Campaigns:
The focus has been on Turkey, of course — our largest campaign ever and soon to be the first to break the 20,000 mark. This week we launched a Turkey Twitter campaign in which hundreds of people tweeted the same message at Prime Minister Erdogan. We live blogged developments, here on Inside LabourStart. We ran a live feed on our Facebook page with reports from Ron Oswald of the IUF in Taksim Square. A Greek language version of the campaign will go live today – our first-ever campaign in Greek.
The 3 Cosas campaign in the UK has been the focus of some attention as well — we’ve gotten a commitment from the student unions in London to email their members, thousands of students, many of whom are expected to support the campaign.
In Canada, we’re about to close one campaign and launch another one.
We raised the possibility of a Nike campaign with IndustriALL and are waiting to hear from them.
We followed up this week with the ITF regarding the Vancouver, Washington port dispute. The campaign is now two months old and is just under 10,000 messages sent.
And as we do once a month, we wrote to all our campaign partners with updates and reminders.
Next global solidarity conference – Berlin, May 2014:
There’s been a lot of discussion by email about this, and next Monday, Eric, Edd and Gisela will meet in London to discuss. We have draft 2 page conference document in English and German versions. Matt and others have been scouring Berlin to find the best venue for our meeting.
Publicity:
As I reported earlier this week, we suspended the Facebook ad campaign.
We’ve begun building a list of press contacts in the hope of getting some coverage in mainstream (and alternative) media for LabourStart. Within minutes of our first mailing yesterday (to about 70 addresses), the British left-wing magazine Red Pepper posted a very short version of what we sent them as a tweet to their nearly 10,000 followers.
LabourStart Books:
Sales remain slow, though have picked up slightly in mid-June. We sold 11 copies of the Global Labour Movement book last week and 4 copies of the Online Campaigning book.
We have two more books in the pipeline both of which will come out in 2013.
Dormant languages:
As I reported, 11 of the approximately 30 languages on our website are not updated regularly. Edd and I selected the six most important (where we have mailing lists, or do campaigns, or both) in an effort to revitalize. We’ve recruited some new correspondents and will be checking to see if any of these pages have come alive. The next step is to deal with the other five languages.
Today in Labour History:
We’ve begun work on the next step of this project — a print calendar, to be available for purchase in Q4 of 2013.
