Inside LabourStart

Campaigns:

We closed two campaigns last week – the very short Bangladesh campaign which did flood the labour minister with messages and for which the ITUC was grateful, and the Mitsui Vancouver port campaign, which had run for the full three months.  We launched two new campaigns together with the ITF and IndustriALL on India and the Philippines.  Meanwhile, our newly-globalized Canada campaign is well above 9,000 messages sent.

Books:

We’re proceeding at a good clip with the research and writing of our third book this year.  More details at the end of August.

Sales of the first book (campaigns) rose substantially from just 7 sold in July to 32 (including 15 distributed at the Global Labour Institute summer school).  Sales of the second book (global labour movement) rose in July from 11 to 31, also including 15 at the GLI event.

2014 Conferences:

There’s been a draft paper written about the Vancouver (Canada) conference to be held in the fall of 2014.  And a small organizing committee is to meet in August in Berlin to make further plans for the May 2014 conference there.

Fundraising:

Unite the Union, Britain’s largest, made a substantial donation, as pledged.  The total amount donated to LabourStart in July is £3,549.

Internationalization:

We now have campaigns in Hindi — something we’ve been planning for 5 years and now finally realized.

We’ve also decided to focus much more on the languages where we already have substantial mailing lists, but for which we do not always have translations of campaigns and mailings.  The top five language priorities for us are English, French, Spanish, Italian and Turkish.  We’re working to make sure that the top 10 languages, all of which have mailing lists of 1,000 or more, are translated for each campaign, and a mailing done each time.  (The other five languages — also very high priorities for us — are German, Norwegian, Russian, Dutch and Chinese.)

Meetings in the real world:

Edd attended the GLI summer school and wrote up an account (see below).
Eric had a meeting with Elizabeth Tang, head of the International Domestic Workers Network and we discussed many potential areas of cooperation.

Our Maruti Suzuki campaign is now available in Hindi, thanks to contacts in IndustriALL who did some translation for us.

This means we can begin to create an email list in this important world language and hopefully translate future campaigns as well.

At the request of the ITUC we’re closing the Bangladesh campaign after just 11 days and 6,472 messages sent.

The government passed a labour law that wasn’t entirely to our liking, but our campaign did have an effect.

According to our source, “the labour minister himself mentioned to me how many emails he had received when I saw him last week”.

This is a big one — hundreds of workers jailed, a mass hunger strike about to begin … Please support it and help spread the word: http://www.labourstartcampaigns.net/show_campaign.cgi?c=1889

Let’s try to make this one as big as we can, even if summer campaigns (here in the northern hemisphere) are notoriously hard to do …

Campaigns

At the request of the ITUC we launched a campaign in support of labour law reform in Bangladesh. It will not be live for very long. After 6 days online the campaign has 6,143 supporters in 8 languages.

We also turned our Canadian brewery campaign into a global one, and it now has 8,365 supporters in 3 languages. The IUF is supporting this one.

We’re going to launch two new campaigns (one is definite, one is a maybe) tomorrow — in support of Maruti Suzuki workers in India, and to protest the killing of a trade union leader in the Philippines. We’re working with the ITF and IndustriALL on this.

At the request of the IUF, we promoted their Mondelez Lebanon campaign to our English list and via social media. It shot up from 4,007 to 6,464 supporters in just two days.

In our campaigns, we added a new feature — a link to the Radio Labour report or interview linked to the campaign. You can see this on the right side of our campaigns pages.

And as “Select a country” had become one of our most popular countries for campaign supporters, I’ve now deleted this option which so many people were accepting as the default.

LabourStart books

We now have the beginnings of a rudimentary Publications page on our site, This will be tweaked and improved and probably moved off Inside LabourStart. We’ll be adding reviews as we find out about them.

I met with co-author Jeremy Green to make final plans for one of our next two books, about Firefox OS as a tool for social change. I’ve been writing a lot of text for it, and we hope to have it ready for sale by early September.

We’re still hoping to publish a selection of Dan Gallin’s writings as well, so 2013 should see at least 4 LabourStart books published.

Sales remain sluggish, with only 7 copies of the campaigning book and 11 copies of the global labour movement book sold by CreateSpace this month.

Fundraising

Our July 1st appeal to readers did not produce the results I’d hoped for, in part because it’s July, and in part because we allowed donations only in British pounds for the first few days.

That’s now been corrected and the donations page works in six popular currencies.

The total raised from the 19,962 campaign supporters so far has been £1,843.72.  This is less than half what we raised in April.

We received a donation from the Lipman-Miliband Trust (yes, that Miliband) and commitments from the IUF, Unite and the RMT.

Internationalization

We recruited 4 new Italian correspondents in an effort to revitalize our Italian news page, following a mailing to our entire Italian list about this.

This campaign may be live for only a couple of weeks – but it’s hugely important.

Campaigns

Bangladesh: The ITUC is proposing a new campaign in support of changes to the labour laws; it could be launched today.

India: We’ve been asked to do a campaign in support of Suzuki workers.  We’re waiting for an answer from IndustriALL on this.

Turkey: We’re up to 21,634 supporters for this, our largest-ever campaign.

Canada: Our campaign in support of brewery workers is rapidly approaching the 5,000 mark, which is exceptionaly good for a campaign in just one language, targetting only one country.  It was helped by the IUF promoting it in a mailing.

PepsiCo India: We helped the IUF promote this important campaign on their site, which is now up to well over 9,400 supporters.

Thailand: Our campaign in support of Andy Hall was closed, and we await news from BWI and UNI about the results.

International Training Centre of the ILO – Turin, Italy

I spoke yesterday at a seminar for trade union communicators from Asia.  There were 15 participants from a wide range of countries and for most of them it was their first exposure to LabourStart.  Each of them left with copies of both of our books.  I’ll be following up with all of them as individuals.

LabourStart books

Our total sales for Campaigning online and winning is 904 (78 in French, 826 in English), and for the Global labour movement it’s 427 (English only).  Of those 1,253 books, 92 were Kindle editions and all the rest, paperbacks.  We’re working hard on books 3 and 4 now, and will have more details very soon.

Fundraising

We did the quarterly fundraising mailing on Monday to our 19,692 core supporters (people who’ve supported at least 3 LabourStart campaigns in the last 12 months).  There were some issues with the payment system (until today, it only accepted one currency) and some people were confused about how to change the default country it was showing. Nevertheless, we’ve received a considerable number of donations, totalling £1,523 (US$2,283).

Labour history calendar

We’re now getting closer to publishing this and today are writing to a number of key LabourStart correspondents and translators in different countries to get the best 13 illustrations we can for this.

New home page

Edd has been working together with Espen and Andy to finalize the migration of our last two remaining language editions of LabourStart to the new format introduced some time ago in Englsh.  The Norwegian version is now live and the French one is coming soon.

After three months and 9,105 supporters, we’ve closed down the Andy Hall / Thailand campaign.  Waiting to hear from UNI and BWI what effect, if any, the campaign had on the ground.  This leaves us with just 3 active campaigns one of which will closed in two weeks.  However, there have been at least two campaign requests that came in over the weekend.

Today we helped the IUF with their new campaign to compel PepsiCo to stop union-busting in West Bengal. The help consisted of a mass mailing and promotion to social media (including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit and Wikipedia). The campaign had 4,899 supporters and after 90 minutes of a LabourStart push, that had risen to 5,219 — a gain of 320. I hope we can get this campaign over 10,000, quickly.