Inside LabourStart

Cambodia: Striking workers at NagaWorld band together to protect union leaders from further arrests.

Cambodia: We expect to shortly launch a campaign in support of jailed casino union leaders.

Iran: Our three-month-old campaign has now been closed in all languages.

Kazakhstan: Following the release of jailed union leaders, a decision was taken not to launch a LabourStart campaign at this time. However, the ITUC did issue a strong statement which we shared widely on our news pages and across social media.

Fundraising: We now have a draft letter and have reached out to a couple of global unions which donated during this quarter last year.

Interns: The Global Labour University has put us in touch with five students; we will be interviewing them all early next week.

T-shirts: We did a second round of publicity to promote the Rosa Luxemburg t-shirt, across social media. Later in the month, we’ll send out a mass mailing as well.

Ramzi Dardar – still in jail.

Algeria campaign: Following a conversation with IndustriALL – in which we learned that Ramzi remains in jail – we decided to ramp up publicity, both LabourStart and IndustriALL. We will make a special effort to reach out to unions in the Arab world.

Myanmar: We closed down the campaign with BWI’s permission. As they summed it up, “Early November, the CGU [Council of Global Unions] sent out letters to the UNGA [United Nations General Assembly] credentials committee chair and members with the signatories of the petition in attachment, asking to reject the junta’s credential. On 1 December, the credentials committee deferred the decision – rejecting the junta’s credential for the moment. Good first step.” This is good news and we believe that our campaign contributed to this.

Palestine: A couple of us participated in the webinar organised by Maan – and we expect a new campaign to be launched in the new year.

Puerto Rico: After three months we asked whether we could suspend the campaign and have been told we should keep it live for now.

Mailing lists: In the absence of new campaigns, the list is only growing slowly – we picked up just 37 new subscribers this week. This will grow in the new year.

Twitter: We have just under 30,000 followers to LabourStart’s main global account (in English) – and by the time you read this, we will probably have reached our target. Well done to all those who have invested many hours in growing our presence on this important social media platform – especially Derek.

Palestine: We had a long call with WAC Maan to discuss one of their current struggles to unionise food workers in the West Bank.  We will find ways to help.

Africa: We did a second mailing to our Africa correspondents about holding an online meeting in January.

Algeria: We’ve proposed closing this campaign down, and will have a discussion with IndustriALL next week about this.

Campaign victories in 2021: Our intern Cam prepared a report on our wins, which we shared with our mailing lists.

Myanmar: We will shortly be closing down this campaign with the agreement of BWI.

Podcast: The Union Dues podcast we did, which had 215 listeners and was the 2nd most popular they had ever done, rose to 278 in the last week.

T-shirts: We included a promotion for the Working Class History t-shirt of the month in this week’s mailing.

Twitter: Our list of global unions which had 25 followers this week now has 73 followers.

Twitter: We created a List of global unions and publicised it widely across social media (but not yet in a mass mailing). The list already has 25 followers and we’ve been re-tweeting many of the posts there to boost interest in what the global unions are saying and doing.

Africa: We wrote to all 68 correspondents we identified in 19 countries noting that we’ll hold our first online event with them in January.

Romania: With the agreement of the ETF, we closed down the long-running campaign in support of Bucharest metro workers.  The campaign had nearly 7,800 supporters, making it one of the largest recent campaigns.

Interns: We will be reaching out to labour studies departments looking for recent graduates as potential paid interns (living wage). We have also been approached by GLU to again take interns this coming year.

LabourStartJobs.org: We gave further publicity to this sub-site of LabourStart, which continues to feature jobs in unions in the UK and Canada, with a smattering form elsewhere.  27 jobs were posted here in the first 9 days of December.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew by another 143 subscribers this week – 96 of those for the English list.

Podcast: The Union Dues podcast (UK) featuring Eric Lee talking about LabourStart is the third most popular they have ever done, with about 215 listeners. We did a further round of publicity later in the week to boost this a bit.

Africa: Work continues on preparing for our first-ever online meeting of correspondents. We have a tool that will allow our intern to compile a current list of all correspondents for the more than 50 African nations.  It turns out that we have 30 volunteer correspondents in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Nigeria with others scattered across the continent, and it will be good to meet them all — even if the meeting is on Zoom.

Brazil: With the agreement of PSI, we are closing down this campaign after many months.

Colombia: We have been asked to keep this campaign live for a while longer.

Jordan: We had an online meeting with the Education International to discuss next steps in this campaign. These will include online events in English and Arabic and a major effort to ramp up support for the Arabic version of the campaign.

Newswires: We have begun the process of repair, having fixed the Dutch and Norwegian newswires. Many more will be done in the coming days.

Pakistan: We have been asked to keep this campaign live for a while longer; there has apparently been some progress on the ground and the campaign is having an effect.

T-shirts: We did a second mass mailing to promote the t-shirts with Working Class History.  We’ll shortly share the results  — when we get them.

UnionDues podcast: This went live on 30 November. According to their website, it has been downloaded more than 200 times. We gave this podcast extensive publicity, including a mass mailing to our English list. (Our own counter shows just under 500 people clicked on our version of the link to the podcast.)

Amazon: We shared a link to all LabourStart’s coverage of struggles at Amazon on Black Friday (today).

Germany: Apparently, our Twitter feed came under attack from some far-right accounts.

Jordan: One month after the launch of the campaign we asked Education International about possible next steps, including a webinar

Norway: IndustriEnergi voted at its congress to make a very generous donation to LabourStart.
We have fixed the Norwegian newswire but now need to get the word out about changes that need to be made.

Sweden: We had a very good discussion with LO about cooperation in future.

UK: We did a mailing to our UK list (about 9,600 people) in supporting of striking couriers in Sheffield.
The Union Dues podcast has been finalised and will be released next week. As it’s all about LabourStart, we’ll share it widely.

Africa: We are discussing holding our first ever African regional meeting of LabourStart correspondents. More details soon.

Algeria: We did a second mailing to our English list today. The campaign has 4,774 supporters, but we expect this to above 5,000 today.

Nigeria: We are continuing publicity for the Yoruba versions of our campaigns, two of which have already been translated.

Sweden: We closed down our Zalando’s campaign today and informed the union there. The campaign had about 3,500 supporters, though the Swedish version only had 2.

UK: Eric was interviewed for the labour podcast “Union Dues” – it will be aired in another couple of weeks and we’ll publicise it widely.

T-shirts: We did a mailing to our German list. Sales of the dna-merch shirts have not been as high as we would have liked (they are only a fraction of what we sold last year). We will continue the marketing and are in discussions with our friends about what we can do to improve this.

This was a relatively quiet week for us, as Eric was on holiday with family for part of the time.

Algeria: This campaign goes live and after just a day or so, had 3,200 supporters.  It currently appears in 4 languages with many more on the way.

Sweden: We began publicity for this campaign on Thursday with a mailing to the English list. As of 10:30 GMT, the campaign has 722 supporters.

Mailing lists: Grew this week by 103 names.

T-shirt of the Month: We began to publicise this wonderful new project from Working Class History and dna merch in Germany. We did extensive publicity across social media and a mass mailing, and will know results in early December. Feedback was almost entirely positive.  We expect to do publicity in German soon (dna merch is based in Germany).

Algeria: Expect a new campaign shortly — we’ve been given a heads up from IndustriALL.

Jordan: Our new campaign has taken off and already has more supporters (6,020) than our two most recent camopaigns. That’s the good news; the bad news is that a court has ruled against the union.

Nigeria: Our first campaign in the Yoruba language has now gone live and we have begun publicising it.  So far, no one has signed up to the campaign.

Sudan: We shared widely Eric’s column about the role of unions in the fight for democracy and against the military coup.

Donations: We received a very generous — and unexpected — donation from Education International.

Mailing lists: We picked up another 133 subscribers this week; this is more than triple what we added last week.

T-shirts: We’re about to embark on a join effort with DNA Merch in Germany to sell workers’ history themed t-shirts on a monthly basis.

Jordan: We launched a major new campaign in partnership with the Education International and the support of the ITUC. The campaign had 2,802 supporters after one day online.

Nigeria: We are shortly expecting our first campaign to be translated into Yoruba, and we will publicise that fact widely — we’re to be first global union website campaigning in an indigenous African language. Yoruba, by the way, has about 50 million speakers.

Sudan: We’ve had a lot of coverage of workers’ responses to the military coup, and shared this widely across social media on Wednesday.

Sweden: We’ve had a soft launch for the Zalando campaign now that SAC has begun to promote it, and we will do much more in the coming days.

Zimbabwe: We have a new correspondent who has begun posting news.

Labour newswire: We’ve begun to fix some long term problems here. With the help of a webmaster of a local trade union (scroll to the bottom of the page) in the state of Washington (USA), we managed to fix the state and provincial newswires for the whole world. We’ll fix this on the website and announce, and move on to fix any others that have stopped working.

Mailing lists: These continue to grow slowly. Before the launch of the Jordan campaign, we were able to add just 43 new subscribers to our lists.