Inside LabourStart

While on holiday I managed to launch an ActNOW campaign in support of the embattled trade unions of Fiji – at the request of the British TUC and ITUC. Even without the normally extensive LabourStart publicity, it has already gotten 2,184 messages sent and was translated (without prompting by me) into two languages. Today I asked 11 other volunteer translators to get to work on it, and am beginning our own publicity blitz.

Update: Following our publicity blitz, support is increasing.  Here are the latest totals as of 10:00 London time (Wednesday), 12 hours later  –

• 4,213 supporters
• 730 recommendations on Facebook

A lot remains undone for our upcoming Global Solidarity Conference – this will be my top priority in the next week. I leave next Wednesday, 7 September, for Istanbul, where I’ll be meeting with our Turkish comrades and we’ll try to fix all outstanding issues.

We’ve been given permission to suspend our current Iraq campaign. The GFIW tells us: “The situation in Iraq is quiet now–re trade unions rights- since May-June upheaval and the ITUC, TUC and ILO intervention. The oil union leader in Kirkuk, thanks to the labourstart Campaign, has not been relocated, al though the risk of being relocated is still hanging over his head.” By the end, the campaign got 3,430 messages sent – making it one of the larger recent campaigns.

Let’s spread the word – this is not going to be an easy one to build, both because of the subject and the timing (August).  Click here to send your message today:

http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/solidarityforever/show_campaign.cgi?c=1074

Conference: We’ve jumped from 69 to 85 registrants – and now have 11 from the UK, due to a special mailing I did.  The Solidarity Center is now telling us we should have 8 participants from 4 Arab countries as well.

Campaigns: Vale Colombia is now closed.  Malawi one should launch today.

Newswires: I’ve been doing a lot of work on the regional newswires, which had not been working for a very long time.  Most of them are now working fine.  I’ll give a full update when complete.

Absence: Early warning – I will be away from my desk from 15-30 August with only very limited email access (and none at all during the first week).

18 killed in Malawi protests - global unions take action.

It’s August, schools are closed, many trade union offices are working with skeletal staffs.  (At least in Europe.)  And yet we have a steady flow of requests for new campaigns, updates on existing ones, and so forth.

According to a report we got from the United Steelworkers in North America, “the union at Vale in Colombia advised would be best to stop LS email campaign for now.”

Meanwhile, expect a new campaign relating to Malawi – see this ITUC press statement.

See here – and please promote widely.

After less than 2 months online, at the request of PSI we’re closing down the Botswana campaign. It sent off 3,373 messages. I am waiting to hear from PSI what the results were on the ground, and if we can get a message from the union there.

In the last four days, in addition to watching our Palestine campaign grow, showing off our new conference poster, and and thinking about Cafe Press (see earlier posts), here are a few of the things that have been on the agenda at LabourStart this week …

1. Have been holding an email conversation with our internet service provider (1&1) about the possible listing of their IP address in the SORBS spam database – some people sending off protest messages to Georgia have received reports that indicate this. Still investigating what’s going on.
2. Attended a meeting at the Trades Union Congress to discuss Egypt and expressed a willingness to do more – including a possible campaign in support of labour law reform in that country.
3. Fixed the newswire which is now featured on LabourStart’s French page on Facebook to open links in a new window (as is the case for the campaigns newswire).
4. Received another nice donation from a Canadian union, processed it and had Derek thank them.
5. Spoke with the International Metalworkers Federation about a possible campaign on Malawi – but after consulting with the ITUC, this has been placed on hold.
6. Provided advice on social networking to UNI, which is campaigning against Deutsche Telekom – a union-buster in the USA.
7. Mailed all members of UnionBook about our conference, the campaigns, and the need to recruit some 900 new members in 40 days.
8. Improved daily campaign stats program to show only the current month; could not get it to show in reverse order.
9. Backed up mailing lists, MySQL databases, and all files on the website.
10. Added campaign supporters to MailChimp lists.
11. Removed spam signups to the conference database.
12. Updated conference website with the Turkish version of the ‘respect’ form.
13. Sorted out tickets for travel to Istanbul in September for a meeting with our conference committee.
14. Sent out the weekly mailing in German.
15. Sent out a mailing to over 600 Francophone Canadians.
16. And answered dozens and dozens of emails.

The Palestine campaign now has 3,605 supporters after only 6 days online.  It is only 32 behind the Georgia campaign, which has been online for  27 days.  One or two points to note – just random observations, really:

• The other campaigns were launched at the initiative of large and powerful national trade union centers and global union federations (IMF, AFL-CIO, ICEM, PSI, etc.).  This one was launched at the initiative of a very small, independent union (WAC Ma’an).  Sometimes, small is beautiful.
• Sometimes, the nationality of the workers involved is decisive. I’ve noted before that campaigns targetting countries like Botswana and Swaziland are unlikely to draw widespread support (at least from outside the region – Southern Africa).  But some countries are always in the news, and people from all over the world therefore feel a genuine, spontaneous sympathy for the workers in that country.  Palestine would fall into this category.
• The addition of Hebrew has done little to expand the campaign – there are only 32 messages that have been sent out in that language.  The Arabic campaign, which has been repeatedly edited and fixed, is not yet drawing any support at all.
• The Canadians are once again in the lead – a result of there being so many of them on the mailing list, which is in turn the result of a very successful campaign that interested their labour movement (the postal workers’ strike and lockout).  They are followed close behind by the UK and USA, and together these three countries account for a clear majority of the messages sent.  (Australia is, unfortunately, now lagging far behind.)

The number of people who are fans of LabourStart’s Facebook page in English has leaped from 1,710 to 1,879 in just two days – a growth of 10%.  If this rate continues, sometime in the next day or two we will reach 2,000 fans.  This would mean leaping over five other sites in the ‘league table’ I published here on the weekend, putting LabourStart in 19th place instead of 24th.

Also over the weekend I quietly launched a LabourStart ‘badge’ which people can use on Facebook.  You can learn more here.  It looks like Derek, myself and one other person have successfully done this to our Facebook images. Should we promote this more aggressively?

Finally, the Palestine campaign is doing very well relative to other recent campaigns.  Here are the totals:

1. Georgia 3,617 (25 days online)
2. Iraq 3,411 (55 days online)
3. Botswana 3,363 (49 days online)
4. Palestine 3,138 (only 4 days online)
5. Colombia 2,819 (35 days online)
6. Korea 2,746 (12 days online)
7. Russia 1,697 (46 days online)