Inside LabourStart

Fundraising: Facing a significant fall in our bank accounts, we put out a call for donations, including a mailing to our English list. In the last few days, we raised over £2,800 and are expecting more to come in. Comrades are encouraged to ask their unions to make donations if possible.

Programming: I looked into a complaint about the language selection drop-down menus, but could not reproduce the problem. Meanwhile, our pages showing state/province news have had a bug for years — clicking on ‘More news’ would show news from the country, not the state, and the display of the page was terrible (very small font, etc.) I have now fixed this.

Podcasts: I participated in the regular weekly online meeting of the Labor Podcasting and Radio Network, a US-based group. I learned that the numbers of downloads we are seeing is actually quite good, and will grow. I also learned that often the most successful interviews are with rank-and-file activists, and these sometimes draw larger audiences than those with high-ranking union leaders.

News: In the first two weeks of June, 32 of our volunteer correspondents were active, and they posted a total of 1,503 news stories — averaging 107 stories per day.

Campaigns: We continue to have no new campaigns listed on our home page. We have reached out to a number of unions, but so far nothing.

Campaigns: We now have no campaigns listed on our home page as we have now closed the Kenya and Myanmar campaigns.  Both ended with good results, as did the Egypt campaign which we closed last week.  We added new code to the home page to cope with this situation.  We continue to reach out to unions offering help, and today did a social media post across numerous platforms advertising our availability to help.

Fundraising:  Our appeal a week ago following the good news from Egypt generated just under £1,000 in individual donations.

Correspondents:  We wrote to 6 new correspondents (out of 16) who have not posted any news stories, asking if they need help.

Today in Labour History: We had a problem with one new correspondent not being able to login; this was now fixed.

Victory in Egypt: We suspended our campaign in support of the Mahalla textile workers following receipt of the news that the two remaining jailed union activists have now been freed.

Zimbabwe: We were approached by a union whose leader has been jailed and we reached out to the Education International. We’re now having discussions with them about how we can help.

New campaigns: We have reached out to a number of unions as we are about to run out of live campaigns. There are several good prospects, though we may shortly face a situation where we have no current campaigns on our home page.  I will be tweaking our home page software to cope with that situation.

Podcasts: We didn’t release a new podcast this week, though we do have one that needs some editing and will be released shortly. We have a number of people to followup with to ensure that we continue released one new show each week.

News: In the first 30 days of May, our 44 active volunteer correspondents posted 3,525 news stories, an average of 117 per day. This is a big increase compared to a week ago, as we added nearly 1,000 stories this week. The top 5 correspondents who have posted the most news stories this month are (in order) Derek, Eric, Patrick, Pat and Espen.

Fixed bug: Previously, when looking at news from a particular country, if you selected ‘all languages’ it would only show English stories in the top 10, on the left side the page. I have now fixed this to work correctly.

Clicky: We briefly used this service to trace hits to our site, but have not done so for many years. Following reminders from the company, I have now removed all references to Click from our site.

Podcasts: We released our interview with Esther Lynch, general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), this week. It fairly quickly picked up over 100 downloads. The previous week’s interview, with Khaing Zar, now has over 220 downloads. We have one interview ready to go, and are trying to finalise interviews with trade unionists in Argentina, the US and Europe. We now have a prominent link to the podcasts on all our home pages, in all languages.

Kenya campaign: We’re slowly getting close to 3,000 supporters in what we hope will be the final days of this campaign, as the strike appears to be over. The union has asked us to keep it going a bit longer. The campaign is in 15 languages, and the ones with the largest numbers of supporters are (in order) English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian and Dutch.

New campaigns: We continue to reach out to unions that might need our help. This week, this included IF Metall in Sweden, where the Tesla strike continues, the independent trade unions of Belarus, and the Georgian Trade Union Confederation offering our help in supporting the pro-democracy protests.

News: Our volunteer correspondents posted 1,879 stories to LabourStart in the first 16 days of May, an average of more than 117 per day, a slight decrease compared to the previous week. This month, 36 of our correspondents have been active – we need to grow that.

Podcasts: This week we interviewed Esther Lynch, general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation — that interview will go live next week. We released the interview we did with Myanmar trade union leader Khaing Zar and in its first day online, it soared to 139 downloads, well on its way to being one of our most popular podcasts.

Kenya campaign: The Kenya campaign, launched at the request of PSI, picked up more than 1,000 new supporters in the last week, and appears in 15 languages — a gain of 8 languages this week. The union has suspended the strike but we’ve been asked to keep the campaign live for a while longer.

Panama campaign: We closed this campaign after more than four months online — it had 5,282 supporters and appeared in 12 languages.

News: In the first 9 days of May, our volunteer correspondents posted 1,082 news stories, or 120 on average every day.

Campaigns: We launched a new campaign in support of striking health care workers in Kenya.  It currently appears in 7 languages and has 1,338 supporters.

Podcasts: This week we interviewed a leader of the independent trade union movement in Myanmar — which will go live next week.  We released an interview with Jan Willem Goudriaan, general secretary of EPSU.

Iran: The workers’ rights NGO ‘Free Them Now’ released a video of LabourStart’s Eric Lee calling on the ILO to refuse to seat the Iranian ‘worker delegates’ at the International Labour Conference next month.

Egypt: We also prepared a video for the CTUWS at their request demanding on May Day the release of the jailed worker activists from Mahalla textiles.  It does not yet appear to be live on the net.

This blog: After about 8 months of silence, we resumed updating this blog, with several catch-up posts this week.

Since the beginning of August, when this blog was last updated (sorry!) we’ve run seven campaigns in support of workers and their unions, around the world.  These included campaigns in Central America, North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. There are several more in the pipeline.

Here’s the list:

Current campaigns:

– Egypt: Solidarity with Mahalla Textile Workers [11-Mar-2024] – CTUWS – 4,867 supporters
– Panama: Stop attacks on SUNTRACS [21-Dec-2023]  – BWI – 5,270 supporters
– Workers’ Rights, not for Sale! Rescind FSC certification in Military Junta-ruled Myanmar [19-Dec-2023] – BWI – 4,754 supporters

Closed campaigns:

– Québec: Support unions’ call for dialogue and negotiations [28-Nov-2023] – Education International and PSI – 5,095 supporters
– Serbia: Airline must stop union busting [02-Nov-2023] – ETF – 4,670 supporters
– Georgia: Reinstate sacked doctors who protested [11-Oct-2023] – EPSU – 5,785 supporters
– Iran: Free jailed teacher unionists now [14-Sep-2023]- Education International – 6,910 supporters

These campaigns are somewhat smaller than other recent campaigns and there are fewer of them, but we expect in 2024 to host more campaigns and working together with our global union partners, to involve more people in them.

Due to some overseas travel and other issues, I’ve not been updating this blog — the last update was on 1 June.  So this will try to cover the last two months briefly.  I’ll try to keep the updates shorter and more frequent in future.

Campaigns:

• We just now launched a new campaign, together with PSI, in support of a jailed trade union leader in Mexico.  Translations are coming in and publicity happening.  After the first day, we have 2,750 supporters — a good start.
• We closed the Belarus and Georgia campaigns after three months.

Publicity:

• We’ve created the first version of a media list with a few dozen names.  All campaigns, events and conferences will now be sent to them.  Comrades with suggestions of who else should be on this list, please do let us know.
• We have reinvigorated our Instagram account (485 followers) and signed up for a Threads account.  We continue to grow our followings on Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn and Mastodon.
• We ran advertising campaigns on Facebook and Microsoft in support of our Belarus campaign, but they produced very disappointing results.

Next book:

• Some of the participants in our recent Global Solidarity Conference have sent in texts of their presentations.  We have about 9,000 words and will probably post this online and perhaps as a print booklet as well.  The texts need to be edited.

Donations:

• We received a very generous donation from the European Transport Workers Federation (ETF) and another from NUPGE in Canada.  In September we will resume our fundraising efforts.

Advertising: We had ad campaigns on both Microsoft and Facebook but with disappointing results, so both have been suspended.  We need to have a re-think about how we promote our Belarus campaign more effectively.

Arabic: We’ve migrated our Arabic language mailing list from Mailjet to a different provider, as Mailjet handled right-to-left languages quite poorly.  And we did our first Arabic language mailing for a long time — in support of the Belarus campaign.  Thank you Assaf for the translation!

Cambodia: We shared Eric Lee’s article about the jailing of a woman trade union leader — but so far we have not been asked to help with a campaign (we did reach out).  The Australian Council of Trade Unions already has an online campaign going.  The article was also posted by the Svensson Foundation in Norway.

Campaigns – Belarus: The campaign is now in Arabic.  The campaign has now also been translated into Polish, but we are awaiting the translation of the mass mailing as well.

Campaigns – Georgia: The Wolt campaign is now in Polish.  Waiting for the mass mailing text to be translated.

Fundraising: The last translated fundraising mailings have now gone out — to our Portuguese, Hungarian and Polish lists.  So far, the mailing went out in 12 languages, but unfortunately it has not yet been translated into German.

Global Solidarity Conference: The Georgian Trade Union Confederation released an excellent video which we’ve shared widely. We also wrote to all the conference participants asking those who spoke in plenaries or workshops to share their texts for a possible book.  (If we don’t publish a book, we will find a way to share the texts online.)

News: As we reported today across social media, LabourStart shared 17,109 news stories in the first five months of 2023 — that’s an average of 3,421 per month, or over 113 per day.  Thank you to all our volunteer correspondents!

In the last week …

Belarus campaign: We’ve launched an ad campaign on Facebook following a small one on Microsoft (1,716 views of the ad, 15 clicks, no new supporters added). The Facebook ads, after two days online, were shown 9,833 times and 218 people clicked on them. The campaign currently has 6,475 supporters. So far, only one new supporter has been added through this advertising campaign. The campaign has now been translated into Arabic. Significant publicity was given to the campaign at this week’s ETUC congress in Berlin, but only a very small number of delegates there signed up to support it.

Poland IKEA campaign: This campaign has now been suspended after three months online.  We have not yet heard back from Solidarnosc on this.