Inside LabourStart

I’ve just written to every member of UnionBook to announce the good news – the social network for trade unionists will continue.

But I’ve asked them to redouble their efforts (literally), aiming to recruit 6 new members per day (instead of the 3 members a day we’ve been getting in September) between now and the end of the year.  If we can do this, we can reach 5,000 members.

And I’ve suggested that each and every one of them use this as their Facebook status update today:

Union member? Fed up with Facebook? Join me on UnionBook: www.unionbook.org

Please do so yourself.  Thanks.

The survey results are in.  81.7% of the 461 people who participated in our survey regarding UnionBook answered ‘yes’ to the question ‘Should UnionBook continue?”

232 people (!) submitted comments — see below:

(more…)

Here are the totals with the last month in brackets:

In the last four days, in addition to watching our Palestine campaign grow, showing off our new conference poster, and and thinking about Cafe Press (see earlier posts), here are a few of the things that have been on the agenda at LabourStart this week …

1. Have been holding an email conversation with our internet service provider (1&1) about the possible listing of their IP address in the SORBS spam database – some people sending off protest messages to Georgia have received reports that indicate this. Still investigating what’s going on.
2. Attended a meeting at the Trades Union Congress to discuss Egypt and expressed a willingness to do more – including a possible campaign in support of labour law reform in that country.
3. Fixed the newswire which is now featured on LabourStart’s French page on Facebook to open links in a new window (as is the case for the campaigns newswire).
4. Received another nice donation from a Canadian union, processed it and had Derek thank them.
5. Spoke with the International Metalworkers Federation about a possible campaign on Malawi – but after consulting with the ITUC, this has been placed on hold.
6. Provided advice on social networking to UNI, which is campaigning against Deutsche Telekom – a union-buster in the USA.
7. Mailed all members of UnionBook about our conference, the campaigns, and the need to recruit some 900 new members in 40 days.
8. Improved daily campaign stats program to show only the current month; could not get it to show in reverse order.
9. Backed up mailing lists, MySQL databases, and all files on the website.
10. Added campaign supporters to MailChimp lists.
11. Removed spam signups to the conference database.
12. Updated conference website with the Turkish version of the ‘respect’ form.
13. Sorted out tickets for travel to Istanbul in September for a meeting with our conference committee.
14. Sent out the weekly mailing in German.
15. Sent out a mailing to over 600 Francophone Canadians.
16. And answered dozens and dozens of emails.

This is progress – albeit slow progress.   (UnionBook has grown from 2,800 to 4,000 in 6 months – an average growth of 200 per month.)

I’ve just sent out a message to all 4,000 members of UnionBook urging them to recruit others – and there’s now a countdown clock on the front page to 4 September when we will decide whether to continue with the project.

If we have 5,000 members signed up by then, we will.  If not, we’ll have to think about this.

Campaigns: I’ve done a mass mailing to our English list announcing the two new campaigns (Russia, El Salvador) and the release of Rosalba in Colombia (subject of a campaign of ours last winter). We also promoted Amnesty International’s Iran campaign, the ITUC annual survey, and a contest sponsored by UCS.  Last week we suggested a super-campaign to the ITUC based around their annual survey, but we’ve gotten no answer from them. We’ve gotten permission to close down the Chile campaign after 3 months and have asked permission to close down the Botswana one as the strike is now over.  Once again at the request of the RMT union we launched a UK-specific campaign and did a mailing to the more than 5,000 UK subscribers on our lists.  Nearly 700 messages have already been sent.

Conference: Work continues on the conference registration – I’ve gotten stuck on a bit of code and have been asking for help.  Made some progress today and hope to have this settled tomorrow so that we can begin registering people.  The problem has to do with the interaction between the Perl scripting language and a MySQL database.  I tested out Ustream, which integrates with Ning (UnionBook) as a way of doing video podcasts for the conference, but while it worked, the advertising was incredibly annoying, so I’ll be trying out different software instead.  Had a long Skype conference call with the Solidarity Center about the participation of Middle East and North African trade unionists at our event.

Fundraising: As the USA was lagging far behind other countries, I wrote to some of our friends in the American labour movement and have gotten some positive responses.  The total raised so far (including some money which has been pledged but not yet received) is £15,341 — a nearly 40% increase over last year.

UnionBook: I wrote to all UB members telling them how things were going with our drive to recruit new members – trying to reach a goal of 5,000 by 4 September.  While the site is growing, it’s not growing fast enough to meet that goal.  18 new members joined today, and another 18 yesterday.

The ITUC has issued its annual report on the violations of trade union rights.   It’s important that we do all we can to promote this — in all our languages and in all countries.  Here are some of the things I’m doing today:

• Promoting this in a LabourStart mass mailing later today
• Posted it to the LabourStart page on Facebook
• Posted it as a tweet – as LabourStart
• Posted it on UnionBook – and then automatically through my personal account to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn

Other correspondents have already made sure it’s a top news story on LabourStart today.

What have you done?