Inside LabourStart

Ukraine campaign: Some good news and bad news. The good news is that the campaign was a relatively large one for us — in the end, we got 7,090 supporters. The bad news is that President Zelensky ignored our appeal and signed the anti-union bill into law. The campaign will be suspended today.

Poland: Just some good news this time. We’ve heard from UNI Europe that “4 of 10 dismissed union leaders [have been] reinstated at Castorama/Poland”. The LabourStart campaign closed some time ago, but we made a real contribution to that victory.

Global Solidarity Conference 2023: We held the first (online) meeting of the global steering committee and have agreed on next steps. The conference will be held in Tbilisi, Georgia next spring and we plan to announce the actual date very soon.

Mailing lists: Following the growth of our Ukraine campaign, we’ve picked up 437 new subscribers to our lists — including 137 new ones for the Ukrainian list. Last week, we added 440 new names to our lists.

Our home page: The technical issues now appear to have been fixed following the corruption of our database last month.

To-do list: We’ve made more progress in reducing the backlog of tasks this month. We started with 107 at the beginning of this month and are today down to just 66. We hope to be around 56 by the end of this month – a much more manageable number.

In Ukraine, workers demonstrate against the new anti-union law.

Ukraine campaign: Following our launch in English last Tuesday, the campaign quickly grew to 5,785 supporters and currently appears in 15 languages with more to come. SumOfUs.org helped by encouraging people who support their petition to also support ours (this is a first, and good news). At our suggestion, they cleared their campaign and text with the unions. The unions in Ukraine are helping to build support, and the campaign also benefitted from a re-tweet by the popular British writer and journalist Paul Mason. We received a small number of hostile messages accusing us, on the one side, of being pro-Putin for daring the criticise the Ukrainian government during war-time, and on the other — for being pro-Zelensky and … well, you can imagine the rest.

Kazakhstan campaign: We are running this for a bit longer as the case remains in the courts. We will do a followup mailing today to our list about this.

Iran campaign: We closed the campaign, announcing that one of the two labour rights defenders has been released. This too will be covered in today’s mailing.

Global Solidarity Conference 2023: We’ve scheduled a first meeting of the joint local and international steering committee for later this week. We hope to be able to announce dates shortly.

Mailing lists: Our lists have grown as we add more campaign supporters; last week, we picked up 440 new subscribers, most of them in English but also 37 new subscribers to our Ukrainian list.

Home page: I fixed a long-standing software issue with links to the second country (if there is one) for a news story.

Other software issues: Our programmer has returned and resumed work on fixing our database; she will also be available to help with other projects.

T-shirts:I had a long conversation with No Sweat in the UK and we’re exploring the possibility of doing a second t-shirt very soon. Last year’s campaign was quite successful.

Facebook: Our Group (Global Labour News & Information) has come under attack by spammers – though there is no reason to believe that we’ve been singled out. We’ve been deleting the offensive posts and blocking the spammers, have resumed vetting people who try to join the group, and have posted a pinned message to the group explaining what’s going on.

To-do list: As promised, the list of often longstanding items has been dropping steadily throughout August, from 107 to 75 today. I hope to have this list below 60 by the end of the month.

We’re back to weekly updates.

Campaigns: We launched a new campaign on Friday in support of Ukrainian trade unions.  We’ll be keeping our Kazakhstan campaign live for a bit longer as we wait for news from the union.

T-shirts: We’ve scheduled a call with an organisation in the UK that does union-made t-shirts as a possible new way to produce our shirts this year.

Global Solidarity Conference 2023: This week we’ll be writing to the members of the steering group to schedule a first meeting (on Zoom).

Our to-do list:  We’ve had a very long to-do list for some time now, and it was 104 a week ago.  It is now down to just 83 and I hope to continue to reduce it throughout August, aiming to reach 60 by the end of the month.

Software issues: The programmer who assisted us recently is back from holiday this week so we should be able to move forward with more fixes and improvements to the website.

Conference 2023: We have begun work planning our next Global Solidarity Conference — which is long overdue — in Tbilisi.  The Georgian Trade Union Confederation has named its members of the steering committee and we have invited members of the LabourStart Executive to participate as well.  We hope to have the first meeting of the joint committee very soon.

Iran: We have raised workers’ rights cases in Iran with three global union federations — IndustriALL, the ITF and Education International.  EI has requested to be included as a sponsor of our current campaign; we have asked about whether they want a separate campaign for a teacher activist.

News database: The work repairing this continues as we consider moving the whole database to a different web hosting company.  (Support from our current hosts has been non-existent — and they caused the problem in the first place.)

New correspondents: We added three new correspondents last week from Canada (Iran), Germany and Hong Kong (UK).

Campaigns: We had been invited to prepare a campaign in support of a workers’ rights activist in Kenya, but the company caved and agreed to the demands before a campaign could be launched.

Because we’re very late with this report, it will be very brief — but should give you a good idea of what LabourStart has been up to in the last four months. Regular updates will resume from next week.

Campaigns

• We closed the IUF’s Cambodia Nagaworld campaign – it was a win.  We also closed the Lithuania and Colombia campaigns – which we could not declare as victories.
• We launched a campaign in support of Borjomi water workers in Georgia – and closed it after a couple of days – this was a big win for the workers.  Eric got to spend a day with the strikers during his visit to Georgia in May, where he also met with the Georgian union leadership.
• In early May, we launched a new campaign in support of jailed union leaders in Belarus – with the help of GLU students.  It is currently our largest campaign, with over 9,700 supporters.
• We also launched a new campaign on Iran, with the support of the IUF.
• And we also launched a campaign in support of a jailed trade unionist in Kazakhstan.
• We launched our first campaign in Armenian, now that the interface has been translated into that language.

Global Solidarity Conference 2023

Discussions begin with the Georgian Trade Union Confederation about holding a conference in Tbilisi in early 2023.

Fundraising

We sent out a fundraising appeal at the beginning of April. We raised over £2,000 in the first 24 hours, and more funds over the course of the following months.

Home page

Due to changes made by our web hosts, IONOS, many records became corrupted and character encoding on our home page broke on 1 July. Following that, we had problems with our jobs page, our photo of the week and our link to Radio Labour. Most of this has now been fixed, and work on this should be completed by 10 August.

Interns

Our three GLU interns finished their work at the end of March.  We were lucky to have Jessica, Malaika and Zubair working with us — albeit for just a few weeks — and thank them for their efforts.

Labour News Network

This was improved with a new banner and with several items posted to it.

Mailing lists

We migrated from Mailchimp to Mailjet in May, saving a lot of money.

May Day

• We organised a recorded May Day event with the participation of many trade unions from around the globe.
• There were 649 views of the video as of 2 May, and 500 more since then.
• We shared many of the individual videos across social media in May.

Social media

• A new Twitter account was created – https://twitter.com/LabourSouthAsia
• Our YouTube channel was revived to accommodate the May Day videos.

UK

• Invited by the TUC, Eric spoke with campaigns and communications staffers from several unions on a Zoom call.
• We participated for the first time in the Tolpuddle festival – Derek and Eric spoke in one session, LabourStart had a stall, we gave out hundreds of leaflets, and distributed some copies of our book on migrant workers.

Elizabeth Tang from the IDWF.

International Women’s Day: Our webinar run jointly with the International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF) was a success. About 300 people participated in the event on Zoom and Facebook. The event was recorded and we shared the link today (https://vimeo.com/686778630).

Jordan: Working together with the Education International, we will be hosting a webinar next Friday, 18.3 in English and Arabic. We will be reopening our campaign in support of the Jordanian Teachers’ Association which was suspended a while back.

UK: We were invited to speak to the London/South East TUC about LabourStart this week — and also got the chance to speak with a group of fisherman from Namibia who were on the call.

Donations: IndustriALL has made a very generous donation.

International Women’s Day: We agreed a day, time and topic for a global webinar organised with the International Domestic Workers Federation. We’ve done a lot of publicity on social media and mass mailings. IDWF is pulling together a fantastic panel. The event takes place on Tuesday, 8 March at 13:00. This is the URL to register to attend the event: http://www.labourstart.org/go/iwd2022

Lithuania: Our campaign continues to grow. We’re now at 5,563 supporters. The strike has been suspended due to the state of emergency in the country, but they have asked to continue promoting the campaign.   This week we did another mass mailing to our English list.

Ukraine: We continue posting lots of news from unions around the world about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Using our website and social media accounts we have promoted the ITUC appeal for donations too.

UK: Next week I’ve been invited to speak at an online event organised by trade unions in London and the South East of England on the subject of global solidarity and LabourStart.

USA: We’re helping the Progressive Caucus of Democrats Abroad, at their request, with weekly labour news bulletins, focussing mainly on US labour news.

Ukraine: Following the Russian invasion on Thursday morning, we have made certain to offer comprehensive coverage of the trade union reaction in Ukraine, Russia and around the world on our news page and across social media.

We have also been in touch with all 18 of our correspondents in Ukraine.  One of them wrote back, saying:

“Thank you very much for your genuine support. At the moment we need as strong an international reaction as possible,  more demonstrations and political pressure on the EU and the governments to react with economic and political sanctions against Putin, his family members and Russian corporations. And Ukraine needs financial and military support as well.  It is also obvious that we will need help in providing humanitarian aid to the union members, refugees and war victims. We appreciate your support and will let you know what that may mean in practical terms.”

Cambodia: Thanks to a mass mailing to members of the UNITE HERE union in the USA promoting the campaign, it jumped to nearly 15,000 supporters — a gain of nearly 2,000 in just one day.

Colombia: Our campaign continues to grow following our follow-up mailing. The number of supporters has grown from 4,809 to 6,092 as a result.

Lithuania: Our campaign went live this last week. Today it appears in 11 languages with more on the way, and has 4,272 supporters.  It will be our first campaign ever in all three Baltic languages — including Estonian and Latvian.

Instagram: Our presence there has been vastly improved and the number of followers is starting to grow.

International Women’s Day: We are now expecting to organise a major online event featuring domestic workers and in partnership with their global union.

Mailing list: Our list continues to grow as we add new campaigns. This week we picked up 399 new subscribers – and launched our mailing list in Lithuanian.

Campaigns: Last week I reported that we had 3 campaigns in the pipeline, including ones for Colombia and Lithuania. Those both went live this week. The Colombia campaign is already in 16 languages and has 4,455 supporters.

As for the campaign we expected on Turkey — there’s no news at the moment.

But in addition we have received proposed campaigns from the Hungarian teachers union and EPSU, the European regional body for public sector workers.

The Cambodia campaign has grown a bit from 12,355 supporters to 12,995, a gain of 640 supporters this week.

Interns: Our three new interns from the Global Labour University – Jessica, Malaika and Zubair – began work on Wednesday this week.

Campaigns: We expect to launch campaigns shortly in support of workers in Colombia, Lithuania and Turkey. Details soon.

Algeria: With the agreement of IndustriALL we have now closed this campaign. Unfortunately, our comrade Ramzi is still in jail. The struggle continues.

Cambodia: We wrote to dozens of our translators in six languages — resulting in three more translations. But we still have nothing in Japanese, Arabic and Swedish, which is a problem. The campaign continues to grow — now in 22 languages with 12,355 supporters. But growth has slowed.

Iran: At the request of some comrades, we shared statements from Iranian workers’ organisations about expelling Iran from the ILO with senior figures in the global unions.

Jordan: Next month we will host (and promote) a major global webinar in support of Jordan’s embattled teachers’ union. We will reactivate the online campaign before then.

Fund raising: Two unions in Norway made generous donations last week.

Interns: Our three new interns will start their work on Wednesday next week.

Mailing lists: Our mailing lists continue to grow due to the Cambodia campaign – we picked up 223 new subscribers this week, and doubled the size of our small Hindi language list.

Internationalisation: We made a number of improvements to the Russian language home page, adding corrections to the language and replacing the occasional English phrase with the Russian equivalent.

Working Class History T-shirts: We discussed next steps with our friends at DNA-Merch and received payment for the few shirts we sold.