Inside LabourStart

Conference: Registrations now up to 111; a gain of 50 in the last 7 days.  The Australian Council of Trade Unions has been publicizing.  An agenda is now agreed and nearly ready for circulation.  International guests are expected to attend from the UK, Turkey, Russia, Norway, the USA, the Philippines, Fiji, Taiwan, China, New Zealand and Timor l’Este, and maybe more — at least a dozen countries represented.  During the week, I had Skype calls with both Andrew Casey and Peter Lewis in Sydney to discuss conference progress.  Members of the organizing committee have been receiving a daily email from me updating them as we rapidly approach the conference opening.  The conference has an event page on Facebook.

Intern: Interviews took place last Monday, 22 October; each of the four shortlisted interns was then asked to complete a written test (to draft a plan for a new LabourStart campaign).  The result of all this is that our new intern, Edd Mustill, has begun work 3 days a week in the office.  Say hello to Edd – intern@labourstart.org.

Campaigns: We launched a new campaign yesterday demanding the release of two teacher trade union leaders in Bahrain; it took off very quickly and within less than 20 hours had generated 4,544 messages.  (The campaign is already larger than our China NGOs campaign, which was launched 18 days ago..)  We also did a promotion of our Zimbabwe campaign, which had stalled at under 4,700.  It’s picked up another 800 supporters thanks to our additional effort.

Books: I had a short meeting in London with David Prosten, owner of Union Communication Services.  David’s not only our partner bookseller for the Labour Book of the Month, but he’ll also be publishing my next book on unions and the internet, due out next year.

To be fair, I was away for more than a week …

Intern: We had 12 applicants. Derek Blackadder (Canada) and John Wood (UK) helped me prepare a shortlist of 4, who will be interviewed on Monday, 22 October. Roger Darlington has volunteered to assist with the interviews.

Conference: We’re working hard to build this — it’s only 6 weeks away. We did a mailing on 24.9 to our lists in Australia and New Zealand. I’ve provided the organizers with a list of who to invite from the region, and have been in touch with several others from outside the region whose flights we are subsidizing.

New campaigns: We launched a campaign in support of workers in Guatemala; we ran a short and sharp campaign in support of jailed Turkish trade unionists; we launched a campaign in support of labour NGOs in China facing repression.

Closed campaigns: I closed down five campaigns – China (Li Wang Yang), UK (RMT Olympics), Turkey (Togo), Morocco and Kazakhstan.

Labour book of the month: I’ve revived this, and in the first 4 days, we sold over $600 worth of books.

Facebook: I tested the promotion of one of the posts on our page. This was the post – “Over 300 dead textile workers in Pakistan – demand justice! Support the online campaign!” It was seen by 63,151 people, 713 of them liked it, 23 commented on it, and 150 shared it. A typical post on Facebook is seen by a tiny fraction of that — usually around 5,000 people. The cost was $100.

Sponsorship of LabourStart UK: UIA, which provides insurance cover for union members here, now has a banner on our UK website, for which they are paying us.

Ukrainian: We have a new newswire in Ukrainian, following a request. I’ve also provided them with a list of country names for translation.

Urdu: We had an offer to translate our Pakistan campaign, but there’s been no translation yet.

Swedish & Danish: We’ve done a mailing to our small lists in these two languages to try to recruit new correspondents and translators.

South Africa: I’ve written both to all our existing correspondents and to hundreds of our readers there in an effort to get more active correspondents.

Brochure distribution: I’ve recruited three volunteers to help me distribute LabourStart brochures at Saturday’s giant demonstration and march organized by the Trades Union Congress in London.

• We’ve resumed the book of the month. The next mass mailing will feature it. Today, social media was used to publicize. This month, it’s Joe Hill.
• ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow has agreed to open our conference with a video message. She can’t be there, but this is the next best thing. We hope to get the message in time to allow us to subtitle it in Turkish (and Arabic?)
• Our first app for a smartphone is nearly ready (within 24 hours). If you have a Nokia smartphone, let me know. We have submitted something to their app store. (The iOS and Adroid versions are in the works.)
• We’ve sent a long message to PSI about their Korea campaign with suggestions about how to revive it after two months online. Some 3,000 of the 3,200 messages were sent in the first week.
• At the request of our Russian comrades, we’ve now closed down the Valentin Urusov campaign. We may need to revive it later this year, as he is still in jail.
• We will almost certainly have a campaign focussed on India next week (in support of Suzuki workers).  We’re waiting for final approval from the IMF.
• Work on the upcoming Global Solidarity Conference is going well, if a bit behind the scenes at the moment. I have weekly phone conferences with our staffer in Istanbul, Eyup. This Monday, we’ll begin the process of approving who gets subsidies. I have made special efforts in the last week to encourage participation from Jordan, Palestine, Iraq and Georgia.
• We have a much more prominent signup form on our home page now for our mailing list (in English only at the moment). This will be an important feature of our site redesign, which will begin probably just after our conference ends.
• We have a new newswire for Fiji – created at the request of the Australian unions, who are using it.
• I’ve upgraded our Facebook group – not sure exactly what that means, but people now need to be approved to join and there’s a lot more activity there than before.
• UnionBook has reverted to much more staid colors after a pink and purple phase. No one seems to have noticed …

I’ve been posting this item today to UnionBook, Facebook and Twitter:

No to Amazon.com sweatshop: http://ning.it/oytoiU Yes to unionized bookshops: http://ning.it/mR9lGn Spread the word!

This week, I hope to begin targetted sales once again – there’s a new, interesting biography of Joe Hill out there which our readers might want to buy.

This is the first campaign we’re promoting using MailChimp and we’ll see if the vastly increased speed of delivery as well as improved graphics capability leads to better results.  In the first 20 minutes, all the messages were delivered to our list, 915 people opened and read them, 168 of whom supported the campaign (an astonishing 18% response rate!).  In addition to this campaign, we’re promoting BananaLink’s campaign in support of women plantation workers, telling people to save the date for our conference, and promoting our book of the month.

Indeed there is.  And it’s LabourStart’s latest book of the month – check it out here.

We’re trying to promote one new title every month — here’s the latest.

I haven’t been able to update this blog for some 4 weeks and lots has happened in that time. Here are some highlights:

New campaigns: We launched three new campaigns – India: Over 500 workers jailed in dispute with Foxconn (4,036 messages sent so far), Thailand: Migrant workers have the right to workers’ compensation (1,703 messages), and Colombia: Free jailed university lecturer and trade unionist (1,707 messages). We’ve closed down one campaign last Friday — PSI’s campaign in support of jailed workers in Turkey.

LabourStart.tv: The domain registrar closed our account in late September — we’re now making efforts to get it reopened. Meanwhile, I’ve changed the link on our front page to point to http://www.labourstart.org/tv which works.

Labour and Technology podcasts: I’ve done two of these in the last month – Spammers and online communities: The challenge for trade unions (50 listeners) and Activist apps (258 listeners).

Labour photo of the year: Derek and I have agreed to begin work on this in another couple of weeks.

UnionBook: The old site has been completely shut down and unionbook.org and unionbook.org.uk now both point to the new site.

Upcoming conferences: I have been invited to speak at a conference of the International Metalworkers Federation in Geneva next week — it’s called “IMF global trade union networks in TNC’s as a tool to organising and promoting solidarity”. I’ve also been invited to Istanbul to speak at a conference on trade unions new media on 27 November.

2011 LabourStart global solidarity conference: Andrew has made some progress on this and we’ll be talking about it and beginning planning within the next few days.

Labour’s online bookstore: We’re ready to use the new version of UCS’s software, and this should be live in a day or two. We continue to promote about one book per month.  Authors and publishers continue to contact us regularly asking us to promote books.

This month we’re promoting Paul Mason’s Live Working or Die Fighting: The Global Working Class.  Please spread the word in your unions.