Inside LabourStart

Campaigns: In the last 2 weeks we launched two new ones — in support of striking railway workers in Korea, and jailed oil workers in Kazakhstan.  Both are exceptionally important — these are dramatic struggles where workers are up against the power of the state, and I hope everyone will do their bit to make these campaigns among our biggest ever.  We’ll be launching a followup campaign next week for the Crown Holdings workers in Canada.  I hope after that we’ll be able to take a short break before the new year — to catch our collective breath …

Mailing lists: Due to an extraordinary effort by the Korean teachers’ union to build support in the country for their campaign, we picked up several hundred Koreans for our mailing list.  As a result, Korean has gone from being our 21st largest list to being the 11th largest, with 714 subscribers (this was just 173 a month ago).

Berlin 2014: Two weeks ago I reported that we had 128 people signed up for the conference; today that number is 197.  The largest groups are from Germany (44), the UK (24), Pakistan (15), Liberia (12) and Nigeria (11).  I’m still not certain that the comrades from Pakistan, Liberia and Nigeria and some other countries have fully understood that LabourStart is not covering airfares, although it’s possible that some of them will be in Berlin for the ITUC.  The registration form is now available in Russian as well as English and German; we expect that a Dutch version is on the way.  Tom and Edd developed a comprehensive strategy for promoting the conference to a UK audience, so we should see the size of the UK contingent grow.  Meanwhile, I’ve focussed some attention on building participation from Finland, Denmark, Israel, the Czech Republic and Poland, with more countries coming soon.

Books: We’re about to begin work on book 4 — a collection of essays by former IUF General Secretary Dan Gallin.  Sales of the earlier books and calendar remain sluggish.

Two years after the shocking massacre, seven oil workers remain in prison — and we’ve launched a new LabourStart campaign today to demand their release.  Please help spread the word:

At the request of the Korean railway workers union, the ITUC and the ITF, we just launched a major new online campaign in defense of the right to strike.  And we’ve been warned to expect a new campaign from Kazakhstan next week, probably timed to coincide with Human Rights Day (10 December).  At the moment we’re running 10 campaigns, 9 of them global, and the largest one has 14,431 supporters, though only one other has broken the 10,000 barrier.

Campaigns: We launched another campaign today, in support of locked out workers in the USA.  Meanwhile, our Sri Lanka campaign is doing well, with well over 8,000 messages sent — a significant number of them from Australia.  Our volunteer translators have been working very hard on the many campaigns we’ve had in the last few weeks.  We expect to very soon have another campaign in support of Korean railway workers — now being reviewed by the ITF and ITUC.  And we’ve just learned today that the 3 Cosas campaign here in London has been victorious.  They had a LabourStart campaign that was UK-only during the summer.

Berlin 2014: The organizing committee in Berlin continues to meet regularly and a draft agenda is shaping up very nicely. Last week I reported that 40 people had registered so far; today that number is 128, with the largest groups coming from the UK (19) and Germany (19).  If you’ve not yet registered, please do so today.

Publications: Sales of our calendar have started to pick up — in part due to publicity we did today.   (Free shipping helps.)  This afternoon so far we’ve sold 6 of them to 6 separate individuals.  So the total so far is 197 — but I have every hope that we’ll be over 200 tomorrow and sales will continue to rise as we approach Christmas.

Upcoming meetings: Tom is attending the Unions 21 conference in London tomorrow.  I’ll be speaking next Friday in Freiburg, Germany at an academic conference on “Mobility and Civil Society: How social commitment takes place.”  Among other things, it will be an opportunity to meet German students and talk up our conference.

Articles: I submitted a piece to the ITUC’s online magazine Equal Times about the trade union movement in Georgia; it should appear next week.

This blog: I fixed a problem we were having with the new subscription module.  If you’re getting this as an email, this means it all works.

FirstEnergy sounds like a very nasty employer, having locked out 150 unionized workers three days before Thanksgiving.

They’re the target of the latest LabourStart campaign, launched at the request of IndustriALL and PSI this afternoon.

Campaigns: Three new campaigns were launched in the last week, plus we did publicity for the IUF campaign on Colombia and IndustriALL’s campaign on Iraq.  I really appreciate the incredible work done by our volunteer translators in getting these translations done.

Berlin 2014: Our conference blog is being updated, some 40 people have already registered, and we’re doing loads of publicity. On Friday, I was invited to address a meeting of global union communicators at the ITF headquarters in London about the conference.  There were participants from the ITUC, ITF, IndustriALL, PSI, etc.  I migrated the entire database of conference participants to a relational database using MySQL, which has made it much easier to display (and sort) the list of people who’ve registered.  I wrote to 10 comrades in Turkey specifically appealing for help building a Turkish contingent; no one has replied yet.  If you’ve not yet registered, please do so today – click here.

Mailings to national lists: We just did a mailing to our UK list advertising a half dozen events taking place in the next month and plan to do this regularly; we encouraged people to submit their events to our online events list — and we’ll take future ones from there.  We also did a Canada-only mailing today promoting a Bangladesh garment workers’ meeting in Toronto.

Writings: I had an article in Solidarity about the successful railway workers’ strike in Georgia and have been commissioned to write something on the same subject for Equal Times.  I have also been commissioned to write about the Histadrut’s recent organizing successes for Jungle World, in Germany.

Book & calendar sales: Still sluggish.  We’ve now sold 190 calendars; our third book (Firefox OS) is up to over 160.  An attempt to promote sales of the book on the Iraqi labour movement, “Hadi Never Died”, disappointed with only two sales. Tom is preparing a calendar of trade union events in the UK at which we can sell our publications in 2014, following on the success Derek had at the CUPE convention in Canada.  Comrades — you can help by posting reviews of our books on Amazon and spreading the word about all LabourStart publications.

Social networks: Our group on Facebook is growing quite quickly, though we’re doing nothing to promote it.  66 people joined in the last week alone.  On Twitter, we’ve launched a low-key, low-cost ad campaign which has brought us 12 new followers in the last 2 days (at a cost of £2.00).

At the request of IndustriALL Global Union we’ve launched our third campaign in a week — this one in support of workers in Sri Lanka.

IndustriALL has even done a nice logo for the campaign with their logo and a version of ours.

And after you’ve sent it off, see what you get on the landing page.

Once again we’ve been asked by the RMT union to campaign in support of an industrial dispute — see here.

As these campaigns do not involve extreme violations of workers’ rights, they don’t meet the criteria for global campaigns — but we can certainly do UK-only campaigns as we’ve done in the past.

The campaign should NOT be translated and there’s no need for people from outside the UK to show their support.

Please keep this model in mind when approached by unions in your country who want campaigns that wouldn’t necessarily have a global appeal.

The new campaign is here.  I’ll be doing some basic publicity today, and will send out the appeal for translations over the weekend.

I’ve not been updating this regularly enough, but a lot’s been going on over the last 24 days.

Berlin 2014: I just returned from a short visit to Berlin where I met our organizing committee.  The conference opens in a little more than 6 months and so far we’ve got a venue (Ver.di headquarters), an organizing committee, a registration form and a blog full of information — so far, so food.  Please make sure to register if you plan to come.

Kiev 2013: We had a very successful meeting of LabourStart correspondents (and potential correspondents), and our first ever rock concert last week.  See details below.  Followup has included the translation of additional pages into Russian, and signing up some new correspondents.

Firefox OS book: This was published on 24 October; sales so far have not been as high as expected, but we have sold over 140 of them.  If you’ve read the book, please make sure to post reviews to Amazon.  If you don’t have the book, please order a copy now.

The LabourStart Calendar 2014: We need to work harder to promote sales.  We sold 164 last time I reported to you, and in the last 24 days — just 11 more.  Please do what you can to promote this.

Intern: We have hired Tom Harris, who began work 8 days ago.  Edd continues to work with us one day a week.

Campaigns: Last time I reported, we were at 10,100 messages for our most recent campaign (Colombia); in the last 24 days we’ve picked up about 800 more.  We closed our Peru campaign.

Donations: We’ve received substantial donations from the FDHT in Geneva and the RMT union in London.

Upcoming travel: In December, I’ve been invited to speak about online campaigning at a conference in Freiburg, Germany.  In January, Tom and I will go to Berlin for another meeting with the conference organizers.  At the end of that month, I’ll be in Brussels to help the European Trade Union Institute plan a course — initiated by the German national trade union center DGB — on the subject of unions and the net.