Inside LabourStart

From 2004 through 2010, LabourStart ran five campaigns in support of South African trade unions.

Though the campaigns have been relatively small, they have attracted 960 South African trade unionists to LabourStart’s mailing list.

And in at least two cases, the campaigns contributed to significant victories for the workers.

Three of those campaigns were run at the request of the South African Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers Union (SACCAWU), a COSATU-affiliated union claiming 107,000 members.

The largest of those campaigns was launched in December 2009 under the headline “Sun International must negotiate with strikers – not try to break their union”.

The other two were “Support striking workers at Dis-Chem” (June 2010) and “Woolworths engages in union-busting” (October 2008).

These were not large campaigns by LabourStart standards. The Sun International got just over 3,600 supporters; Dis-Chem had less than half that (1,700 supporters) and the Woolworths campaign was smaller still — just 937 supporters.

We reported on an agreement reached between Sun International and the union in February 2010. According to the IUF, “The seven-week strike by SACCAWU at South African hotel chain Sun International has ended with a negotiated settlement which brings important gains for union members. SACCAWU’s January 25 official release (which warmly thanked the workers’ international supporters for their solidarity during the long and bitter conflict) on the settlement describes the strike as ‘marked by an extreme intransigence on the side of the company, coupled with violence from the SAPS and private security on the picket-line, including racist and sexist insults, extreme provocations, assaults as well as arrests of numerous strikers, a full-time shop steward and a union official’.”

But we don’t know much about how the other campaigns turned out. For example, the last news story on LabourStart about Dis-Chem is from July 2010 and reports on Cosatu’s support of the strike. There has been no news about Woolworths on our site since October 2008.

It would be hard to find out from SACCAWU itself, as its website no longer exists.

A campaign launched by LabourStart in June 2009 in support of shop stewards sacked for going out on a safety strike also contributed to the resolution of the dispute. This was a campaign in support of Chemical, Energy, Paper, Printing, Wood and Allied Workers’ Union (CEPPWAWU), a COSATU affiliated union claiming 67,000 members. The campaign came to us from their global union federation, the ICEM. It generated a respectable 2,300 messages sent and according to the ICEM, “the parties came to a negotiated memorandum on the issue of suspension of shop stewards and others, following unprotected safety strikes in April and May. A 4-page memorandum was signed August 5 putting and end to the conflict. There were no dismissals, and that is good news, considering Sappi had originally sought job dismissals on some. … The ICEM thanks all those who supported this campaign and congratulates both Sappi and CEPPWAWU for putting this dispute behind them.”

The earliest campaign we did in support of a South African union was back in August 2004 when we built support for the Communication Workers Union (CWU), which is also COSATU-affiliated and claims 44,000 members. The campaign protested job cuts and attracted considerable media attention. LabourStart was thanked in the union’s print publication for our contribution. There has been continuing coverage of Telkom and the union ever since on LabourStart.

It’s important that we build upon these experiences and learn lessons. Here are some random thoughts:

1. The campaigns are bigger, and we get more detailed reports on how they turned out, when we work closely with global union federations. The GUFs are able to get the local union activists to provide news — and the two campaigns we ran with GUFs involved (Sun International and Sappi) did considerably better in terms of the number of supporters.

2. Now that we have close to 1,000 South Africans on our mailing list, it’s important that we make a special effort to reach out to them when we have a South African campaign. We certainly didn’t have this base of support in country back in 2004 when we started.

3. We should consider adding at least one of the 11 official South African languages to our campaign system — possibly Afrikaans or Zulu. This would send a clear message to all that our campaigns are not just targeting the elite, but all workers.

4. We must make it clearer to unions that we expect them to inform us when a campaign can be closed, and what the result of the campaign was. This is especially true in the case of SACCAWU.

5. There are many important disputes taking place in South Africa today and we must be more pro-active in encouraging unions there to allow us to help them campaign. The fact that we have not done a campaign there since June 2010 is not good, because there have been some real possibilities for large-scale campaigns — such as SACCAWU’s campaign against Wal-Mart. That would have gotten considerable global attention and might have helped the union, which has been struggling — not least to raise the funds for legal work on this.

6. The fact that we have made a considerable contribution to resolutions of disputes in Sun International and Sappi is not well known in the South African labour movement and we should do more to let unions know what we have done, and what we can do in future, to help them.

We’ve just closed the Ecuador campaign which ran for two months and was not one of our largest. But PSI tells us that it had an effect:

“Combined with other actions by PSI, it generated a useful response from the government – a detailed letter of response, which at one stage the government was also copying to all those who had signed the on-line campaign. The response itself was rather unsatisfactory, but useful to our affiliates in terms of media work and keeping up the pressure. The President’s office has also asked the labour minister to explore the possibility of a meeting with PSI representatives in order to discuss matters further.”

We know, sort of, that our mass mailings generate the vast majority of supporters for any of our campaigns.  And that things like links on websites, Twitter and Facebook are somewhat over-rated in this sense.  But to prove it — and to find out how people really do come to our campaigns and sign up — I’ve just written some code that allows us to track exactly this.

Normally, when we tell people about a campaign we give out this code (for example) — I’ve had to break this into 2 lines to make it readable:

http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/

solidarityforever/show_campaign.cgi?c=1239

Now we have the option of adding on a parameter — done like this:

http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/

solidarityforever/show_campaign.cgi?c=1239&src=test

This tells our system that the source of this visit to our campaign is from “test“.

It’s very important to do the code exactly like that, with no spaces at all.

You can see an example of how we can track this, starting today, here.  Scroll to the very bottom and look at record 4187 (my name).  See the red text?  That’s because I used the link ending in “&src=test”.

I’m going to try this out today using a few online tools.  You should see results soon by scrolling down to the bottom of this page.  Make sure to refresh the page to see new supporters.  I’ve used the following codes: unionbook, twitter, lsfbpage and lsfbgroup. These should be pretty obvious.  But any codes will do (e.g., blackadder) – but they should be less than 16 characters and include no blank spaces.

I think we should begin doing this in our MailChimp mailings, when we post to Facebook and Twitter, when unions put links on their home pages, in our ActNOW newswire and so on.  I think we’ll learn a lot by doing so.

At the request of the UE (the independent union in the USA) and the Solidarity Center, we’ve just launched this campaign in English and Spanish simultaneously.

So those weren’t the last campaigns of 2011 (see yesterday’s posting).  Today, police opened fire on strikers in Kazakhstan.  We’ve been asked to launch another online campaign, now live. The campaign we launched in September to support those workers has now been closed after getting just 2,102 messages sent.

I hope so, as I plan to be away for the next three weeks.  But that hasn’t stopped some companies and governments from attempting to crush unions and to deny workers their rights, so we’ve had to launch two new campaigns today.  One supports the Italian metalworkers union in their fight with Fiat; the others backs Turkish unionists who are the victims of savage repression.

The Education International has given us a new campaign, just launched.

This campaign, sponsored by UNI Global Union, was our second largest of 2011 – and possibly our second largest ever, with well over 10,000 messages sent.

In fact, half of the last six campaigns we closed reached the target of 5,000 messages.

That number is increasingly becoming a minimum and not some far-away goal.

The question now is: can we create campaigns that routinely go over the 10,000 mark – and when will we have our first 6 figure campaign (100,000+)?

At the request of the ITUC, this two month old campaign has been closed with just shy of 5,000 messages sent. According to one person who knows about these things, “We did get some progress, the interim cabinet approved it recently (only the first step of several), but things are obviously in flux with the elections and ongoing protests” We may need to launch a similar campaign in the future, but this one has run its course.

Following the discussion we held at the annual correspondents’ meeting in Istanbul, we will not be hold a Labour Photo of the Year competition this year.  However, we will continue with the Labour Video of the Year competition and I will begin work on this on 9 January, when I’m back from winter travels.  We will also be exploring the possibility – suggested by Kristyne Peter of the IMF – of ‘campaign of the year’.