Inside LabourStart

The unions in Turkey have agreed for us to shut down the May Day campaign.  We reached 2,759 messages sent in a very short period and the campaign was rapidly translated into seven languages.  For the first time in more than 3 decades, some trade unionists were allowed to meet in Istanbul’s Taksim Square.

The International Metalworkers Federation has asked for our help to support Turkish metal workers sacked for their membership in a trade union. The campaign is now live in English and our volunteer translators have been asked to do translations into the various languages.  A mass mailing will go out shortly.

After four months – we’ve gotten permission from the International Metalworkers Federation to suspend this campaign.  The campaign had 2,415 messages sent in 7 languages.

Campaigns:

• We’ve asked to close down the Russian campaign after 4 months and 2,415 supporters.
• We are about to launch a new campaign in support of Turkish workers.  Both campaigns came from the International Metalworkers Federation.
• Campaign counter now works on all languages.

News:

• Work has begun on localizing the entry of news links – we’re testing this on French first.  The aim is to have all the input screens work in the local language so we can recruit correspondents who don’t know any English at all.

Book sales:

• We’ve sold 53 copies of the Global Unions, Global Business book, which is not bad.
• The Union Books group has 71 members, making it one of the largest groups on UnionBook.
• We’ve sold $986.55 worth of books at UCS in the first week of April.
• We’re in negotiations with the bookstore of one of the largest unions in Europe, Ver.di, in Berlin and might be able to begin selling German-language union books to German trade union members.
• We’re also talking to an Australian university press about helping to sell one of its titles.

Newswires:

• Did some more work on creating a Unicode version of these for sites which have switched over to Unicode. So far, French and German are working.

Fundraising:

• There will be concert in Sheffield on 2 May the proceeds of which will be donated to LabourStart – more details soon.
• We’re also finishing up the deal with No Sweat Apparel to produce a union-made UnionBook t-shirt.
• We’re following up with possible donations to LabourStart from Unite (UK) and CUPE (Canada).

LabourStart has had a long association with the Iraqi trade unions starting only a few weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003.  Later that year, when American forces broke into the trade union headquarters in Baghdad, we launched an urgent action appeal.  We also helped the Iraqi unions get their websites up and running in English and Arabic.

Today, I had a phone call from Abdullah Muhsin, the representative of the Iraqi unions overseas, and he’s asked us to launch an urgent action campaign in support of the teachers union — one of the largest and most successful of the new democratic trade unions.  It’s very important that we do our best to mobilize support for this campaign, which also includes a UnionBook group as well.

Please do what you can to spread the word in your unions.

• We now have over 59,000 addresses on our mailing lists.
• We’ve sold 29 copies of the Global Unions book — I was hoping to sell more (ideally, 100).
• UnionBook is 11 members short of the 2,500 member mark.
• We’ve helped the CAW in Canada by promoting one of their campaigns – but not as a LabourStart campaign.

I wrote a short script to calculate how many supporters each active campaign now has, for all languages, and display this number (which is updated every 15 minutes) on the English version of the campaign page.  Totals for active campaigns at the moment are as follows:

• Costa Rica 3,580
• Iran 6,670
• Russia 2,381
• Turkey 5,707

We were asked by Peoples Solidarity (France) to support this campaign and have now launched our campaign in English, French and German.  I’ve just written to our volunteer translators in 7 other languages as well (Norwegian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Farsi).

A few things from the last couple of weeks that I haven’t updated yet here …

• LabourStartJobs.org will finally close down this summer.  We needed to give 6 months notice.  Once this is closed, we can consider launching a free jobs board for trade unionists – this is something we might want to discuss this summer.
• UnionBook now has over 2,500 users though not all have confirmed.  We continue to send out weekly mailings to all of them.  In the last 7 days, we’ve picked up another 122 users.  We have a list of things we want done to the site and have hired someone to do these things.
• The ActNOW wire in French has been fixed – this is part of a whole bunch of problems we’ve had after we converted LabourStart to Unicode without waiting for the rest of the trade union movement to join us – meaning that we’ve had to re-convert some of our content back to earlier formats to display properly on union websites.
• We’ve submitted a proposal to Unite, the largest union in the UK, asking for support.
• The link to show more news for individual countries now works properly in all languages.
• Having written our first script that can read the UnionBook database – it shows the size of the various groups – we can now do much more.  We can create our own tools to monitor and administer the system.
• We’ve submitted a draft early day motion to the British House of Commons regarding UnionBook – this will probably be introduced in the next few days.
• The Labour News Network in its most recent incarnation (Jottit) has now been closed down.  UnionBook replaces it.
• We’ll shortly begin selling this book – waiting for final confirmation from the publisher.
• We’re exploring moving our campaigns from the existing 1&1 server – which could not handle the most recent flood of participants – to our new dedicated server which we use for UnionBook.  This should solve the problem.
• NoSweat Apparel in the US has offered to produce UnionBook t-shirts which we will shortly begin selling.
• There’s probably more, but I can’t remember it all.

We’ve run, as it turns out, 20 campaigns in the last 12 months.  The results appear below (English language totals only).  Here are some quick observations:

• The country we protest the most about is Iran – and the 3 campaigns we waged in support of Iranian workers were among the top 6 campaigns we ran.  Clearly this a popular subject.
• We also ran 3 campaigns in support of workers in Turkey – including our most popular campaign this year, and 2 of the top 5 campaigns we ran.
• The most popular campaigns focus on workers’ rights issues – arrests, murders, whippings.  The campaigns at the bottom of the list are more traditional workplace issues like failure to negotiate or recognize a union.
• Campaigns which we publicized to specific audiences only (Canada, Australia) in general were considerably smaller than the global campaigns.
• The two biggest campaigns focussed on women — and both had good photos of the women.
• Campaigns in support of workers in the countries our readers live in — Canada, the USA, Australia — were the weakest.

Here is the list:

7412 Turkey: Free jailed woman trade union leader [30-Jun-2008]
5771 Iran: Protest intensified repression against labour activists – No to whippings and executions! [14-Aug-2008]
5571 Iran: Save the life of Farzad Kamangar [28-Nov-2008]
5345 Korea: Stop arrests of trade union leaders [04-Aug-2008]
5121 Turkey: DESA leather workers fight for the right to have a union [16-Nov-2008] – still active
4271 Iran: Drop charges against jailed union leaders [20-Feb-2009] – still active
3439 Colombia: Protest murder of Leonidas Gomez Rozo [04-Apr-2008]
2807 Russia: North Urals mining company refuses to bargain with workers after hunger strike [18-Apr-2008]
2653 Tell the Gap: Don’t Harbor Worker Abuses [24-Oct-2008]
2625 Stop the Attack on Trade Union Rights in Saskatchewan [19-Mar-2008]
2309 USA: Pacific Beach Hotel workers have a right to a union [17-May-2008]
2275 Ireland: BT Discriminates Against own staff because they are Irish [25-Apr-2008]
2122 Russia: Stop attacks on auto workers union [03-Dec-2008] – still active
1452 Turkey: Release jailed road transport union members [30-May-2008]
1335 Australia: Boeing – recognize the union at Hawker de Havilland [10-Jun-2008]
937 South Africa: Woolworths engages in union-busting [10-Oct-2008]
855 USA: Union-busting in Minnesota Attorney General’s Office [27-Feb-2008]
833 Mexico: Reinstate sacked workers in Janos [26-Aug-2008]
825 Tell the Mayor of Ottawa to put an end to the public attack on ATU 279 and return to the bargaining table [24-Jan-2009]
15 Unions in Victoria – Save our TAFES [15-Aug-2008]