Inside LabourStart

Two generations on the picket line in Turkey.

At the request of IndustriALL and the Turkish Metal Workers union we’ve launched a new campaign demanding that M&T Reklam reinstate workers sacked for joining a union.  

After less than 24 hours online, the campaign — launched simultaneously in Turkish and English — has just under 3,000 messages sent.  

A good start.  

Please spread the word:

http://www.labourstartcampaigns.net/show_campaign.cgi?c=2328

Sounds like a horror film, but it’s actually the latest LabourStart campaign:

http://www.labourstartcampaigns.net/show_campaign.cgi?c=2316

Please spread the word.

Conference:

The most important thing that happened this month was, of course, the LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference that took place last weekend in Berlin.  We’re preparing a report on that right now, so nothing further to say here.

Books:

We published our 6th book — Solidarity, the Selected Essays of Dan Gallin. Sales are approaching 300 copies after little more than two weeks. A Kindle edition will go live later this week.

Work has already begun on our next book — Global Crisis, Global Solidarity — a collection of articles and speeches from our conference.

Campaigns:

We launched four campaigns in the last month:

• Germany: Solidarity with strikers at Autogrill – now closed
• Philippines: Stop union-busting at NXP Semiconductors – still active
• Indonesia: Support strikers at one of the world’s largest paper mills – still active
• Turkey: For the right to celebrate May Day in Taksim Square – now closed

There is now a live running total showing for active campaigns — there is no need to do anything to show this.

The mycampaigns.cgi script — which is what we link to at the bottom of our mass mailings in English — was broken, but has now been fixed. It’s an important way to encourage people to support our other campaigns.

Finally, the display of news stories on campaign pages has also now been fixed.

Office:

As we anticipate the closure of the Lee Valley Technopark, we are currently looking for new, inexpensive offices in London.

Labour News Network:

This has now been revived. See here for details.

Publicity:

We have a new and growing list of 239 media contacts and have been doing regular mailings to them. We mailed 6 times to them in the last month. Every campaign launch now includes a press release from us.

Before the Berlin conference we printed out full-colour flyers advertising LabourStart in English, German and Russian. These were distributed at May Day events in London and Berlin, and many copies were taken away from our Berlin conference.  We also printed and distributed widely postcards advertising Dan Gallin’s new book.

We had stalls displaying our books and other publications at the 3rd World Congress of the International Trade Union Confederation in Berlin earlier this month, at the DGB (German national trade union centre) congress, and at May Day in Berlin.

Update: Our campaigns are back online.

Our domain name for campaigns (labourstartcampaigns.net) seems to have expired, causing an error message when anyone or anything tries to access our campaigns.  I’ve reported this to the company which hosts the site and which is responsible for the domain.  Fingers crossed, this will be sorted shortly.  Meanwhile, I’m having to answer all the emails coming in reporting this …  Very bad timing!

This campaign, which came to us from IndustriALL and the local union the Philippines, is going live today.

Please do what you can to spread the word.

This just launched this afternoon: http://www.labourstartcampaigns.net/show_campaign.cgi?c=2285

There have been some issues with the campaign counter, and this caused a delay of an hour or two in launching the campaign, as well as taking our campaigns offline for several minutes.  All campaigns should now be online but there are still issues with the counter.  (I’ll explain when it’s all fixed.)

My comments this time appear below, at appropriate points in the long lists of numbers.

Mailing lists [with 200 or more subscribers]

The most spectacular gain this month has been to our German mailing list — which grew by 850 subscribers net. This is substantially greater than the total growth for all other lists combined. At this rate, German will become our third largest list sometime this month.  A year ago, this list had just over 2,000 subscribers.

English: 85,670 [85,432] +238
French: 7,801 [7,707] +94
Spanish: 5,131 [5,106] +25
German: 5,069 [4,219] +850
Italian: 4,115 [4,110] +5
Turkish: 3,440 [3,253] +187
Norwegian: 2,878 [2,907]
Russian: 2,524 [2,525]
Korean: 2,122 [2,122]
Dutch: 1,349 [1,391]
Chinese: 1,073 [1,073]
Finnish: 609 [624]
Japanese: 494 [494]
Arabic: 390 [381] +9
Portuguese: 351 [338] +13
Polish: 269 [269]
Indonesian: 265 [262] +3
Tagalog: 254 [254]
Hebrew: 243 [250]
Farsi: 242 [242]

Social networks

Twitter followers

The big news here is the launch of our LabourStart Indonesia twitter feed — an initiative by our new correspondent, Pete Moss, who covers Indonesian news.  And the main English Twitter feed continues to grow at a healthy pace, and is just under 12,000 followers.  (The ITUC has 5,407 followers; the ILO has 29,885 — we’re in the middle.)

English: 11,995 [11,816]
Canada English: 3,067 [2,957]
Canada French: 432 [416]
French: 209 [205]
USA: 252 [209]
Spanish: 66 [67]
German: 48 [45]
Indonesia: 26 [new]
Japanese: 23 [23]
Russian: 17 [16]
Portuguese: 7 [7]

Facebook

What’s interesting here is that 3 times as many people joined our Group than liked our Page in English this month. There’s obviously a dynamic to Group growth that our page on Facebook is missing. It’s very important therefore to always post new campaigns, etc to both the Page and the Group.

Like LabourStart.org page (English): 8,633 [8,546]
Members of LabourStart group: 7,511 [7,268]
Like LabourStart page (French): 418 [409]
Like LabourStart page (German): 315 [301]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 134 [131]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 105 [105]

UnionBook

Now really stagnant, the question is — do we spin this off somehow? Maybe someone could be persuaded to buy it from us?

Members: 5,760 [5,750]

LinkedIn

LabourStart group: 1,625 [1,605]

Flickr

A small gain this month as we asked our worker-photographers to submit May Day photos and join the group. Still, when you email 90,000+ people and that leads to a gain of just 26, it’s not that impressive.  (Our LinkedIn group, which we do absolutely nothing to promote, grew by  nearly as much.)

Union group on Flickr: 774 [748]

Website

Correspondents: 703 [699]

Website traffic

LabourStart.org (1&1 statistics)

Total visits: 638,835 [635,661]

LabourStart.org (Clicky)

Total visitors: 40,845 [40,645]

Where they come from:

Sweden continues to bring us hundreds of visitors every month — even though we still don’t have a proper news page or active correspondents in that language. Something to work on.  The other popular news pages here (English, German, Norwegian, French and Indonesian) are all updated regularly.

USA – 9,419 [8,525]
Canada – 7,245 [8,140]
UK – 5,478 [4,809]
Australia – 2,670 [2,618]
Germany – 1,671 [1,526]
Norway – 1,562 [2,132]
France – 871 [820]
Sweden – 784 [888]
Indonesia – 760 [1,252]
Belgium — 718 [–]

Their operating systems:

Windows – 68.9% [68.2%]
Mobile – 13.8% [15.6%] (iOS – 7.2% [7.3%]; Android – 4.7% [5.6%])
Mac – 15.4% [14.8%]
Linux – 1.9% [1.4%]

LabourStartCampaigns.net (Clicky)

Total visitors: 33,523 [29,094]

Where they come from:

Good to see Turkey back in the top 5, no doubt due to our having just launched two campaigns relating to Turkey. Note also huge gains in German traffic to our campaigns, up six-fold in two months.  Also note increased traffic for every single one of our top ten languages.

Canada – 4,980 [6,464]
UK – 4,679 [3,965]
USA – 4,343 [4,087]
Germany – 3,292 [1,236]
Turkey — 1,805 [–]
Australia – 1,450 [1,349]
France – 1,224 [1,152]
Belgium – 1,186 [1,030]
Spain – 1,153 [1,038]
Italy – 884 [750]

Their operating systems:

Nearly one in five people who support our online campaigns now do so using a smartphone or tablet — watch this number grow month on month.

Windows – 68.5% [68.4%]
Mobile – 18.8% [18.6%] (iOS – 9.8% [10.1%]; Android – 7.7% [6.9%])
Mac – 10.6% [11.1%]
Linux – 2.1% [1.8%]

Once again, our Turkish comrades are asking for our help.

Please spread the word of this widely:

http://www.labourstart.org/go/taksim

Berlin conference: We’re now just 4 weeks away from the conference opening on Friday, 23 May. The number of people registered since I last reported 4 weeks ago has gone up by 85 — we now have 579 registrants. It is very likely that this will pass 600 in the next week.

The majority of registrants (300) come from just 11 countries — Germany (129), the UK (61), USA (20), Russia (18), Canada (16), the Netherlands (15), Switzerland (12), and Ukraine (11). There are 17 coming from three Nordic countries. More than 30% of all registrants in the last month came from Germany.

There are some large delegations registered from developing countries, though we’re not certain how many of these people will actually be able to attend. These include: Nigeria (31), Liberia (25), Bangladesh (20), Pakistan (20), and Cameroon (17).

In total, we have delegations registered from 70 countries.

The 61 coming from the UK is larger than the total number of participants in our London conference in 2008, and the 36 coming from North America probably exceeds the total number who attended our Washington conference in 2009.

LabourStart will have a stall at the ITUC World Congress which is happening in Berlin just before our event. In addition, a number of LabourStart correspondents will be attending the ITUC as journalists. If you can be at the ITUC event, please let me know. We’ll need help staffing that stall and raising LabourStart’s profile there in general.

Publicity: We now have a global media list with over 200 addresses on it. We’ve now sent out our first three press releases to that list. If you have any suggestions for journalists who should be added to the list, please send them on.

We’ve now prepared a new LabourStart flyer which will be published initially in English, German and Russian. Thanks to Gisela and Derek who helped write the text and to Masha who did the graphic design. If you’re coming to Berlin, please make sure to leave room in your luggage to take copies of the flyer home with you.

For the second time, LabourStart is a sponsor of the London Labour Film Festival which takes place next week. We have a large ad in the festival programme, and we did two mailings to our UK list urging people to attend.

Books: We’re nearly ready with Book 4 (Dan Gallin) — this will be ready for sale at the book launch in Berlin.

Campaigns: We’ve launched just two new campaigns in the last six weeks — supporting Georg Fischer workers in Turkey and union leaders sentenced to jail in Ecuador, launched this week. Both campaigns are growing well and quickly.

We closed down the Crown Holdings (Canada) campaign after some 4 months online. We are keeping a couple of older campaigns going at the request of their initiators — Aeroflot and Cambodia. Both have very large numbers of supporters (+12K).

In addition, we’ve helped give extensive publicity to campaigns launched by our friends. We just did a mass mailing yesterday to support the IUF campaign for North Carolina tobacco workers. We also gave extensive publicity to the Amnesty International campaign in support of jailed union leaders in Bahrain.

Finally, we launched a Canada-only campaign last month — also in support of the Crown Holdings workers, but targetting the premier of Ontario.

News: As I reported earlier this month, there’s now a new, quick way for correspondents to add news links to LabourStart. The number of active correspondents has grown; in mid-March we only had 76 actives and today that number is 92. We need to continue working to ensure that many more LabourStart correspondents post news regularly.

Fundraising: April is one of the months that we tend to do a fundraising appeal and our totals this time were disappointing. The total donations for this month are nearly £6,400 — more than £1,000 less than the average we get for the months we do such appeals (though considerably better than we did in July 2013). I discussed these issues in a post below, and have decided to move toward annual, rather than quarterly, appeals.

In addition to that money, we have received a pledge of yet another donation from Unite Here (in the USA). And we’ve received substantial support from German trade unions and foundations for our Berlin conference. Finally, we don’t appear to have won any of the three competitions we were entered into (see my post from 19 March). Darn.

At the request of PSI, we launched this new campaign today on LabourStart:

http://www.labourstart.org/go/ecuador

Please spread the word.