workers in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.  After less than two days online, the campaign had over 3,000 supporters which is very fast growth for us.  (The fact that it is no longer August and union offices have re-opened may have helped.)  The campaign appears in eight languages — includind Indonesian and Serbian — with more in the pipeline.  We are expecting this campaign to also appear in Tamil and are awaiting translation; this will be our first campaign in that language.  We’re also hoping to get a podcast interview done for this campaign next week and are waiting to hear back from our partners.  We currently have 6 active campaigns online.

Translators: For the first time, we had an online meetup of our Translators.  About 12 came, nearly all of them active translators, and of those there were three translators for German, which had been until recently a problematic language for us (no consistent translation).  It was a very good meeting and it will not be the last time we meet as a group.

Interns: We also reached out this week to the 16 individuals who we have identified so far (there may be a few more) who have been LabourStart interns since 2012.  A couple have already responded positively and this is a very welcome development.

Finances: Finally, this week we were able to report on a worsening financial situation for LabourStart, and we reached out to our union partners as well as the more than 700 people who regularly donate.   (Our donors’ mailing list is something very new for us.)  Even though we have not yet reached out to our public mailing lists about this, this week we raised £2,430 and received pledges totalling another £1,688, so well over £4,000 in just 7 days.  But that level of donations has to continue for a little while in order to restore some stablity and to ensure that we meet our spending commitments — which was not the case in early September.