Inside LabourStart

• 531 people have already answered our survey on trade union use of the net, with the number rising all the time.  You can track the results in real time here.
• The Education International has agreed for us to close down the campaign we launched 3 months ago today.  It has gotten over 2,000 responses but has had little impact on the Colombian government.
• I’ll be attending NetRoots UK tomorrow – a major conference about activist (not specifically trade union) use of the new technology, hosted by the Trades Union Congress in London.
• I’ve been invited to speak in New Orleans in March at the annual conference of UALE, the labor educators organization.
• Our Global Solidarity Conference scheduled to take place in Sydney later this year is going to have to be postponed to 2012 or later; we’re currently exploring whether we can do a 2011 conference somewhere else.
• I’ve stopped podcasting; interest levels were far too low.
• UnionBook picked up more than 20 new members in the last 24 hours and is getting interesting publicity — a great article in Spanish from a Peruvian trade unionist which you can read on the site, plus I’ve been interviewed at length by a reporter from Hurriyet, Turkey’s largest newspaper.

• Last week we published our first news story in Tamil.
• We’ve been in touch with our comrades in Tbilisi and have been assured that our Georgian language edition will go live next week.
• We’re expecting the translation into Hindi to be ready in the next few days.
• Our front page in Turkish now includes graphical links to all the country’s national trade union centers as well as two pro-labour NGOs we’ve been working with – and they’ve all been informed of this.  One of the centers (DISK) has discussed ways to cooperate with us.  Meanwhile, a very large number of Turkish trade unionists have signed up to use UnionBook.
• The ITF has called for a global day of action in support of Turkey’s TUMTIS union which is locked in dispute with UPS – we may need to launch a big online campaign in another week or two.
• We have a new newswire – USA labour news stories in Spanish.
• We stopped submissions to our Labour Photo of the Year competition and the judges are currently preparing a shortlist.
• I’ve begun work in earnest on our iPhone/iPad app.
• We’ve asked correspondents to help our comrades in Egypt (at CTUWS) who are looking for books to translate into Arabic – they’ve begun with one that was a LabourStart book of the week.

I’ve chased up with correspondents and translators about our new language editions (Tamil, Georgian, Ukrainian, Serbian and Hindi) none of which have gone live yet.  I’ve noted also a ‘Plan B’ in each case where we continue to get no responses from our comrades.  It’s important that all the languages we list have fresh content and we need to identify people who can help consistently with each one.

Next Friday I’m off to Istanbul to speak at a trade union conference on new media – my second visit to Turkey this year as a guest of the unions.

All our recent campaigns have now been published in Turkish thanks to a team effort lead by a new comrade, Deniz.

The front page of Turkish LabourStart now features our campaigns in that language – it used to show only the English ones.

We asked BWI for permission to shut down the Cambodian construction workers’ campaign, which is now 3 months old.  Of course we’ve asked what the result of the campaign has been so that we can report back to our readers.

I’ve begun intensifying our use of Facebook Causes and have now emailed everyone in our largest cause, the one supporting the jailed Vietnamese union activists.

The campaigns software has been fixed – now when you send off a message and see the page asking you to do more, clicking on the link to show all current campaigns takes you directly to your language (instead of to an old page that showed a bunch of flags and languages).

We launched a second Colombian campaign this week at the request of Justice for Colombia, an NGO backed by the British TUC.  JFC has promised to promote the campaign on their website and to their lists.

I wrote a followup email to the comrade who has agreed to coordinate the team of German volunteer translators as none of our recent campaigns or emailings have gone out in that language – even though we have volunteers ready to do so.

I’ve made a number of suggestions to Andrew regarding work towards our conference in Sydney which is only one year away. These include regular phone calls, a closed group on UnionBook, and following up with our correspondents in the region.

We expect to launch a Finnish version of our campaigns starting with the Nokia one (of course) but have not gotten a correctly formatted version of the file we need yet from the metal workers.

I’ve been invited to speak at two union training events in the UK in the near future on the subject of online campaigning and social networks — one is for the UCU (academics union) in Leeds; the other will be a series of events for TSSA.

This morning we launched our Vietnam campaign in Vietnamese and in Korean as well.

And this afternoon, we were asked by the International Metalworkers Federation to launch a new Foxconn campaign to replace the old one, which we’ve done.  There’s a Facebook cause as well.

Results have begun to come in following up on yesterday’s semi-annual LabourStart fundraising appeal.  So far, 59 donations have come through totalling approximately US $1,800.

Busy day …

I’ve added the option now add a link to a Facebook Cause tied in to any of our online campaigns. The first one is in support of the jailed Vietnamese trade unionists.  You can see the cause here and note its number – 542225.  We simply copy this number into the newly-created facebook_cause_id field when creating a campaign — the Facebook cause needs to be created before you have a number, of course.

If a cause exists, it automatically appears – with a small Facebook icon – on the campaign page.

I think this could be a way to raise awareness of our online campaigns as the ’cause’ software on Facebook is actually a fairly developed organizing tool, encouraging people to invite their friends to join causes.  There might well be a viral effect if the cause is interesting enough.  We’ll see.

Every single one of the current LabourStart campaigns appears in English, French, Russian, Spanish and Italian, and that’s fantastic.  Andy, Masha, David and Andrea have ensured that our readers in those languages have a chance to participate.  We’ve done pretty well with Norwegian and Chinese as well, with the vast majority of campaigns translated promptly by Espen and Lennon.

But there are languages that we have the capacity to campaign in, and have sometimes run campaigns in, but which have recently become dormant.  These are the following:

1. German
2. Dutch
3. Turkish
4. Portuguese
5. Polish
6. Korean
7. Farsi

Taken I’ve written to all those who’ve helped, and others who might help, to try to make sure that we once again have all our campaigns in those languages.

In the German case, we’ve had one of the five current campaigns translated and we have quite a few volunteers ready and willing to do the work.  Today I’ve asked them if one would agree to be the coordinator so that we could sort this out in future without me having to randomly pick one translator each time.

If we get this right, every campaign will appear in 14 languages, and we should plan to expand that to include other key languages in which we already have active news sites, such as Finnish.

If we look at LabourStart’s ActNOW campaigns, I’d guess we’d find the following: campaigns that focus on extreme violations of workers’ rights (such as arrests and killings) attract far more support than those which build support for more ordinary disputes.

Now let’s look at the current active campaigns to see if this is actually true:

Jailings of trade unionists
India: Over 500 workers jailed in dispute with Foxconn – 4,368 supporters in 6 days (728/day)
Colombia: Free jailed university lecturer and trade unionist – 1,796 supporters in 14 days (128/day)
Vietnam: Labour rights advocates face prison – 1,326 supporters in 1 day (1,326/day)

Sacking of trade unionists
Turkey: Support sacked UPS workers – 3,137 supporters in 2 months and 24 days (37/day)
Mexico: Reinstate sacked workers, recognize union, and drop all charges – 2,048 supporters in 2 months and 22 days (24/day)
Cambodia: Reinstate sacked construction workers – 2,015 supporters in 2 months and 2 days (32/day)

Other repressive measures
Iraq: Minister closes all union offices in Saddam-style move – 3,575 in 3 months (40/day)

None of the above
Thailand: Migrant workers have the right to workers’ compensation – 1,788 supporters in 9 days (199/day)

Some quick thoughts on what might be happening:

• Campaigns on Colombia and Iraq seem to occur fairly frequently and on the same themes, which might result in campaign fatigue.
• The Turkey campaign might have done well in part because of the support of the ITF, with whom we’ve always had a good partnership on campaigns.
• In general, campaigns about sacked workers barely go over the 2,000 mark, even after months online.
• The publicity for all the campaigns above was essentially the same — though the Colombia and Thailand ones were publicized together which may have resulted in a smaller number of participants for both.

We’ve been asked by the Committee to Protect Vietnamese Workers to launch this campaign.  Publicity is starting now, and I’ll be asking the volunteer translators for their help today.  Please do what you can to promote this.

I haven’t been able to update this blog for some 4 weeks and lots has happened in that time. Here are some highlights:

New campaigns: We launched three new campaigns – India: Over 500 workers jailed in dispute with Foxconn (4,036 messages sent so far), Thailand: Migrant workers have the right to workers’ compensation (1,703 messages), and Colombia: Free jailed university lecturer and trade unionist (1,707 messages). We’ve closed down one campaign last Friday — PSI’s campaign in support of jailed workers in Turkey.

LabourStart.tv: The domain registrar closed our account in late September — we’re now making efforts to get it reopened. Meanwhile, I’ve changed the link on our front page to point to http://www.labourstart.org/tv which works.

Labour and Technology podcasts: I’ve done two of these in the last month – Spammers and online communities: The challenge for trade unions (50 listeners) and Activist apps (258 listeners).

Labour photo of the year: Derek and I have agreed to begin work on this in another couple of weeks.

UnionBook: The old site has been completely shut down and unionbook.org and unionbook.org.uk now both point to the new site.

Upcoming conferences: I have been invited to speak at a conference of the International Metalworkers Federation in Geneva next week — it’s called “IMF global trade union networks in TNC’s as a tool to organising and promoting solidarity”. I’ve also been invited to Istanbul to speak at a conference on trade unions new media on 27 November.

2011 LabourStart global solidarity conference: Andrew has made some progress on this and we’ll be talking about it and beginning planning within the next few days.

Labour’s online bookstore: We’re ready to use the new version of UCS’s software, and this should be live in a day or two. We continue to promote about one book per month.  Authors and publishers continue to contact us regularly asking us to promote books.

We’ve not had a working French language campaigns newswire for weeks (maybe months).  Now fixed – see it here.  Thanks for everyone’s patience with this.