Inside LabourStart

With the way things have been going around here lately (such as running 12 campaigns simultaneously), a two-week breather between campaigns is a good thing.  That barely gives us time to complete the translations of the campaign and the mass mailings.  Once again, we’re doing a campaign together with Public Services International focussing on Latin America – this time on Colombia.  I hope that this time, unlike our previous experience, we will get a good response from members of public sector unions around the world.

I’ve been able to integrate both the current and archived campaigns into a single page so that now, once again, we’re able to view statistics for the 250 or so campaigns we’ve waged in the last decade.  Click here to see what I mean.

We’re now down to 8 active campaigns — which is far more manageable than the 12 we were at a few days ago.

Today I suspended the Kazakhstan campaign after three months.

This campaign like nearly all of the 2012 campaigns did relatively well in terms of numbers – 6,598 supporters.

It did far better than the Kazakhstan campaign we launched three months earlier, which had only 2,102 supporters.

Today is the first day in six months that there is no Kazakhstan campaign running on LabourStart – though there is still plenty of labour news from that country.

As I was travelling in the USA for part of this time, I have an excuse. Anyway, here are some of the things I’ve been up to these past 3 weeks.

Campaigns: I’ve closed a number of those that reached the 3 month limit, and launched three others. Our biggest campaign ever was launched during this period. I began work on a new system to allow others – senior correspondents, for example – to launch campaigns while I am travelling. I also did a full review of the last two campaigns and what’s been translated and what not; as a result, we now have campaigns and mailings done for Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish and Hebrew. I’m still waiting for responses from our translators for Korean, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish and Vietnamese. Ideally, all campaigns will appear in 18 languages, and we’ll mail to 18 lists.  As a result of these campaigns, we now have over 93,000 names on our mailing lists.

Social media: I dealt with problems that arose from repeated attacks on our Twitter account (now solved). UnionBook grew to more than 5,000 members for the first time.

Partners: I set up a meeting at the ITUC, to take place in Brussels next week. I continued fundraising efforts with GUFs and British unions. So far this year, nine GUFs have given money and seven British unions have either pledged or donated.

Conference 2012: Work continues in Sydney; our organizing committee there is growing and meeting regularly and we’re sharing information on Basecamp.

Today I closed the campaign “Turkey: Unjust prison sentence on trade union activists“, which we ran on behalf of the Education International. Unlike more recent campaigns, this one generated far fewer than 5,000 messages.

I also closed down the Fiat campaign, which reached nearly 8,000 messages sent – many of them in Italian. This was the largest campaign we’ve closed since the T-Mobile USA campaign launched last September.

I’ve also requested permission to shut down the 3-month-old Kazakhstan campaign tomorrow.

Today I closed down the Mexico: Support electrical workers campaign after only two months online at the request of the SME union. The campaign did well, with 6,725 messages sent, and it was the largest campaign we’ve closed since the ‘No more fear at T-Mobile USA’ campaign which was closed in December. This weekend I’ll be closing the campaigns set up in mid-December for Italy (Fiat), Kazakhstan and Turkey (EI). This will bring the number of active campaigns down from 12 to 8.

The Education International has asked us to urgently promote a new campaign in support of an Iranian teacher who has been sentenced to death. Though I am still travelling overseas, I have been able to do this – though much of the work promoting it will have to wait until my return to London later this week.

It’s not every day that we get asked to campaign on behalf of someone who we know personally – but that’s certainly the case with Egyptian trade union leader Kamal Abbas. Kamal’s organization, the Centre for Trade Union and Worker Services (CTUWS) have long been active LabourStart correspondents and I had the chance to meet Kamal and his colleagues during my 2010 visit to Cairo, and again in 2011 when he came to London. The decision by Egypt’s military rulers to jail him for the “crime” of insulting a Mubarak-era union hack is appalling. I expect this campaign to be one of the largest ones we have ever run: http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/solidarityforever/show_campaign.cgi?c=1287

Some of the things that have been keeping me busy in the last 8 days …

Canada – Acadia campaign. This has been launched, appears in 4 languages, responses coming in very slowly.  I’m prodding the union to do more to promote it and not to rely solely on the LabourStart mass mailing which will go out next week.

Twitter. Following the issues we had with Twitter, I suspended use of Twitterfeed and have just set up an alternative in HootSuite.  We’ll see how well this works.

MyCampaigns. This little script has been very effective in getting people to sign on to campaigns they may have missed.  We’re seeing good results in some of our older campaigns.  I’m tweaking the campaigns system slowly to make it more visible, and have arranged for its translation into other languages.

App. Our app is nearly ready, but there’s a problem with Conduit Mobile – we can’t change any details about our account.  I’ve asked for some help from them and am awaiting an answer before we submit the Apple App Store (and Android and others).

New website. I’ve resumed work on this, and have converted what I was doing into a Perl script — I’m more familiar with Perl than PHP and it will allow to have a dynamically generated home page with lots of interactivity and personalization.

Even if Derek Blackadder is away sunning himself on some beach, class struggle in Canada continues.

We’ve been asked by the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) to run an online campaign in support of locked out workers at Acadian Coach Lines in the Atlantic provinces of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.  That campaign is now live here.

We’ll be getting out the text to our translators and promoting it heavily over the next few days.