Inside LabourStart

Campaigns: I’ve done a mass mailing to our English list announcing the two new campaigns (Russia, El Salvador) and the release of Rosalba in Colombia (subject of a campaign of ours last winter). We also promoted Amnesty International’s Iran campaign, the ITUC annual survey, and a contest sponsored by UCS.  Last week we suggested a super-campaign to the ITUC based around their annual survey, but we’ve gotten no answer from them. We’ve gotten permission to close down the Chile campaign after 3 months and have asked permission to close down the Botswana one as the strike is now over.  Once again at the request of the RMT union we launched a UK-specific campaign and did a mailing to the more than 5,000 UK subscribers on our lists.  Nearly 700 messages have already been sent.

Conference: Work continues on the conference registration – I’ve gotten stuck on a bit of code and have been asking for help.  Made some progress today and hope to have this settled tomorrow so that we can begin registering people.  The problem has to do with the interaction between the Perl scripting language and a MySQL database.  I tested out Ustream, which integrates with Ning (UnionBook) as a way of doing video podcasts for the conference, but while it worked, the advertising was incredibly annoying, so I’ll be trying out different software instead.  Had a long Skype conference call with the Solidarity Center about the participation of Middle East and North African trade unionists at our event.

Fundraising: As the USA was lagging far behind other countries, I wrote to some of our friends in the American labour movement and have gotten some positive responses.  The total raised so far (including some money which has been pledged but not yet received) is £15,341 — a nearly 40% increase over last year.

UnionBook: I wrote to all UB members telling them how things were going with our drive to recruit new members – trying to reach a goal of 5,000 by 4 September.  While the site is growing, it’s not growing fast enough to meet that goal.  18 new members joined today, and another 18 yesterday.

It’s here.  Please spread the word.

These are the active campaigns at the moment on LabourStart with the total number of supporters and launch date for each one:

• Iraq: Union leader forcibly relocated – 3,111 (30 May)
• Swaziland: Protest mass arrests of trade unionists – 2,210 (21 April)
• Bahrain: Stop the attack on the trade union movement – 4,425 (19 April)
• Chile: Government Reneges on Mine Safety Standards; Demand Reform – 3,280 (09 March) – closing down this week

(The other Iraq campaign is about to close down – it got 3,808 messages since 10 May.)

We’ve been asked by PSI do a campaign in support of public sector workers in Botswana, which we’ll launch tomorrow. Full coverage of the situation in that country can be found here.

We’ve been asked by the Trades Union Congress (UK) and others to support the Iraqi trade  unions with this new campaign.

We’ve gotten a handful of complaints in the last month from people who couldn’t fill in the form.  There have always been complaints – but we know that for thousands of people the form works fine.  But the number of complaints is now too high to ignore, so I’ll be investigating what’s happening here.  It could be related to the redesign of the form, and the problem may only occur on certain devices (e.g., the iPad).  More later …

Update: I’ve removed a bit of unnecessary JavaScript – this might fix the problem.  We’ll stay alert and see if there are any more complaints.

• The British magazine .net selects a website every month and has a major design company suggest a makeover. In the June 2011 issue, that site is LabourStart (I suggested it to them). The company doing the makeover suggestion is an award winning studio.
• The last 150 campaigns we ran are now listed in the Our Campaigns page.
• My meetings in Istanbul last week around our upcoming conference were successful. I was also interviewed for the new Turkish satellite TV channel IMC, which wants to broadcast the conference live. Nearly 20 people attended the conference organizing committee meeting at the headquarters of the oil workers union – which is where the conference will take place. I’ve done a very basic flyer about the conference which will be distributed at the European Trade Union Confederation congress in Athens this week.

In our first new campaign in three weeks, we’re responding to an appeal from the Iraqi unions.  The campaign has a short and memorable URL: http://www.labourstart.org/iraq

This is not the first campaign we’ve run in support of the Iraqi unions — so let’s see if we can do better than before.  Here is what we’ve done so far:

• Iraq: Minister closes all union offices in Saddam-style move – TUC/GFIW – 23 July 2010 – 3,100
• Iraq: Stop harassment of oil union leaders – Solidarity Center – 12 April 2010 – 2,643
• Hands off the Iraqi Teachers Union! – TUC – 26 February 2010 – 328
• Iraq: Stop government interference in the unions – GFIW – 19 October 2009 – 2,530
• Iraq: Teachers union faces threat of government takeover – ITU – 27 March 2009 – 4,468
• Iraq: Raid on trade union offices – GFIW – 1 March 2007 – 3,068

Let’s see if we can do better than that March 2009 effort, aiming to get over 5,000 messages sent this time.

I’ve just closed down 3 campaigns that had been running for three months with no results:

Turkey: Polyplex must reinstate sacked workers, negotiate with union – 09 February 2011 – ICEM
Company (Polyplex)
1,961 (all languages)

Mexico: Defend trade union rights – 10 February 2011 – IMF
Government
3,677 (all languages)

Pakistan: Reinstate sacked trade union leader at Syngenta – 09 February 2011 – ICEM
Company (Syngenta)
4,398 (all languages)

(There is reason to believe that the numbers for the third campaign are somewhat inflated by over-enthusiastic supporters.)

In another two days, we commemorate one year since the launch of the last campaign we ran that exceeded 5,000 supporters. In other words, we’ve now had a full year without a large campaign. Any thoughts on what we can do?

We’ve been asked by UNITE and by the RMT to do two campaigns that are not global but are UK-only.  You can see them on our UK news page, and we will promote them to the 5,000+ UK names on our mailing lists.  The campaigns are:

• RMT reps unlawfully sacked
• Thanet Earth: Respect workers rights now

If these work well, we’ll be able to similar campaigns for specific countries (though the USA remains a problems because the country code top level domain, or cctld, is not widely used).