Inside LabourStart

This is the most significant political aspect of LS.  Our “secret agenda” for the campaigns is to increase the size of our mailing list.  By definition, these campaigns are small and specific.  However, they also are part of our political organizing; they “raise conscience.”  Campaigns “for apple pie” and against global warming.  Anti-child labor campaign.  Ban nuclear weapons.  Such “supersize” campaigns would greatly increase the exposure of LS.  This is how we get our mailing list to a million names.

Guidelines for campaigns.  Small, local issues are problems.  Some requests for campaigns have been “union vs. union”.  We only will campaign for an issue of global significance.  Must be requested by a national union.  Campaign launches should be accomplished automatically.  Vietnamese and Japanese translations of our campaigns.  Impact on employers will be greater if they are received in as many languages as possible.  Maps:  where are the campaigns centered?  Many in Turkey.  None in Latin America.

All of these grow our lists.  How did we attract a substantial number of Spanish readers in the past.

In Australia, maybe national (non-global) campaigns.  Maybe some country-specific ActNOW campaigns of regional value to LS.  (Not enough people are involved.)  Those on our US lists are often bothered by the international character of ActNOW issues.  Campaign issues:  Asbestos?  Job security?

Workers rights issues seem to generate the largest responses.  Korea?  FedEx?  Canada produces the most asbestos than any other country in the world–in CLC, this gets no play:  many Canadian workers are involved in asbestos production.

Eric:  Iran–“How can we help?”  Photos of two women sentenced to floggings.  From silly employers hit by a campaign–there’s nothing better for us than a good liable suit.

LabourStart Jobs, UnionJobs.com, Jobs on oz.labourstart.org.

There is a large market for union jobs.  Labourstart Jobs has been shut down because of high-fees issues.  However, Union Jobs Clearinghouse at www.unionjobs.com has provided an excellent service since 1997.  No ads, no links.  $35/position/month.  There are also postings for internships.

Bernie Lunzer from the Newspaper Guild:  Discussion on the crisis of journalism in the US and the attitude of journalist who are also trade unionists to the internet and its tools.

Facebook?  Twitter?  Our Twitter page is updated automatically every time a Top LS story is posted.  UnionBook:  Elgg allows us to build a Facebook-type site, an integrated social-networking tool.  Eric demonstrated the use of UnionBook and how it can be set to automatically update Twitter page.  Once the coding problems are solved, UnionBook should become much more useful.

UnionBook can be used for immediate and continuing news, such as updating the situation in South Korea’s auto plants recently.

Spammers’ access to UnionBook is a new problem that needs to be solved.

Are we duplicating our efforts?  Different networks reach different people.  Some people spend much time with Twitter who don’t necessarily check UnionBook.  One can receive UnionBook RSS feeds through email.

Keep in mind that if we had had this same discussion a few years ago, it would be in reference to MySpace and not Facebook.

Tula Connell introduced President Sweeney.  President Sweeney discussed the role LabourStart has provided for online labor news for the past ten years.  The labor movement hopes to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, hopes to pass health care legislation.  LabourStart has helped the labor movement to provide new models to reach out to trade unionists and the American labor movement hopes to use the internet and these new technologies to reach out to new members and to spread the word.

Here we are at AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, DC.  About 30 of us are in the Samuel Gompers Room; we are introducing ourselves to one another.  Canadian Sr Correspondent Derek Blackadder is chairing this session.  We are expecting soon that President John Sweeney will arrive to address the conference.  In the meantime, it’s donuts, coffee and the like.  And we can buy union toys in the Union Shop near the building’s entrance.  There will be a reception starting at 5 pm at Teamsters headquarters.

LabourStartJobs.org is officially closed as of yesterday.  I’ve removed the main link from our English-language home page. If you spot a link anywhere else on our site, please let me know.

At our conference next month we can talk about what replaces it, but now we need to do an orderly shutdown of the existing service.

As we all increasingly use various social networking tools, it would be great to have a way to be able to update our status or send out a short message to all of them – with just one click.  UnionBook now offers such a way.  If you correctly configure the Twitter plugin, when you post an entry to The Wire in your UnionBook account, it will automatically send out a tweet.  There’s a Twitter plugin for Facebook which now works and which turns your latest tweet into your Facebook status.  There’s also some really simple code that turns your latest tweet(s) into a list for your blog.

So this morning, for example, I posted the news that 1,000 more people have signed up for the South African campaign on LabourStart — I posted this as a Wire entry on UnionBook.  It automatically, and instantly, went out as a tweet, appeared as my Facebook status, and is on my blog.

Of course you can do all this without the UnionBook element as well, but what that means is you get even more visibility, because UnionBook Wire entries appear on the front page to those who are not yet signed in.

We should all be doing this and encouraging others to use UnionBook as the starting point for a fully-integrated system of status updates throughout one’s social networks.

Campaigns: Launched a campaign in support of workers at Paul Yu in the Philippines at the request of the Labor Party there (now with 1,209 supporters, in 7 langauges).  Received a request for assistance raising money for strikers from the IMF and am currently following through on this.   Launched campaign in support of striking Stella D’oro workers in New York at the request of the BCTGM, via the IUF (930 supporters in 7 languages).  Launched a campaign in support of South African union shop stewards suspended for calling safety strikes, at the request of the ICEM (with 445 supporters in 3 languages; will be publicized to our list tomorrow).

UnionBook: Integrated The Wire with Twitter, so posts to one are automatically posted to the other.  Continued work on getting Twitter integrated with Facebook as well so that this can be an easy and elegant way to update one’s status across a number of social networks — starting with a post to UnionBook.  Continued work on the mail-to-groups feature which works, but needs to be fully secured against spammers.Added the ability to include any RSS feed, including your blog, in your home page and profile.  There are now 3,147 registered users who have validated their accounts.

Languages: Continued work on problems with conversion of upper case Norwegian characters in our RSS feed — they don’t convert from Unicode to the old Western European character set known as iso-8859-1.  Fixed all the pages displaying our newswires so that the characters now render correctly.

Regional RSS newswires: Sorted out the Caribbean one.

LabourStart Canada: Sorted out ca.labourstart.org to work like oz.labourstart.org.

Global labour calendar: Did quite a bit of work getting this ready for prime time.

Books of the week: Promoted several from UCS including a book of labour quotations and a biography of Eugene V. Debs in June. In this quarter (April – June), 194 orders for books were placed through our UCS affiliated bookshop with sales totalling $7,779 (our share of that, $778, equals £475).  In the previous quarter, only 9 orders had been placed and we sold $746 worth of books (our share of that, $74.60, equals £45).  This is a 1000% increase due to the promotion of books of the week most weeks.  In the same quarter, we also sold 41 copies of Steve Early’s book directly through the publisher, for a total of $1,031.  Our share of that was was $294 (£179).  So our total book sales for the quarter is probably a record for us — $8,810.

Our Twitter feed: Now part of the union Twibe.  We currently have 1,127 followers and automatically post all top news headlines, each new campaign as it is launched, and our book of the week.

August conference: Sorted out with the AFL-CIO a hotel people can stay in at a decent price.  Created a group in Gmail for all those registered so far.  Arranged housing with local trade unionists for some of us.  Details on who is attending and the agenda so far on featured on the conference blog — click on the tab above.

We did a mailing to our English list 33 hours ago, reaching some 52,000 subscribers.  The results are interesting, I think:

• Only 559 signed up to the IUF campaign – I think in part because there have been several IUF Pakistan campaigns and there’s real “campaign fatigue” and possibly confusion about these.
• Only 22 more people signed up to UnionBook, so we didn’t get that much closer to an interim goal of 3,000 verified users.  This may be because we’ve pitched UnionBook many times before and did not come up with a new and compelling reason to sign up this time.
• On the other hand, our news about a revived Twitter feed got 23 people to subscribe, so we now have over 1,000 Twitter followers.
• Finally, book sales were actually not bad at all — even without an author interview this time, we managed to get 12 orders totalling $421.35 (our share is $42.13 of that).