Inside LabourStart

Campaigns:

• I contacted Hava Is about their campaign (aviation workers in Turkey); they want to continue it for another month in part because of the ITF’s renewed commitment to this cause.
• There was a fairly large backlog of campaigns that had been translated, or mailings, that required additional work by me.  About two thirds of these have now been done, and I’ve asked translators to help out by posting the content directly themselves – this is now happening in German, for example.
• The page showing how campaigns are doing in all languages now continues a clear link to see the breakdown for each campaign, including showing countries.
• The Algeria campaign has been closed.
• We suffered a brief (hour long) distributed denial of service attack to our connection the new server in Iceland; following this, I discovered a fairly large number of spammers trying to sign up to our campaigns.  I removed all the ones I could identify from our mailing lists and then added a simple spam-prevention bit of code to the campaigns software (which had a bug in it that caused problems for about a day).
• I wrote to all translators showing them what was missing and encouraging them to translate all active campaigns and mass mailings.
• We’ve had campaigns translated into Indonesian and Portuguese for the first time in years – thanks to new volunteer translators.
• We’re about to launch a new campaign in support of public sector workers in Swaziland.

Conference: We had a Skype videoconference with Andrew and Alison in Sydney and Eric in London to clarify what’s being done, and what needs to be done, over the next three months.

Correspondents: I appealed to our 73,000+ subscribers in English for new correspondents; only 3 have volunteered so far (2 from the UK, one from Ireland).

Fundraising: I continue to mail out brochures to local labour councils throughout Ireland (including Northern Ireland) and to the 26 local labour councils in London.

Office: I continued the search for a new London office for LabourStart.

And all the usual stuff: The monthly “LabourStart in Numbers” report (see below).  Backups – every week – of the entire site, the mailing lists, and the databases.  New users added every day to UnionBook.  Regular postings to social media – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, UnionBook.  Answering dozens of LabourStart emails every day.

Update: There was a small bug – so people were not able to complete the sending of campaigns.  Now fixed.

A couple of days ago our campaigns site was down for an hour or more following a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on the company which hosts the connection to our new server in Iceland.  I have no idea if the attack was directed against us, but noticed today when updating our mailing lists that we’ve had dozens of people signing up to our campaigns with addresses like xkfrjw@flikjdk.com and random countries.

These are fairly easy to spot, as it’s very unlikely that a person with the email address of xkfrjw@flikjdk.com who says their country is the Falkland Islands is likely to sign up to our Norwegian language mailing list.  So I spent an hour today trying to clear many of these addresses from our lists.  MailChimp itself will purge them over time, so in that sense it doesn’t really matter much.

The problem, however, is that these spammers have been attempting to use our system.  It’s unlikely that they’ve been able to send out mail through it, but they may have been sending some of the recent campaign messages to our targets.  The numbers we’re talking about our quite low – perhaps a few dozen attempts we can see.

I looked into using a CAPTCHA system but it strikes me that this might make it very hard for people to sign up (Recaptcha is the most popular) and I’d like an easier-to-use system now.

If you look at our campaigns now, you’ll see at the bottom a little box above the Submit button with this logo:

At the moment, let’s test this and see if it effectively blocks most spam.

If not, we will have to upgrade to a proper CAPTCHA.

We will need this bit of text translated — if we decide to stay with it:

Enter the number ___ here:

Thank you.

As well as this:

This campaign has been live for less than two months but we heard that it was no longer relevant (the hunger strike was over).  I contacted PSI, and it appears that they are without a trade union rights officer, so there was no one around to tell us this. I have closed the campaign today.  I remind all of us, especially those who request LabourStart campaigns, that our “contract” with our partners includes the following:

“Unions which request campaigns from us are expected to keep us updated . . . The union will keep LabourStart updated, ideally every few weeks, and the best way to do this is to have a volunteer correspondent regularly posting news which we will link to the campaign. . . . [After 3 months] the union will provide a report which we may circulate to supporters telling them what the effect of the campaign has been – not only whether the employer or government has conceded, but also whether the union members themselves were made aware of the international support shown to them and whether this boosted their morale.”

So, what do we do when this doesn’t happen?  Clearly we can’t just say to a global union — we won’t do campaigns with you any more.  That would be stupid and counter-productive.  If anyone has any ideas about how to ensure that unions keep us updated, especially about the need to close down a campaign which is no longer relevant — please add these to the comments.

This is a bit delayed because I was on holiday from 13-20 July but now back at work and making progress on several issues.  Here are some highlights:

Conference: Our organizing committee continues to function; I have a conference call scheduled with them for next week.

Correspondents: The internal messaging system is now fixed; there had been a problem before that spam could be sent, though not via email, to all correspondents.

Campaigns:

• Closed: The Unite bus campaign in the UK was closed down following a victory. Another Unite campaign, in support of MMP workers, was closed down after three months.
• I added a key to the flags and languages here.
• We asked for and received the support of IndustriALL in the Kazakhstan campaign.
• New campaigns launched in support of sacked trade unionists in Peru and Turkey, and RMT cleaners in London.
• I fixed a bug in our special news pages for the UK, USA, Canada and Australia – we were not showing lists of the most current campaigns there, but we are now.
• Closed and archived campaigns – When trying to view certain closed campaigns, you couldn’t actually call them up – but I’ve now fixed this and you can see any campaign. I fixed the display of supporters for a campaign which has been closed. There’s now an accessible archive of closed campaigns.

Office: I’ve begun an intensive search for a London office.

Mailing list: We now have more than 100,000 addresses.

Book: I was approached by UCS, our book-selling partner in the USA, about doing a primer for trade unionists on use of the net.  I’ve agreed to do so.  Details to follow.

Internationalization:

• A problem was discovered with part of the display of the Turkish website; this is now nearly fixed.
• Work began on a Ukrainian edition – also nearly complete.

Newswires: Two more unions added the labour newswire to their sites.

Fundraising:

• The IUF has agreed to make a substantial donation to LabourStart.
• In addition, we’ve received several large donations from Canadian unions.
• We had 2,000 copies of our new fundraising brochure printed and I have begun mailing them out one by one to selected unions; the first target audience is Irish unions.

At the request of Peru’s largest national trade union centre, we’ve just launched this campaign in defense of a trade union leader sacked for “defaming” his employer on television.

Yup, that’s two campaigns in one day.

At the request of Deri-Is and Industriall, we’ve launched this campaign today in support of Togo Footwear workers, who were sacked for joining a union. This makes three out of the nine current campaigns Turkish ones.

Today I’m closing down Unite’s MMP campaign (UK). Thought the campaign generated nearly 7,000 messages, Unite officials have not been great about responding to our emails and we don’t actually know the results of this campaign yet. As a result of the closure of this campaign and the other Unite/ITF campaign two days ago, we now have only one UK campaign running – and this time it’s with the full and unambiguous support of the union (RMT).

First of all, I am closing down the London bus drivers Olympics campaign today after one month online.

This campaign, launched with the support of the ITF and Unite, resulted in a big win for the workers. As Unite reported in a press release last week, “London bus workers have overwhelmingly voted to accept an offer of an Olympic award, meaning most workers will get £577 for the massive increase in workload over the Olympics.”

Bobby Morton, Acting National Passenger Officer for Unite, wrote: “On behalf of Unite the Union I wish to offer my heartfelt thanks to all of you who sent messages of support through Labourstart to the London Busworkers who achieved a great victory in the Olympic solidarity campaign. I am convinced that if there was a gold medal for solidarity you would all be recipients. Thanks also to the International Transport Workers’ Federation, ITF, for their unstinting support and efforts during this campaign.”

The ITF’s own statement issued last week is here.

Second, today we broke through a major barrier and now have 100,223 names on our mailing lists. Wow.

We launched a new campaign on Saturday for the UK only, and in English only, in support of cleaners employed by London Transport. A very similar campaign, in support of London bus drivers, ended in victory last week and we’ll be closing this down tomorrow.

I’ve also tweaked the software so that on a UK-only campaign, the default country is now “United Kingdom”. I’ll make similar changes next time we have a Canada-only campaign or something similar.

Over time, more and more of the messages being sent out in support of our campaigns are coming in languages other than English. In our current campaigns, it can be as much as a third of all messages sent. Even if the English messages still outnumber the non-English ones by two-to-one, it’s still significant. There are global unions which campaign in one, or perhaps two or three languages, not necessarily realizing the potential.

If you look at our live review of campaigns broken down by languages, you can see the most recent one (Turkey: Free jailed trade unionists now) has had 5,883 messages sent and of those, 1,865 come from non-English versions of the campaign. The biggest ones are actually quite substantial, with 650 in Turkish and well over 500 in French. I’m going to do a bit of a push now to get additional translations and mailings out. If we can pick up another 135 non-English messages, this will be the first time we’ve ever broken the 2,000 barrier for a campaign.