Inside LabourStart

New country - new possibilities.

There’s a new country in the world – South Sudan (this is their flag).

At the moment we don’t have any correspondents there, and no readers (that we know of), and a quick scan showed no current labour news.

But we’re ready for all of the above, as ‘South Sudan’ is now one of the choices for news stories in our database, and for participants in our online campaigns.

If there are any other countries you know of that we’ve missed, let me know and we’ll fix it.

Meanwhile, we have successfully launched our first campaign in Hebrew — here.  You should see something like this in your browser:

We hope this will also be our first campaign to appear in Hebrew – to reach out to Israeli workers.

The Swaziland campaign was suspended today after 3 months online – and a disappointing 2,357 messages sent. (We’re waiting to hear from the ITUC what effect, if any, it had on the ground.)

This leaves us with six active campaigns, listed in order of popularity:

• Georgia 3,596
• Iraq 3,406
• Botswana 3,357
• Colombia 2,807
• Korea 2,683
• Russia 1,690

This means that the Georgia campaign, launched only 3 weeks ago, is the one most likely to reach 5,000, making it one of our larger campaigns.

We just received this from the United Steelworkers –

Movement at Vale in Colombia

After intervention by unions from around the world, there has been some positive movement in the struggle by Vale workers at the El Hatillo mine in Colombia who have organizied with the union Sintramienergetica. The Vice Minister of Labour called a meeting with the union and Vale.  In the meeting Vale agreed to negotiate with the union. The union is now waiting for Vale to name its bargaining committee.

In the meeting, Vale also took note of receiving over two thousand letters of protest from workers around the world concerned about Vale’s behavior in Colombia. Sintramienergetica is thankful for the LabourStart campaign run on its behalf.

After three months, I’ve closed down the Bahrain campaign – which came in with 4,693 messages sent and which appeared in 10 languages. I’ve asked the ITUC to tell us what effect, if any, the campaign had.

This is a good beginning – and today we’ll be launching a Korean language version of this campaign which will hopefully begin to build a Korean language mailing list as well.

This new campaign comes from the Korean Metal Workers via the International Metal Workers Federation.  It is, as we’ve grown to expect from our comrades in Korea, a very exciting one – an aerial protest in a crane lasting for months, police battling workers using liquid tear gas, arrests of activists, and so on.  Please do what you can to promote this – it’s urgent.

93,000 workers went on strike at an Adidas factory in Vietnam two weeks ago; 20 were reportedly arrested.  I’ve asked SACOM (in Hong Kong) who broke the news if we should do a campaign.  If so, it could go very large – Adidas is a household name.  More details soon.

• Bahrain – 4,671 (after 79 days) +5
• Georgia – 3,412 (after 7 days) +60
• Iraq – 3,391 (after 37 days) +5
• Botswana – 3,343 (after 31 days) +3
• Colombia – 2,773 (after 17 days) +6
• Swaziland – 2,338 (after 77 days) +2
• Russia – 1,663 (after 28 days) +7

(Updated after 3 days – the numbers in blue indicate how many new supporters each campaign has signed up in the last three days.)

Some thoughts – and I’d love to hear yours …

• The Georgia campaign is doing exceptionally well after only a week.  If we can keep up some momentum, this could become one of our big ones.  This may be due to the big surge in our lists after the very successful online campaign in support of Canadian postal workers.
• The Russia campaign, on the other hand, is getting hardly any response at all.  I wonder why.  Could it be that people don’t want to get involved in what may be a complex case — one that requires us to trust a union’s account of what has happened and to distrust the authorities?  Or is it just too obscure?
• Very disappointed in the Swaziland result, but my guess is that it’s the fact that there’s so little media attention paid (outside of southern Africa), so people don’t know where this is.  Of course the same may be said of Georgia, but many Europeans will at least have a vague sense of where Georgia is.
• The Bahrain campaign is the next one we’ll shut down in another 11 days, and it’s unlikely (unfortunately) that it will be one of the special ones that clears the 5,000 mark.  Too bad.

So, what do others think?

The International Department of the AFL-CIO in Washington has asked for our help with this one. It’s an important campaign and I hope that we can grow it into a very large one.