Dec
30
2022
0

Last post from 2022

The final week of 2022 was destined to be a relatively quiet one as many union offices shut down for the holiday.

Nevertheless, we did a few things at LabourStart …

  • We sent out an end-of-year mailing to all our correspondents. This encouraged them to contact us if they’re having difficulty logging in to post news, to help recruit new correspondents and to publicise our news page more widely.
  • Our mailing lists grew this week as we added 52 more subscribers from the new campaign supporters.
  • We did more work to publicise our Belarus campaign across social media. That campaign now has 7,938 supporters — a gain of 50 in the last week. We also shared widely the ITUC statement condemning the sentences handed down to the jailed leaders of the trade union movement in that country. (Unfortunately the ITUC has not yet translated the statement, so it’s only in English.)
  • We continued work fixing LabourStart’s back-end. This week that included dealing with a bug in the caption for our photo-of-the-day feature, as well as problems with character encoding on our home page for some Spanish-language stories. We continued work creating new and fixed RSS feeds for a number of countries. Unfortunately, not all of these yet function correctly, but we’re continuing the work.
  • We continued this week with discussions with our partners in Georgia in the run-up to our upcoming Global Solidarity Conference at the end of April.

In 2023 we’re looking forward to working harder and smarter to defend workers’ rights and rebuild union power all over the world. Thanks to all of you for all that you do — and happy new year!

Dec
23
2022
0

The week before Christmas at LabourStart

ITUC: We continued providing unparalleled coverage of the Qatargate scandal, including the first reports online about the ITUC General Council meeting this week.

Belarus: We continued to share news and promote our campaign as the trials began.  We currently have 7,888 supporters for this campaign.  We are also in discussion with the Danish union 3F about supporting our efforts.

Trade Union News from Finland: After a quarter century, this website is finally closing down. We have worked closely with them over the years and we shared the news of their demise widely.

Radio Labour: We don’t do enough to promote this remarkable project, so last week we did a social media blitz to help raise awareness of it.

Mastodon: Our following continues to grow on this Twitter alternative, but slowly. We’re now up to 212, a gain of 28 this week.

2023 Global Solidarity Conference: Following a Zoom call with our colleagues in Georgia, we are going ahead with this. Expect a rush of announcements in early January.

Programming: We have now fixed the RSS feeds for four countries (Australia, Canada, UK, USA), which had been broken for some time. We will be copying the source code for other countries and languages now that we have this fixed. And then we will publicise this again to our lists, encouraging individual trade unionists and their unions to make use of our newswires on their websites and blogs.

 

Written by admin in: 2023 conference,Newswires |
Dec
03
2021
0

Weekly update: Africa, Brazil, Colombia, Jordan, Pakistan, etc.

Africa: Work continues on preparing for our first-ever online meeting of correspondents. We have a tool that will allow our intern to compile a current list of all correspondents for the more than 50 African nations.  It turns out that we have 30 volunteer correspondents in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Nigeria with others scattered across the continent, and it will be good to meet them all — even if the meeting is on Zoom.

Brazil: With the agreement of PSI, we are closing down this campaign after many months.

Colombia: We have been asked to keep this campaign live for a while longer.

Jordan: We had an online meeting with the Education International to discuss next steps in this campaign. These will include online events in English and Arabic and a major effort to ramp up support for the Arabic version of the campaign.

Newswires: We have begun the process of repair, having fixed the Dutch and Norwegian newswires. Many more will be done in the coming days.

Pakistan: We have been asked to keep this campaign live for a while longer; there has apparently been some progress on the ground and the campaign is having an effect.

T-shirts: We did a second mass mailing to promote the t-shirts with Working Class History.  We’ll shortly share the results  — when we get them.

UnionDues podcast: This went live on 30 November. According to their website, it has been downloaded more than 200 times. We gave this podcast extensive publicity, including a mass mailing to our English list. (Our own counter shows just under 500 people clicked on our version of the link to the podcast.)

Written by admin in: Campaigns,Intern,Newswires,Publicity |
Apr
07
2021
0

Kyrgyzstan: We spoke too soon …

We spoke too soon – in Kyrgyzstan, the government has had a change of heart and has passed anti-union laws. We are just about to launch a campaign demanding that the president veto that law.

In other news …

Canada: We’ve done a mailing to our entire global list encouraging submissions to CLIFF, the labour film festival. We received a very generous donation from a Canadian union. And we also launched a new Canada-only campaign.

Israel: We continued with building our mailing list and social media following, writing directly to the more than 500 Hebrew speakers who supported our campaign – which now has just under 7,500 supporters.

Myanmar: We have given extensive publicity to two union fundraisers, organised by DSA in the US, and BWI.

Pakistan: We did more followup mailings to promote our campaign, also to our English, German and French lists.  The campaign has over 7,000 supporters.

Home page: A problem emerged with the ‘more stories’ for country link not working; this has now been fixed.

Interns: We participated in Cornell University’s Social Justice Career Fair and interviewed a number of participants. Three of these were short-listed, they were interviewed, and we took a decision to hire one, who will begin work in June. Our intern Amos, who is studying at the Global Labour University in Berlin, completed his internship with us.

Labour News Network: We have revived this tool which allows LabourStart correspondents to post news stories that have not appeared elsewhere on the web. This is now being beta-tested. More details coming soon.

Mailing list: We added 366 new subscribers from the new campaign supporters, mostly to the English list but also with significant growth for the Dutch list.

May Day: We are working on two events online — a panel discussion focussing on jailed trade union activists around the world, and a possible world premiere online of a major new film about working people (more details soon).

RSS newswires: We have been alerted to the fact that these are broken; we will aim to fix them ASAP.

Dec
14
2020
0

Victories in Belarus, Colombia; new campaigns in Brazil, Kyrgyzstan; webinars; and we have a bookshop!

Apologies once again as this update has been delayed by a couple of weeks. It’s been a very busy month and here are some highlights:

Belarus: We shared the good news of the release of the jailed trade unionists (pictured) widely across social media and closed our campaign.

Brazil: We launched a campaign demanding an end the anti-union attacks in the city of São Paulo. After one month online, the campaign has 6,198 supporters.

Cambodia: We closed our current campaign after three months. We don’t know the result yet as we have not yet heard back from the sponsoring unions – ITUC and EI.

Canada: We invited our list to view the CLIFF videos — one of which received a LabourStart prize.

Colombia: We won a big victory in the ‘death shifts’ campaign and publicised this widely.(Pictured – right.)

India: We are in discussions with a colleague who had been an active LabourStart correspondent about ramping up our activities by working together on an Indian labour news page on Facebook which he founded, and that already has tens of thousands of supporters.

Iran: We raised the question of a campaign in support of a workers’ rights activists who received 74 lashes — but have not yet heard back from our global union partner.

Kyrgyzstan: We launched a major new campaign, and now have nearly 6,000 supporters. The campaign has benefitted from repeated posts across social media, and the GUF partners all posting news stories on their home pages about this.

Philippines: We gave a lot of publicity to the global unions’ “Workers’ Quest for Justice – an international webinar on human rights and the labour movement” which took place on 23 November.

UK: I gave a talk (via Zoom) to a London branch of Unite the Union. The subject was LabourStart; the branch has made a donation to us.


Books: We have launched — just in time for Christmas — online bookshops in cooperation with bookshop.org in the USA and UK.

Correspondents: We cleared the backlog of new correspondent applications. At the moment, we have 1,007 correspondents, the majority of whom are inactive. Of those, 64 joined us in 2020. (See ‘webinars’ below.)

Internationalisation: We’re checking all our home pages in various languages to try to standardise features and have completed this for the Dutch page.

Interns: In addition to our two current interns in the USA, Nate and Hargun, we have agreed with the Global Labour University (based in Germany) to take on one or two more for a 6-week period starting in mid-February. We have already interviewed the first one, a young Israeli trade unionist.

Labour Newswire: Our language-based newswires have been broken for some time, but we finally managed to find the problem and fixed the Russian and Spanish ones. We can now begin to publicise these again. We purged the Labour Newswire Global Network page of the many websites which no longer use our newswires (or which have gone defunct).

Site security: Due to changes made by our Internet host (IONOS), we were compelled to close our CloudFlare account and instead have bought into IONOS’ system, SiteLock. We needed to work with IONOS tech support to get this all to work properly. We are working to ensure that all pages on our site are now SSL-protected and no longer trigger warning messages in browsers.

Social media: In addition to our LinkedIn group, we now have a LinkedIn page which we are starting to recruit to.

Webinars: We are today holding our first-ever Zoom webinar, for LabourStart correspondents. Over 50 people have registered to attend. We plan to hold many more webinars to support our campaigns, etc. We are hoping to hold another public webinar in support of FLOC in the US, with the support of the IUF, but are waiting.

Oct
29
2020
0

New campaign in Belarus; our first album; “Alexa, play LabourStart” and more …

We last updated this blog two weeks ago — and what a fortnight it has been!

CAMPAIGNS:

We launched a new campaign demanding the release of jailed trade unionists in Belarus; after just six days online it is already our 5th largest active campaign (out of 9) and could easily grow into our largest. In addition to all the usual publicity, I wrote about it in my weekly column for Solidarity, which was shared widely.

Jailed trade unionists in Belarus.

Jailed trade unionists in Belarus.

Soon we’ll do followups after a week online and this should give it a big boost; our recent Myanmar campaign grew by about 25% thanks to that second wave of publicity, so this will almost certainly result in the campaign reaching 7,000 supporters, if not many more.

We now have 9 live campaigns, and here they are listed in order of the number of supporters and including the date they were launched:

1 Belarus: Stop the violence – defend democracy and human rights – 21-Aug-2020 – 7412
2 Myanmar: Stop union-busting at sporting goods company – 14-Oct-2020 – 7033
3 Colombia: Support miners striking against the ‘death shift’ at Cerrejón – 01-Oct-2020 – 6733
4 Albania: Solidarity with the miners – end repression now – 12-Dec-2019 – 6544
5 Belarus: Free union leaders and activists – 23-Oct-2020 – 5862
6 Jordan: Release leaders of the Jordanian Teacher Association – 10-Aug-2020 – 5838
7 Cambodia: Free jailed union leaders now – 24-Aug-2020 – 5729
8 India: Workers’ rights under attack – 13-Jun-2020 – 5678
9 Ukraine: Support miners in their fight for decent conditions – 18-Sep-2020 – 5346

We have another campaign in the pipeline from Israel, involving young workers and a major transnational company.

To help raise awareness of how successful we are with these campaigns, we’ve been sharing the translated PDFs of our campaign victories across social media, showing a new language every other day.

MAILING LISTS:

Our lists grew significantly in the last two weeks, as we added 822 new subscribers, mostly to the English list. (If we continue at this pace, we’ll pick up 21,000 new subscribers in the next year.) We also added 239 new subscribers to our Belarusian list yesterday, which previously had just 18 subscribers.

In an effort to raise awareness of our new campaigns in Punjabi (every campaign is now translated into that language, which is spoken by 125 million people), we did a mailing to 1,400 people from India and Pakistan on our English mailing list — and invited their help to translate our campaigns into other languages in that region.

FUNDRAISING:

We completed a 4-week campaign to sell our “Workers’ Rights are Human Rights” union-made t-shirts and increased sales from 130 to 230 by the time the campaign ended. The company which is producing the t-shirts (CustomInk) has already paid us our share, including many individual donations over and above the cost of the shirts.

People should begin receiving their shirts in the next 10 days and we wrote to everyone who ordered, suggesting that people post photos of themselves in the shirts on social media, which we can then share.

Our best-selling LabourStart t-shirt.

Because of problems some people were having with PayPal — and a reluctance by some to use PayPal on principle — we’ve added an alternative way to donate to LabourStart (Transferwise) to our donations page, and have suggested it to some individuals. We’ll mention this the next time we try to raise money. Transferwise allows easy international bank transfers as well as credit and debit card payments, with no need to sign up for an account.

We received generous donations from CUPE in Canada and the Education International, as well as pledges from both the ITUC and ETUC.

David Thorpe, a British entertainer and long-time supporter of LabourStart, has released an album with his band and is generously donating 30% of the proceeds to LabourStart. We’ll shortly be publicising this.

David Thorpe.

David Thorpe.

TELEGRAM:

Some time ago we set up a public channel on this network, which is widely used by pro-democracy protestors in Belarus, Hong Kong and Thailand. Two weeks ago, it had just 26 subscribers and we had not been posting to it. We’ve now revived it, and there are 137 subscribers now. We’ve begun posting regularly to this group — mostly events, new campaigns, and our photo of the week. We hope we can grow this by several hundred in the next few weeks.

INSTAGRAM:

This is another social network that we had not been using — but we now have an account and a page there, and already have 100 followers. Anyone who wants to help post images and texts there is invited to volunteer.

SMART SPEAKERS:

Tens of millions of people now use smart speakers (most notably Amazon echo, but there are others including Google Home and Apple’s Siri) to play music, listen to the news, etc. We now have a rudimentary LabourStart ‘skill’ which reads out (and shows on-screen) the latest top global labour news stories, updated every day. We should have a public version of this ready in the next few days.

LabourStart news - on an Amazon Echo device.

LabourStart news – on an Amazon Echo device.

AND FROM AROUND THE WORLD …

Armenia and Azerbaijan: We’ve given extensive coverage to the international and local trade union responses to the fighting in Nagorno-Karabakh, and now regularly report on the region. I wrote about this in a recent column for Solidarity.

Canada: LabourStart will be sponsoring a prize in CLIFF – the labour film festival.

Georgia: We’re reached out and gotten agreement from the Georgian Trade Union Confederation to resume translating all our campaigns and mailings into Georgian. We’ve also reached out (twice) to our five inactive correspondents in Georgia, and will soon try to recruit more. We’ve also shared a document on how to do global labour solidarity conferences with the GTUC, as we consider Tbilisi as a possible venue for such a conference in late 2021.

Singapore: A local union activist reached out to us and we had a very long discussion, including ways in which LabourStart can be helpful, particularly in supporting exploited migrant workers there.

USA: We continue to reach out to unions, including the mineworkers and farmworkers, and expect to shortly hold a live event online with the latter.

Apr
09
2018
0

A busy week: Updates for Algeria, Brazil, Georgia, Iran, North America, Turkey, Ukraine, UK, and the USA

Our stall at the Labor Notes conference in Chicago this weekend.

Algeria: Our campaign in support of the independent energy workers union has been extended by a month at the request of the global union federations. It has reached 9,925 messages sent, making it the largest currently-running LabourStart campaign. I encourage all of you to help us get that number up past the 10,000 mark in the next few days.

Brazil: We collected and publicised widely the many statements by international unions condemning the arrest of former president Lula.

Georgia: Three Georgian news stories this week got special attention on LabourStart and wide promotion by us on social media – the mining disaster in Tkibuli in which six workers died, a hunger strike by port workers in Batumi, and the court decision in support of Rustavi Azot workers, who were the subject of a recent LabourStart campaign. Our 8-week old campaign supporting the Georgian unions’ call for a new labour law is up to 6,070 supporters. Eric will be travelling to Georgia in another 13 days and will meet with trade union leaders then.

Global: We continued doing weekly promotions on social media aimed at attracting new, individual subscriptions to the English mailing list. We also began preparing for our annual fundraising appeals, both to individuals and to major union donors.

Iran: Our campaign demanding the release of Esmail Abdi, which is getting close to the 3-month mark, has now reached 8,356 messages sent. This is the most recent of several campaigns we’ve run demanding his freedom, and is our second most popular current campaign.

North America: We had a strong presence at the Labor Notes conference in Chicago organised and led by Derek, who drove from Ontario. We also promoted this effort in a mass mailing to our US and Canadian lists, and with a dedicated website. We had a fully kitted-out stall, distributed flyers, sold books, and signed up new supporters.

Turkey: We signed up a new volunteer correspondent, who works for a well-regarded project called Solidarity TV. Meanwhile, our current campaign targetting Roy Robson is up to 7,670 supporters and is running in 16 languages.

UK: We designed and printed 1,000 full-colour leaflets for distribution at upcoming events, including this week’s Unions 21 conference in London, with a link to a dedicated website very similar to the one we did for Labor Notes – this will be template for other ‘welcome to LabourStart’ websites as needed.

Ukraine: We responded to an appeal by metal workers, urging them to get in touch with IndustriALL.

USA: At the request of a union webmaster in Michigan, we finally completed the creation of RSS news feeds for all 50 US states, updated automatically every 30 minutes.

Jun
16
2017
0

Thanks to our latest campaign, a massive Indonesian language mailing list

Campaigns: The new campaign on Indonesia very quickly became one of our largest ever, with 12,000 supporters after little more than a week online.
After three months online, we closed the campaign in support of TUMTIS members in Turkey with the approval of the ITF. It was one of our largest, with more than 10,000 supporters. The workers’ leaders remain in jail and the struggle continues.
We fixed one of the landing pages in Russian which was not rendering correctly.

Mailing lists: We imported 6,483 new names this week — probably a record for us — and the vast majority are from Indonesia. These names will be added to our small Indonesian list which now needs to be revived, with a new translator.

Facebook: We’ve launched a 4-week long promotion of our new UK page. In the first few days, we grew our audience by more than 40%, from 521 to 741. We expect to soon have more than 1,000 followers.

Arthur Svensson prize: As the winners last year, we were asked to make a video for the presentation of the award to a South African union this year, and have done so. The ceremony in Oslo is today.

UnionBook: The International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam has asked for, and received, the full archived contents for their use.

Labour Newswire Global Network: This is the page where we list all the websites that run our news and campaigns (using JavaScript or RSS) — and now we’re going to add the option of state/province in some cases. (We have quite a few Canadian union websites using our newswires.)

New flyer: We have the text of our new flyer ready, and have approached a graphic designer we used previously to complete the work.

Donations: In addition to the £8,000 raised from individual donors, we have received commitments from the Education International, the International Transport Workers Federation and IndustriALL this week.

Mar
14
2016
0

2 new campaigns, conference getting closer, new correspondents, etc. – two weeks in the life of LabourStart

Campaigns:

At the request of the Education International, we launched a campaign in defense of a jailed teacher trade unionist.
The ITF requested and we launched a campaign protesting the killing in custody of a Gambian trade union leader.
A Turkish union, GIDA-IS, has asked us to do a campaign which we will launch shortly.

Conference:

We now have a draft agenda ready, a logo, a WordPress blog is being created, and we have hired an intern to work with us on this (Angela).

Correspondents:

I resumed weekly mailings to all our 600+ correspondents. Each week, they get news and ideas how they can be more active or use LabourStart better. Focusses of recent mailings have included encouraging them to get their unions to issue statements in support of our campaigns, International Women’s Day, and how to link campaigns to news.
I added at least 16 new correspondents in the last two weeks — there had been a backlog dating back to January.

Mailing lists:

We’ve added hundreds of new people to our lists due to the recent campaigns.

Newswires:

I fixed the script that builds the JavaScript newswire, adidng a requirement that stories be in English, because there are now Russian and French priority 1 news stories.
It also turned out that there was an old, broken link to our campaigns newswire on the site, but this has now been fixed.

Outreach:

I’ve been invited to speak on a panel on 31 March in London, together with Shane Enright from Amnesty International, on campaigning. The panel is hosted by the Ethical Trading Initiative.
I will also be representing LabourStart at an event to be held in mid-April at the House of Lords in London; details to follow.

Ratify the Protocol:

We continue offering support to this important initiative from the ITUC (against modern slavery) and this month did a mailing to our Italian list after our volunteer translators translated the ITUC’s campaign page.

WINS Working World – Labor Radio:

I continue with recording weekly programs — the most recent one was on the Palestinian teachers’ strike. These can be found here: http://www.laborradio.org/?zone=/unionactive/view_page.cfm&page=The20Working20World

May
30
2015
--

2016 conference, new China campaign, and much more – a busy week

Global Solidarity Conference 2016:

We have a date and a venue, which I hope to announce in the next day or two.

Campaigns:

The Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions has given us a campaign which will go live in the next day or two.
We’ve been in touch with a group that works to support Iranian political prisoners.
I did a followup mailing to build support for our current Iran campaign after it turned out that two of the prisoners have been released on bail.
Our campaigns interface has now been translated into Sinhala, a language spoken by about 16 million people.
We helped BWI with their FIFA/Qatar Thunderclap, boosting it substantially.
The link to show more campaigns on the Swedish campaign page was broken; I have now fixed it.
Our Berlin group now has access to add campaigns directly to our database.

News:

I have begun fixing the redirect when you key in the URLs for languages like this: http://www.labourstart.org/no — they now go to the ‘news’ directory rather than the ‘2013’ directory, part of a long-term project to migrate everything over.
Small changes made to the Norwegian home page, at Espen’s request.
We’ve had a problem with the German interface to add news; I’ll be helping Gisela to sort this out.
We have a new search engine which I’ll deploy next week; it was set up in response to a request from a Canadian academic doing research on lockouts and works better than our current one.

London Hackathon:

On 12 June we’ve been invited to participate in this event, mentioned earlier (see my post from 14 May). I’ve done a short ‘shopping list’ of some of the many tech things we need help on. If any of you have any suggestions or things to add to that list, please let me know.

Books & Publications:

I’ll resume work on the 2016 Global Labour Calendar next week after a few months of inactivity.
20 copies of Dan Gallin’s Solidarity have been ordered for sale at Northern College in the UK this summer.
I’ll prepare a detailed report on sales in recent months in an upcoming report.

Donations:

We’ve had another donation from a Norwegian union, and PSI has pledged £3,090.
I’ve begun contacting US unions one by one to get their support for the next year.
Our donations page is now translated in Spanish, and we did a mailing to our Spanish list (but with very poor results).

Newswires:

The British TUC has asked us to look into making our newswires secure (using SSL) so we’ve ordered this from our ISP. This will allow the newswire to appear again on some popular TUC sites, such as unionreps.org.uk.

Mailing lists:

We picked up 123 new subscribers this week, and 928 last week.

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