Inside LabourStart

Iran campaign: We received a translation of the mailing into Farsi from IndustriALL, and have sent this out to our Farsi list.

Italian edition: We changed one of the permanent links on the home page.

Italy: Eric’s article on the attack on CGIL was shared very widely across social media, including by leading figures on the British Left and Labour Party.

Myanmar campaign: We created a special petition format to allow campaign supporters’ names to be delivered to the credentials committee of the UN General Assembly, at the request of BWI.

Polish: For some time now we have been adding daily news from one of the two Polish national trade union centres (OPZZ) to our Polish-language news page. From this week, we are also adding news from Solidarnosc.  Our campaigns are appearing in Polish, though we still need to sort out regular mailings to our Polish list.

Puerto Rico: We held a webinar in Spanish with English translation in support of the campaign. Despite technical glitches, and thanks to Euan’s efforts at PSI, the webinar had good attendance, especially from Latin America. DSA’s publication, Democratic Left, is running a major piece on the campaign with a link.  With 7,610 supporters, it is our second largest current campaign.

Turkey: At long last, the article about Cihan Erdal and co-authored by Peter Tatchell and Eric Lee, appeared in print in the British daily Morning Star. It was widely shared online.

Interns: We have begun work with a second intern, Bunmi, from York University in Toronto. Our other intern, Cam, has been working on an updated version of our online campaigns book, discovering some good victories that we should publicise.

Italy: The attack on the CGIL headquarters last week by fascist thugs dominates our home page these past few days. We have shared many news stories across social media as well, in English and Italian, and have reached out to global unions regarding a possible campaign (with no positive response so far). Eric also devoted his weekly column for Solidarity to this subject.

Iran: We now have a version of the campaign running in Farsi, thanks to IndustriALL. A followup mailing to the English list last week helped, and the campaign now has 5,308 supporters – a gain of nearly 1,000.

Puerto Rico: Together with UTIER and PSI, we’ll be hosting a live event in support of the campaign later this week. With 7,411 supporters, this is one of our largest recent campaigns.

Sweden: We now have a translation into Swedish of the campaign, which will shortly go live.

UK: We’ve been invited to appear on the ‘Union Dues‘ podcast next month.

Donations: We received a very generous donation from the nurses union in Canada, bringing our total donations this year from Canada to over $20,000.

Interns: We have two new interns from York University in Canada and will be meeting them for the first time today (on Zoom, of course).

Mailing lists: Our largest lists grew by just 81 new subscribers this week.

World Day for Decent Work: We revived our WDDW page from last year, tagged 14 news stories to appear there, and shared this widely across social media.

Hungary: At the request of ETF, we have closed the campaign down and have asked for a report.

Puerto Rico: Democratic Left, published by Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) will be running an article about our campaign. DSA currently has 95,000 members, so this is great publicity for a campaign that is already getting some traction, especially in Puerto Rico. Our Spanish list, already one of our largest, grew by 10% this month as a result.

Romania: We’ve asked ETF for permission to close the Bucharest Metro campaign after more than three months.

Sweden: The union has gotten back to us and wants the Zalando campaign to go live ASAP. We’ve asked for a Swedish translation first.

USA: With the agreement of FLOC, we have closed the BAT campaign.

Donations: One of our supporters in the UK recently passed away and her son wrote this week to donate £1,000 in her memory to LabourStart. This is the largest donation of this type that we have ever received.

Newswires: Problems were reported with our old newswires; I managed to fix it and am now waiting for results of tests.

Translations: Thanks to Mark, we are back on course with German translations with the last three campaigns now live. The response rate for our German list is the highest for any large mailing list, so this is particularly important.

Iran: We are about to go live later today with a campaign in support of striking oil workers in Iran.

Myanmar: After two weeks online, this campaign has less than 4,800 supporters. A Burmese version went live this week – and for the first time, LabourStart can now campaign in Burmese. We’re having a call with BWI to discuss next steps.

Puerto Rico: The number of supporters has grown significantly — now up to 6,638. The campaign is in 13 languages and we’ve seen very significant support in Spanish for the first time – with 1,093 supporters backing the campaign in Spanish.  839 of th0se are in Puerto Rico – in addition to 159 supporters of the English language campaign coming from Puerto Rico as well.

USA: We’ve received a green light to suspend our campaign in support of FLOC tobacco workers, which has been running for more than 3 months and has 5,186 supporters.

Iran: We have reached out to IndustriALL who will probably sponsor a campaign with us in support of striking oil workers next week.

Myanmar: The campaign is growing slowly, and after 8 days online has just 3,835 supporters. A followup mailing to some 70,000 names on the English list is going out today. A Burmese language version has been prepared. We asked the global unions if they wanted to host a live event and they are now consulting about this.

Puerto Rico: The campaign went live last Friday and has grown quickly (4,624 supporters in the first 6 days).  As a result, we now have a fairly large number of campaign supporters in Puerto Rico (406 in Spanish and 150 in English). In addition, the union has agreed to hold an online event hosted by LabourStart.

Campaigns: We discovered a bug in the software that showed the wrong error message if you failed to select a country; this has now been fixed.

Intern: We have a new intern working with us from this week – Cam Cannon, from the University of Manitoba, in Canada.

As people come back to work after their summer holiday (in the northern hemisphere), we are beginning to see more activity, including new campaigns being launched this week.

Iran: As announced previously, we participated in an online event with various pro-democracy campaigners from Iran. The text of my remarks are here.

Myanmar: We launched a major new campaign with the support of global unions today. We had a Zoom call earlier this week with BWI staffers who responded to our suggestion of a campaign.

Puerto Rico: We are launching a campaign this week in support of electricity workers. We had a Zoom call with leaders of the union and supporters in the mainland US about this.

Closed campaigns: We have now closed down our Thailand Yachiyoda campaign and the long-running Fedex/TNT campaign after more than three months, with the approval of the sponsoring unions.

Essential for Recovery: We did fairly extensive publicity online for this 3-day event whose sponsors included the ITUC, UNI Global Union, IDWF, the Solidarity Center, etc.

Today in Labour History: There was a problem with the software to delete records; this has now been fixed.

Afghanistan: We continue to look for, and promote, news about the fate of the trade unions and workers, with several top stories — many coming from the International Federation of Journalists.

Iran: We’ll be participating in an online event on Sunday in support of striking oil workers.

Korea: We had a lot of information about the arrest of the leader of the KCTU, and publicised this across social media.

Kyrgyzstan: We shared widely the good news that following a campaign on LabourStart, the anti-worker bill was finally vetoed by the President.

Sweden: Our comrades have asked us to wait until 15 September before launching the campaign.

Thailand: We’re asked for permission to close down the campaign which has now been running for three months.

Correspondents: We signed up new correspondents in Brussels and Geneva. Our new Moroccan correspondent has been active, posting in Arabic, French and English.

Donations: We received a generous donation from UNI Global Union.

Essential for Recovery event: We did extensive publicity to support this event, which is being backed by ITUC, UNI, Solidarity Center, WIEGO and others.

Global Labour Calendar 2022: We’re continuing to collect photos and suggestions for dates to highlight. If there are dates in this list that you think should appear in the calendar, please let us know.

Jobs: We were approached by two unions who asked about how jobs are added to LabourStart and one has already signed up as a correspondent to post these. Unions are beginning to see the value in LabourStartJobs.org. Correspondents are encouraged to post jobs using the same link as we use to post news.

Egypt: Following recent developments at Lord International we have reached out again to our partners asking if the campaign we created now needs to go live.

Europe: We had a very positive online meeting with EFFAT, the European food workers’ union.

Global: We are helping publicise the ‘Essential for Recovery’ event next week which is being sponsored by ITUC, UNI Global Union, and others.

Puerto Rico: We have reached out to the electrical workers union offering help with their struggle.

Sweden: Our not-yet-launched campaign is on hold for another two weeks while we wait for the decision of the local union, who have gotten back to us.

Fundraising: UNI Global Union has made a very generous donation.

Global labour calendar: We have begun work on this, aiming to have it ready for publication by 1 October.

Internationalisation: We wrote to our Arabic correspondents from Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia and Yemen asking for their help to revive the page and to translate our campaigns. We did the same with our Hebrew language correspondents, two of whom have now responded favourably. We made a number of additional improvements to both the Arabic and Hebrew editions this week. We also reviewed the Farsi language edition of LabourStart and noted next steps. Other languages will follow.

Jobs: We listed another dozen jobs in the last two weeks and have done a weekly round of publicity across social media. Correspondents are encouraged to help with this as all the jobs being posted are coming from the UK and Canada for the moment.

Our 2014 calendar.

Global Labour Calendar: We plan to have this ready and on sale on 1 October. If you have any great labour photos that we might consider using, please email canada@labourstart.org. If you have ideas for dates we should mark on the calendar, please email ericlee@labourstart.org.

Afghanistan: We have reached out to both national trade union centres in the country, and have also engaged with the ITUC. We continue to upload news stories from unions abroad about Afghanistan, mostly from the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ).

Egypt: We have a campaign ready, but have been asked to place it on hold for the moment.

Iran: We are discussing launching a new campaign with an NGO that campaigns in support of jailed trade unionists, Free Them Now. More details soon.

Myanmar: We are in discussions with a Danish trade union about a possible campaign.

Internationalisation: Having largely completed the fixes to our Hebrew page, we’re now turning our attention to LabourStart’s Arabic language edition — including efforts to revitalise our core group of volunteer correspondents across the Arab world.

LabourStart Jobs: We continue adding jobs, mostly from Canada and the UK for the moment, publicising them across social media every week.

News database: We’ve continued work on the problem of countries whose names have changed. From this week, correspondents will no longer have the option to use the older names of a number of countries, including Swaziland, Burma and East Timor (though people will be able to view news posted under those names in the past).

August is quiet time for many people and even some trade unions — but not for LabourStart.

We’re responding to a number of new appeals for help which come in every day …

Afghanistan: We’re posting any comments and statements by unions which we can find, and have been sharing posts across social media as well.

Egypt: We are just about to launch a new campaign in support of workers at Lord International – details this coming week.

Europe: We have been reaching out to the various European regional organisations of the global union federations, and this coming week will have a call with another of the general secretaries.

Hungary: After a slow start, the campaign has picked up quite a bit – and currently has over 5,200 supporters. We raised the question of Hungarian support for the campaign with ETF.

Iran: A group that campaigns to release jailed trade unionists has reached out to us and we’ve scheduled a call for later this week to discuss joint actions.

Israel: We learned that the workers at 10bis, for whom we campaigned earlier this year, have won a big victory in the courts. We’re waiting for an English translation of the news to appear, and it’s already on our Hebrew language edition. In addition, we made further improvements to how our news shows in Hebrew (and other languages) on the country pages, having fixed the main home page last week.

Puerto Rico: We’ll be following up with several emails in the hope of providing some support for electricity workers there, possibly a campaign.

Sweden: We have prepared a new campaign and are waiting for the green light from the union.

Turkey: We have now closed our campaign in support of Cihan Erdal. The campaign had 7,172 supporters and appeared in 16 languages. As we wrote: “Cihan was ordered released from custody on 15 June 2021. He has to report to the police twice a week and cannot leave the country. Hearings will start again in September 2021.”

LabourStart Jobs: We did the first round of publicity for our new project — https://www.labourstartjobs.org — and will do weekly bursts – including a mailing to our subscribers, and highlighting some key jobs.

New correspondents: We added four new correspondents this week, two from the USA and one each from Morocco and the UK.

Our home page: We had a problem — the second country in a news story was rendering in the correct language on one part of the home page (the bottom) but not the other parts. This is now fixed — the country name is now correctly translated across the whole page.