Inside LabourStart

The first number next to each item is the current total as of today; the second number is the total as of the first day of last month.  Where one number is provided it means that there has been no change since last month.

Mailing Lists:

We continue see the impact of the General Data Protection Regulation.  Shrinking lists are in Italics.  Lists experiencing significant growth are in bold.

The top 10:

English: 73,959-74,209

French: 7,659-7,614

German: 5,812-5,797

Spanish: 5,106-5,137

Turkish: 4,274-4,282

Korean: 3,317

Italian: 3,310-3,293

Russian: 2,637-2,641

Norwegian: 2,260-2,234

Dutch: 1,442-1,435

The others:

Arabic:  736-738

Belarusian:  257-18

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 980-978

Creole:  11

Czech: 65-66

Danish: 101

Esperanto: 159-155

Farsi:  212

Finnish:  516

Georgian:  138

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  241-239

Hindi:  35-36

Hungarian:  192

Indonesian:  432-434

Japanese: 404

Polish: 862

Portuguese: 1,289-1,288

Punjabi:  2-0

Romanian:  39

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 1,026

Tagalog: 159-160

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 304-295

Vietnamese:  24

LabourStart Correspondents:  635

LabourStart Translators:  73

Flickr:

834-833 members.  10,267-10,236photos.

Facebook Pages/Groups:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

LabourStart.org page likes: 13,416-13,410

LabourStart.org page follows: 14,208-14,178

Global Labour News and Information: 8,869-8,867

LabourStart UK:  2072-2075

LabourStart Franco: 590

LabourStart Brasil:  507

LabourStart Turkce:  2,184-2,020

LabourStart TV: 447-444

LinkedIn:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Group: 2204-2192

Twitter:

The Global English-language account received a bit of attention this month.  No other concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Global English: 26,235-25,504

Canada English: 14,470-14,279

USA: 5,623-5,645

Australia: 4,962-4,970

Global Spanish: 4,490-4,475

Portuguese: 3,459-3,417

Canada French: 2,767-2,734

Italian: 503-505 (last tweet June 2019)

Swedish: 351-352 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 350 (last tweet 2015)

French: 228-227 (last tweet 2018)

German: 126 (last tweet 2018)

Russian: 42 (last tweet November 2019)

Japanese: 20 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

The first number next to each item is the current total as of today; the second number is the total as of the first day of last month.  Where one number is provided it means that there has been no change since last month.

Mailing Lists:

We continue see the impact of the General Data Protection Regulation.  Shrinking lists are in Italics.  Lists experiencing significant growth are in bold.

The top 10:

English: 74,209-74,228

French: 7,614-7,679

German: 5,797-5,793

Spanish: 5,137

Turkish: 4,282

Korean: 3,317-3,397

Italian: 3,293-3,322

Russian: 2,641

Norwegian: 2,234-2,243

Dutch: 1,435-1,455

The others:

Arabic:  738

Belarusian:  18

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 978-980

Creole:  11

Czech: 66

Danish: 101-103

Esperanto: 155-158

Farsi:  212

Finnish:  516-519

Georgian:  138

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  239-242

Hindi:  36

Hungarian:  192-193

Indonesian:  434-435

Japanese: 404

Polish: 862-859

Portuguese: 1,288-1,290

Romanian:  39

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 1,026-1,031

Tagalog: 160

Thai:  152-153

Ukrainian: 295-281

Vietnamese:  24

Flickr:

833 members.  10,236-10,220 photos.

Facebook Pages/Groups:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

LabourStart.org page likes: 13,410-13,406

LabourStart.org page follows: 14,178

Global Labour News and Information: 8,867

LabourStart UK:  2075-2,139

LabourStart Franco: 590-591

LabourStart Brasil:  507-506

LabourStart Turkce:  2,020-2,191

LabourStart TV: 444-431

LinkedIn:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Group: 2192-2174

Twitter:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Global English: 25,504 25,449

Canada English: 14,279-14,132

USA: 5,645-5,663

Australia: 4,970-4,956

Global Spanish: 4,475-4,557

Portuguese: 3,417-3,418

Canada French: 2,734-2,646

Italian: 505-504 (last tweet June 2019)

Swedish: 352 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 350 (last tweet 2015)

French: 227 (last tweet 2018)

German: 126 (last tweet 2018)

Russian: 42-40 (last tweet November 2019)

Japanese: 20 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

Mailing Lists:

The first number next to each item is the current total as of today; the second number is the total as of the first day of last month.  Where no number is provided for last month this means that the list was re-created this month from our Mail Chimp back-up.

We continue see the impact of the General Data Protection Regulation.  Shrinking lists are in Italics.  Lists experiencing significant growth are in bold.

The Top 10:

English: 74,228-73,527

French: 7,679-7,720

Spanish: 5,137-5,141

Turkish: 4,282-4,222

Korean: 3,397-3,399

Italian: 3,322-3,326

Russian: 2,641-2,630

Norwegian: 2,243-2,558

Dutch: 1,455-1,472

The Others:

Arabic:  738

Belarusian:  18

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 980-984

Creole:  11

Czech: 66-66

Danish: 103-104

Esperanto: 158-160

Farsi:  212

Finnish:  519

Georgian:  138

German: 5,793-5,844

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  242-243

Hindi:  36

Hungarian:  193-192

Indonesian:  435

Japanese: 404-no change

Polish: 859-863

Portuguese: 1,290-1,258

Romanian:  39

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15-15

Swedish: 1,031-1,036

Tagalog: 160-161

Thai:  153

Ukrainian: 281-277

Vietnamese:  24

Flickr:

833-834 members.  10,220-10,218 photos.

Facebook Pages/Groups:

LabourStart.org page: 13,410-14,148

Global Labour News and Information: 8,867-no data.

LabourStart UK:  2139-2145

LabourStart Franco: 591-592.

LabourStart Brasil:  506-no data.

LabourStart Turkce:  2191-no data.

LabourStart TV: 431-no change.

LinkedIn:

Group: 2174-2150

Twitter:

All the major feeds experienced growth starting when the COVID-19 crisis hit.  Accounts experiencing significant increases are in bold.

English: 25,449-25,265

Canada English: 14,132-13,729

USA: 5,663-5,669

Australia: 4,956-4,872

Spanish: 4,557-4,432

Canada French: 2,646-2,612

Portuguese: 3,418-3,176

Italian: 504-517 (last tweet June 2019)

Swedish: 352-361 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 350 (last tweet 2015)

French: 227-no change (last tweet 2018)

German: 126-no change (last tweet 2018)

Russian: 42-40 (last tweet November 2019)

Japanese: 20-no change (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12-no change (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7-no change (last tweet May 2012)

Mailing Lists:

The first number next to each item is the current total as of today the second number is the total as of the first day of last month

We continue see the impact of the General Data Protection Regulation though the effect appears to be reduced over time.  Shrinking lists are in Italics.  Lists experiencing significant growth are in bold.

The top 10:

English: 73,527- 73,336

French: 7,720-7,117

German: 5,844- 5,841

Spanish: 5,141- 5,124

Turkish: 4,222- 4,216

Korean: 3,399- 3,400

Italian: 3,326- 3,329

Russian: 2,630- 2,631

Norwegian: 2,558- 2,263

Dutch: 1,472- 1,475

The others:

Swedish: 1,036- 1,036

Chinese: 984- 985

Portuguese: 1,258-1,006

Polish: 863-863

Japanese: 404-405

Ukrainian: 277-277

Hebrew: 243-243

Hungarian: 192-184

Tagalog: 161-162

Esperanto: 160-157

Danish: 104-104

Czech: 66-66

Slovakian: 15-15

Flickr:

834 members, No change.  10,218 photos.

Facebook Pages/Groups:

LabourStart.org page: 14,148-13,440.

LabourStart UK:  2145-2087.

LabourStart Franco: 592-no change.

LabourStart TV: 431-no change

LinkedIn: 2150-2137.

Twitter:

During this period we have made occasional efforts to build the Spanish-language, Portuguese-language, English-language Canadia and Australian accounts. All the major feeds experienced growth starting when the COVID-19 crisis hit.  Accounts experiencing significant increases are in bold.

English: 25,265-24,939

Canada English: 13,729-13,063

USA: 5,669-5,662

Australia: 4,872-4,991

Spanish: 4,432-4,040

Canada French: 2,612-2,545-

Portuguese: 3,176-2,913-

Italian: 517 (last tweet June 2019)

Swedish: 361 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 350 (last tweet 2015)

French: 227 (last tweet 2018)

German: 126 (last tweet 2018)

Russian: 42-40 (last tweet November 2019)

Japanese: 20 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

Despite the summer heat, the pandemic and lockdown, the last three weeks have been quite busy for us, with new campaigns — and a new intern.

New campaigns: We launched two new campaigns — for Zimbabwe and Turkey. The Turkey campaign, launched with in partnership with Deriteks and IndustriALL, appears in 14 languages and has 5,799 supporters. The Zimbabwe campaign, in partnership with Public Services International (PSI) and the Zimbabwean Nurses Association (ZINA) also appears in 14 languages and has 5,918 supporters. These campaigns appear alongside eight other active campaigns — the most campaigns we have ever run at the same time.

Our older campaigns: All have been given a boost by repeated posts across social media in the last couple of weeks.

Campaign translations: We did a comprehensive review and found that of the top 10 languages (other than English), we had complete sets of translations for just five campaigns. We followed up with key translators and activists about the other languages, but with limited success.  Our biggest problem is with Korean — we have a large mailing list, but no active volunteer translators.

Mailing lists: We imported 440 new subscribers who supported our campaigns, most of them to the English list.

Intern: LabourStart has now hired its sixth intern since October 2012 — Nathanael Cheng. Nate has just graduated from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, is currently based near Philadelphia in the US, and he began work for us during the last week of July.

The first volume, published in 2014.

Dan Gallin book: We’ve made a lot of progress on this book this month, and hope to have most of the work done in August. This is the second volume of essays; the first (Solidarity) we published in 2014.

Global Labour University: I met for an hour (online) with a dozen trade unionists from Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, Liberia, Korea, India, Brazil, Germany, and Canada. We had a very good, productive conversation.

Our new home page: We’re rewritten some of the code for the Spanish page so that it will show many more news stories at the bottom of the page — and will consider doing the same for other languages as we roll these out. We also fixed a problem with top news stories not appearing on the bottom of the page in English and French editions. Because we have 10 active campaigns and on our new home page we show images for each campaign, this was taking up too much of the page (and pushing the news too far down). Instead we’re now limiting this to just the five latest campaigns. We’ll have a ‘more campaigns’ link in all languages, as we already do in English.

IONOS: Our web hosting company caused a major problem for us when they upgraded to a new version of Linux. No one could add news — as was reported by two of our more active correspondents in the UK. We managed to quickly fix the code which allows our software to keep running, but we will need to attentive in case anything else is broken too.

1 June vs 1 May 2020 Numbers

Flickr:

834 members, 10,210 photos. No Data for May.

Facebook Page:

14,133-no data from May.

LinkedIn:

2,077.  No data for May.

Twitter:

During this period we have not made any concerted efforts to build the accounts. All the major feeds experienced growth starting when the COVID-19 crisis hit.  Accounts experiencing significant increases are in bold.


English: 24,364-23,798
Canada English: 12,394-11,706
USA: 5,609-5,526
Australia: 4,344-4,227
Spanish: 3,674-3,493
Canada French: 2,429-2,277
Portuguese: 2,132-1,816
Italian: 517 (last tweet June 2019)
Swedish: 361 (last tweet 2016)
Indonesia: 350 (last tweet 2015)
French: 227 (last tweet 2018)
German: 126 (last tweet 2018)
Russian: 40
Japanese: 20 (last tweet 2012)
Dutch: 12
Arabic: 7

During this period we have not made any concerted efforts to build the accounts. All the major feeds experienced growth starting when the COVID-19 crisis hit.

Just eyeballing it, the Portuguese feed, which carries almost exclusively stories from Brazil and Portugal, seems to have experienced the greatest proportional growth.

Note also the dormant accounts. If anyone is interested in assuming responsibility for any of them please let us know.

Our global feed in English remains one of the largest union-friendly Twitter accounts around.

English: 23,798- 22,578

Canada English: 11,706-10,547

USA: 5,526-4,822

Australia: 4,227-3,986

Spanish: 3,493-2,177

Canada French: 2,277-2,155

Portuguese: 1,816-1,397

Italian: 517-516 (last tweet June 2019)

Swedish: 361-364 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 350-354 (last tweet 2015)

French: 227-230 (last tweet 2018)

German: 126-122 (last tweet 2018)

Russian: 40-34

Japanese: 20-19 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12-12

Arabic: 7-7

Most of our work in the last week has revolved around our upcoming Virtual May Day.

We encourage all unions to submit short videos (up to 3 minutes) using this online form:

https://www.labourstart.org/go/submitvideo

We have begun promoting that link very widely, as have our global union partners.

This included a mailing to all our correspondents.

We continue to have regular Zoom meetings with global unions, and last week we were able to do a first trial run of our live streaming platform.

In non-May Day news, we assisted a network of call centre workers (in Francophone countries) with a trilingual campaign they launched on change.org.

We also extensively publicised the winner of this year’s Arthur Svensson prize for international trade union rights.

And we received a generous donation from the Geneva-based FDHT.

Finally, our backlog of emails — and new correspondent applications — is starting to clear. We can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

We’ve launched three campaigns already in July and the month isn’t even over yet.

One, which we launched last week, is in support of Erlan Baltabay, a jailed trade union leader in Kazakhstan. That campaign has 5,665 supporters after just five days online and already appears in 15 languages.

The second one is supporting municipal workers in Izmir, Turkey (pictured). The local authorities dismissed trade union members without any legal basis. The workers have been picketing since the 20th of May. The number of dismissals reached 187 on July 24. This campaign will be going live today — and a LabourStart banner will be taken the picket line this week.

The Cambodia campaign (Cambodia: Solidarity with workers at the West Mebun temple) which we launched 26 days ago has 5,482 supporters and appears in 17 languages. It looks like we will soon be able to add Khmer to that list.

Our largest active campaign remains Pakistan: Reinstate the Karachi 8 (pictured above) with 7,478 supporters. This campaign appears in 16 languages and has been active for a little more than two months.

In the last three weeks we launched one new campaign, closed one, and did a lot of other stuff. Keep reading …

Poland campaign: We launched a new campaign in support of a union activist facing victimisation for his trade union activity. The campaign is currently in 14 languages (with more on the way), and has 6,159 supporters. It targets the same company (Hutchison) as another current LabourStart campaign in support of port workers in Karachi.

China campaign: We closed the campaign in all languages after three months online and are waiting to hear back from the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions about the results. The total number of supporters of the campaign was 8,557 and it ran in 18 languages. It was our largest current campaign when we closed it.

ITUC Global Rights Index: Having discussed this with an ITUC staffer in Oslo, we proceeded to give the launch of this report extensive publicity this year, doing a special mailing to our list timed to coincide with the official release of the report, and promoting it widely across social media. A Turkish translation was done, and was sent out to our Turkish list as well.

Arthur Svensson Prize: Eric Lee was invited to represent LabourStart in Oslo for the award ceremony. His speech is available to read here. You can also view the whole panel including Eric in this video.

Correspondents: We recruited 30 new correspondents in the first half of 2019. They come from 20 countries: Australia, Canada, Colombia, Greece, Guyana, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Swaziland, the UK, and the USA. Most of them have not yet been active but we will be making a special effort to reach out to all of them.

New mailing list system: We’ve now migrated nearly all the mailing lists from MailChimp to Sendy, with a potential cost saving of over 90%. There have been some hiccups, but on the whole this works well. The biggest lists (especially English) will be the last to be migrated in the next few days.

Static pages: The static pages on the LabourStart website have been built over more than two decades, with many different designs. From this week, they are all getting a unified design using an ultra-light content management system called Pico, which they call “a stupidly simple, blazing fast, flat file CMS.” For an example of what these pages might look like, see here.

Donations: We received generous donations from unions in Canada, Norway and the UK this month, as well as many individual donations.