Inside LabourStart

Campaigns: We expect to launch campaigns shortly in support of workers in Colombia, Lithuania and Turkey. Details soon.

Algeria: With the agreement of IndustriALL we have now closed this campaign. Unfortunately, our comrade Ramzi is still in jail. The struggle continues.

Cambodia: We wrote to dozens of our translators in six languages — resulting in three more translations. But we still have nothing in Japanese, Arabic and Swedish, which is a problem. The campaign continues to grow — now in 22 languages with 12,355 supporters. But growth has slowed.

Iran: At the request of some comrades, we shared statements from Iranian workers’ organisations about expelling Iran from the ILO with senior figures in the global unions.

Jordan: Next month we will host (and promote) a major global webinar in support of Jordan’s embattled teachers’ union. We will reactivate the online campaign before then.

Fund raising: Two unions in Norway made generous donations last week.

Interns: Our three new interns will start their work on Wednesday next week.

Mailing lists: Our mailing lists continue to grow due to the Cambodia campaign – we picked up 223 new subscribers this week, and doubled the size of our small Hindi language list.

Internationalisation: We made a number of improvements to the Russian language home page, adding corrections to the language and replacing the occasional English phrase with the Russian equivalent.

Working Class History T-shirts: We discussed next steps with our friends at DNA-Merch and received payment for the few shirts we sold.

Cambodia: Our campaign continues to grow – we are nearly at 12,000 supporters with translations into 20 languages. It appeared in additional languages last week including Sinhalese, Indonesian, Hindi, Thai and Punjabi. We will be following up regarding missing translations later today – including Korean, Japanese, Swedish, Finnish, etc.  Eric Lee’s article on the struggle in Cambodia was shared widely.

Colombia: We expect a new campaign to be launched next week.  Details coming soon.

Myanmar: We publicised our news page on the first anniversary of the military coup – http://www.labourstart.org/go/1year. We also participated in an online event in support of a brands boycott of Myanmar, as proposed by the unions there.

Other Campaigns: We closed the Jordan teachers and Puerto Rico electrical workers campaigns this week.

Interns: We are down to three interns from the Global Labour University coming on board in mid-February as two have chosen to do their internships elsewhere.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew by 496 this week — due entirely to the fast-growing Cambodia campaign.

T-shirts: We apparently helped to sell 18 Rosa Luxemburg t-shirts last month.

Cambodia: Our campaign had more than 10,000 supporters by mid-day — our largest campaign in several years. One result of this has been a big increase in the size of our mailing lists. Another is that the company has been forced to make a rare public pronouncement insisting that they are not busting unions (they are).

Colombia: We have a draft campaign in the works, probably to go live next week. The previous campaign is now closed.

Latin America: We have plans to hold an online regional meeting of LabourStart correspondents – details coming soon.

Thailand: We had a long online chat with the Solidarity Centre staff there to discuss cooperation, including future campaigns together.

Donations: We received a very generous donation from the BC Government Employees union in Canada.

Interns: We will be having five interns from the Global Labour University and are currently planning their projects.

T-shirts: We did an unprecedented second mass mailing promoting the Rosa Luxemburg shirts. With fingers crossed, we hope to have helped sell a few. We should have an update next week.

Cambodia: We launched a major new campaign with the support of the IUF. As of right now, the campaign has 4,700 supporters and appears in ten languages.

Donations: PSI has made another generous donation to LabourStart.

Interns: We interviewed five potential interns from the Global Labour University and have decided to take them all. They will begin work in mid-February for about six weeks.

Our next book: Good progress is being made on our next book, an updated version of our ‘Campaigning Online and Winning’ book from several years ago.

T-shirts: We continued with weekly publicity across social media and next week we’ll include a reminder in the mass mailing as well. This month’s shirt featuring Rosa Luxemburg should prove more popular than the previous ones, we think.

Cambodia: Striking workers at NagaWorld band together to protect union leaders from further arrests.

Cambodia: We expect to shortly launch a campaign in support of jailed casino union leaders.

Iran: Our three-month-old campaign has now been closed in all languages.

Kazakhstan: Following the release of jailed union leaders, a decision was taken not to launch a LabourStart campaign at this time. However, the ITUC did issue a strong statement which we shared widely on our news pages and across social media.

Fundraising: We now have a draft letter and have reached out to a couple of global unions which donated during this quarter last year.

Interns: The Global Labour University has put us in touch with five students; we will be interviewing them all early next week.

T-shirts: We did a second round of publicity to promote the Rosa Luxemburg t-shirt, across social media. Later in the month, we’ll send out a mass mailing as well.

Ramzi Dardar – still in jail.

Algeria campaign: Following a conversation with IndustriALL – in which we learned that Ramzi remains in jail – we decided to ramp up publicity, both LabourStart and IndustriALL. We will make a special effort to reach out to unions in the Arab world.

Myanmar: We closed down the campaign with BWI’s permission. As they summed it up, “Early November, the CGU [Council of Global Unions] sent out letters to the UNGA [United Nations General Assembly] credentials committee chair and members with the signatories of the petition in attachment, asking to reject the junta’s credential. On 1 December, the credentials committee deferred the decision – rejecting the junta’s credential for the moment. Good first step.” This is good news and we believe that our campaign contributed to this.

Palestine: A couple of us participated in the webinar organised by Maan – and we expect a new campaign to be launched in the new year.

Puerto Rico: After three months we asked whether we could suspend the campaign and have been told we should keep it live for now.

Mailing lists: In the absence of new campaigns, the list is only growing slowly – we picked up just 37 new subscribers this week. This will grow in the new year.

Twitter: We have just under 30,000 followers to LabourStart’s main global account (in English) – and by the time you read this, we will probably have reached our target. Well done to all those who have invested many hours in growing our presence on this important social media platform – especially Derek.

Palestine: We had a long call with WAC Maan to discuss one of their current struggles to unionise food workers in the West Bank.  We will find ways to help.

Africa: We did a second mailing to our Africa correspondents about holding an online meeting in January.

Algeria: We’ve proposed closing this campaign down, and will have a discussion with IndustriALL next week about this.

Campaign victories in 2021: Our intern Cam prepared a report on our wins, which we shared with our mailing lists.

Myanmar: We will shortly be closing down this campaign with the agreement of BWI.

Podcast: The Union Dues podcast we did, which had 215 listeners and was the 2nd most popular they had ever done, rose to 278 in the last week.

T-shirts: We included a promotion for the Working Class History t-shirt of the month in this week’s mailing.

Twitter: Our list of global unions which had 25 followers this week now has 73 followers.

Twitter: We created a List of global unions and publicised it widely across social media (but not yet in a mass mailing). The list already has 25 followers and we’ve been re-tweeting many of the posts there to boost interest in what the global unions are saying and doing.

Africa: We wrote to all 68 correspondents we identified in 19 countries noting that we’ll hold our first online event with them in January.

Romania: With the agreement of the ETF, we closed down the long-running campaign in support of Bucharest metro workers.  The campaign had nearly 7,800 supporters, making it one of the largest recent campaigns.

Interns: We will be reaching out to labour studies departments looking for recent graduates as potential paid interns (living wage). We have also been approached by GLU to again take interns this coming year.

LabourStartJobs.org: We gave further publicity to this sub-site of LabourStart, which continues to feature jobs in unions in the UK and Canada, with a smattering form elsewhere.  27 jobs were posted here in the first 9 days of December.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew by another 143 subscribers this week – 96 of those for the English list.

Podcast: The Union Dues podcast (UK) featuring Eric Lee talking about LabourStart is the third most popular they have ever done, with about 215 listeners. We did a further round of publicity later in the week to boost this a bit.

Africa: Work continues on preparing for our first-ever online meeting of correspondents. We have a tool that will allow our intern to compile a current list of all correspondents for the more than 50 African nations.  It turns out that we have 30 volunteer correspondents in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Nigeria with others scattered across the continent, and it will be good to meet them all — even if the meeting is on Zoom.

Brazil: With the agreement of PSI, we are closing down this campaign after many months.

Colombia: We have been asked to keep this campaign live for a while longer.

Jordan: We had an online meeting with the Education International to discuss next steps in this campaign. These will include online events in English and Arabic and a major effort to ramp up support for the Arabic version of the campaign.

Newswires: We have begun the process of repair, having fixed the Dutch and Norwegian newswires. Many more will be done in the coming days.

Pakistan: We have been asked to keep this campaign live for a while longer; there has apparently been some progress on the ground and the campaign is having an effect.

T-shirts: We did a second mass mailing to promote the t-shirts with Working Class History.  We’ll shortly share the results  — when we get them.

UnionDues podcast: This went live on 30 November. According to their website, it has been downloaded more than 200 times. We gave this podcast extensive publicity, including a mass mailing to our English list. (Our own counter shows just under 500 people clicked on our version of the link to the podcast.)

Amazon: We shared a link to all LabourStart’s coverage of struggles at Amazon on Black Friday (today).

Germany: Apparently, our Twitter feed came under attack from some far-right accounts.

Jordan: One month after the launch of the campaign we asked Education International about possible next steps, including a webinar

Norway: IndustriEnergi voted at its congress to make a very generous donation to LabourStart.
We have fixed the Norwegian newswire but now need to get the word out about changes that need to be made.

Sweden: We had a very good discussion with LO about cooperation in future.

UK: We did a mailing to our UK list (about 9,600 people) in supporting of striking couriers in Sheffield.
The Union Dues podcast has been finalised and will be released next week. As it’s all about LabourStart, we’ll share it widely.