Inside LabourStart

What follows is a brief summary of highlights followed by the usual long list of numbers.

SUMMARY:

Our new podcast service is picking up and we have passed the 7000 downloads mark.  Older episodes continue to see new downloads, suggesting that the word is still getting out about the series.

Our first podcast to break the 500 downloads mark dropped in March, an interview with the President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees regarding his union’s reaction to Trump’s threat to ‘annex’ Canada.

We continue to see changes in the mailing lists as the problems that resulted from several mailing service provider changes are corrected but growth has returned.  Spanish has displaced German as our third-largest list.

Our two Bluesky accounts are managed in much different ways.  Sporadic efforts were made the increase the followers of the global accounts which now stands at 15,301, up from 13.2k.  The Canadian English-language account went from 297 to 353.

XTwitter feeds continue to decline.  Most or all of that can be attributed to our followers abandoning the platform for Bluesky and perhaps Mastodon.

Our other numbers remain fairly stable.

THE NUMBERS:

The first number next to each item is the current total as of today; the second number is the total as of the last report. Where one number is provided it means that there has been no change since our last report.

Lists or accounts that have shrunk are in italics.  Lists or accounts which experienced growth are in bold.

STORIES POSTED TO OUR NEWS SITE IN THE LAST MONTH:

3807 (123 per day)-2927 (105 per day)

MAILING LISTS:

The lists are being rebuilt after some technical hiccups so the numbers can be expected to fluctuate considerably over the next month or two.

The top 10:

English: 85126-84862

French: 7089-7075

Spanish: 5566-5553

German: 5522-5511

Turkish: 4503-4460

Korean: 3197

Italian: 2828-2824

Russian: 2677

Norwegian: 2003-1996

Romanian:  1730

Dutch: 1437

The others:

Arabic:  770-763

Belarusian:  299-288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 965-964

Creole:  11

Czech: 58

Danish: 79

Esperanto: 187

Farsi:  164

Finnish:  439

Georgian:  176

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  270

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  172

Indonesian:  385

Japanese: 382

Lithuanian:  62

Malaysian: 20

Polish: 964

Portuguese: 1274

Punjabi:  2

Serbian:  97

Sinhalese: 1

Slovak: 15

Swedish: 909

Tagalog: 183

Thai:  142

Ukrainian: 493

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive:  12

Interns and Past Interns:  15

LabourStart Correspondents:  611

LabourStart Translators:  104

Africa Caucus:  63

Media Contacts: 69

Donors:  885

FLICKR:

Members:  838

Photos:  10351-10337

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  133-135

FACEBOOK PAGES/GROUPS:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

LabourStart.org page likes:  14k, details unavailable

Global Labour News and Information: 9.2k

LabourStart UK likes:  2.1k, details unavailable

LabourStart Francophone: 620 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 489

LabourStart Brasil:  552

LabourStart Turkce:  2k, details unavailable

LabourStart TV likes: 465

LabourStart TV follows:  455

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Italia:  68

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Canada-English: 191

LabourStart Nepal:  7 (last post April 2017)

LabourStart Israel: CLOSED (last post 2018)

LINKEDIN:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Group: 2640-2634

Page: 322-317

PODCASTS:

We passed the 5000 downloads mark in January.  By labour podcast standards this is considered more than reasonable given the effort required.

LabourStart is a member of the US-based Labor Radio / Podcast Network.

Rather than list each podcast and the numbers of times they have been downloaded we will report the three (3) podcasts that have been downloaded the most times to date.

1. 533 downloads: Interview with Mark Hancock, President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees re. the union’s recently-adopted “Montreal Declaration” which was drafted in response to US President Donald Trump’s threats against Canada.
2. 424-423 downloads: Interview with Carlos Ching-Hung Wang, the president of the China Steel Express Union (Taiwan).
3. 321-320 downloads: Interview with Sally McManus, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU)

BLUESKY:

As an experiment we created a global news in English feed mid-November.  The account is growing far more quickly than any other of our social media accounts ever did.  A Canadian English-language feed was added in late December.

Our Mastodon experience, as with most people’s, was not great as the initial excitement wore off quite quickly.  That does not appear to be happening with Bluesky.

No concerted effort was made to grow either account last month.

Global English-language: 16.5k-15301

Canada-English-language: 378-353

X (TWITTER as-was):

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for these accounts.  If we wish to maintain our footprint we will have to start doing so again or the erosion of our numbers will continue.  Whether that is possible is another question given the current flight of users from the platform.

We experienced decline in all accounts except the Australian, which grew slightly.  Prior to the exodus to Bluesky all would have usually experienced slow growth without any effort on our part.  This is almost certainly the result of trade unionists closing their Twitter accounts and moving to other platforms (such as Bluesky or Mastodon).

Global English: 36303-36431

Canada English: 20202-20949

Global Portuguese: 9925-9956

Global Spanish: 10247-10265

Australia: 9422-9702

USA: 4683-4708

Canada French: 3101-3107

Russian: 50

Hebrew:  50 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 508 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 329-330 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 341 (last tweet 2015)

French: 224 (last tweet 2018)

German: 120 (last tweet 2018)

Japanese: 21 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

South Asia (English): 28 Placeholder and not yet active.

Campaigns: We launched our first campaign of 2025 — in support of Telus workers in Turkey. As of today, the campaign appears in 13 languages and has 3,089 supporters.

Podcasts: We posted our third podcast of 2025, an interview with Kivanç Eliaçik, Director of International Relations Department for DISK. It is already the most popular podcast we did this year. We are hoping to record and share another podcast next week. In addition, one of our volunteers is readying our first long-form podcast.

News: In the first 21 days of February, our volunteer correspondents posted 2,253 new stories, an average of 107 per day.

Webinar: Three members of the LabourStart Executive spoke at the recent webinar on “Trade union struggles in authoritarian regimes”. We were informed that half of the participants — perhaps more — came due to the publicity we did for the event.

Syria: We had an online meeting with three leaders of the union of teachers in north and east Syria and followed this up by email.

Instagram: We revived our account there, and have gone up from 596 followers to 662, an increase of 11%.

Fundraising: We discovered that supporters in New Zealand have been unable to donate using PayPal and have changed our page to reflect this. We are now looking into alternatives.

Women workers at Nike: We supported the campaign launched by Global Labor Justice and managed to increase the number of pledged supporters by nearly 60%.

YoungWorkers.org: We publicly launched this new site this week with posts to social media and a mention in our mass mailing to the English list.

Mailings: We picked up 139 new subscribers this week, many of them for our Turkish list.

 

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Podcasts: We posted our second podcast of 2025 this week (interview with ICTUR’s Daniel Blackburn) and recorded our third — an interview with our own Kivanc from DISK Turkey, which will go live next week. Our 30.1 interview with Stephanie Ross and Larry Savage has already been downloaded 155 times in its first week online, which is already more popular than six of our earlier interviews. Our most popular podcast was downloaded 421 times.

Campaigns: We are just about to launch our first campaign of 2025 — possibly as early as today — with a couple more in the pipeline.

News: Our correspondents posted 817 news stories in the first 7 days of this month, or 117 news stories per day. The average number of news stories posted each day continues to rise. We wrote to all 858 inactive correspondents; as a result, a couple asked to be removed from the database, while others asked to be given new passwords. We will continue efforts to get our existing correspondents to be active, while also recruiting new ones.

Webinar: We are supporting the webinar on “Trade union struggles in authoritarian regimes” taking place next week. Three members of the LabourStart Executive will be speaking at the event. We did a dedicated mass mailing to promote the webinar and extensive publicity across social media, as well as making it our top priority global news story.

ICTUR: Following up on our podcast interview with ICTUR’s Daniel Blackburn, we had a meeting with him to discuss future collaboration with LabourStart. In the past, we partnered with ICTUR to promote their journal International Union Rights, and may do so again this year.

Syria: We have a call scheduled for next week with a teachers’ union in northern and eastern Syria. This is our first contact with Syrian trade unionists, who reached out to us.

Instagram: We’re going to resume promoting our content on Instagram as our old/new intern Isabel will be taking this on. We have 596 followers on Instagram and can grow this number if we make an effort.

Well, it’s been two weeks, actually. And there’s a lot to report, so here goes:

Recruiting new correspondents: This is a priority for us and we’re going to tackle it one country at a time. This week we wrote to our 459 email subscribers in South Africa asking them to check out our news page and to apply to be correspondents.

Turkey campaign: This has been growing, now with 4,510 supporters. The campaign appears in 21 languages, which is a lot for us. Among these is Urdu, for the very first time, I think. We also picked up over 100 new subscribers to our mailing list from Turkey in a recent update.

Thailand campaign: Yesterday this was our smallest current campaign, with just 3,842 supporters. But a follow-up mailing to the English list meant we picked up over 700 new supporters and are now up to 4,563 — surpassing the Turkey campaign. This campaign now appears in 14 languages, with more on the way.

Social media: Our home page now features links to all five of our active social media accounts, including the newest – Bluesky, and we’ve dropped links our inactive Instagram and Mastodon accounts.

Donations: We are waiting on one pledged donation and we are hoping for one more that we applied for. In early January, we will have to chase after major union donors and individuals if we are to stay secure for the next few months.

Germany: The teachers’ union GEW asked us to design a postcard (colour, two-sided) which we did and got the short text translated into German. They will be printing this out and distributing it to everyone attending the union’s conference next month. GEW already made a generous donation to us in 2023.

This month we return to reporting mailing list numbers.  Over the next few months we will likely see large changes in the numbers as the problems that resulted from several service provider changes are corrected.

Also this month we start reporting on the Bluesky account which was created mid-month.  Currently we have just one Blusky account, a Global news feed in English, but if the site continues to grow others will be added.

As of this month we will be reporting stories posted.

The first number next to each item is the current total as of today; the second number is the total as of the last report. Where one number is provided it means that there has been no change since our last report.

Lists or accounts that have shrunk are in italics.  Lists or accounts which experienced growth are in bold.

 

STORIES POSTED TO OUR NEWS SITE:

3166 (105.5 per day)

 

MAILING LISTS:

The lists are being rebuilt after some technical hiccups so the numbers can be expected to fluctuate considerably over the next month or two.

The top 10:

English: 84800-84014

French: 7642

German: 5503-5957

Spanish: 5979

Turkish: 4367-4426

Korean: 3321

Italian: 2819-3117

Russian: 2672-2702

Norwegian: 1996-2232

Romanian:  1730-1771

Dutch: 1437-1536

The others:

Arabic:  763-821

Belarusian:  288-293

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 964-902

Creole:  11

Czech: 58-61

Danish: 79-93

Esperanto: 187-190

Farsi:  164-207

Finnish:  438-476

Georgian:  176-156

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  270-295

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  169-186

Indonesian:  385-460

Japanese: 382-398

Lithuanian:  62-63

Malaysian: 20-21

Polish: 964-970

Portuguese: 1274-1292

Punjabi:  2

Serbian:  97

Sinhalese: 1

Slovak: 15

Swedish: 909-950

Tagalog: 183

Thai:  142-152

Ukrainian: 493

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive and Interns:  14

LabourStart Correspondents:  608-677

LabourStart Translators:  104-97

Africa Caucus:  63

Media Contacts: 69-51

Donors:  885

 

FLICKR:

Members:  840

Photos:  10366-10225

 

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  131

 

FACEBOOK PAGES/GROUPS:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

LabourStart.org page likes:  14k, details unavailable

Global Labour News and Information: 9188-9161

LabourStart UK likes:  2k-2.1k, details unavailable

LabourStart Francophone: 607 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 495

LabourStart Brasil:  550-547

LabourStart Turkce:  2k, details unavailable

LabourStart TV likes: 462-443

LabourStart TV follows:  455-465

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Canada-English: 188-176

LabourStart Nepal:  7 (last post April 2017)

LabourStart Israel: CLOSED (last post 2018)

 

LINKEDIN:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Group: 2636-2623

Page: 318-305

 

PODCASTS:

Rather than list each podcast and the numbers of times they have been downloaded we will report the three (3) podcasts that have been downloaded the most times to date.

PODCASTS:

Rather than list each podcast and the numbers of times they have been downloaded we will report the three (3) podcasts that have been downloaded the most times to date.

1. 412 downloads: Interview with Carlos Ching-Hung Wang, the president of the China Steel Express Union (Taiwan).
2. 315 downloads: Interview with Sally McManus, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU)
3. 296 downloads: Interview with Judith Kirton-Darling, General Secretary of IndustriAll Europe.

 

BLUESKY:

As an experiment we created a global news in English feed earlier this month.  The account is growing far more quickly than any other of our social media accounts ever did.

Our Mastodon experience, as with most people’s, was not great as the initial excitement wore off quite quickly.  That does not appear to be happening with Bluesky.

Global English-language: 5.9k, details unavailable.

 

X (TWITTER as-was):

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for these accounts.  If we wish to maintain our footprint we will have to start doing so again or the erosion of our numbers will continue.

We experienced some decline in accounts that usually experience slow growth.  This may be the result of trade unionists closing their Twitter accounts and moving to other platforms (such as Bluesky or Mastodon).

Global English: 37321-38245

Canada English: 21637-22574

Global Portuguese: 10131-10381

Global Spanish: 10835-10503

Australia: 9695-10133

USA: 4805-5035

Canada French: 3199-3313

Russian: 49

Hebrew:  50 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 508 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 329-330 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 341 (last tweet 2015)

French: 224 (last tweet 2018)

German: 120 (last tweet 2018)

Japanese: 21 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

South Asia (English): 28 Placeholder and not yet active.

 

 

New logo: We needed a generic logo to use on our social media accounts and had our graphic designer modify an existing one we used. We think the new logo actually looks pretty good.

Bluesky: Last week we reported that in our first week using the new platform we picked up over 3,000 supporters. Today, that’s nearly doubled to over 5,800 followers. We’ve shared 265 posts so far and many of them are being liked and passed on. That’s a lot more than most other Bluesky accounts belonging to global unions. Of the ones we could find, they ranged from 188 to 1,000 followers — but these numbers will certainly grow. To help them grow their followings, this week we also created our first “starter pack” on Bluesky, listing all the global and European union federations with a presence on the new platform. We publicised this widely and will be creating more such “packs”. If you want to help, get in touch.

Mailing lists: As part of an effort to allow segmentation of our lists to work, which requires that we ‘tag’ each email subscriber with their country names, we’ve been adding thousands of new subscribers and tagging many existing ones. As a result, for example, we now have a mailing list for the USA with over 13,500 subscribers. We’re doing this country by country, starting with the English-speaking ones. This will allow for much more targetted mailings.

Donations: Unions and individuals continue to respond generously to our appeal. This week NITO, the Norwegian union for engineers and technicians, told us that they honoured Thomas Seltzer and gave him a NOK 50,000 prize — which he donated in full to LabourStart.

KESK campaign: We did a lot to grow this campaign this week. It grew to 3,870 supporters and appears in 14 languages, with more coming.

Thailand campaign: This new campaign also saw growth last week and now has 3,295 followers. It appears in 11 languages with more on the way.

Bluesky: Our brand-new account there [@labourstart.bsky.social] has picked up over 3,100 followers since our launch last week. We have posted 106 times to that list this week and are closely monitoring responses to the posts, also comparing this to our account on Twitter.

Mastodon: We have decided to stop posting to Mastodon and we will limit our social media presence to Facebook, X, Bluesky and LinkedIn only (for now).

Campaigns: We were given two new campaigns on the same day and are launching them over the course of the next several days. One involves the arrest of a trade union activist in Turkey and the other focusses on union-busting in Thailand. Translations are starting to go live today. Please do what you can to share these.

News: In the first three weeks of this month, 34 of our volunteer correspondents posted 2,218 stories — more than 100 per day.

 

We haven’t had a number report since November 2023.  With this post we’re returning to monthly reports.  This month’s report does not contain any new information regarding the mailing lists as we have changed the structure of the language segments and won’t report those numbers until next month.

The first number next to each item is the current total as of today; the second number is the total as of the first day of November 2023. Where one number is provided it means that there has been no change since our last report.

Lists or accounts that have shrunk are in italics.  Lists or accounts which experienced growth are in bold.

 

MAILING LISTS:

The top 10:

English: 84014

French: 7642

German: 5957

Spanish: 5979

Turkish: 4426

Korean: 3321

Italian: 3117

Russian: 2702

Norwegian: 2232

Romanian:  1771

Dutch: 1536

 

The others:

Arabic:  821

Belarusian:  293

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 902

Creole:  11

Czech: 61

Danish: 93

Esperanto: 190

Farsi:  207

Finnish:  476

Georgian:  156

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  295

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  186

Indonesian:  460

Japanese: 398

Lithuanian:  63

Malaysian: 21

Polish: 970

Portuguese: 1292

Punjabi:  2

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 950

Tagalog: 183

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 493

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive and Interns:  14

LabourStart Correspondents:  677

LabourStart Translators:  97

Africa Caucus:  63

Media Contacts: 51

 

FLICKR:

Members:  839-840

Photos:  10212-10233 (after a culling of off-topic photos)

 

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  130-126

 

FACEBOOK PAGES/GROUPS:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.  Authority for the LabourStart Brasil page has been devolved to a volunteer in Brazil.

LabourStart.org page likes:  unavailable-14071

Global Labour News and Information: 9159-9094

LabourStart UK likes:  unavailable-2137

LabourStart Francophone: 607 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 500

LabourStart Brasil:  552

LabourStart Turkce:  2116

LabourStart TV likes: 443

LabourStart TV follows:  464-454

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Canada-English: 173-17 (new)

LabourStart Nepal:  7 (last post April 2017)

LabourStart Israel: CLOSED (last post 2018)

 

LINKEDIN:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Group: 2622-2617

Page: 300-274

 

PODCASTS:

Rather than list each podcast and the numbers of times they have been downloaded we will report the three (3) podcasts that have been downloaded the most times to date.

1. Mar 27, 2024. Interview with Sally McManus, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU).  296 downloads.
2. April 11, 2024. Interview with Amanda Gearing and Darren Westwood about the strike by Amazon workers in the UK.  273 downloads.
3. May 8, 2024.  Interview with Khaing Zar, trade union leader from Myanmar.

 

X (TWITTER as-was):

A few months ago the Portuguese, Spanish and Canada-EN accounts were  devolved to volunteers in Brazil, Spain and Canada.  As a result changes to tweet frequency and format have been introduced.  This may have had an effect on our numbers.

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for these accounts.  We will have to start again or the erosion of our numbers will continue.

We experienced some decline in accounts that usually experience slow growth.  This may be the result of trade unionists closing their Twitter accounts and moving to other platforms (such as Mastodon).

Global English: 38328-40123 [A technical problem with a third-party account manager cost this account in excess of 3k followers last December]

Canada English: 22604-24923 [A technical problem with a third-party account manager cost this account in excess of 2k followers last December]

Global Portuguese: 10413-10754

Global Spanish: 10517-10614

Australia: 10148-10342

USA: 5103-5133

Canada French: 3316-3325

Russian: 49-47

Hebrew:  50 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 508 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 329-330 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 341 (last tweet 2015)

French: 224 (last tweet 2018)

German: 120 (last tweet 2018)

Japanese: 21 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

South Asia (English): 28-27 Placeholder and not yet active.

 

 

Podcasts: This week we interviewed Macarena Grimalt Fernandes from Argentina. In the first 24 hours online, this podcast already had nearly 120 downloads. The five most popular podcasts we’re done so far were: Khaing Zar (Myanmar), Amanda Gearing and Darren Westwood (UK), Sally McManus (Australia), Carolina Dantas (Panama) and Olesia Briazgunova (Ukraine).

Reddit: We have begun sharing some campaigns and news on Reddit in addition to all the other social media platforms we use. These have been seen by, in some cases, many thousands of people; our first post had over 8,000 total views. For a number of reasons, our posts to Reddit are likely to have a wider reach than those to, for example, Twitter.

News: Our volunteer correspondents have posted 2,560 news stories in the first 23 days of May, averaging over 111 per day. This is, again, a small decrease compared to last week, but still a very large number of news stories.

Due to some overseas travel and other issues, I’ve not been updating this blog — the last update was on 1 June.  So this will try to cover the last two months briefly.  I’ll try to keep the updates shorter and more frequent in future.

Campaigns:

• We just now launched a new campaign, together with PSI, in support of a jailed trade union leader in Mexico.  Translations are coming in and publicity happening.  After the first day, we have 2,750 supporters — a good start.
• We closed the Belarus and Georgia campaigns after three months.

Publicity:

• We’ve created the first version of a media list with a few dozen names.  All campaigns, events and conferences will now be sent to them.  Comrades with suggestions of who else should be on this list, please do let us know.
• We have reinvigorated our Instagram account (485 followers) and signed up for a Threads account.  We continue to grow our followings on Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn and Mastodon.
• We ran advertising campaigns on Facebook and Microsoft in support of our Belarus campaign, but they produced very disappointing results.

Next book:

• Some of the participants in our recent Global Solidarity Conference have sent in texts of their presentations.  We have about 9,000 words and will probably post this online and perhaps as a print booklet as well.  The texts need to be edited.

Donations:

• We received a very generous donation from the European Transport Workers Federation (ETF) and another from NUPGE in Canada.  In September we will resume our fundraising efforts.