Inside LabourStart

This doesn’t happen every day, but we’re feeling the pressure from trade unions around the world and global union federations … so we can’t really say no.

Here are the three campaigns launched today:

• Philippines: Dole must respect union rights
• Turkey: Polyplex must reinstate sacked workers, negotiate with union
• Pakistan: Reinstate sacked trade union leader at Syngenta

We are today launching a very big joint GUF campaign in support of trade union rights in Mexico.  The campaign is being launched simultaneously in 7 languages.

The ICEM has given us two campaigns to launch today – but we are holding off for a few days on the publicity blitz.  The campaigns focus on Pakistan and Turkey.

We are very close to a public announcement of our Hindi language edition.

We’ve been holding some email based discussions about the next Labour Video of the Year competition – work will begin on this in March.

Campaigns: We were asked by KMU in the Philippines to launch a campaign on behalf of Dole workers; after consulting with colleagues in the field, we agreed to do so and are now awaiting the text.  Meanwhile, we have informed the International Metalworkers Federation that we wish to close down the India Foxconn campaign after three months and are in the process of doing so — we await final instructions from them.  We publicized the IUF’s joint campaign with FLOC regarding the murder of a union organizer in Mexico.

Conference: I’ve drafted a short proposal for the conference, to be held in the fall in Istanbul.  I plan to visit to Turkey at the end of this month to meet with the organizing committee which is being formed there.

Egypt: While the Internet was down, our comrades in the CTUWS were able to phone out short messages which were then transcribed and translated in to English – and sent to us.  We’ve been publicizing our special Egypt news page throughout the week using our mailing lists, social networks, etc.

Languages: We have now been sent the text for a Hindi edition of LabourStart which we hope to launch soon.

• I had  a meeting yesterday with Shane Enright, the trade union coordinator for Amnesty International UK.  We discussed among other things Turkey and Mexico and ways we can continue to work together – including Amnesty’s involvement in the next LabourStart conference.
• Our survey now has 1,300 responses – a big gain over the last week.  I will close it down on Monday and report the results.
• I managed to dilute the size of LabourStart’s news links database.  We are supposed to be restricted to 100 MB of data, though our internet service provider has not made an issue of us going slightly above that.  Nevertheless, I now have a system in place to check once a month and to keep the size of the database under control.
• I’ve created a new newswire – soon to be publicized – in French covering the countries of the Maghreb. In the course of doing so, I found that all our regional newswires are still referencing our old database and need to be fixed.  I will do this next week.
• LabourStart was temporarily offline – even emails to labourstart.org weren’t working – very briefly last week.  Our internet service provider spotted the problem and solved it even before we complained.
• Our new campaigns are picking up support – the Turkey campaign has 1,388 supporters after one day; the Bangladesh campaign has 4,356 supporters after 8 days.

Espen Loken writes:

Also in peaceful Norway workers sometimes have to fight for their basic workers’ rights. Workers in “Bekken & Strøm”, a company producing working clothes, were on strike since 26th of November to get collective agreement. The employer’s answer was that “it is our clear opinion that the company is given a free hand and a collective agreement with your union cannot be imposed on the company. We are fundamentally against any imposed and involuntarily agreement”. Just as we were about to launch a global Labourstart campaign in support of the workers, we got the message that the employer gave up. He had just been notified that the Norwegian court ruled that notified secondary actions and boycot of the company were legal, and expected these actions to take place the next day. Seldom we have been so pleased to not launch a campaign!

We’ve just launched this campaign – our second this week.  Please sign up, publicize, etc – and join the group on Facebook as well.

Moshrefa Mishu, jailed Bangladeshi trade union leader.

We’ve launched our first campaign of the new year — and our first in several months — today.

We have been asked by the Swiss union-backed NGO SOLIFONDS to campaign for the release of Moshrefa Mishu (pictured).

Please do what you can to promote this important campaign as well as the associated Facebook Cause.

• I plan to stop allowing participation in our online survey once we have 1,000 responses.  We currently have 978.  Please help by spreading the word.  By the way, the largest groups of survey participants come from the following countries so far: UK, USA, Canada, Australia and Norway.
• UnionBook has now reached over 3,000 members following the push yesterday.  In fact, we’ve picked up 120 new members in the last 9 days.
• We’ll be closing the Vietnam campaign in the next few days.  This will bring us down to only two active campaigns.
• We’ve had a formal request for a campaign from Bangladesh.
• We are expecting additional requests for campaigns in the next few days from Turkey, Japan and Korea.
• I’ll be setting up a French language newswire for the Maghreb countries, as Andy has long proposed.
• I’ve read the Berkman Center (Harvard) report on denial of service attacks on independent media and human rights websites and plan to implement some of their suggestions for improved security in the next few days.  I’ve also written up a short article for the British weekly Solidarity about this.
• I’ve changed the way we backup the site now.  There is now a full weekly backup of our MySQL databases (we didn’t do this before) and instead of packing (zipping) all our other files and backing that up, we’re now backing up all the files on the site on a weekly basis using FTP.
• I have written once again to the domain registrar for the “.tv” domain requesting that they reinstate our labourstart.tv domain.

Here’s what we’ve posted on the closed site:

According to reports from people in the field, the planned compensation fund scheme with private insurance has gone silent, and this may be related to the campaign. In addition, the prime minister talked about need to address migrant social security last week at a major conference, so that’s also promising. Migrants continue to be unprotected however. We’re also waiting to see if the ILO will issue a report critical of the Thai government, and if so we will publicise this widely.

We’re about to drop to only 3 active campaigns and are most recent one was launched two months ago.  But we may have two campaigns coming up in the next couple of days both of which could prove to be very popular.  One would support an ongoing protest by Korean metalworkers – very dramatic stuff, with great photos – and the other in support of workers in Norway.  (It’s a rare day that we get a request for solidarity from a Nordic country, and hopefully a campaign focussed on local issues could get a large response from the Norwegian trade union movement.)