Inside LabourStart

Conference 2010: We’ve got a registration page up, not yet for public consumption.  We also have written to Labor Notes about purchasing a full page ad in their own conference program book.  And we’re making a special effort to attract women trade unionists to our conference, and to fund travel for women from developing countries to attend.

Labour Video of the Year: So far, over 1,300 votes cast in less than two days.

TUC campaign in support of Iraqi teachers: We did a mailing to our 5,000 or so UK subscribers. This boosted support for the campaign from 12 (after 2 weeks in which British unions did little or nothing to promote) to 118.

Guyana campaign: We’ve gotten the green light from ICEM to launch this — should be sometime soon.

New campaign for Mexico: UE and the ICEM have green lighted this as well — we’re waiting for some clarifications before launch.

And this too: “The support of LabourStart was vital to the Green Isle Foods dispute because the parent company, Northern Foods, was largely insulated from the dispute in Ireland in terms of public relations, even though local management said everything discussed in local discussions had to be referred to Leeds for a decision.  The Irish mainstream media showed little interest in the dispute so that we were heavily reliant on alternatives. The fact that so many British trade unionists and consumers sent emails to Northern Foods brought home to the employer that there were consequences to bad behaviour, such as ignoring the Labour Court.  Many thanks, Padraig Yeates on  behalf of the Technical Engineering and Electrical Union.”

Our 25th language? We have a new correspondent in Spain who speaks Basque …

I haven’t been updating this blog often enough — but LabourStart has been keeping us very busy these days …

Labour Video of the Year competition – voting began yesterday.  Over 800 votes cast in the first 24 hours.  Click here to watch the voting as it happens.

Global campaigns – We launched a campaign in support of Mexican miners last week.  3,112 supporters so far and the campaign is available in 7 languages.  Our campaign in support of imprisoned Turkish trade unionist Seher Tümer also has over 3,000 messages sent — in 7 languages as well.  The campaign we launched in support of hunger striking Irish workers ended with an agreement and was closed down within 6 days of launch. We will shortly be launching a campaign in support of workers in Guyana, at the request of the ICEM.

National campaigns – We have been asked both by the British TUC and the New Zealand union PSA to launch campaigns targetting only people in those countries.  The TUC campaign has been very slow to take off, but the New Zealand one has brought in well over 400 responses — adding many New Zealand trade unionists to our list. In addition, we did our first mailing to our thousands of Australian subscribers in support of a campaign there.

Travels – I continue to be invited to speak at union events around the world.  My upcoming travel schedule includes visits to Egypt, Turkey, Canada and Brazil — all within the next two months.  The last of these (not yet confirmed) is to speak at the SIGTUR congress for trade unionists from throughout the global south.  They are particularly keen on UnionBook.

This is the full text of the statement issued by SACCAWU today:

After a brave and bruising strike by more than 4 500 workers lasting for seven weeks since 4 December 2009, SACCAWU and Sun International reached an agreement that effectively saw the end of the strike. Workers are expected to return from 26 January 2010 and by the latest 28 January 2010.

This strike was marked by an extreme intransigence on the side of the company, coupled with violence from the SAPS and private security on the picket-line, including racist and sexist insults, extreme provocations, assaults as well as arrests of numerous strikers, a full-time shop steward and a union official.

Despite all these provocations, workers remained united and determined, continuing their strike over the festive season throughout January as schools reopened. Despite all these pressures on working class families, the strikers remained united. This unity of the striking workers was further boosted by the solidarity from COSATU, especially by the COSATU North West Province and Moses Kotane Local. The morale of the striking workers was further boosted by the international solidarity and the Labour Start campaign that saw thousands of letters from unionists and the public in general from all over the world, sent to the management of Sun International. SACCAWU and the striking workers wish to acknowledge and express our gratitude for the solidarity, on the picket-line, in the communities and internationally, that played an important role in keeping the unity and building the morale of striking workers throughout the strike.

While the striking workers did not see all their demands met, the significance of the victory should not be underestimated. Because of the drawn out nature of the dispute, and the since we once again were on the eve wage negotiations, the Union felt it was a strategic necessity to enter into a two-year agreement, which was accepted by both parties.

The agreement reached covers the following:

• Extension of the bargaining unit to a range of supervisory categories previously excluded from the bargaining unit, while others will be included into the bargaining unit for the purposes of accessing benefits and housekeeping supervisors will also benefit from the 2009/2010 wage increases.

• The current minimum will increase from R66 479.00 to R72 295.91 from July 2009

• An across the board increase of 8.75% effective from 1 July 2009

• Back pay to workers from July 2009 will be paid to workers not later than 31st January 2010

• An increase of CPI + 1.75% or 7.75% whichever works out greater will come into effect from July 2010

• Shift allowances will be increased to R3.00 per hour from 1st July 2009

• Home ownership subsidy scheme limit shall be increased from R100 000 to R135 000

• Employees with 2 – 5 years service shall qualify for a 30% subsidy. Those with less that 5 years service were not qualifying previously.

• Educational assistance shall increase from R5 000 to R8 000

The issues of averaging of hours of work and scheduling of permanent staff and other unresolved matters will be explored in future interactions with the Company, with the Union reserving its right to pursue the legal route.

There’s been a need to resume daily — or near daily — mass mailings.  Yesterday, we needed to announce the launch of RadioLabour.net — something we’d already done for our UnionBook members. Today, the IUF has asked us to help promote a solidarity campaign in support of striking workers in South Africa (at AB Miller).  Tomorrow, we may well do a mailing to report on the end of another dispute there (Sun International).  These mailings are being kept deliberately brief.  So far, no complaints.

I’ve just done our first mailing to the English language LabourStart list — more than 50,000 addresses.  It should take anywhere from 10 to 17 hours to complete.  (And yes, I am looking into ways to speed that up.)  This is the first real test to see how well our new server (DirectNIC in the USA) and software (PHPlist) stand up under pressure.  There’s no real way to know if everyone receives a mailing, but one way to test is to watch our daily stats for all campaigns, here.  If there’s no bump today, we have a problem.

The red pins are generated from a file, linked to our active campaigns.

See here.

We keep getting asked to promote workers’ rights campaigns and we keep having to say yes — that’s the nature of our business.  There’s already a queue forming and even as I write these words, we’ve got another appeal coming in from 12,000 workers in Turkey.  Today’s mass mailing — the second this week — has an update about the Sun International dispute which I’ve published on UnionBook as the union (SACCAWU) doesn’t update its website; appeals from the Clean Clothes Campaign and American Rights at Work for their Triumph International and T-Mobile campaigns; and finally a plug for the book, Click Clack Moo, which is a perfect Christmas gift our supporters can buy for their kids.

Today’s mailing makes much greater use of rich text formatting, with small images next to each story, and the images themselves can be clicked on.

We don’t often get requests for help from South African unions, so this is a great opportunity for us.  The new campaign is live here.

I spent Thursday and Friday last week as the guest of the South West TUC, which was holding a major conference (150 participants) involving the whole range of British unions.  I conducted two short workshops on online campaigning, signed up a whole bunch of people to our list, and got to hear wonderful feedback about our work — including UnionBook.

Stage one was the Facebook ads campaign.  We’ve now shown over a million ads (1,067,344 to be precise), bringing UnionBook over 300 new visitors, some of whom have signed up.

Stage two was to write to all current users (nearly 5,000) plus all those in our Facebook UnionBook group (614 members) to tell them to become active again, that we’ve clobbered the spammers and restored messaging — and that there’s a new UnionBook group in support of the Vale Inco strikers.

The next stage — weekly mailings to UnionBook members telling them what’s new, giving them reason to be active on the site.