Inside LabourStart

A second global union federation has asked for our help this week – the International Transport Workers Federation has requested our help with an online campaign in support of London bus workers.

The campaign is now live here.

I have just returned from Copenhagen, from the founding congress of IndustriALL Global Union, the merger of IMF, ICEM, and ITGLWF that unites 50 million workers in a single federation.

IndustriALL’s first campaign, announced from the podium by its new general secretary, is this one – on LabourStart.

This looks interesting.  I’m testing it now.  We currently have 6,504 followers on Twitter, but we’re not maximizing the power of this network.

Here’s what I did today:

Stopped following hundreds of Twitter accounts who don’t follow us.

Started following popular Tweeters who do follow us – everyone with more than 1,000 followers, we now follow.

Sent Direct Messages to 20 Tweeters with over 8,800 followers each asking them to re-tweet our message:

Who killed Li Wangyang? http://bit.ly/KUpfiS

This is huge – I don’t have to explain why.  Please do what you can to help.

It’s great that so many LabourStart campaigns these days get 5,000 messages or more sent.  But there’s a big gap between what happens to our campaigns in certain key European languages (English, French, Spanish, Norwegian and Italian) and all the rest.

And in some cases, we have campaigns running that don’t have a single supporter.

I’ll be writing to our translators today to try to figure out with them what we can do — because there’s no point in translating campaigns that no one knows about.

Here are the current campaigns with zero (0) supporters – the number in brackets is the size of our mailing list for that language:

• Chinese (simplified) [357]: Colombia,
• Farsi [188]: Iraq, Turkey, Algeria
• Hebrew [153]: Colombia,
• Korean [93]: Bahrain,
• Vietnamese [12]: UK, Iraq, Algeria

Note that mailings did not go out in most cases to the lists.

Any correspondents with any suggestions about how to deal with the issue are invited to post comments below.

Some of the things I’ve been working on for the last week:

Campaigns:

• Closed two campaigns (Kamal Abbas – Egypt, Abdolreza Ghanbari – Iran) without clear results yet.  Both cases continue.  The Ghanbari campaign set a new standard for us, and with over 17,000 messages sent it was our biggest campaign ever.  As Derek Blackadder points out in the comments, this means our next goal has to be 20,000.
• We also launched new campaigns this week in support of oil workers in Egypt and public sector workers in Algeria; both campaigns have gotten off to a slow start.
• We expect new campaigns to be launched shortly in support of workers in Korea, Kenya and possibly Turkey and Spain.
• The campaign counter is now fixed, though not yet fully automated (we’re unable to use ‘cron’ on the new server, for those of you who understand these things.)  I also tweaked a few more things the resulted from the move to our new campaigns server, such as ensuring that ‘ActNOW’ links that appear next to news stories point directly to the new site.  I fixed the campaigns script so you should no longer be able to choose ‘Select your country’ as your country (as many people have done).

Mailing lists: We are very close to 100,000 names.  When we cross this threshold, we’ll need to raise an additional £1,600 a year.  We’re going to attempt to grow the Danish and Swedish lists, and to find volunteer translators to help with mailings to these lists and campaigns.  (This is currently covered by Espen who does it in Norwegian, but it would be better to have versions in all three Scandinavian languages.)

ILO: We’ve gotten no further news from the ITUC and GUFs about the employer attempt to block discussion of workers’ rights at this year’s International Labour Conference. We have told all that we’re ready and willing to do an online campaign on a moment’s notice.

Writing: I had articles published this week in both Solidarity and the Morning Star about the case of US politician John Edwards.

Office: I’ve begun looking for an office for LabourStart as I will be moving house by late September and will no longer be able to work from home.  At the moment we’re budgetting about £600 per month (£7,200 a year), which will either get us a very small office or possibly a studio apartment.

Intern: I looked into what it would cost to hire an intern at the London Living Wage; I think this and an office are the next two steps toward professionalizing LabourStart even more and expanding our capacity.  At £8.30 per hour, and calculating a 35 hour week, that would be an additional £15,100 per year we’d need to raise.

Donations: We received £1,100 in the last week from two British unions (CWU – £1,000; Napo – £100), £126 from the OECTA in Canada and a number of individual donors (£222).

We are now able to show totals for a campaign in all languages again – this was a considerable task on the new server, but it’s now working fine. The totals for our current campaigns in all languages are as follows:

• 8,508 Bahrain: Free jailed trade union leader Mahdi ‘Issa Mahdi Abu Dheeb
• 6,535 Colombia: End harassment of trade unionists
• 5,541 UK: First employer lock-out in over 50 years
• 4,612 Turkey: New law aims to ban strikes in aviation sector
• 4,397 Mexico: Human rights defender kidnapped and tortured
• 4,187 Thailand: Free Somyot
• 2,379 Iraq: End harassment of oil union activists
• 2,079 Algeria: Union leaders on hunger strike since 6 May

Note that a number of campaigns which have been running for some time now are struggling to get past the 5,000 mark (e.g., Thailand and Mexico). These campaigns are considerably smaller than the ones we have run recently. The Turkey, Iraq and Algeria campaigns are all quite new.

Our campaign to stop the execution of Iranian teacher trade unionist Abdolreza Ghanbari has now closed after three months.

With 17,214 messages sent to Iran, it was the largest campaign we have ever waged.

We’ve asked the Education International for a summary of the effect the campaign had.  One of the striking things about this campaign was the very high response in languages other than English.

We had just under 5,000 messages sent in other languages, with the largest groups being French (1,951), Spanish (904), Italian (483), Russian (477) and German (470).

Yes, that’s two campaigns in as many days.  It’s a busy time, and I think some GUFs and others are very focussed on using the International Labour Conference which takes place in Geneva every June.  I guess we should always expect more campaigns at this time of year.  Please make sure you sign up here and spread the word.

After three months, I closed down the Kamal Abbas (Egypt) campaign today. The campaign generated 7,448 messages to the Egyptian authorities. I am waiting to hear from our partners (the ITUC) what effect the campaign had on the ground.
Today we also launched a new campaign at the request of the ICEM and the Solidarity Center to support oil workers in Iraq.