Dec
30
2022
0

Last post from 2022

The final week of 2022 was destined to be a relatively quiet one as many union offices shut down for the holiday.

Nevertheless, we did a few things at LabourStart …

  • We sent out an end-of-year mailing to all our correspondents. This encouraged them to contact us if they’re having difficulty logging in to post news, to help recruit new correspondents and to publicise our news page more widely.
  • Our mailing lists grew this week as we added 52 more subscribers from the new campaign supporters.
  • We did more work to publicise our Belarus campaign across social media. That campaign now has 7,938 supporters — a gain of 50 in the last week. We also shared widely the ITUC statement condemning the sentences handed down to the jailed leaders of the trade union movement in that country. (Unfortunately the ITUC has not yet translated the statement, so it’s only in English.)
  • We continued work fixing LabourStart’s back-end. This week that included dealing with a bug in the caption for our photo-of-the-day feature, as well as problems with character encoding on our home page for some Spanish-language stories. We continued work creating new and fixed RSS feeds for a number of countries. Unfortunately, not all of these yet function correctly, but we’re continuing the work.
  • We continued this week with discussions with our partners in Georgia in the run-up to our upcoming Global Solidarity Conference at the end of April.

In 2023 we’re looking forward to working harder and smarter to defend workers’ rights and rebuild union power all over the world. Thanks to all of you for all that you do — and happy new year!

Dec
16
2022
0

ITUC, Mastodon, 2023 Conference, Programming, Myanmar and more

We seem to have missed a week with updates – sorry about that.

ITUC: The arrest of the newly-elected ITUC General Secretary Luca Visentini last Friday in Brussels has rocked the trade union world. Next week the ITUC General Council will decide on the next steps; meanwhile, Visentini has stepped aside. We have provided very extensive coverage in many languages, both on our website and across social media, and will continue to do so.

Mastodon: Growth of our account has slowed. Two weeks ago, just before our webinar, we had 144 followers. Today that’s up to 184. Still, we’re getting lots of great followup to our webinar, including features on Radio Labour and the Union Cities radio show from Washington D.C.

2023 Global Solidarity Conference: We have a call set up for next with our friends in Georgia, and we hope to be able to announce more details of the event soon.

Programming: We continue to make tweaks every day to LabourStart’s software; we are currently working hard to fix our newswires which worked very well for a time but have now broken in some places. We hope to announce good news in the next several days about this. Also, after being informed by a new correspondent in Korea, we made the login for correspondents more secure.

Myanmar: We closed the campaign at the request of BWI. Though it appeared in a record-breaking 25 languages and had the support of nearly all the global unions, it was a fairly small campaign for us.

Belarus: This remains our largest current campaign and is just under 8,000 supporters. We gave the campaign a recent boost and hope to see an increase in the number of supporters.

Backlog: We achieved “inbox 0” again last week, and there is no backlog of campaigns or translations at the moment.

Written by admin in: 2023 conference,Campaigns |
Nov
24
2022
0

Belarus, Turkey campaigns go live

I’m a bit late with this update – sorry.

Our new Belarus campaign went live on 12 November, appears in 15 languages and currently has 6,906 supporters.

The Marlboro campaign (Turkey) finally went live to all our lists in early November. It too appears in 15 languages and has 5,646 supporters.

The Philippines campaign had just 2,875 supporters last month; it’s now up to 4,495.

We posted our first campaign ever in Greek.

Our mailing lists are growing. In November we added 753 new subscribers, with hundreds of new subscribers to both our English and Turkish lists.

Following the crisis in Twitter, we created a LabourStart account on Mastodon, the free, open source alternative. Our account is called @labourstart@union.place and as of this morning we have 70 followers.

We discovered a problem if one person did multiple translations of a campaign; this has now been fixed.

In late October in Kvareli, Georgia Eric spoke to an audience of 50 young Georgian activists about the trade union movement at an event funded by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung.

Eric also met with the Georgian Trade Union Confederation and three NGOs in Tbilisi to discuss our upcoming Global Solidarity Conference, which is currently scheduled for 28 April 2023.  He also visited two universities that might host the event.

Oct
22
2022
0

New campaign launched in support of Marlboro workers in Turkey

Turkey Marlboro campaign: This campaign is going live this weekend. Thanks to DISK’s efforts, we already have 384 supporters, most of them for the Turkish version.

Philippines campaign: This campaign finally went live globally this week, and already has 2,875 supporters, and appears in 4 languages with more on the way. One of these is Greek, for which we now have a volunteer translator.

Canada campaign: Our campaign in support of locked-out actors already has 6,253 supporters, making it larger than four other current campaigns.

2023 conference: Eric Lee will be in Tbilisi this coming week to meet with meet with partners and supporters and to choose the venue. We hope to hold our Global Solidarity Conference in late April next year.

Arthur Svensson international prize for trade union rights: Nominations are now open for this important prize, which LabourStart won in 2016, and we’ve publicised it very widely in our mass mailings and across social media and our news page.

 

Written by admin in: 2023 conference,Campaigns |
Oct
13
2022
0

New campaigns launched in support of workers in the Philippines, Canada

Apologies for the delay in posting this update.

Philippines campaign: We just launched a new campaign in support of workers’ rights in the Philippines, at the request of the KMU.

Canada campaign: We launched a campaign in support of 28,000 locked out actors — initially it was Canada-only, but we’ve now gone global with it and it has over 5,000 supporters already.

Global Solidarity Conference 2023: Eric will be visiting Tbilisi in another 11 days and will meet with local trade unions and other partners, and visit possible venues for the event.

Radio Labour: For some reason, the feed of their latest stories had disappeared from our home page. This has now been fixed.

Translators: We wrote to all 89 volunteer translators on International Translation Day (29 September) to thank them for all they do.

 

 

Written by admin in: 2023 conference,Campaigns |
Sep
26
2022
0

Campaigns, conference and fund-raising: an update on the last six days

Belarus campaign: We have been informed that a new campaign will be launched shortly and we will then be able to close down our long-running current campaign, which has 10,210 supporters. It is currently our largest campaign.

Kazakhstan campaign: As our comrade Erzhan Elshibayev is still on trial, the unions have asked us to keep this long-running campaign live for a time, and we are doing so.

Myanmar campaign: The campaign has grown somewhat to 5,596 supporters and appears in nearly two dozen languages with more on the way.

Conference 2023: The first mailing (a simple ‘save the date’) went out on Thursday. Translators were sent the text today so the news can be shared much more widely. We are already seeing signs of interest in the conference.

Canadian campaigns: We have two campaigns running but growth has been hindered by the fact that following our transition from Mailchimp to Mailjet, our Canadian segment of the English mailing list has gotten much smaller. We are looking into way to fix this. Here are the two campaigns with the number of supporters –

Donations: September has, so far, been a good month for our fund-raising, as we took in £10,490.27.

Written by admin in: 2023 conference,Campaigns,Fund-raising |
Sep
20
2022
0

New campaign launched to support democracy in Myanmar

The main news this week was the launch of our Myanmar campaign at the request of the global unions. IUF did a mailing to promote the campaign and BWI posted on their website about it. After just six days online, the campaign has 4,710 supporters and appears in 19 languages, with more on the way.

Many of those 4,710 people asked to be added to our mailing list, but nearly all of them were already subscribed. Our current subscribers are not sharing our campaigns with others in a big way, and without the active involvement of unions, the lists will not grow. We were unable to update the English list yet due to a problem with the file we submitted, but for the biggest six lists other than English, we only picked up 18 new subscribers this week.

We launched two new Canadian campaigns this week but ran into a couple of problems mailing to the Canadians on our English list. First and most important, the mailing was blocked. We have now figured out why, and the mailing went out successfully yesterday. The other problem is that Canadian segment is much smaller than we thought it would be, probably due to a problem when we exported our lists from Mailchimp to Mailjet a few months ago. We are investigating why that happened and will try to restore the list segment to its previous size.

Finally, we continued to raise more money this week, partly due to a mention of our needs in the mailings that went out to support the Myanmar campaign. Since I last reported, we have taken in £1,915.37 into our PayPal account, with other money also arriving as cheques and bank transfers. We are probably over £6,000 in donations since the beginning of September and we expect more to come through (including a substantial donation from a Canadian union).

Written by admin in: Campaigns,Fund-raising,Mailing list |
Sep
12
2022
0

Great news – Cihan Erdal is free

Cihan Erdal: Good news – our comrade who had been jailed in Turkey and was the subject of a major LabourStart campaign is now back in Canada. We have shared this news very widely.

USA: We have reached out to unions which are organising workers at Amazon and Starbucks in the hope of helping them with LabourStart campaigns. We are hopeful that at least one of these
will result in a campaign shortly.

Polish campaign: Solidarnosc informed us that the campaign we were planning on is no longer needed, as the workers have won.  As we were informed, “the strike is over and the union leader is back to work.”

Myanmar campaign: We have a call today with BWI following a decision by the Council of Global Unions to revive the LabourStart campaign demanding recognition of the national unity government instead of the military dictatorship.

Fundraising: Last week I reported that we had raised just under £2,800. Today, that number is £3,709, a gain of about £910 this week. Mailings have yet to go out (not yet translated) into German, Russian, Ukrainian, Norwegian, Danish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Esperanto and other languages.  I appeal to comrades to help with these translations — thank you!

Written by admin in: Campaigns,Fund-raising |
Sep
05
2022
0

September fundraiser kicks off

Fundraising: As we do a couple of times a year, last week we sent out a fundraising appeal to our readers.  Nearly all the donations came in via PayPal and these totalled £2,796.73 so far.  As there were around 120 donors, the average donation was £23.30.  The appeal went out in ten languages – Belarusian, Chinese, English, Finnish, Georgian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, and Spanish.  We’ll be following up today with the other languages, trying to get translations done.

Belarus: Support for the campaign has slowed down to a trickle, with just 17 new supporters this week, as we wait for the union to decide on next steps.

Poland: Solidarnosc reached out about a possible campaign and we are in discussions about it.

Ukraine: Following up on our recent campaign, we were contacted by a group of trade unionists who have doing solidarity work in a number of countries and who had launched their own campaign on change.org.  We had a Zoom call this week to discuss joint work in the future.

Telegram: Using all our social media accounts (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) we reached out to encourage people to follow our public feed on Telegram, which had just 119 followers.  The result was a gain of just one new follower, which does say something about the limits of those social media accounts — and possibly how few trade unionists are using Telegram.

Written by admin in: Campaigns,Fund-raising,Social networks |
Aug
29
2022
0

“Summertime … and the livin’ is easy”

Yes, we’re opening this week’s blog post with lyrics from George Gershwin’s masterpiece, Summertime.

Many global unions (and others) tend to shut down in August, particularly in the northern hemisphere, and as a result we’ve not gotten any campaign proposals recently. This will almost certainly change in the next week or so as people return to their offices. In the meanwhile …

This week we shut down the Ukraine campaign following President Zelensky’s decision not to veto the anti-union law. We announced this in a mass mailing early in the week, together with the good news from Castorama in Poland, where workers have won a major court battle (we had a campaign on this a couple of years back).

The Belarus campaign finally broke the 10,000 barrier – and today has 10,175 supporters.

Our mailing lists grew by just 66 last week – this is due to not having a new campaign, which would lead to a boost in new subscribers.  This should change soon.

To-do list: From 107 at the beginning of August the list is now down to 60 as we clear up many older tasks, mostly dealing with back-end of the website. We hope to shortly bring this number down to 50.

Written by admin in: Campaigns,Mailing list |

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