Inside LabourStart

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.

Africa: We are discussing holding our first ever African regional meeting of LabourStart correspondents. More details soon.

Algeria: We did a second mailing to our English list today. The campaign has 4,774 supporters, but we expect this to above 5,000 today.

Nigeria: We are continuing publicity for the Yoruba versions of our campaigns, two of which have already been translated.

Sweden: We closed down our Zalando’s campaign today and informed the union there. The campaign had about 3,500 supporters, though the Swedish version only had 2.

UK: Eric was interviewed for the labour podcast “Union Dues” – it will be aired in another couple of weeks and we’ll publicise it widely.

T-shirts: We did a mailing to our German list. Sales of the dna-merch shirts have not been as high as we would have liked (they are only a fraction of what we sold last year). We will continue the marketing and are in discussions with our friends about what we can do to improve this.

This was a relatively quiet week for us, as Eric was on holiday with family for part of the time.

Algeria: This campaign goes live and after just a day or so, had 3,200 supporters.  It currently appears in 4 languages with many more on the way.

Sweden: We began publicity for this campaign on Thursday with a mailing to the English list. As of 10:30 GMT, the campaign has 722 supporters.

Mailing lists: Grew this week by 103 names.

T-shirt of the Month: We began to publicise this wonderful new project from Working Class History and dna merch in Germany. We did extensive publicity across social media and a mass mailing, and will know results in early December. Feedback was almost entirely positive.  We expect to do publicity in German soon (dna merch is based in Germany).

Algeria: Expect a new campaign shortly — we’ve been given a heads up from IndustriALL.

Jordan: Our new campaign has taken off and already has more supporters (6,020) than our two most recent camopaigns. That’s the good news; the bad news is that a court has ruled against the union.

Nigeria: Our first campaign in the Yoruba language has now gone live and we have begun publicising it.  So far, no one has signed up to the campaign.

Sudan: We shared widely Eric’s column about the role of unions in the fight for democracy and against the military coup.

Donations: We received a very generous — and unexpected — donation from Education International.

Mailing lists: We picked up another 133 subscribers this week; this is more than triple what we added last week.

T-shirts: We’re about to embark on a join effort with DNA Merch in Germany to sell workers’ history themed t-shirts on a monthly basis.

Jordan: We launched a major new campaign in partnership with the Education International and the support of the ITUC. The campaign had 2,802 supporters after one day online.

Nigeria: We are shortly expecting our first campaign to be translated into Yoruba, and we will publicise that fact widely — we’re to be first global union website campaigning in an indigenous African language. Yoruba, by the way, has about 50 million speakers.

Sudan: We’ve had a lot of coverage of workers’ responses to the military coup, and shared this widely across social media on Wednesday.

Sweden: We’ve had a soft launch for the Zalando campaign now that SAC has begun to promote it, and we will do much more in the coming days.

Zimbabwe: We have a new correspondent who has begun posting news.

Labour newswire: We’ve begun to fix some long term problems here. With the help of a webmaster of a local trade union (scroll to the bottom of the page) in the state of Washington (USA), we managed to fix the state and provincial newswires for the whole world. We’ll fix this on the website and announce, and move on to fix any others that have stopped working.

Mailing lists: These continue to grow slowly. Before the launch of the Jordan campaign, we were able to add just 43 new subscribers to our lists.

Iran campaign: We received a translation of the mailing into Farsi from IndustriALL, and have sent this out to our Farsi list.

Italian edition: We changed one of the permanent links on the home page.

Italy: Eric’s article on the attack on CGIL was shared very widely across social media, including by leading figures on the British Left and Labour Party.

Myanmar campaign: We created a special petition format to allow campaign supporters’ names to be delivered to the credentials committee of the UN General Assembly, at the request of BWI.

Polish: For some time now we have been adding daily news from one of the two Polish national trade union centres (OPZZ) to our Polish-language news page. From this week, we are also adding news from Solidarnosc.  Our campaigns are appearing in Polish, though we still need to sort out regular mailings to our Polish list.

Puerto Rico: We held a webinar in Spanish with English translation in support of the campaign. Despite technical glitches, and thanks to Euan’s efforts at PSI, the webinar had good attendance, especially from Latin America. DSA’s publication, Democratic Left, is running a major piece on the campaign with a link.  With 7,610 supporters, it is our second largest current campaign.

Turkey: At long last, the article about Cihan Erdal and co-authored by Peter Tatchell and Eric Lee, appeared in print in the British daily Morning Star. It was widely shared online.

Interns: We have begun work with a second intern, Bunmi, from York University in Toronto. Our other intern, Cam, has been working on an updated version of our online campaigns book, discovering some good victories that we should publicise.

Italy: The attack on the CGIL headquarters last week by fascist thugs dominates our home page these past few days. We have shared many news stories across social media as well, in English and Italian, and have reached out to global unions regarding a possible campaign (with no positive response so far). Eric also devoted his weekly column for Solidarity to this subject.

Iran: We now have a version of the campaign running in Farsi, thanks to IndustriALL. A followup mailing to the English list last week helped, and the campaign now has 5,308 supporters – a gain of nearly 1,000.

Puerto Rico: Together with UTIER and PSI, we’ll be hosting a live event in support of the campaign later this week. With 7,411 supporters, this is one of our largest recent campaigns.

Sweden: We now have a translation into Swedish of the campaign, which will shortly go live.

UK: We’ve been invited to appear on the ‘Union Dues‘ podcast next month.

Donations: We received a very generous donation from the nurses union in Canada, bringing our total donations this year from Canada to over $20,000.

Interns: We have two new interns from York University in Canada and will be meeting them for the first time today (on Zoom, of course).

Mailing lists: Our largest lists grew by just 81 new subscribers this week.

World Day for Decent Work: We revived our WDDW page from last year, tagged 14 news stories to appear there, and shared this widely across social media.

Hungary: At the request of ETF, we have closed the campaign down and have asked for a report.

Puerto Rico: Democratic Left, published by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) will be running an article about our campaign. DSA currently has 95,000 members, so this is great publicity for a campaign that is already getting some traction, especially in Puerto Rico. Our Spanish list, already one of our largest, grew by 10% this month as a result.

Romania: We’ve asked ETF for permission to close the Bucharest Metro campaign after more than three months.

Sweden: The union has gotten back to us and wants the Zalando campaign to go live ASAP. We’ve asked for a Swedish translation first.

USA: With the agreement of FLOC, we have closed the BAT campaign.

Donations: One of our supporters in the UK recently passed away and her son wrote this week to donate £1,000 in her memory to LabourStart. This is the largest donation of this type that we have ever received.

Newswires: Problems were reported with our old newswires; I managed to fix it and am now waiting for results of tests.

Translations: Thanks to Mark, we are back on course with German translations with the last three campaigns now live. The response rate for our German list is the highest for any large mailing list, so this is particularly important.

Iran: We are about to go live later today with a campaign in support of striking oil workers in Iran.

Myanmar: After two weeks online, this campaign has less than 4,800 supporters. A Burmese version went live this week – and for the first time, LabourStart can now campaign in Burmese. We’re having a call with BWI to discuss next steps.

Puerto Rico: The number of supporters has grown significantly — now up to 6,638. The campaign is in 13 languages and we’ve seen very significant support in Spanish for the first time – with 1,093 supporters backing the campaign in Spanish.  839 of th0se are in Puerto Rico – in addition to 159 supporters of the English language campaign coming from Puerto Rico as well.

USA: We’ve received a green light to suspend our campaign in support of FLOC tobacco workers, which has been running for more than 3 months and has 5,186 supporters.