Inside LabourStart

I cannot emphasize enough how important this is:

http://www.labourstartcampaigns.net/show_campaign.cgi?c=1840

Campaigns: We launched two new campaigns this week and closed down one.

Our campaign in support of General Electric’s Erie, Pennsyslvania workers (organized by the UE), has already gotten over 7,500 messages sent in 9 languages with more to come.

The UK-only campaign we launched in support of outsourced workers at the University of London has gotten just under 1,200 messages.

In addition, we closed down the Turkey campaign after 3 months — a campaign which generated 12,700 messages making it one of the largest we’ve ever run. According to the ITUC, “KESK does consider it [our campaign] to be one of the elements in a whole joint effort which eventually led to the release of several dozens of trade unionists, even if 90 of them remain in jail to date.”

We now have a version of our campaigns that works really well on phones and tablets and expect to go live with it sometime today. (Read more here).

We discovered a problem on our campaigns page — it seemed that quite a large number of people were clicking on the ‘share on Facebook’ link but not actually sending off messages. It may be that the page design was flawed. This has now been fixed (read more here).

We helped the TUC with a special mailing to our UK list about their online campaign to pressure the Gap and Debenhams to sign up to the Bangladesh Accord.

News: We’ve made some fixes to our various pages, including these:

A country page (e.g., the UK) that is supposed to show one language (e.g., English) will now only show campaigns in that language.

On the French Canadian edition, we’ve now fixed some translation problems Andy reported.

We’ve made some steps forward on the Turkish and other editions getting them ready for launch using the new format for all languages.

We fixed a glitch that was sorting some news stories on the country pages in the wrong order, as Roy reported.

We also dealt with the problem of a state/province appearing on the wrong country page, discovered by Derek.

And finally, we made the photo of the day and the campaign photo appear on the front page with the same width for each one, so the page won’t appear to be lop-sided.

Berlin 2014: We’ve been in touch with the ITUC this week about coordinating our efforts.

Events: There have been some improvements to the Events module now displayed on the front page of country pages in English. (See here for example.)

We’re not showing old events anymore.

We have a link to show more events if there are any. (This page is being improved to look nicer.)

And we’re currently working on a link to submit events which will appear together with the events.

Publicity: I had articles in Stronger Unions (UK) and Our Times (Canada), both on labour themes. I’ve also been in touch with Equal Times (ITUC) and Neues Deutschland about articles on labour issues.

We’re running an ad campaign on Facebook now — here are the numbers so far: Ad seen by 37,747 people in the UK and Germany; 264 of them have liked our page, bringing the total number of likes up to 6,964.

Books: We’ve sold 251 copies of the Global Labour Movement book so far, plus 18 Kindle editions for a total of 269. This is a slower sale than our previous book, which sold more than 400 copies during the first month. We hope that bulk purchases from unions can help.

Fundraising: We just received a very generous donation of £5,000 from the ITF, and C$500 from Canadian labour lawyers.

One of the odd things we used to notice was that sometimes, especially at the start of a campaign, the number of people who seem to be recommending the campaign on Facebook (which we displayed) exceeds the number who actually sign up to the campaign.

This may have to do with the fact that the ‘recommend on Facebook’ button appears higher on the page and is therefore somehow more prominent.

So some people have probably been clicking on it, as one might do with an article on a website, not realizing that they haven’t actually supported the campaign yet.

Today, I’ve removed this from the page.

You get another chance to share on Facebook after sending off your message, and I think most people have figured out by now how to share a link on Facebook anyway.

Let’s see if this leads to even a small growth in the number of campaign supporters.

We’ve launched a campaign at the request of UE today.  Some publicity today, much more tomorrow.

And this one (UK only) launched in support of outsourced workers at the University of London.

Campaigns: As reported below, we closed two big campaigns this week. I also posted below a summary of the results of our recent Philippines campaign – written by the union there. We had a meeting in the LabourStart office with a representative of cleaners in London and are looking forward to creating a UK-only campaign for them in the next few days. Edd and I have both been working on creating a mobile-friendly version of our campaigns and hope to have results in a few days.

Events: We’ve gone live with this new module – see details below. It’s just one more service we offer to the international labour movement and one more reason to visit LabourStart every day.

Publicity: To our surprise, there was a full page in Neues Deutschland about LabourStart this week. This could not have come at a better time as we strive to raise our profile in Germany.

Books: Sales of the Global Labour Movement book rose by just 44 this week, up to 224. The first book (Campaigning online) was doing better at this point. This week, I plugged the book yet again to 12,000 trade unionists on our UK list, but got a minimal response. We’ve now sorted out a Kindle edition of this book and will begin publicizing it. Last week, we arranged for ‘extended distribution’ of both titles, meaning they should be available in many local bookstores and shops other than Amazon. Meanwhile, it turns out that CreateSpace has been very poor about payments to us — we’ve raised this with them and they’re invesigating. The total sales of both titles should have earned us over £720 — but we’d only received about £211 of that so far.

Fundraising: The head of Geneva-based charity that promotes human rights in the workplace visited our offices last week and we discussed a number of areas of possible joint work and funding. I followed this up with a detailed proposal on Friday.

Correspondents: Edd has identified 128 active correspondents who are not on our mailing list. We’ll be following up, trying to make sure that we can email to all correspondents. In addition, he’s written to all UK correspondents to encourage them to be more active, and to tag their stories by region (Scotland, Wales, etc).

We’ve gotten permission from IndustriALL to close down two campaigns, one of which is one of the largest we’ve ever done.

The Bangladesh campaign got 14,306 messages sent and appeared in 14 languages.  Though it didn’t reach the 17,214 messages sent in the June 2012 campaign around the case of the Iranian teacher Ghanbari, it ran for just 26 days — and most important, it lead to a major win.  (Mailing is going out today to our lists.)

The Mexico campaign was part of our contribution to IndustriALL’s global week of action in February and resulted in 9,578 messages sent in 15 languages.  The struggle at PKC continues and the union will let us know if a new campaign is needed in the next few weeks.

I always ask unions to tell us what effect our campaign had on the ground.  I don’t always get answers and when I do, they’re often quite … brief.  But the KMU in the Philippines, which we have supported a number of times with campaigns, has sent us a report on the most recent one and have agreed for me to share it with all of you.  It makes for interesting reading.

LabourStart campaign in the Philippines: Summary

The struggle against the systematic attacks on the Philippine trade-union movement continues. One of the most prominent recent forms of these attacks is the filing of trumped-up charges against four leaders of the Kilusang Mayo Uno.

The campaign activities against this attack include giving radio interviews, sending of petition letters to judges, and holding forum in unions and community organizations. The campaign kicked off with the online petition hosted by Labourstart.

The impacts of the LabourStart campaign:

(1) It helped us spread, locally and abroad, the news about the latest attack on workers’ rights in the Philippines.

(2) Locally, it served as part of the activities calling against trade-union repression.

(3) In teaching workers on how to sign up to Labourstart, we were able to give the union members and the general public an idea about attacks on workers’ rights in different countries. In explaining the Labourstart campaign, we also gave a background on the global financial crisis, how it is affecting workers, and how workers are mounting different protests to counter the attacks.

(4) We were able to teach workers the importance of utilizing and maximizing social media in launching campaigns.

The 4,451 signatures mean a lot of support for the accused KMU leaders and for the rest of KMU. Many workers were surprised to know the number of signatures that can be gathered.

Weaknesses:

We encountered some difficulty in holding the online campaign. At first, we relied on sending text messages to union members and friendly organizations, as well as on forwarding the petition via email. In the Philippines, this yielded just a few signatures, mostly of leaders of unions, federations and workers’ institutions.

We then set-up a workers’ committee to help gather more signatures. The committee set up a sign-up booth in different workers’ forum and actions before Labor Day. We explained what LabourStart is and how to sign-up online. This is a positive initiative given that most workers still don’t have email addresses.

So the weaknesses are: (1) Not knowing union members’ use of the Internet – how frequent, through what sites, etc. (2) Relying on electronic means at first in trying to spread awareness about the petition, and (3) Late attempt to overcome the previous weaknesses by coming out with a manifesto.

We learned that if we are going to hold online campaigns again, these should be coupled with actual legwork and face-to-face information drives.

Campaigns: The Bangladesh campaign is one of our very largest, with over 14,000 messages sent — we got a big boost from the British TUC which did an image that went viral and brought a lot of attention the campaign. We will probably close this soon as IndustriALL and UNI have made a lot of progress this week.

The Hong Kong campaign closed and we’ve asked about closing the Mexico campaign after three months — waiting to hear from IndustriALL about that one. We asked the RMT in the UK if we could close the “Justice for the 33” campaign and have been asked to continue to run with it for another month or so.

In addition to publicizing our own campaigns, we were asked to do mailings and promote Amnesty International’s new campaign in support of releasing jailed Bahraini teacher Mahdi, which we did. We also did a special promotion on Fiji for the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the ITUC.

On the technical side, we fixed some of the German text, got an Indonesian ActNOW newswire working, and have made more progress on the new campaigns database which will make our translators’ job considerably easier.

News home pages: Edd’s been working on some of the more complex language home pages which have not yet been moved over to the new format (Dutch, Polish); Eric will be completing work on the French version in the next few days. We fixed a lot of things on the country pages this week, including how campaigns appear (now showing the photo from the most recent campaign and horizontal lines to separate them); news stories that appear in the top 10 don’t repeat in the stories below; when a state/province/region appears in the headline (e.g., England), it now appears in a different colour (as it does in the list of stories); there’s now an ad for the new book on all the country pages in English; the “for more info” link now appears again on all stories where there’s something in that field.

Book 2: Sales are going well; we’ve sold 180 copies — 156 of them this week. We’ll begin work on a Kindle edition this week. Matt H. has volunteered to work on a German edition of this (and the previous book).

Berlin/Vancouver 2014: Edd’s been in touch with some German comrades and we’re making slow and steady progress. Derek is talking to comrades in Canada about a global solidarity conference there as well.

Mailing list: We had a problem with the latest version of our Sendy software — it was screwing up character encoding. This was now fixed.

CloudFlare: The adoption of CloudFlare, which we pay to ensure that our site is accessible everywhere at an improved speed, and which will keep us going even if we go offline for a while, has caused some teething pains. One of them was a delay in seeing the new photo of the day, which Derek has been posting. This has now been fixed.

Today in Labour History: I noticed that the word ‘more’ would appear even when there was no more; this has now been fixed. We have a lot more stories in the database now and a big thanks to Andy for translating so many of them into French.

Fund-raising: The ITF has pledged to donate something, and we’re expecting a donation from the RMT as well, which voted at its conference last year to support LabourStart. In addition, we’ve put in requests for grants for specific purposes to two UK-based charities — the Lipman-Miliband Trust and the Edge Fund.

May Day Party: Considering that this was the first time we’ve tried a real-world fundraiser, it has to be considered a success. The party was held on Saturday night at the Bread & Roses pub in Clapham, south London. David Cockroft, the outgoing general secretary of the ITF, spoke, as did Kirill Buketov of the IUF. (Cockroft’s speech was videoed and we’ll make it available when we have it.) In addition, we had speakers from the “3 Cosas” campaign organizing London cleaners and the RMT “Justice for the 33” campaign, and two entertainers — Dave Thorpe and The Ruby Kid. There were about 45 people there, and we raised £300 for LabourStart. Next year, let’s have LabourStart May Day fundraisers in a dozen cities around the world – start planning yours today.

Books 1, 2 and 3: The global labour movement – an introduction has now been published, we have 100 copies here in London, and today we’ll begin publicity. My personal goal is to sell more copies of this than book 1 (Campaigning online and winning) — we’ve distributed about 769 of those, of which 725 are actual sales. Andy has begun work on a French translation already. We already have plans for a third book — selected essays by former IUF general secretary Dan Gallin. One of those essays almost went into Book 2, but we felt it was more suited to a collection of Dan’s writings, which he’s agreed we can publish. His articles have appeared in book form in French and Russian, but not yet English. We’re putting in a request for financial support to do this to the Lipman-Miliband foundation.

Campaigns: We closed the KMU Philippines campaign after more than 3 months online. The Bangladesh campaign is already one of our largest with 10,649 messages sent as of this morning. We’re about to close down the last remaining UK-only campaign for the RMT. I’ve made steady progress on the transition to a MySQL database for campaigns – we can now show campaigns and add new ones, and we can migrate all campaigns from the old system. As I’ve mentioned before, this will not only lead to a more robust and secure system, but it will be MUCH easier for translators to do their work. It’s a big project and should take a couple more weeks to complete, including thorough testing.

LabourStart country pages: We’ve made a lot of improvements to the LabourStart Canada page and have much more work to do on others, such as the UK page.

Today in Labour History: Edd and others are working very hard to ensure that there’s something every day on the main global page and something every month for each of the key countries. This is an ongoing project and every LabourStart correspondent is invited to help out.

I don’t always post here links to articles I’ve written, but because this one is about a LabourStart campaign and the reaction to it, I thought I’d share it with you.