Inside LabourStart

Note: There will be no update next week as I will be on holiday.

Campaigns: Several improvements noted below, including the ability to see all active campaigns on one page, broken down by language. We’re also now showing campaign news in English as well as the campaign’s own language on each campaign page. And the pass-it-on code for campaigns is now working again. We’ve also made it impossible for Google to find and show the list of email addresses of campaign supporters — something that was happening on our new server due to the unusual configuration of Apache there (this was not the case on our old server).

Fundraising: We’ve hired a graphic designer — having talked to 9 different individuals and companies, who all made proposals — to produce a small brochure which we can use to explain to unions what LabourStart does for them and encourage them to make donations. We’ll let you know when copies are available. We’re still waiting to get addresses of US unions.

Labour films: We noticed that the links to the online labour films database and the list of labour film festivals – maintained by the Washington DC Metro Labor Council and co-sponsored by LabourStart – had stopped working and were removed. We’ve now gotten the new details and will be putting up new links.

I’ve been working on a script for some time now – and just this morning completed it – to allow us to do two things we could never do before.  The results, I think, are pretty interesting.

Here’s what I wanted to achieve:

• To see all our campaigns on one page, and how big each one is.
• For each campaign, to see a clear breakdown of support by language.

You can see this by clicking here.

• When viewing a campaign now in a language other than English, you’ll see news from that campaign in the correct language  – and in English. This was requested by some of our translators, otherwise nothing was showing in the “latest news” box.  (Thanks, Lennon.)
• The pass-it-on code hadn’t been working on the new server; it has now been fixed. (Thanks, Kirill.)
• The “old” ICEM campaign (from June) has now been re-branded as an IndustriALL campaign.  (Thanks, Alex.)

Campaigns closing: We were able to close down 4 campaigns in this period – Bahrain, Mexico, Colombia and Thailand. None of them, unfortunately, was a complete win for us. And none were record-breakers in terms of the number of supporters. The number of supporters ranged from 5,533 to 8,525.

New campaigns: Kazahkstan and Turkey launched just one day apart.

Upcoming campaigns: We are still waiting to hear from the Korean Metal Workers Union and IndustriALL about a Ssangyong campaign.

Campaign “contract”: We agreed a text that is now shown on the page where unions request campaigns that spells out what we will do and what the union will do. Let’s hope it makes things clearer and easier, and encourages unions to do more to build the campaigns.

Campaign “cookies”: We’re now compliant with the European Union directive on cookies, I think. (See full report below.)

Campaign translations: We’ve sorted out the problem of both Arabic and Turkey in the last week – thanks very much to Erin, Molly, Eyup and Mohamed.

Campaigns – new server: Still tweaking things that don’t work as before. The list of current campaigns now works in languages other than English. There’s a problem with permissions for the file listing email addresses – hopefully to be fixed this week. The “my campaigns” link in mailings should now work for most languages. The good news is that we’re not getting tons of complaints that the server isn’t responding, nor is a campaign launch causing the old LabourStart server (with our news) to freeze up as it sometimes would in the past. And we’re not getting any threats from 1&1 Internet to shut us down. So all in all, a successful transition to our new eco-friendly server in Iceland.

Articles: My article on the launch of IndustriALL has now appeared in Italian on the website of FIOM-CGIL. Another article on the same subject has been accepted for publication by Solidarity in the UK.

FAQ: I reviewed and updated the FAQ page on LabourStart.

Brochure: I’ve gotten details of many graphic designers and we’ll soon get this thing printed. It should help us with fundraising with unions.

Donations: A raffle held at the National Union of Workers Officials’ Conference in Australia raised A$1,000 for us – a wonderful example of grassroots activity that I hope others will follow.

The ICEM (now IndustriALL) has given us permission to close the “Free Somyot” campaign after two months.

This is a joint campaign by the ITUC and at least three global union federations.

After one day online, it had only 23 supporters – let’s hope this picks up after the weekend.

LabourStart will, meanwhile, do what it can.

In the bad old days, we’ve have unions – including locals and branches – approaching LabourStart all the time, asking for campaigns.  And to keep the numbers under control, we’d tell them that we only do global campaigns, we only focus on big, serious issues, and we only work with global union federations and the ITUC.  That, we thought, would solve the problem.  Oops.

Today we have three campaigns being launched at the request of the ITUC and global union federations, with possibly more on the way.  As I launch them, I will update this page.

• The first one that’s ready is this concerns Kazakhstan – a followup to the deadly rioting last December and the campaign we did then.  It is also our first jointly-sponsored effort, with the ITUC working together with Russian and Kazakh labour federations.  The Russian language version will go live very shortly; let’s hope this a big one and helps get some justice for the oil workers there. UPDATE: After less than 4 hours we’re already up to 1,500 – that’s 375 per hour. If that were to continue for a whole day, we’d be up to 9,000 messages by tomorrow evening. Keep it up!

The following short draft is what I propose to put on the page where unions request campaigns. In filling in the form, they agree to be bound by what is written here. It won’t necessarily solve any problems, but it will at least make things clearer.

LabourStart’s ActNOW campaigns are a partnership between LabourStart and the union requesting the campaign. That means that each of us agrees to do certain things.

What LabourStart will do:

Upon receipt of a request for a campaign, LabourStart’s senior correspondents will discuss it among themselves and consult with the international trade union movement (including the global union federations – GUFs) if necessary. Campaigns proposed by national or local unions will almost always require — and benefit from — the approval of global union institutions. If a union is a member of a GUF, it is always best to approach them first and have the GUF propose the campaign.

LabourStart will setup the campaign in English (and retains the right to make changes to the proposed texts), arrange for its translation into a number of languages, and promote it to our mailing lists, via our website (including syndication through our newswires) and through social media such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and UnionBook. While the campaign is running, we will offer the union real-time reporting on support being shown, showing the names, unions and countries of those who signed up. We will run the campaign for three months, unless we are asked to close it down sooner.

Unions requesting a campaign from LabourStart are expected to do the following:

When proposing the campaign we will need a header, background text and default message; the union’s full name, logo and a description; a working link to a web page for more information; accurate and tested addresses for the target of the campaign; and photos to illustrate the campaign.

Once the campaign has launched, the union will do its utmost to promote the campaign to its own members, to other unions in its country, and to the global labour movement through any federations (such as GUFs or the ITUC) to which it might belong. Global unions will be expected to promote the campaign to their national affiliates. Promotion will not consist solely of a link on the union’s website, though this is obviously required. In addition, the union must use other tools such as email, social media and even offline methods to get the word out. The union must keep LabourStart updated, ideally by having a volunteer correspondent regularly posting news which we will link to the campaign.

After three months, the campaign will close unless a decision has been made to close it sooner. At that time 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.

LabourStart campaigns are offered free of charge.

If any of this is not clear, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

I’m closing the Bahrain, Mexico and Colombia campaigns today – bringing the number of live campaigns down from eleven to “only” nine. Full details will be here.

OK, so not weekly.  But I was in Copenhagen for three days last week attending the founding congress of IndustriALL global union, so that’s why I’m late with this roundup of some recent news.

Social Media: I began using SocialBro to increase our visibility on Twitter (see note below).  We’ve gone up from 6,414 to 6,642 followers since the beginning of this month – a growth of about 10 per day.  (We picked up 44 in one day thanks to a mention in one of our mailings.)  At this rate, we’ll reach 8,500 followers by the end of this year.  On Facebook, our Page – www.facebook.com/labourstart.org –  is rapidly approaching the size of our Group, as we had hoped.  The Page has 4,627 ‘likes’ while the Group has 4,771 ‘members’.  As you may recall, there are certain advantages to the Page, which we built long after the Group was launched.  At the very end of March last year, we started our Page (with zero followers) and we had 4,332 members of the LabourStart Group.  So you can see that all the growth is taking place in recruiting new fans or followers for the Page, which has been growing at the rate of about 10 per day, just like Twitter.

Campaigns: I posted something about campaigns that have zero followers earlier this month and had several interesting responses (see below).  Two new campaigns were launched this week, one for the ITF and one for IndustriALL; ten days ago we launched our Li Wangyang campaign which is now over 5,700 messages sent. Two campaigns are closing this weekend – Mexico and Colombia.  I fixed character encoding issues in the news iframe that appears on campaign pages.  I also fixed the script that shows supporters for a campaign so that it doesn’t update the overall numbers (this made it look like campaign numbers went up and down throughout the day). I fixed the mycampaigns script (which shows you which campaigns you have participated in) so it works with the new system and with different languages, again.  I’ve been having a discussion with our volunteer translators for Turkish; we now may have a solution that ensures timely translations of both campaigns and mailings, which is very important now that we have 1,244 Turkish addresses (up from 778 since the beginning of the year – a gain of 466, up more than 37%).

Mailing lists: There’s now a prominent link on our home page in English to sign up to the mailing list (this had disappeared for a while, though we have it for other languages) – and I removed all traces I could find of links to join any of our earlier mailing lists.  The total size of the lists is 98,356.

Writing: I had an article published in In These Times (about the launch of IndustriALL).  I’ll be doing another tomorrow for Solidarity.  I approached a number of other publications about writing on the same subject — Red Pepper, Progress and the Big Issue — but none of them responded.

Donations: The only big donation in the last couple of weeks came from LO Norway, which gave NOK 30,000 (£3,200).  We’ve raised over £9,000 since the beginning of April, with another £6,400 in our Canadian account.  (Derek can give a breakdown of which Canadian unions have made substantial donations or pledges.)  This is pretty much equal to what we had raised last year by this time.