Inside LabourStart

While many global union websites are slow to return to normal after the holidays, we’ve kept LabourStart going all the way through.

Android app: We have taken the first step to building an Android app for LabourStart. We expect this will take several months as there’s a steep learning curve. If successful, we will aim later in the year to create an iOS app as well. For many people, their phones (especially low-cost Android phones) are the way they connect to the net, so it is extremely important that we be accessible there as well.

News: In the first 9 days of 2025, our correspondents posted 705 stories — an average of 78 stories per day, or one every 18 minutes. This year we have set the goal to triple the number of active correspondents.

Recruiting new correspondents: We have sent out targetted emails to our South African (459) and Irish (1,722) lists. The latter received a message from us two days ago. So far, no new correspondents have signed up and we are checking to see if there’s a technical problem.

Inside LabourStart: This blog — which you’re reading right now — allows people to sign up to receive emails every time it is updated. Today we have 100 subscribers, nearly all of them our volunteer correspondents. We are going to increase the number of people receiving those updates and as a first step, we’ve added a sign-up box on the right side of this page.

LabourStart-branded merchandise: With our cool new logo, it’s time to make things like t-shirts and mugs available. We found a wonderful co-op in the USA which we could work with, but they need to sort out world-wide shipping first. We’re working on this.

Goals for 2025: In addition to the things mentioned above, in 2025 we will reduce our long-term to-do list (over 80 tasks, some quite old) by one per week on average. We’ll publish at least one book (we have three in the pipeline in draft form). We’ll continue our work with a new generation of activists. And we’ll fight hard for workers’ rights — everywhere in the world that they are threatened.

Podcasts: We’ve resumed our podcasts after a gap of about a month; two new interviews were recorded, one of which has now been posted. That interview, with Judith Kirton-Darling of IndustriAll Europe, is already our second most-popular podcast of the last three months after just one day online. We are waiting to hear back from three trade unionists who we invited for interviews.

Mailing lists: To cut our costs we have been looking into alternatives to the very expensive MailChimp. We will be testing using Mailjet again, at least for the English list.

Campaigns: We are likely to shortly resume campaigns following an email conversation with the International Federation of Journalists. We also offered campaigns to IUF, the Education International and IndustriAll Europe and are awaiting their response.

LabourStart Jobs: Canadian jobs continue to dominate this page, as very few correspondents have been posting any. We re-sent the mailing to all correspondents about this, which first went out in February.

Today in Labour History: For some time now we have had issues with updating records here — this is now well on the way to being fixed.

T-shirts: We have begun work on getting another batch of shirts printed and sold by a unionised place in the USA at a much lower cost than our previous efforts.

Books: A review of sales of books we print using Amazon KDP (including ebooks) shows that we sold about 6,500 of these in the last 12 years, earning over £3,000 for LabourStart. We have three new books in the pipeline and will ramp up efforts to get them all published this year. Our best-selling title is Solidarity: Selected Essays by Dan Gallin, which sold 1,045 copies.

Labour films: We are helping out a British trade unionist who has made a short film about workers on strike in the UK.

Due to some overseas travel and other issues, I’ve not been updating this blog — the last update was on 1 June.  So this will try to cover the last two months briefly.  I’ll try to keep the updates shorter and more frequent in future.

Campaigns:

• We just now launched a new campaign, together with PSI, in support of a jailed trade union leader in Mexico.  Translations are coming in and publicity happening.  After the first day, we have 2,750 supporters — a good start.
• We closed the Belarus and Georgia campaigns after three months.

Publicity:

• We’ve created the first version of a media list with a few dozen names.  All campaigns, events and conferences will now be sent to them.  Comrades with suggestions of who else should be on this list, please do let us know.
• We have reinvigorated our Instagram account (485 followers) and signed up for a Threads account.  We continue to grow our followings on Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn and Mastodon.
• We ran advertising campaigns on Facebook and Microsoft in support of our Belarus campaign, but they produced very disappointing results.

Next book:

• Some of the participants in our recent Global Solidarity Conference have sent in texts of their presentations.  We have about 9,000 words and will probably post this online and perhaps as a print booklet as well.  The texts need to be edited.

Donations:

• We received a very generous donation from the European Transport Workers Federation (ETF) and another from NUPGE in Canada.  In September we will resume our fundraising efforts.

Our 2014 calendar.

Global Labour Calendar: We plan to have this ready and on sale on 1 October. If you have any great labour photos that we might consider using, please email canada@labourstart.org. If you have ideas for dates we should mark on the calendar, please email ericlee@labourstart.org.

Afghanistan: We have reached out to both national trade union centres in the country, and have also engaged with the ITUC. We continue to upload news stories from unions abroad about Afghanistan, mostly from the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ).

Egypt: We have a campaign ready, but have been asked to place it on hold for the moment.

Iran: We are discussing launching a new campaign with an NGO that campaigns in support of jailed trade unionists, Free Them Now. More details soon.

Myanmar: We are in discussions with a Danish trade union about a possible campaign.

Internationalisation: Having largely completed the fixes to our Hebrew page, we’re now turning our attention to LabourStart’s Arabic language edition — including efforts to revitalise our core group of volunteer correspondents across the Arab world.

LabourStart Jobs: We continue adding jobs, mostly from Canada and the UK for the moment, publicising them across social media every week.

News database: We’ve continued work on the problem of countries whose names have changed. From this week, correspondents will no longer have the option to use the older names of a number of countries, including Swaziland, Burma and East Timor (though people will be able to view news posted under those names in the past).

This long-delayed report covers quite a bit of time — more than ten weeks. And it’s been a very busy ten weeks at that. This will be concise, but from next week I hope to resume regular weekly updates which can feature some more details. So here, basically, are the headlines since 10 May …

Campaigns: We launched quite a few, and even won some. These included campaigns in support of tobacco workers in the USA (in partnership with FLOC and the IUF), Thailand (with IndustriALL), Metro workers in Bucharest, Romania (with ETF and EPSU), Brazil, Colombia, and more. We also closed campaigns in Albania, India, Israel, Algeria and Ukraine. The last two were victories — our brother Mourad in Algeria was released from jail, and Profbud reached agreement with the employer in Ukraine. We’ve also had a partial win in Turkey, as Cihan has been released from jail but ordered to remain in the country to stand trial (that campaign continues).

Webinars: We held two excellent webinars in June, with several hundred participants. These focussed on Colombia and Brazil, and were closely tied to campaigns we launched in support of workers in both countries. Both the webinars and the campaigns have helped to raise the profile of our work in Latin America. We also reached out to the RWDSU in the USA to get a webinar going around the Amazon organising effort, but that seems to have stalled.

Publications: Dan Gallin’s new book Resistance was published and we’ve promoted it widely, including a limited time offer of free versions on Kindle. We have begun work on a 2022 Global Labour Calendar, our first in many years. We have also been working on a long-overdue edition of our Campaigning Online and Winning book.

Interns: The intern we were expecting to begin employing in mid-June was not available to us. Meanwhile, we are working on getting one or more interns from Canadian universities.

Fundraising: We did our annual appeal in mid-June, followed up by mailings about the release of Mourad and Cihan. We also did our first Facebook fundraiser, meeting our target this week. We’ve received generous donations in the last couple of months from IndustriALL, EPSU and ETF, and have reached out to other global unions and European federations. In addition, we have had tremendous support from a number of Canadian unions.

Outreach: We were approached by a team of academics in Canada who are doing “a research project which focuses on technology-driven innovation for the labour movement”. Eric had a two-hour interview with them, and Derek will soon be invited as well.

Fixes and changes to LabourStart: We are always making small changes, but in recent days have begun to attack a very long to-do list of suggested changes. We have now sorted out the country news pages for countries which have changed their names so that you will automatically see a link to the alternate name (e.g., Burma / Myanmar) — for the moment, this works only in English. We also fixed a problem with tweeting campaigns not in English and this seems to be working.

Blue skies: One project just beginning will be the tagging of news stories if these concern jobs in the labour movement. We often have such stories and we will find a way to show them in one place for people looking for such jobs — at no cost to the unions.

May started off with a bang, as we hosted a global event on Zoom on 2 May with speakers from the embattled trade union movements in Hong Kong, Myanmar, Turkey and Belarus. We also received a video from Iran, which we were unable to show on the day. The video of our event is live here. It has been seen by 213 people. Over 500 trade unionists registered to participate in our event. For the first time, we actually commissioned a logo, which has been shared widely:

We also completed the publication of the new book of essays by Dan Gallin, Resistance. The book is already available for sale from Amazon and we will begin promotion shortly.

We’ve also been working on a number of new campaigns:

• Algeria: We launched a campaign last week at the request of PSI. The campaign already has 3,480 supporters and has been translated into a number of languages.
• Hong Kong: We are in discussions with the HKCTU about ways we can help, including a global campaign.
• India: A new campaign has been proposed and we’re working to coordinate a response with local and global unions.
• Malaysia: We are supporting BWI’s new campaign by sharing their link across social media and our news page.
• Myanmar: We’re in discussions about the possibility of organising a global campaign as well helping (again) with fundraising.
• Turkey: We’re just about to go live with a campaign in support of a jailed Canadian trade unionist in Turkey.

USA: And finally, we’re discussing the possibility of a global webinar with the RWDSU on the struggle to unionise Amazon. Details coming soon.

May Day: We’ve announced our event – an online meeting in support of jailed trade unionists in Hong Kong, Myanmar, Belarus, Turkey and Iran.  We’re invited the speakers and created a signup form for participants.  At the moment, 720 people have visited the registration page, and 257 have signed up to participate in the event — after less than one day of publicity.

Books: We’re in the final stages before the launch of Dan Gallin’s book, Resistance. Details soon.

New correspondents: We added new correspondents from the USA, Vanuatu, the UK, Canada, Italy, Nigeria and Malaysia.

Jordan: We asked the Education International if it’s possible to close down this campaign, which has now been running for more than 3 months.

Malaysia: We are about to launch a campaign, at the request of BWI.

Donations: We received another generous donation from a union in Norway.

FAQ: We had an old page on the site with old information — this has now been updated.

Home page: We fixed a problem – if there was a second country for the news story for a top story, it wasn’t appearing.

At the end of each year, we write to all our volunteer translators. Our message this year included this:

We’ve run 24 campaigns this year.

Some of these campaigns resulted in victories for the workers.

We’ve helped get trade unionists released from jail, companies to sit down and negotiate with workers’ representatives, and workers reinstated after being wrongfully sacked.

Thanks to your efforts, these campaigns often appear in many languages — and as a result are much larger and more effective than campaigns that appear only in English or a handful of major languages.

We are strong believers in linguistic diversity and equality, and we believe that workers everywhere should be encouraged to participate in global solidarity campaigns, regardless of what language they speak.

Your work is turning that commitment of ours into a reality.

We also write to all our volunteer correspondents. In this year’s message, we wrote:

According to our statistics, 111 of you posted 55,618 news stories to our site this year. That’s average of 155 news stories every day of the year.

A new labour news story every 9 minutes.

When I look at the mainstream media news sites, I barely see a hint of all this news. Working people and our unions rarely make headlines.

Even some union websites feature hardly any updated news. Some major union websites go weeks without a single update.

But not LabourStart.

If you don’t glance at our site for a week, you’ve missed 1,000 news stories.

This is entirely due to your efforts — and to your understanding of our movement and the challenges we face, in your country and all over the world.

In the last two weeks, despite the holiday season, we’ve been busy as usual.

New campaign: We launched a new campaign in support of Ukrainian workers who have gone without pay for the last three years. The campaign is backed by the Ukrainian union PROFBUD and BWI. Today it already has nearly 4,000 supporters, and appears in 9 languages with more coming.

Our home page: This is now working in Russian and Ukrainian, showing our current campaigns. The ‘more campaigns’ link now works for all languages, which are showing only the most recent active campaigns. All links on the home page that pointed to insecure (http) links now point to secure (https) versions of the same page. We’ve been going through our home pages in all languages trying to make certain that all signup links to our mailing list now point to Mailchimp and not Sendy.

Reviving dormant languages: We wrote to volunteer translators for Finnish and Polish, and are following up also with Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese as well. All of these languages have had volunteer translators in the past, and if we can revive them all, our campaigns will reach much larger audiences.

Outreach: We wrote to a large number if Indian and Pakistani mine workers’ unions, and also reached out to the person who controls the ‘India labour news’ page on Facebook, in the hope of growing LabourStart’s presence in the region.

Bookshop: We’ve added many more titles to our US and UK bookshops on bookshop.org, and are planning to hold live author events on Zoom next month. In December, the US bookshop had 241 views and the UK one had 384 views and two sales.

Correspondents’ webinar: Our first-ever online meeting with correspondents was a success, with 35 participants.

LinkedIn: We now have a page in addition to our long-standing group. It has 33 followers. The group has grown to 2,250.

Resistance: This is the working title of the next collection of essays by Dan Gallin which we will be publishing in the next few weeks. Work on this has now resumed.

We are currently running 13 campaigns — a new record for us.

They come from Albania, Belarus, Brazil, Cambodia, the Czech Republic, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Malaysia, Peru, Poland, Turkey, and Zimbabwe — so we have most of the world’s regions covered.

Our campaign partners include the International Trade Union Confederation, European Trade Union Confederation, Building and Wood Workers International, Education International, IndustriALL, International Transport Workers Federation, International Union of Foodworkers, Public Services International, UNI Global Union, the European Transport Workers Federation, the Zimbabwean Nurses Association (ZINA), Deriteks (Turkey), Indonesian Labour with the People Movement (GEBRAK), National Union of Workers in Hospital Support and Allied Services (Malaysia), the Trade Union of United Mineworkers of Bulqiza (Albania), and the independent Belarusian trade unions.

The most recent campaigns we’ve launched (this month) are these four:

• Belarus: Stop the violence – defend democracy and human rightsv- 5,135 supporters
• Cambodia: Free jailed union leaders now – 4,566 supporters
• Indonesia: Stop Widodo’s Omnibus Bill and protect workers and their families – 5,178 supporters
• Jordan: Release leaders of the Jordanian Teacher Association – 5,511 supporters

Please do what you can to help us ramp up support for all these campaigns.

A number of the campaigns are having successful results — for example, in Jordan jailed leaders of the teachers union were released, and we expect to close the current campaign shortly. And we now have a document which we can begin to share telling the stories of a significant number of campaign we victories we had in 2019-20.

Thanks to the work of our wonderful volunteer translators, two languages that had been problematic for us (few translations) are now working well — German and Korean. These are two of our biggest mailing lists (with over 9,200 subscribers between them), so we’re very pleased to be able to share all our current campaigns with them. In addition, our backlog of campaigns has now been translated into Turkish.

Much of the work getting the campaign translations posted and the mailings sent out is now being done by our new intern, Nate. In addition, we have this month taken on another intern, a student at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Hargun Sodhi; she will begin work with us this week.

Thanks to all the new campaigns, our mailing lists are experiencing significant growth this month. In August we added 1,188 new subscribers, most of them to the English list. All of our mailing lists have now been imported into Sendy.

We made a lot of progress on the second volume of Dan Gallin’s writings — we now have all the texts digitised and ready to be edited. Dan has even suggested a title — Resistance.

Finally, we’ve had a problem with our newswires in the different languages (though the country newswires work) — this is due to changes IONOS made to their system and we are working to fix this.

It’s been six weeks since this page was last updated – we’ll be resuming regular updates from today. For this update, we’ll organise the news by country.

Cambodia:
We closed our campaign in all 18 languages after 6 months; it had 6,012 supporters. This did not end in a win.

Germany:
We launched a campaign in support of Ver.di members at Ameos, which has been doing some union busting. After just a few days online, it had over 4,600 supporters.

Striking workers at Ameos.

Ghana:
A student at the Global Labour University from Ghana (and currently based in Germany) is likely to begin work for us shortly for a few weeks as an intern.

Indonesia:
We closed the campaign (which had 5,638 supporters) because Rio has been set free, but we are waiting to hear the results of his upcoming court appearance before issuing a public statement to our lists.

Kazakhstan:
We have asked if we can close this campaign after three months and are awaiting a response.

Russia:
During a four-day visit to Moscow in January, we led a workshop with trade unions affiliated to KTR, the labour federation. We were also interviewed by the trade union newspaper Solidarnosc. We also discussed with our Russian comrades the possibility of a regional or global conference.

Switzerland:
We met with Dan Gallin of the Global Labour Institute in Geneva to discuss a second volume of his writings (we published the first in 2016).

UK:
We met with the new director of communications at the London-based International Transport Workers Federation in London and discussed our joint work. The ITF also made a generous donation to LabourStart this year.
We met with the new General Secretary of the teachers’ union, NASUWT. This union plays a very active role in international solidarity campaigns.

USA:
We have ordered a quarter page advertisement in the program of the upcoming Labor Notes conference in Chicago.