Inside LabourStart

We’re liaising very closely with the international trade union movement on this one, and partner organizations like Amnesty International.  In fact, we had an hour-long conference call today to discuss.

The campaign is rapidly approaching 4,000 messages sent, and is now working in nine languages — including simplified and traditional Chinese, Farsi, Italian, Norwegian, Dutch, Russian, French and English. We have a partial translation into German.  Mailings have gone out in English, French, Norwegian, Russian and Italian so far.

We’ve been asked by the Labor Party of the Philippines to help one of its affiliate unions with a campaign, and have just launched this today.

Please sign up to support the campaign and spread the word.

Thanks to the help of our comrade Lennon Ying-Dah Wong, General Secretary of the First Commercial Bank Industrial Union (FCBIU) in Taiwan, we are just about to launch the first-ever LabourStart campaigns in Chinese – both simplified and traditional.

You should be able to see them at some point very soon here.

Thanks to John Wood at the British TUC for setting this up for us yesterday — four Twitter petition campaigns in support of Taiwanese workers:

• Samsung http://act.ly/1xg
• Htc http://act.ly/1xf
• Google nexus http://act.ly/1xh
• Lg http://act.ly/1xi

Meanwhile, the web-based campaign itself is catching fire, with over 2,000 messages sent in four languages — and the prospects of a Chinese language version coming soon!

Check it our here.

I’ve posted my draft notes for the two talks I would have given at SIGTUR in Brazil this week.  (I gave one by videoconference just now.)  Here they are:

• UnionBook
• Online campaigning

Some brief news items from the last few days …

Participation in SIGTUR event in Brazil: Volcanic ash has prevented me from flying, but we’ll be using Skype videoconferencing instead.  My presentation will be on LabourStart and online campaigning.

UnionBook: Glenn Thompson of the Australian union AMWU will be making a presentation on this to the SIGTUR conference and promoting its use.  We need to get automated registration working again — I hope to have that sorted out today.

Campaigns: We have two new campaigns on the way, from the Philippines and Taiwan.  Details soon.

LaborComm Turkey: It appears that the conference, including my presentation, will be broadcast live online.

We’re about to launch two campaigns — one global and one UK-specific — both submitted by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in Britain.  The global one is a joint initiative involving the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center, the ICEM, the TUC and others and supports Iraqi oil workers.  The UK one relates to attacks on the public sector in the channel island of Jersey.

At the request of the UE and ICEM, we’ve launched another campaign — the second in two days — here.

This campaign is featured, together with other campaigns, on my new personal (not official LabourStart) blog on the website of Amnesty International’s UK Section.

The problem? There’s some evidence mounting that there may be some attempts to block our campaigns again, black-listing us as spammers:

• Everyone who signed up to the LabourStart campaign in support of the Iraqi teachers received a threatening email from one of the targets, who claimed he’d go to the police.  I wrote to him, as did the TUC, telling him to fuck off.
• Our ISP (1&1 Internet) sent us a form letter warning us that there have been reports that we’ve been spamming.  I replied asking for additional details but have heard nothing.
• An email I just sent to a target in our new Mexican campaign bounced back saying that the address sending it was associated with spam.  Not sure if this is our ISP or Gmail or labourstart.org.
• One of our readers has spotted a possible attempt to block our laborlists.org address as being a source of spam — I’m investigating this now.  This is not connected to our ISP, and is worrying. UPDATE: I’m less worried about this now; it’s being caused by ZoneAlarm which may be flagging up laborlists.org because it’s a new domain name, and because our domain name registrar is based in the Cayman Islands (which should set alarm bells ringing).

All this couldn’t come at a worse time, as I’m travelling for the next two weeks.

It’s taken a long time but we’ve finally got the green light and texts from the ICEM to launch this campaign — our first-ever in support of workers in Guyana.  It is hoped that this campaign will raise our profile in the whole Caribbean region.  This will mean that we have 5 live campaigns at the same time.