Inside LabourStart

Labour Video of the Year: 540 votes have been cast in the last 48 hours, averaging 270 votes cast per day. Last year, we got about 3,000 votes cast. So this year with another 26 days to go, we basically need 100 votes a day to reach the same number of people. You can watch the results in real time here.

May Day appeal: I’ve now written to all correspondents asking for their help to get their unions to donate. So far, the appeal has raised just under £2,000 (US$3,308). This is slightly more than we raised last year by this point.

Global Solidarity Conference: In another week from today, I’m off to Istanbul for a second meeting with the organizing committee. I’ll have a full report when I’m back.

Our campaigns: I continue to update this page – we’re now covered through July 2006, nearly five years. In that time, we ran 124 campaigns (an average of around 25 campaigns each year). Of those, 16 were very large campaigns (by our standards), with more than 5,000 messages sent out in English alone. Of those campaigns, there were one each from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK, Korea, Mexico and Zimbabwe. Two were Turkish campaigns. And nearly half of them – 7 campaigns – were focussed on workers in Iran.

The campaign reached 2,647 messages sent after 3 months online (207 of those messages were sent in Turkish).  I am now writing to DISK to try to find out what the impact of the campaign was.

Thanks to our new translator, Qassim – http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/solidarityforever/show_campaign.cgi?c=907

The little green flag is actually this.

This is the second campaign the ITUC gave us this week – we actually received both within 10 minutes of each other, but have agreed with the ITUC that we could wait a couple of days to launch this one. Please do help spread the word about this one as well.

We’ve had 3,124 messages sent in the first 40 hours. In the English language campaign, we’ve had 704 messages sent from the USA, 593 from the United Kingdom, 525 from Canada, and 373 from Australia. The campaign is also now live in French, Spanish, German and Italian. We have also received the translation into Arabic which I hope will go live today. This is a very good start for this campaign and let’s hope we can quickly break through the 5,000 mark so that this will be one of our large campaigns.

We’re suspending this campaign and have asked SOLIFONDS to tell us what the result of the campaign was.  

With 4,766 messages sent, it was our largest campaign in nearly a year.

We will be suspending all our campaigns after three months, and the next one to go is the Turkey – Reform labour laws (next Tuesday) followed by Pakistan – Reinstate sacked unionist and Turkey – Polyplex (both on 9 May), and Mexico – Defend trade union rights (10 May).  In other words, 5 campaigns are closing over this 3 week period – leaving only two live campaigns on that date.

The ITUC has given us the green light and we’ve gone live with the campaign:

http://www.labourstart.org/bahrain

Can this be the first LabourStart campaign to break 10,000 messages sent?

• Mailing lists: I continue the process of migrating our mailing lists over to MailChimp – all languages except for the Scandinavian ones and French are currently in progress. Today I set up mailing list sign-up forms which are links on our pages in Spanish, Turkish, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Arabic, Finnish, Russian, Chinese and Polish. The only languages that remain to do are the ones with much smaller lists – Farsi, Vietnamese, Bulgarian, Czech, Creole, Greek, Esperanto, Indonesian, Georgian and Hebrew. Translators will need some help in using MailChimp and I will attend to that before we do our next mailing.
• Campaigns: We expect to launch the Bahrain campaign later today.  I had a long discussion last night with the IMF about doing some large scale campaigns in the near future. The Our Campaigns page (see link in the upper right corner) now goes back to early 2007.  We will need to find summaries of what happened – especially in cases where we won.

… probably none of the ones I mentioned yesterday. (We’re still waiting on Bahrain and Swaziland.) More likely, the first campaign of the new batch to be ready is going to be a South African campaign, for the NUMSA union and the ICEM. Details later today.

It’s been something like five weeks since we launched our last campaign – which now has reached over 3,000 supporters – and we’re waiting to hear from partner unions about possible next efforts. Here’s what’s on our radar at the moment –

• USA: IKEA – a great employer in Sweden, crap in the USA – a union organizing campaign facing employer hostility
• Bahrain: A lot of interest here from international unions, Amnesty, etc. We may have something as soon as this week
• Swaziland: Massive, violent crackdown on workers – we’ll see if we can help.

Furthermore we’re continuing with the ITUC and GUFs about running the occasional popular campaign, one where people will already know about the issue and will be keen to spread the word.