Inside LabourStart

Azerbaijan campaign: This now appears in 11 languages with more on the way, and has 2,876 supporters. That number will grow as mailings in the additional languages go out, and following a reminder message to the English list going out later today. This is our first campaign to appear in Azeri and we now have a (small) mailing list for the first time in that language. We got some wonderful publicity about the campaign on this important news site covering the South Caucasus region: International labour movement launches campaign to free detained labour activists in Azerbaijan

Turkey (teachers) campaign: This appears in 13 languages and already has 3,265 supporters which is expected to grow significantly for the same reasons mentioned above.

Alamo Cinema campaign: The union sent us this – “Labourstart proved to be a helpful ally during our strike and we appreciate the work they do and they support they give.” We will share this with our supporters today.

Iran: Yesterday Eric Lee spoke on a panel on a dissident, pro-democracy Iranian TV channel (broadcasting from outside the country). Among other participants in the event was teacher trade unionist Esmail Abdi, who was subject of more than one LabourStart campaign following his arrests.

Interns: Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labour Relations has found 14 students to apply to be a LabourStart correspondent this fall. We have reviewed the applications and created a shortlist of six and will begin interviews next week.

Podcasts: We interviewed US trade unionist Debbie Goldman who has written a book, Disconnected, about organising call centre workers in the US. That interview already has a significant number of downloads even though we haven’t really done a lot of publicity yet. Our podcast page on Buzzsprout now features a significantly longer “podroll” than before. If anyone wants to suggest other union podcasts to include here, please let us know.

USA: We wrote to the Solidarity Center, which has brought legal action against the Trump administration for cutting off their funds, offering to help in any way we can, and reminding them how helpful the Solidarity Center was with our most recent Global Solidarity Conference in Tbilisi.

Donors: We have just under 1,000 people on our new donors’ mailing list, and are regularly sending them updates which are NOT appeals for more money. One of these updates went out earlier this week.

It’s been a busy week.

Azerbaijan campaign: This has now gone live in English and Azerbaijani versions. We will send it out for translation into more languages on Monday.

Belarus campaign: LabourStart activists participated in the ITUC-hosted webinar to mark the global day of action. We reached out to all participants and managed to get commitments from several to boost awareness of the campaign. We also got translations done into Polish and Romanian. This is our largest current campaign with 4,374 supporters.

New York City Alamo campaign: This ended in a victory for the workers, which we shared on our news page, across social media and in a mass mailing. Our campaign has now been shut down.

Nike campaign: We closed this down after Global Labor Justice gave us permission to do so. The results of the campaign were somewhat disappointing.

Turkey – teachers campaign: This campaign also went live this week, in English and translations have now begun coming in.

Turkey – Telus/TikTok campaign: We did a dedicated mailing to our Canadian list (Telus is a Canadian company).

Older campaigns: We’ve closed down all the remaining campaigns from 2024. In most cases, unfortunately, the campaign partners did not respond to our messages, so we don’t know the results of our effort.

Ukraine: There are reports that some FPU leaders are under house arrest. We reached out to learn more, but there is almost nothing in English online.

Dutch LabourStart: We had a 30 minute call with one of our few remaining active correspondents in the Netherlands and discussed reviving our Dutch language page.

News: There was a small problem – when a story was tagged with two countries, and given a higher priority, that wasn’t taken into account on the second country’s page. This has now been fixed. We’ve also removed links to sign up to our mailing list (which could only be found on the state/province news pages.) Nearly everyone who joins our list does so by signing up to a campaign.

Interns: Cornell University has sent on details of 14 prospective interns.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew again this week by 100 — 89 of them for the English list.

Podcasts: We’re arranging an interview with a former union official in the US who has written a book about call centre workers.

Belarus: We continue to ramp up activities in the run up to the 16 April global day of solidarity. This week we publicised our interview with the ITUC’s Luc Triangle. As of this morning, it has been downloaded 104 times.  Our campaign has grown to 4,150 supporters and appears in 14 languages.

Iran: We’ve been invited to speak at an online May Day event organised by emigre groups (on 24.4).  More details soon.

Thailand: With the permission of IndustriALL, we closed our YPC campaign this week.  The campaign had 4,930 supporters and appeared in 16 languages. The campaign did not result in a victory for the workers, unfortunately.

Turkey: It looks like we will launch a new campaign shortly. Meanwhile, Kivanc has a great article in Labor Notes about the Telus struggle.  We’ll be sending out a special mailing to our Canadian list about this.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew by 90 new subscribers this week, due to new campaign supporters being added — mostly to the English list.

Android app: We are now in discussions with two developers about this, and are exploring a “no-code” solution as well.

Podcasts: We launched one new podcast this week (Nilufar Mammadrzayeva from Labor Desk in Azerbaijan) and recorded another to be released next week (Luc Triangle from the ITUC on Belarus).  Meanwhile our interview with Mark Hancock from CUPE (Canada) is our most popular one so far, with 529 downloads.  See all our podcasts here.

Social media: We went live with our WhatsApp channel which is starting with 20 subscribers.  I would not be surprised if this soon grows to be larger than our Telegram channel with its 134 subscribers.

Campaigns:  We’ve written to our partners for our five oldest campaigns and will soon be closing these.  We hope to launch our Azerbaijan campaign next week.

Donations: We received a very generous donation from EPSU this week.

Interns: We heard from the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labour Relations (USA) and they are keen for us to take on new interns.  We’ll begin interviewing candidates next week.  Meanwhile our current intern, Isabel, who also started as Cornell intern for us, will be finishing her work with LabourStart at the end of this month.

The best news this week: Following a LabourStart campaign, our brother Ismet Aslan from Turkey has been released from prison after 6 months. Read more here.

Campaigns: We launched three new campaigns in the last two weeks.

• Our Belarus campaign grew to 3,098 supporters — a gain of 79 this week.
• Our Nike campaign grew to 2,197, a gain of about 1,450 this week.
• And our newest campaign, in support of striking workers at Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas in New York, grew to 2,336, a gain of 766 this week.

Next campaign: Next week we are likely to launch a new campaign in support of jailed trade unionists in Azerbaijan. Stay tuned.

Podcasts: Our most recent podcast, Pat Bulmer’s interview with the president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, Mark Hancock, has been downloaded over 470 times in the last 8 days. It is our most successful podcast after, reaching a much wider audience than usual. We hope that this will get more people to subscribe to our podcasts, and to check out the podcasts we have already done.

News: Our correspondents posted over 3,500 news stories on LabourStart in March, averaging close to 128 per day.

Donations: We were very pleased to receive another generous donation from our friends at the International Union of Foodworkers (IUF).

A very busy week at LabourStart as we launched two new campaigns, a new podcast, and our brand-new LabourStart-branded mugs and t-shirts.

Campaign Number 1: USA: Support striking workers at Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas. This campaign went live on Thursday and has already been translated into several languages. In its first 24 hours online it picked up 1,570 supporters.

Campaign Number 2: Nike: Women workers demand justice. Launched this morning and had over 750 supporters in the first few hours. Campaign is live in English, Spanish and Turkish.

Campaign Number 3: Belarus: Stop repression, free jailed trade unionists. Launched a bit more than a week ago, the campaign now appears in 13 languages and has 3,019 supporters — a gain of about 1,200 this week.

Podcasts: This week Pat Bulmer interviewed the National President of Canada’s largest union, CUPE. The interview is exceptionally good — and has had a great response. It is shaping up to be what is possibly our most popular podcast, and it will be aired on radio stations in both the USA and Australia too.

T-shirts and mugs: Working together with the Trade Union Football & Alcohol Committee in the UK, we have produced these lovely items for sale. Check them out here.

News: And meanwhile, our volunteer correspondents have posted, on average, 128 news stories every day so far in March. That’s a huge increase since February, when they were posting about 104 stories per day.

Belarus: Our new campaign is now live and translations are pouring in. As fo 14:00 GMT today, the campaign (in English only) had 1,825 supporters — that’s after just one day online. Eric’s article on Belarus was widely circulated and will help to raise awareness of the campaign.

Nike: Our campaign in support of Asian women who work for Nike is going live in the next day or two. This is our first partnership with Global Labor Justice.

Other campaigns: We may be shortly launching a campaign in support of striking workers in the US. Details soon.

Swag: We have found a good, left-wing, unionised provider in the UK and are aiming to get new t-shirts, mugs and maybe caps ready in the next few weeks. We sold 597 of our previous t-shirts, earning £4,250 and hope to raise the same amount — or more — with the new products.

Podcasts: It looks like our next interviews will be with a leading Canadian trade unionist and with the people organising an international conference on strikes taking place later this month. (We will also interview some of the participants in that conference.). If you have any suggestions for people for us to interview, please get in touch!

Donations: We continue to be impressed with support from many individuals but also from their unions. We’ve received generous donations in the last few weeks from IndustriALL global union, the Education International, BCGEU (Canada) and Styrke (Norway).

Mailing lists: The lists continue to grow as new campaigns bring in new supporters. We added 67 new subscribers to the lists just before going live with our Belarus campaign — which will no doubt bring in more.

International Women’s Day: First of all, greetings to all working women from LabourStart! Our Working Women’s news page is absolutely full of news this year – check it out: https://www.labourstart.org/women/

Belarus: We are almost certainly going ahead with a campaign in the next few weeks. We also shared our interview with Liza, which went live this week — it already had 175 downloads, which is the same as last year’s interview. It will certainly reach a much larger audience this year.

Podcast interviews: We continue to search for interviewees, including folowing up with trade union leaders who have already agreed to do this.

Interns: Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations has asked if we want more interns this coming all. We said yes.

Young workers: Our Young Workers news page now has a “toolkit” for young trade unionists (mostly for the USA).

Swag: We’re looking for partners to help us produce and sell LabourStart branded products like t-shirts and mugs. Finding ones that are unionised is harder than you’d think. One UK-based company which initially looked like a good fit — “Certified Organic Products; Powered by Renewable Energy; Circular Design” — whose customers included a wide range of progressive charities and NGOs turns out to have a non-union workforce, which is a deal-breaker for us.

International Union Rights: We are probably going to try again to promote sales of this excellent journal, in a partnership with ICTUR. Apparently, it did quite well last time for them and for us.

Instagram: We have our first reel (video) and it’s gotten quite a few views (256). This is quite good considering that we only have 689 followers on the platform.

Fund-raising: Another generous donation from a Norwegian union arrived this week.

Inside LabourStart: We’ve had to disable the mailing list plugin for this blog as it had stopped working properly. We’ll find new ways of letting people know when the blog is updated.

Campaigns: Our Telus campaign in Turkey grew by just 130 new supporters this week. The launch of the French language version will help, but this campaign is still far too small and comrades are encouraged to promote it more widely. We have several other campaigns in the pipeline.

Podcasts: Our third podcast of the year, with Kivanç Eliaçik, is already our most popular this year, with 200 downloads so far. Today we interviewed Liza Merliak from Belarus for our 4th podcast of the year, going live in the next few days.

News: In the first 27 days of February, our volunteer correspondents posted on average 104 news stories per day, a small decline compared to earlier in the month. But the number of volunteer correspondents posting news has grown by 26% since the end of 2024. Last week we did our second regular, monthly mailing to correspondents — this has helped to increase the involvement of some.

Fundraising: We’ve asked for help from the e-campaigning community in finding a PayPal alternative, which we could use in addition to PayPal. As we reported earlier, our supporters in New Zealand can’t use PayPal to donate to us, and other issues have come up in other countries.

Campaigns: We launched our first campaign of 2025 — in support of Telus workers in Turkey. As of today, the campaign appears in 13 languages and has 3,089 supporters.

Podcasts: We posted our third podcast of 2025, an interview with Kivanç Eliaçik, Director of International Relations Department for DISK. It is already the most popular podcast we did this year. We are hoping to record and share another podcast next week. In addition, one of our volunteers is readying our first long-form podcast.

News: In the first 21 days of February, our volunteer correspondents posted 2,253 new stories, an average of 107 per day.

Webinar: Three members of the LabourStart Executive spoke at the recent webinar on “Trade union struggles in authoritarian regimes”. We were informed that half of the participants — perhaps more — came due to the publicity we did for the event.

Syria: We had an online meeting with three leaders of the union of teachers in north and east Syria and followed this up by email.

Instagram: We revived our account there, and have gone up from 596 followers to 662, an increase of 11%.

Fundraising: We discovered that supporters in New Zealand have been unable to donate using PayPal and have changed our page to reflect this. We are now looking into alternatives.

Women workers at Nike: We supported the campaign launched by Global Labor Justice and managed to increase the number of pledged supporters by nearly 60%.

YoungWorkers.org: We publicly launched this new site this week with posts to social media and a mention in our mass mailing to the English list.

Mailings: We picked up 139 new subscribers this week, many of them for our Turkish list.