Inside LabourStart

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.

While we sort out a new mailing service our monthly numbers report will be on hold. When the transition is complete we’ll return to regular reports on the mailing lists and social media accounts.

This month’s report does not contain any information regarding the mailing lists as we have changed the structure of the language segments and at the same are again in the process of changing service providers.

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. (more…)

It’s May Day and we’d like to take this opportunity to express our solidarity with workers everywhere who are fighting for their rights, for equality, social justice and peace.

LabourStart today will be filled with news links from all around the world and we thank our volunteer correspondents for making that happen.

This year, we were approached by worker activists from Iran and Egypt, asking us for May Day video messages.

• The message for the Iranian group ‘Free Them Now’ is now online here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2SW_sXC_Gw
• We are still waiting for the CTUWS in Egypt to send us the link to the video we gave to them.

A very happy May Day to all of you!