Inside LabourStart

With the permission of the IMF and WAC, we’ve now closed down the campaigns in support of the Sinter workers in Turkey and the IAA workers in Israel.  WAC has promised us a full report which we can share with our readers.  Both disputes continue, unfortunately.

Of the seven campaigns currently featured on our home page, four of them are more than three months old.  I’ve written this morning to those who requested the campaigns – in Turkey, Israel, Puerto Rico and Algeria – to ask for permission to close them down.

A reminder why we do this:

• The number of messages sent after the first few days slows down to a trickle, and an employer or government will certainly notice that no one seems to be interested any longer in the campaign.
• Our own readers expect to see fresh campaigns — not long forgotten ones (in some cases, disputes which are already over).
• And — as you can see from the posting regarding the Sappi dispute below — it is hugely important to update our readers on results, and one way to produce such an update is to end a campaign and get a report from the union on what happened.

For those reasons and more, it will be rare indeed that we allow a campaign to drag on beyond three months, but we never close them down without first talking to the sponsoring union.

Subscribers to our mailing list have been writing to tell me what they think about the end of the Sappi dispute in South Africa, which we reported yesterday.  What they write confirms the importance of sending out these follow-up messages, even if what we are reporting is not a 100% victory for the workers.  Here is a sample:

• “Congratulations Eric, another successful campaign.” – Arthur Rorris, Secretary, South Coast Labour Council, NSW Australia
• “Good to hear these victories, congrats once again!” – Mac Urata, ITF, UK
• “Congratulations Eric, Another one bites the dust.  It is joyous to have a win or two. Once again, congratulations on a successful campaign.” – Wendy, Australia
• “Great news, thanks for the feedback.” – Steve, UK
• “Well done in highlighting this one. It is always good to hear about the WINS.” – Tony, Ireland
• “Great news, well done.” – Lindsay
• “Congratulations Eric. People power makes a difference.” – Shaazka
• “Brilliant!” – Jean, UK
• “Viva Worker Solidarity, Viva” – South Africa
• “This is wonderful news. Last year, I was watching a program (I can’t remember what channel or the name of the program) but it featured a black man in an overseas country.  It was the bombardment of on line petitions and faxes with Labour start (I think) that freed  him. The company got freaked out when there was such an outpouring and didnt want any more trouble and exposure. Since then, I always since these petitions and have no problem with faxing to anywhere in the world.  Anything to help those oppressed jailed workers that fight for the right for safety, fairness and human dignity!  Thank you for all your hard-work Labourstart.  I look forward to more on-line petitions!! ” – Linda, Canada
• “Many thanks for this fruitful solution. Hope our world solidarity would find justice for workers.” –
  Narith,VP of CTSWF – Cambodian Tourism and Service Workers Federation

This campaign – “Costa Rica: Solidarity with plantation workers” – has been closed after 3 months.  It attracted 4,217 supporters.  Despite a request for one, we have received no update from Peuples Solidaires about this.

The campaign in support of the Iraqi Teachers Union has been suspended at the request of the union.  As we learned this week, “The Iraqi Teachers Union (ITU) won a legal battle against the Iraqi government on May 7. The landmark ruling against the government decision to setup an official Preparatory Committee with overall authority to take control of the ITU was a symbolic victory. The court ruling stopped the government move to dismiss the ITU democratically elected leadership.” The campaign generated 4,856 messages in English, Norwegian, French, German, Spanish, Dutch and Italian versions.

In addition to Facebook, our readers can now share campaigns on Digg, Delicious, Reddit and StumbleUpon.  I’ve tested this on Digg, where I have an account, but not on the others.  Shouldn’t be a problem, but if others want to test, this is fine.  If you have other social networks or social bookmarking sites we should also offer (MySpace and Twitter strike me as important) let’s add these as well.

I’ll mention this in our Thursday mailing next week – let’s hope this helps make some of our campaigns go viral.

I’ve just added some code that appears on every campaign now and allows our readers with a single click to share the campaign link on Facebook.  I tested it and it works.  Obviously we won’t stop here — like the BBC, we’ll allow this to be used for Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious and other social networking/bookmarking websites.  I strongly encourage each of you to visit our campaigns and click on the link to add to Facebook (make sure you’re logged into Facebook first).

Three months after launching our most recent Iran campaign, we’re suspending it — after consulting with our friends at the International Alliance in Solidarity with the Workers of Iran.  We expect to soon have an update from them on the situation.  Meanwhile, the ITUC and several GUFs have issued a call for a world-wide day of action on 26 June in support of Iranian workers.  We’ve been involved in setting up the website for this event, and have created a special Iranian labour newswire for it.

We’ve launched a new campaign in support of Compass workers in Algeria, at the request of an independent union there.  It’s now in English and French and the other langauge translators have been requested to get this up in additional languages as well.

This is in addition to the campaign launched in support of PSI, to pressure the Puerto Rican government.

Tomorrow I make a presentation a fringe meeting at the annual conference of PCS, Britain’s civil servants union, on the subject of online campaigning.

I’ve been adding a default language and country to many more correspondents accounts – so far, 181 correspondents have default languages set up.  I wrote a special program to show me which languages and countries a correspondent typically posts to, in order to help decide this.

We’ll be doing a second author interview for Labour’s Online Bookstore this week, to tie in with the promotion of Steve Early’s excellent new book, which we’re selling directly through the publisher.

• We’ve successfully upgraded our web hosting account with 1&1 Internet and now have 10 more MySQL databases we can fill up.
• Some changes to Twitter: we’ve taken some ideas from our Dutch edition, and have changed our Twitter icon from a red fist to a coffee cup, our background from a Korean photo to white, and the link on our home page to a very cute Twittering bird – which now links directly to our Twitter feed, where we have 992 followers.
• A lot more people have been invited to our conference and the list of those attending or invited is updated every day.
• The fundraising concert held in Sheffield earlier this month was not a huge success – but £50 was raised for LabourStart.
• Our French edition is now using an interesting Flickr box to display the photo of the day.
• Our photo of the year continues to appear in print — I just sent a packet containing several recent examples to the photographer.
• Two upcoming events: on 20.5 I’ll be doing a fringe meeting at the PCS union conference in Brighton on the subject of online campaigning.  The following week, I’m in Brussels doing a communicators event for the Education International on the same subject.