Inside LabourStart

Subscribe to this blog and get weekly updates from us. Fill in the box on the top right side of this page.

Podcasts: We posted our second podcast of 2025 this week (interview with ICTUR’s Daniel Blackburn) and recorded our third — an interview with our own Kivanc from DISK Turkey, which will go live next week. Our 30.1 interview with Stephanie Ross and Larry Savage has already been downloaded 155 times in its first week online, which is already more popular than six of our earlier interviews. Our most popular podcast was downloaded 421 times.

Campaigns: We are just about to launch our first campaign of 2025 — possibly as early as today — with a couple more in the pipeline.

News: Our correspondents posted 817 news stories in the first 7 days of this month, or 117 news stories per day. The average number of news stories posted each day continues to rise. We wrote to all 858 inactive correspondents; as a result, a couple asked to be removed from the database, while others asked to be given new passwords. We will continue efforts to get our existing correspondents to be active, while also recruiting new ones.

Webinar: We are supporting the webinar on “Trade union struggles in authoritarian regimes” taking place next week. Three members of the LabourStart Executive will be speaking at the event. We did a dedicated mass mailing to promote the webinar and extensive publicity across social media, as well as making it our top priority global news story.

ICTUR: Following up on our podcast interview with ICTUR’s Daniel Blackburn, we had a meeting with him to discuss future collaboration with LabourStart. In the past, we partnered with ICTUR to promote their journal International Union Rights, and may do so again this year.

Syria: We have a call scheduled for next week with a teachers’ union in northern and eastern Syria. This is our first contact with Syrian trade unionists, who reached out to us.

Instagram: We’re going to resume promoting our content on Instagram as our old/new intern Isabel will be taking this on. We have 596 followers on Instagram and can grow this number if we make an effort.

Subscribe to this blog and get weekly updates from us. Fill in the box on the top right side of this page.

Podcasting: Our first podcast interview this year has gone live (thanks Pat!), a second one has been recorded and a third interview is scheduled for Monday. We are on course for one podcast interview every week in 2025, which will be great. This week we also fixed a bug — all the non-English LabourStart home pages were showing a wrong link for the podcasts. (Thanks Espen for pointing this out.)

Campaigns: We have several in the pipeline, including in Turkey, Thailand, Myanmar and Liberia. More details soon.

Fundraising: All the translations of our fundraising message have gone out, but the total income has not increased significantly. We will do a followup mailing to the English list which should help.

Next generation: We held a meeting with former interns and have begun work on a Young Workers news page. One of our interns, Isabel, is back with us for three months, starting this week.

News: With well over 3,000 news stories posted this month, we’re averaging over 104 per day — a very big increase compared to the first nine days of January when the average was just 78 per day. The number of active correspondents is growing, up 15% compared to last month. Our goal is to increase the number of active correspondents three-fold this year, so we are on course.

It was a quiet week with most trade union offices closed — but it was also the week that Amazon and Starbucks workers made the news with unprecedented strike actions in different countries.

Georgia: The Evolution strikers proposed a new text for a new campaign, which we are discussing with them.

News: Despite a slowdown in labour news due to holiday season union office shutdowns, our correspondents have posted 1,969 links — about 73 news stories a day. Big thanks to Derek, Eric, Espen, Kyle and Pat for leading the way.

Norway: LO Oslo has now pledged a generous donation.

Urdu language campaigns: We are nearly there, just need to tweak some things on the landing page.

Podcasting: We will resume interviews in January. Derek and Pat have some ideas in Canada. If others have suggestions, please let me know. According to Buzzsprout, which hosts our podcasts, in 2024 we were in the top 25% of all podcasts and we had listeners in 117 countries. With a bit of a push we can probably make it to the top 10% in 2025.

Thailand campaign: Just eight days ago this was our smallest campaign with 3,842 supporters. It has picked up 982 new supporters in the last week and is 176 supporters shy of 5,000 today.

Turkey campaign: Slow growth this week as support rises by just 64. Ismet has been hospitalised and we’ve asked if we should use that to focus more attention on his situation.

Urdu: We’re making final tweaks to ensure that our campaigns display correctly in Urdu. For 70 million people, Urdu is a mother tongue and this is a big step forward for us.

Amazon: We contacted the union in New York City offering help again, but receive no reply yet. Meanwhile, we’ve shared UNI’s statement about Amazon strikes in the USA and Germany.

Mailing lists: Slow growth this week as we picked up just 35 new subscribers (24 of those for the English list).

Recruiting new correspondents: Our mailing last week to our 459 email subscribers in South Africa did not generate any response, even though 41 of those opened the message and 11 clicked on the link to become correspondents. We’ll be writing to those 11 next weekm to see if we can help them to sign up.

Well, it’s been two weeks, actually. And there’s a lot to report, so here goes:

Recruiting new correspondents: This is a priority for us and we’re going to tackle it one country at a time. This week we wrote to our 459 email subscribers in South Africa asking them to check out our news page and to apply to be correspondents.

Turkey campaign: This has been growing, now with 4,510 supporters. The campaign appears in 21 languages, which is a lot for us. Among these is Urdu, for the very first time, I think. We also picked up over 100 new subscribers to our mailing list from Turkey in a recent update.

Thailand campaign: Yesterday this was our smallest current campaign, with just 3,842 supporters. But a follow-up mailing to the English list meant we picked up over 700 new supporters and are now up to 4,563 — surpassing the Turkey campaign. This campaign now appears in 14 languages, with more on the way.

Social media: Our home page now features links to all five of our active social media accounts, including the newest – Bluesky, and we’ve dropped links our inactive Instagram and Mastodon accounts.

Donations: We are waiting on one pledged donation and we are hoping for one more that we applied for. In early January, we will have to chase after major union donors and individuals if we are to stay secure for the next few months.

Germany: The teachers’ union GEW asked us to design a postcard (colour, two-sided) which we did and got the short text translated into German. They will be printing this out and distributing it to everyone attending the union’s conference next month. GEW already made a generous donation to us in 2023.

New logo: We needed a generic logo to use on our social media accounts and had our graphic designer modify an existing one we used. We think the new logo actually looks pretty good.

Bluesky: Last week we reported that in our first week using the new platform we picked up over 3,000 supporters. Today, that’s nearly doubled to over 5,800 followers. We’ve shared 265 posts so far and many of them are being liked and passed on. That’s a lot more than most other Bluesky accounts belonging to global unions. Of the ones we could find, they ranged from 188 to 1,000 followers — but these numbers will certainly grow. To help them grow their followings, this week we also created our first “starter pack” on Bluesky, listing all the global and European union federations with a presence on the new platform. We publicised this widely and will be creating more such “packs”. If you want to help, get in touch.

Mailing lists: As part of an effort to allow segmentation of our lists to work, which requires that we ‘tag’ each email subscriber with their country names, we’ve been adding thousands of new subscribers and tagging many existing ones. As a result, for example, we now have a mailing list for the USA with over 13,500 subscribers. We’re doing this country by country, starting with the English-speaking ones. This will allow for much more targetted mailings.

Donations: Unions and individuals continue to respond generously to our appeal. This week NITO, the Norwegian union for engineers and technicians, told us that they honoured Thomas Seltzer and gave him a NOK 50,000 prize — which he donated in full to LabourStart.

KESK campaign: We did a lot to grow this campaign this week. It grew to 3,870 supporters and appears in 14 languages, with more coming.

Thailand campaign: This new campaign also saw growth last week and now has 3,295 followers. It appears in 11 languages with more on the way.

Bluesky: Our brand-new account there [@labourstart.bsky.social] has picked up over 3,100 followers since our launch last week. We have posted 106 times to that list this week and are closely monitoring responses to the posts, also comparing this to our account on Twitter.

Mastodon: We have decided to stop posting to Mastodon and we will limit our social media presence to Facebook, X, Bluesky and LinkedIn only (for now).

Campaigns: We were given two new campaigns on the same day and are launching them over the course of the next several days. One involves the arrest of a trade union activist in Turkey and the other focusses on union-busting in Thailand. Translations are starting to go live today. Please do what you can to share these.

News: In the first three weeks of this month, 34 of our volunteer correspondents posted 2,218 stories — more than 100 per day.

Campaigns: We’ve given our Georgia campaign a boost in a mass mailing; it is our smallest current campaign with just over 4,100 supporters. We’ve also helped to raise money for the strikers there via the UNI website, and we made a donation on behalf of LabourStart. We’ve been approached about possible campaigns this week in Turkey and Uganda. We also asked about a possible campaign on Iran.

Podcasts: We interviewed one of the Evolution Gaming strikers this week — our first podcast in several weeks.

Mailing lists: In the course of moving back and forth between systems, we lost the country names for a lot of subscribers. But now we’ve written software that reads through our campaign supporters database and updates our mailing list — and tested this on our Canadian supporters. It turns out the 20% of our mailing list are Canadians. This allows us to do targetted mailings based on country.  Our list has grown significantly as well with almost 6,000 new subscribers, all from Canada, being added. We will do this for other countries as well.

Mailings: We did three mailings to our English list this week, which is a lot for us. These included promotions for the winners of the LabourStart CLIFF video award, the Arthur Svensson international prize for trade union rights, and our latest podcast (see above).

News: Our volunteer correspondents posted 1,432 news stories in the first 14 days of November, averaging over 100 per day. Unfortunately, only 32 correspondents were active during this period and we need to find way to reactivate the many inactive ones — and recruit new ones.

Finances: Our appeals to our supporters have led to some very generous donations, both by individuals and unions. Our financial situation is still by no means secure, but it is considerably better than where it was in early September. We fixed the ‘Donate’ link on our home pages in all languages to offer more donation options in more currencies.  Among those unions which have made donations in the last couple of weeks were the European Transport Workers Federation (ETF), European Public Service Union (EPSU), Canadian Staff Union, and The Society (Canada).

Campaigns: We will shortly be closing our three oldest campaigns — from Eswatini, Serbia and Czechia. That will leave us with four active campaigns. Two weeks ago, I closed the China campaign (in support of jailed journalists).

CLIFF: LabourStart will shortly be announcing the recipient of an award we give out each year to a film shown as part of the Canadian Labour International Film Festival.

Podcasts: We interviewed an activist from the Amazon Labor Union in Staten Island, New York.

LabourStart’s Eric Lee with strikers at Evolution Gaming, in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Apologies for the late update of this blog; I was travelling in Georgia for most of this period.

During my time there I was able to meet three times with strikers at Evolution Gaming (see photo) where some 5,000 young workers have been on strike since mid-July. During one of those meetings, at a rally in front of the Evolution headquarters, I was asked to say a few words — part of the which the union shared online. We increased the number of sign-ups in the Georgian language and discussed next steps, including fund-raising to support the strikers.

While in Georgia, I also learned that an interview with me that took place a year ago appeared on the front page of the newspaper of the Ukrainian atomic workers union.

Marc Belanger has announced that Radio Labour’s International programme is shutting down after many years of great service to the international trade union movement. Our LabourStart podcasts can help take up the slack. As we reported a few weeks ago, our interview with trade unionists from Taiwan has become our most popular podcast so far, with just under 400 downloads. None of the other podcasts we’ve done have come even close to this.

I noticed that our Jobs page did not indicate how one submitted jobs to LabourStart. Now, on top of the page, it reads: “Want to post a job here? If you are a LabourStart volunteer correspondent, you can do this yourself. If you’re not a correspondent, email us at ericlee@labourstart.org.”

30 September was International Translation Day and I took the opportunity to write to all our translators, thanking them and telling them how important their work is.

And finally, a couple of the larger donations we were expecting came through — from the German education union GEW and from CUPE, the public sector union in Canada. We will need to do much more to restore LabourStart’s finances in the next few weeks and months.