Inside LabourStart

The following may be of some use to you in gaining the support of your union (locally, regionally or nationally) for LabourStart. I was asked to draft it for a Union here in Canada and thought it might be (a) helpful, and (b) a trigger to some of us formally asking our Unions to support our work here on LabourStart.

If you do use it it would be great to hear back from you on the results.  It has been drafted using the traditional form for such things, but can be easily converted into plain language if your Union allows or preferrs a more accessible format for motions.

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Whereas we live and work in a globalized world defined by corporations and not by working people;

And Whereas global solidarityis more important now than it has ever been in the history of our Union,

And Whereas LabourStart.org works to connect and inform workers the world over about all our struggles,

And Whereas while we have many experiences we can share with our sisters and brothers around the world, we also have a great deal to learn from others as we all face the same threats to the existence of good, secure, healthy jobs;

And Whereas LabourStart works, without regard to national borders, union affiliation or sector of employment to build global solidarity between workers and to assist them in their struggles by mobilizing workers around the world,

Be It Therefore Resolved That our Union place a link to LabourStart on our website.

Be It Further Resolved That our Union’s website carry the relevant LabourStart newswires

Be It Further Resolved That our Union designate a member or staff person as our LabourStart Correspondent to ensure that news from and about our Union reaches the world.

And Be It Finally Resolved That our Union donate the sum of ________ to LabourStart to allow it to continue its work.

Steve Early’s new book, which comes out this week, is a terrific collection of articles and essays written by a US trade union activist.  I read it almost in one sitting – it was that good.  And it’s very important, discussing a lot the key issues facing unions not only in the US.  Steve and I have had an email correspondence for several years and I’m delighted that we’re getting the chance to market his book through his publisher, Monthly Review Press.  If we push hard the book can sell quite a few copies and this could also be of substantial benefit to LabourStart.

I’ve published an interview with Steve, created a special page where you can order copies, and have made the interview a top news story on LabourStart.  We’ll also promote as usual through Facebook, UnionBook and Twitter.

We’ve launched a new campaign in support of Compass workers in Algeria, at the request of an independent union there.  It’s now in English and French and the other langauge translators have been requested to get this up in additional languages as well.

This is in addition to the campaign launched in support of PSI, to pressure the Puerto Rican government.

Tomorrow I make a presentation a fringe meeting at the annual conference of PCS, Britain’s civil servants union, on the subject of online campaigning.

I’ve been adding a default language and country to many more correspondents accounts – so far, 181 correspondents have default languages set up.  I wrote a special program to show me which languages and countries a correspondent typically posts to, in order to help decide this.

We’ll be doing a second author interview for Labour’s Online Bookstore this week, to tie in with the promotion of Steve Early’s excellent new book, which we’re selling directly through the publisher.

See this article I was asked to write for the Talking Union blog.

In the last 24 hours, we sold $861.04 worth of books following publicity for our latest book of the week.  There were a total of 24 orders placed – one every hour.

This may be due in part to our new way of selling books (using a blog) which both gives us the chance to add more content (such as an author interview) and also provides links to previous books of the week.

If every day were like yesterday, we’d sell $314,279 worth of books in a year, of which we’d keep $31,428 (£20,786).

We sold a total of $3,039.11 in April, with 64 individual orders placed over 30 days.  LabourStart’s share of that is $304 (£204) which while not spectacular is not bad.  We should remember that two of the titles we pushed hard in April were $10.00 books (May Day and I Knew I Could Do This).  We can increase revenue in part by selling more expensive titles ($10.00 is very cheap).  Our next book of the week is Why Unions Matter which sells for $17.95. We’ll be featuring an author interview with that one.

Under construction – but already a big improvement over what we had before.  We’re going to list all our recent books of the week and more – including author interviews, comments from readers, etc.  Click here to visit the shop.

Book sales at UCS for the first 21 days of April total $2,821 – or $940 per week.  At this rate, we can sell close to $50,000 worth of books a year, which is excellent.  Sales in this quarter are running about 17 times the rate in Q1 due to our weekly promotions.  Almost $800 of that is sales of the May Day book, which we will continue to sell right up through May 1st.

In the first 10 days of April, we sold $1,814 worth of books on UCS (our share is 10% of that) and if this trend continues, we will sell over $66,000 worth of books in a year.  That’s not enough to keep LabourStart going, but it is a lot of books (and may help keep UCS going, which is a good thing).

Campaigns:

• We’ve asked to close down the Russian campaign after 4 months and 2,415 supporters.
• We are about to launch a new campaign in support of Turkish workers.  Both campaigns came from the International Metalworkers Federation.
• Campaign counter now works on all languages.

News:

• Work has begun on localizing the entry of news links – we’re testing this on French first.  The aim is to have all the input screens work in the local language so we can recruit correspondents who don’t know any English at all.

Book sales:

• We’ve sold 53 copies of the Global Unions, Global Business book, which is not bad.
• The Union Books group has 71 members, making it one of the largest groups on UnionBook.
• We’ve sold $986.55 worth of books at UCS in the first week of April.
• We’re in negotiations with the bookstore of one of the largest unions in Europe, Ver.di, in Berlin and might be able to begin selling German-language union books to German trade union members.
• We’re also talking to an Australian university press about helping to sell one of its titles.

Newswires:

• Did some more work on creating a Unicode version of these for sites which have switched over to Unicode. So far, French and German are working.

Fundraising:

• There will be concert in Sheffield on 2 May the proceeds of which will be donated to LabourStart – more details soon.
• We’re also finishing up the deal with No Sweat Apparel to produce a union-made UnionBook t-shirt.
• We’re following up with possible donations to LabourStart from Unite (UK) and CUPE (Canada).