Inside LabourStart

Campaigns:

• We’ve closed the Korean teachers’ campaign and will soon be receiving a report back on the results.
• The Cambodia campaign, launched yesterday, is taking off very quickly — already considerably larger than the Carnival (Crown Holdings) campaign launched a week earlier.
• We’re now running our first campaign ever in Ukrainian.

Berlin 2014:

• I’m off to Berlin tomorrow with Tom to meet with the organizing committee.
• At the moment we have 260 registrants for the conference, 54 of them from Germany, 40 from the UK.
• We’ve updated the database adding a number of new fields to begin recording where people will stay, their flight details, contact phone numbers, etc. This information will be added by the conference organizers.

Books:

We’ve just heard from Dan Gallin that he’s assembled the texts for our next book, which we can now begin to produce and sell.  This will be LabourStart’s fourth book.

Mailing lists:

We had a problem with Sendy, trying to resolve it with help from them.

French edition:

Derek and Andy have made several suggestions for improvements which we’ve begun to implement.

Fundraising:

• We’re about to do the quarterly fundraising mailing to people who regularly support our online campaigns.
• I’ve also written to all our correspondents about the Svensson prize (having already told our entire list about it) and fingers crossed maybe this year LabourStart will be considered for this.

Newswires:

We now have a Vietnamese English-language newswire at the request of our comrades in Australia, and it appears on the website of the committee to protect Vietnamese workers.

News database:

We’re adding additional languages to allow new correspondents to post news without having to deal with an English interface. The Finnish one is now ready and others are on their way.

Garment workers beaten, shot, jailed.

We’ve been asked by the ITUC, IndustriALL, UNI Global Union, the Cambodian Labour Confederation and Workers United (SEIU) to launch this very important campaign.

Please do what you can to help promote it urgently.

The struggle at Crown Holdings in Toronto — which was the subject of a LabourStart campaign in the autumn — continues.  At the request of the United Steelworkers, we’re launching a new round in defense of those workers, this time targetting a member of the Crown board.  As most people are still away from their desks, we’ll do a slow launch of this one culminating in a mass mailing on Monday.  Meanwhile, the campaign is online and live here.

Campaigns:

• The Korea campaign, closing today, was one of the largest we ever ran. In the last 13 days, it grew from 11,295, which was already pretty good, to 14,566 — a gain of 3,271 during the Christmas period.
• Our Kazakhstan campaign continues to grow, albeit slower — we’re now up to 10,731, a gain of over 730 in the last two weeks.
• We’ll be a launching a new campaign in support of United Steelworkers Canada after the new year. The earlier version was closed five days ago.
• We closed two other campaigns (Honduras and UN staff) a week ago.

Berlin 2014: We’re up to 241 registrants, 50 from Germany, 36 from the UK, and the remaining 155 from 51 other countries. In another 11 days, Tom and I head over to Berlin to meet the organizing committee there. I’ve done a mailing to all registrants and we now have the option to de-register people who cannot attend. As I’ve explained before, many of the registrants have asked about subsidies even though we’ve repeatedly explained that everyone must pay their own way.

Mailing lists: These continue to grow and grow. We’re ending the year with 97,100 addresses on our top three lists: English – 84,853; French – 7,112; Spanish – 5,135. A year ago, those three lists totalled 85,501— a net gain of 11,599, or nearly 14%.

Social networks:

• We picked up another 5 new Twitter followers in the last 5 days, bringing our total to 11,243. It was 8,115 a year ago — a growth of 3,128, or almost 39%. This is much higher than the growth of our mailing lists.
• We have considerably fewer supporters on Facebook, with only 8,267. A year ago that number was 5,877, so we’ve picked up 2,390 new fans on Facebook — a gain of over 40%.

Book and calendar sales:

• Calendar sales reached 221 by year’s end — disappointing, but not a disaster.  (We didn’t lose any money, and earned £172.)
• Sales of our latest book, Firefox OS for Activists, continue to slowly grow.  We sold 97 paperbacks and 115 Kindle editions, for a total of 212.
• I’ll report on sales of our other titles in the new year.

I’ve just closed two campaigns that ran their 3 month courses — in defense of the Honduran dock workers’ leader Victor Crespo, and in support of the UN staff workers’ union.  I’m waiting to hear from our partners to find out what effect, if any, these campaigns had.

The UN campaign was one of our largest, generating 14,581 messages in 19 languages.

Meanwhile, our Korea campaign continues to grow. Even though very large numbers of our supporters are not online this week, we picked up an additional 1,011 supporters in the last 24 hours.  We’re now up to 13,715 supporters for the Korea campaign.

In my mailing yesterday to our English list, I asked people to visit the websites of the BBC and CNN to demand they cover the Korea strike, as well as write to Sky News.  According to the report on MailChimp, 881 of them clicked through to the BBC site and another 270 to CNN.  You’d think these numbers might influence the news editors there, but a quick check this morning shows no change — BBC, CNN and Sky continue to have no coverage of South Korea …

As you will all no doubt be aware, the South Korean government has brutally cracked down on the striking railway workers, making over 130 arrests.  The unions have decided to call a general strike on 28 December.  It is vital that we all do what we can in the next few days to build support for those workers.

Today I posted extensively to social networks, contacted directly the general secretaries of some railway workers unions who could be quite helpful, wrote to the BBC, CNN, Sky News and Al Jazeera to ask why they’re all ignoring this story, and am just about to send off another mass mailing to our English list.

We’re up to 12,704 supporters for this campaign but it can be and should be many more.  Please do what you can to build the campaign – http://bit.ly/1aUdMGq

Campaigns: No new campaigns were added in the last 7 days — but we’ve seen tremendous support for the two most recent ones (Kazakhstan and Korea).

The Korea railway workers campaign is our second largest current campaign with 11,295 supporters – it will take another 3,262 to make it number 1, which is unlikely to happen. Still, we picked up 2,522 new supporters in the last 24 hours (that’s right — more than 100 per hour), so you never know.

Our next new campaign is scheduled for launch in the new year (in support of USW members in Canada at Crown Holdings – will replace the current campaign.)

We’ve been talking with the Georgian Trade Union Confederation (GTUC) about getting our campaigns up in the Georgian language and they’re keen to help.

One new feature of campaigns is I now do a mailing one week after campaign launch to the people who signed up. This is a one-off (they’re not necessarily on our mailing list) and I use it to update them on what’s happening, to thank them, and to encourage them to spread the word (with details on how to do this with Twitter, Facebook, emails, etc). These messages have a VERY high open rate and they are read, so I will do them for all future campaigns.  The next step is to see if we can do this in additional languages.

Mailing lists: I did a full report on the huge growth of our bigger mailing lists — nearly 16,000 new subscribers to the top 10 lists since January. See below for details.

Berlin 2014: The number of registrants has gone up by 26 this week, most of those coming from the UK and Germany. At the moment we have 223 registrants, 49 of them from Germany and 33 from the UK. The registration form is now available in Dutch — as well as English, German, and Russian. Tom and Eric will visit Berlin on 11 January to meet with the organizing committee, which is doing fantastic work on the ground. There’s now an ad with a link to the conference website on all LabourStart home pages in all languages. We now have a way to modify information submitted by registrants. People who live in Berlin and can offer “solidarity housing” now have the option to do so from the registration page. (About half the people who’ve signed up are requesting this, but many of those are people who I do not expect to attend the conference.) We’ve now made some block bookings at a local hotel and hostel — if you’ve not yet booked, please do so soon.

This has never happened before.

Our Kazakhstan campaign was getting very close to 10,000 supporters already yesterday, so no surprise that it finally reached that number this afternoon.

But our Korea campaign also grew very rapidly today — picking up 1,345 new supporters in the last 7 hours and reaching 10,000 a few minutes ago.

They are among the largest campaigns we’ve ever done.

They both still have a way to go to become our largest current campaigns (two campaigns have many more), but they’re on their way …

By now you should have seen the message going out to LabourStart’s mailing lists (below is the full text) – things are heating up in South Korea.  Because of the seriousness of this, we’ve dropped everything else here in the LabourStart War Room and are totally focussed on building our campaign and growing awareness of the strike and the repression.

Here are some of the things we’ve been working on:

Posted content on social media – Facebook, Twitter, UnionBook, LinkedIn, Google+, Reddit.  Tweets are going out several times an hour.  On Facebook, invested £100 in a promotion of our message about the campaign.   (This should kick in soon; the ad has been approved.)

Posted top news stories on LabourStart — of which there are now many.

Using Twitter, publicly contacted key unions, national trade union centres, global union federations, NGOs and the ITUC.  Our message has been retweeted by the UK transport workers union TSSA and its general secretary, Union Solidarity International in the UK, COSATU in South Africa and the TUC in the UK so far.

By email, contacted other groups including Amnesty, and British transport unions RMT and ASLEF.  Did a mass mailing to our main English list and to all UnionBook members; asked our translators to get the mailing ready for other lists too.  Translated mailings have already gone out in Indonesian, French, Russian, Finnish, Farsi, German and Dutch with more on the way.

Contacted (mostly British) mainstream media organizations which incredibly have nothing at all on this story — the BBC, CNN, ITN, Sky News, the Guardian, and the Independent.

Full text of the message going out to all our lists today:

Two weeks ago I asked for your support as Korean railway workers were about to launch a strike. They were concerned back then that their government might attempt to break the strike. They wanted the solidarity of workers around the world. They wanted a clear message sent to their government and nearly 9,000 of you sent off messages of protest.

Today, their worst fears are coming true.

Just a few days into their strike, the Korean government has launched a savage crackdown.

A few hours ago, the offices of the railway workers union were raided by dozens of police. Computers and other equipment were seized.

Arrest warrants have been issued for the top union leaders — who are currently hiding in a safe place.

Korean media are reporting that the military is prepared to send hundreds of soldiers to work as strike-breakers.

Tomorrow morning, the subway workers in Seoul are set to launch a solidarity strike, shutting down the capital.

It is our job now to mobilize the widest possible support for the Korean railway workers.

Those workers are on the front lines today of the fight against neo-liberal policies such as privatisation — and they are defending the basic human right to have independent trade unions with the right to strike.

If you’ve not yet done so, please send off your message of protest today: http://bit.ly/1c8Uao8

If you’ve already supported the campaign — thanks. But let’s do more:

Post this link to your Facebook page: http://bit.ly/1c8Uao8 Tell your friends there that you support this campaign and urge them all to do so.

Tweet this: Hands off the Korean railway strikers! http://bit.ly/1c8Uao8 @labourstart

If your union has a mailing list of its members, make sure they are all informed about this important struggle. There are many millions of organized workers out there who aren’t aware of this fight. Please email your fellow union members.

Finally, LabourStart is being continuously updated with news about this strike and others. Make sure it’s the place you start your day on the net: http://www.labourstart.org

Thanks.

Eric

One of my ongoing gripes is that unions that ask LabourStart for campaigns sometimes do very little to promote them to their own members.  An opportunity to bring members of a new union, or even a new country, into the network of people who regularly support our campaigns is therefore missed.

In the past, I’ve chided some of our Korean comrades for this and in the last week we’ve seen a complete turnaround.  The Korean teachers union and the railway workers union have mobilized members and supporters in their own ranks, in their own country, and these have been added to the thousands from outside Korea to support our current campaigns.

The result is that our Korean language mailing list has grown ten-fold almost overnight, from just over 150 (where it had languished for months) to 1,646 this morning.  It has gone from being our 21st largest language to being our 9th.

The real test will be what happens when we mail to this list about a non-Korean campaign – for example, our current campaign on Kazakhstan.  Will we see a strong response?  We’ll try to test this later today.