Inside LabourStart

A couple of weeks ago we asked our readers to tell the Filipino government to release a jailed labour lawyer. At least one embassy has begun sending out form responses, which have been forwarded to us:

Thank you for your letter expressing concern over the reported arrest of Atty. Remegio Saladero, Jr. We welcome this opportunity to address the concerns you have raised. I have conveyed your message to the Philippine Government. I would also like to reassure you that the Philippine Government is committed to promoting and preserving democracy and freedom has no policy calling for the suppression of political dissent and curtailment of worker’s rights. We remain open and prepared to act on concerns that are brought to our attention. The Embassy appreciates your interest in and will remain in touch with you on this matter. Sincerely yours, WILLY C. GAA Ambassador

I’m suspending our Korea campaign (which generated 5,922 messages of protest) after we received this message from the KCTU’s International Secretary, Lee Changgeun.

Thank you for your solidarity. We received the protest messages and published it. In case of First Vice-president, Sis. Jin young-ok and General Secretary, Bro. Lee Yong-shik, were released on bail. The President of KCTU is still wanted by the police. And some leaders are still in jail including First-vice president of KMWU. I thank you again for your support.

We received this email today:

The 3 emails you sent for me to Gap Inc Dan Henkle, Darryl Knudsen, and CEO Glenn Murphy did not go and were resent to me. Fortunately their complete address was on the email. Hence, I was able to send a letter to these executives at Gap. Thanks for doing this work for workers rights and for including full addresses to allow people to send returned emails by regular mail. Actually that makes the letters twice as powerful as the email.

I should add that at the request of other readers, the email addresses of our targets also appear on the campaign page, for those who want to send out the emails themselves and not through our system.

This week’s mailing has just gone out. The main thing is to ask people to give our News Challenge bid some support, both by giving us five stars and adding supportive comments. If we can flood the News Challenge website with such messages, it might convince the judges that we really do have such a global constituency. I don’t know if this will have any effect, but I can’t see it hurting.

We’re also reminding people about last week’s Oak Harbor/Gap campaign which has drawn a response from the company and a counter-response from the union (which we’re publishing in full).

And there’s a reminder at the end about the U.S. elections which we really can’t ignore, even if we know for certain that I’ll get a handful of angry emails from supporters of minor, third and fourth party candidates. For 99.999% of the organized working class in the U.S., the impending victory of Obama and the Democrats is an event of historic proportions an we need to acknowledge that.

Impact of the email message:

As of 31.10 07:38 GMT –

• News Challenge – 21 views, rating of 2.3 stars
• Oak Harbor campaign – 2,430 messages sent
• Oak Harbor Facebook cause – 1,050 supporters
• Labour Photo of the Year – 2,648 votes cast

I received this email today from Mike Abrahams from SACCAWU, in South Africa:

Clearly the LabourStart campaign was a contributing factor not only in putting pressure on the company, but also in strengthening the resolve and unity of workers who received regular updates of Solidarity including the LabourStart campaign. However we anticipate the possibility of further difficulties with the company around the same issues, especially since we’ve noticed a systematic suspension of shopfloor leaders since the return to work. I will keep you posted.

Some time ago I began an overhaul of our campaign page — the page that shows an active campaign. The main thing the new page will do is allow one-click campaigning with no more need for a confirmation page. I still have a fairly long to do list but here are the changes implemented so far in the new page – which is not yet live:

1. By default, all campaigns now have ‘utf-8’ (Unicode) embedded in the ‘reserve’ field; this ensures that they will display correctly.
2. The ‘image’ field, which was not being used, is now used for a numeric code to be used for Facebook causes setup in parallel to the campaigns. You can see this at work in the Oak Harbor campaign.

I’ll continue to update this entry and will move it to the top of this blog as changes are made.

When we set up a campaign, we always tell the union that it’s for three months maximum. For a number of reasons, we just don’t run stale campaigns on LabourStart.

Still, unions sometimes ask us to extend a campaign beyond three months and more often, unions just don’t communicate well with us, don’t tell us when we can close the campaign down.

We have two old campaigns now running on LabourStart, both of which are overdue for closing down. I’ve written to both the campaign initiators today and if I don’t hear from them, will unilaterally close down the campaigns by the end of the week. I’m referring to this campaign and this one.

One of our readers forwarded this message on to me today. Further proof – as if any were needed – that our campaigns are effective.

From: gap.com Customer Service [mailto:custserv@gap.com]
Sent: Saturday, October 25, 2008 2:06 PM
To: **********
Subject: Re: GapCanada.ca Feedback (KMM76888400I28583L0KM)

Dear ******,

Thank you for your email about the current dispute between Oak Harbor
and the Teamsters. While we are aware, Gap Inc. is not a party to the
dispute and is not involved in negotiations in any way. We have been
monitoring the situation closely and have strongly urged both parties to
negotiate in good faith and to come to a fair and timely resolution.

Gap Inc. has a long-standing record as a socially responsible company,
and we set very high standards for ourselves as well as the vendors and
suppliers we work with. This has been demonstrated time and again over
the past decade, and is well-documented in our three social
responsibility reports. As guided by our long-standing work in the area
of social responsibility, we know that any rash decisions related to
changing contracts can have immediate and long-lasting impacts on the
suppliers and their employees. For that reason, we feel it?s critical
that we give Oak Harbor and the Teamsters an opportunity to resolve this
matter.

We thank you again for taking the time to contact us about this matter.
For more information about our social responsibility efforts, please
visit our website at gapinc.com.

Sincerely,

Maureen Carter
Gap Inc.

I’ve just sent out a mailing to our more than 52,000 subscribers in English. Even though it’s a Sunday, the effect of the mailing should be dramatic. The things we’ve asked people to do, and which we can monitor, include:

1. Sending off a message in support of Oak Harbor strikers and join the associated Facebook cause.
2. Voting in the Labour Photo of the Year.
3. Donating to LabourStart.

In order to measure the impact of the mailing, it’s important to know our baseline, where we are starting from. So here are the initial numbers:

• Messages sent in Oak Harbor campaign – 83 (English only)
• Signed up to Facebook cause – 132 (Yes, 49 more than those who sent messages)
• Labour Photo of the Year – 2,070 votes cast
• Donations – none so far today

Stay tuned – update coming soon …

Updated 27.10.08 08:51 GMT

Campaign – 1,536
Facebook group – 458
Labour Photo of the Year – 2,212
Donations – $80.00 (4 donations)

Twenty four hours after we posted the current campaign, only 3 people (myself included) have sent off messages.  This is in spite of the fact that it appears on top of our list on the English langauge home page, that it has been syndicated and a priority one story has been linked to it.  As I have long argued, merely publishing a campaign to a website has little effect.  We must do more.

So even though it’s a weekend and we don’t expect much of a response, I’ve started a publicity blitz that I hope will generate large numbers of new signatories to this campaign.  Here is what I’ve done (and I’ll keep updating this list as it goes along):

• I’ve sent off the campaign link for translation into Norwegian, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Polish and Russian.  Other languages may follow.
• I created a Cause on Facebook and invited 60 of my friends to join the cause – this is the maximum number I am allowed to invite today.  The Cause includes a link to the campaign page.  I’ve made this Cause my Featured Cause on my own Facebook profile.
• I’ve changed our software so that if it detects that there is Facebook cause linked to the campaign, it automatically shows this on the campaign page.
• Sent a message via Facebook to the 1,746 members of the LabourStart group.
• Sent a Tweet to our 575 followers on Twitter — our first in nearly two months.