Inside LabourStart

We’ve gotten a very good letter from the union, Hava-Is, which you can read here.

New office: Now moved in; Internet access being set up today. This has taken up a lot of time over the last couple of weeks, and not everything is here yet, and there are still boxes on the floor, but it’s a working office – our very first.

Campaigns: The Spanish miners’ campaign, our first with IndustriALL, is now closed. The Zimbabwe campaign was launched last week, as was the Siemens USA campaign. A fortnightly update was sent to all our campaign partners.

Articles: My article on the case of Kamal Abbas in Egypt was picked up by In These Times (USA), and run in their web edition. In the German newspaper Jungle World (print and web edition) my article on the subject of anti-union violent repression appeared.

Courses: I met in Brussels yesterday with two staffers from the European Trade Union Institute to discuss a course I will help run with them on the subject of online campaigning.

Facebook: We now have a page on Facebook in Turkish.

See here.  One of the first times we’ve been asked to do a campaign where messages were sent to the workers, not to the employer.  The election is on 6 September, only 12 days from now, so this will be a short campaign.

I wrote to IndustriALL as I’d heard that this dispute was now over; they have confirmed this and have asked us to take down the campaign.  We should have a detailed report from them soon about the effect of our campaign – though apparently the result for the miners was not a great one.

In a week when the eyes of the world are focussed on labour relations in southern Africa, perhaps it’s not the best timing, but we’ve been asked by IndustriALL to urgently launch a campaign in support of workers in Zimbabwe.

The campaign is here – please do what you can to promote it.

Mid-August should be a quiet time, so this is actually not the worst time to move office.

This is what our office looked like on Friday — but it doesn’t look this way anymore, as yesterday a volunteer (a UNISON member who works for the NHS) and I moved 8 large boxes, and tomorrow we begin moving the furniture.  (Two new volunteers, one bringing a van, for that one.)

The effort is being helped along by volunteers, trade unionists and friends, as a result of an appeal I made to our UK mailing list.

In addition to everything related to the office move, which is taking up a considerable amount of time, here are some other things that have happened in the last few days:

Campaigns: IndustriALL has asked us to launch a Zimbabwe campaign, but I have raised the question with them of whether this is appropriate at this time considering what has just happened in South Africa.  I’ll keep you posted about their response.  Our latest campaign – DHL Turkey – was promoted on Monday and currently, with 5,720 messages sent, is the largest of the five most recent campaigns.  On Sunday, 12 August we promoted PlayFair’s Olympics campaign, which turned out to be problematic as the IOC began rejecting all the messages sent.  We persuaded PlayFair to write to everyone who had sent a message explaining what happened and making sure their voices would be heard.

Global Solidarity Conference 2012: I have invited one of our comrades from Turkey to participate and will shortly be confirming the participation of a key correspondent from Russia.  I had a Skype call with three members of the organizing committee in Sydney and discussed progress.

Fifty Shades of Campaigning: This is title of a conference being organized by Wales UNISON – I’ve been invited to speak, to actually run four sessions, in mid-September in Cardiff.

LAWCHA Conference, New York City, June 2013: I’ve been invited to organize a panel at this event and have submitted a proposal.

Unite Here: I had a meeting in London with one of their staff who’s been relocated to the UK.  We discussed unions, campaigning, LabourStart, and so on.  I also had a Skype conference with their social media coordinator to discuss issues regarding their global campaigns, which we have helped promote.  These meetings came in the wake of our promotion of the Hyatt Hurts campaign the union is now waging.

Donations: We’ve received a substantial one from the CCU in Canada.  On Monday, I wrote an individual letter and sent this with a brochure to every single trade union general secretary in Britain.  So far, there has been no response.  (Eight British unions have already donated this year for a total of £2,650 – but we can certainly aim to double that.)

Campaigns:

• I cleared the backlog of translations of campaigns and mass mailings.
• Two new campaigns were launched – Swaziland (7 August) and Turkey DHL (8 August).
• I fixed the mycampaigns.cgi script — while it was working OK, it was forcing the system to use the old website addresses and forwarding.
• The Iraq campaign was closed with fewer than 4,000 messages sent.
• We assisted Unite Here and the IUF with promoting their own campaigns this week; in the former case, this also consisted in giving them a lot of constructive criticism about how to campaign globally.
• Two campaigns were given a special boost this week – the RMT campaign in support of London cleaners on Friday when a 48 strike as launched with picketing outside the Olympics venue, and the Hava-Is campaign for Turkish airline workers – because of the new ITF video.  The last of these is our largest campaign at the moment, with well over 8,000 messages sent.

Ukrainian edition: I added 9 correspondents – Masha is co-ordinating this effort.  The interface is already working.

London Labour Film Festival: I’ve been promoting this to our lists and via social media.  LabourStart is getting a quarter-page ad in the festival program.  We are also allowed to distribute our brochure at the door.  The festival takes place in mid-September at the Prince Charles Cinema in central London.

App: We’ve been sent an interesting proposal by a company in Canada offering to do this for us; now under consideration.

Conference 2012: Now little more than 3 months away.  The organizing committee is meeting again next week.  A draft registration form is now ready and a bank account has been set up.  Proposals are being discussed for panels.

Conference 2013: There’s been an offer to host this in Vancouver.  More details soon.

Office in London: I continue to search – have found one very good candidate on Thursday, am looking at another on Monday and will probably decide then.  Packing up of the existing office has already begun.

Fund-raising: We received a substantial one-off donation from the IUF.

Upcoming conferences I’ve been invited to speak at: UNITE Wales in Cardiff in September (“Fifty shades of campaigning“); NASUWT in London in November; Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA) in New York City next June.  (I will be contacting some of you for help on organizing a panel for the last of these.)  I also hope to attend the TUC in Brighton in early September.  These are all also opportunities to distribute the LabourStart brochure (1,900+ copies remaining).

Other writing: The current wave of anti-union repression we’re seeing in places like Nigeria and Turkey is the subject of my next regular monthly column for Jungle World.

Barely three days after the launch of our Swaziland campaign we’re going live with an ITF-backed campaign in support of DHL workers in Turkey.  This is the fifth campaign we’ve launched in the last month and the 4th Turkish campaign out of the 10 active campaigns.  In addition we’ve been asked to show support for Unite Here’s Hyatt Hurts campaign in the USA, the IUF’s campaign in support of Tunisian Kraft employees, and more.  It’s a busy period for us, even if many trade unions are taking a summer break up here in the northern hemisphere …

This is going to be a busy week.

Today we launched the Swaziland campaign – a joint effort of 3 GUFs.

This will be followed later today with a mass mailing.

But following up on phone calls from a union in the USA and one of the GUFs, we’ll actually be doing four mass mailings in English in the next few days.  These will include one new campaign on Turkey at the end of the week, and the other two are pointers to existing campaigns — one is ours (with a new video), the other belongs to a US union.

Not all of these mailings will need to be translated and we’ll try to keep each one very short, and focussed on only one thing.

Our latest Iraq campaign, launched at the request of the ICEM (now IndustriALL) has closed after two months.  The campaign attracted only 3,951 supporters, which is quite small for us, even though it was available in 9 languages.  We’ve asked IndustriALL, who have agreed to close it down, for a summary of what the effect of the campaign was, but are still waiting for a reply.

The backlog of translations of campaigns and mass mailings has now been completely cleared.  In future, we’re aiming to have more of the work done by the translators themselves, which will speed things up considerably.

There are several new campaigns coming up.  We may well launch a Swaziland campaign later today at the request of the EI, PSI and ITF. UniteHere in the USA has something they want to discuss with us.  And we’ve been talking to Iranian comrades about a possible campaign in defense of jailed activists (yet again).  It’s been 12 days since the launch of our last campaign (Peru – 4,851 messages sent so far).