Aug
05
2023
0

The last two months

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.

 

 

Dec
28
2020
0

A busy end to 2020 at LabourStart

At the end of each year, we write to all our volunteer translators. Our message this year included this:

We’ve run 24 campaigns this year.

Some of these campaigns resulted in victories for the workers.

We’ve helped get trade unionists released from jail, companies to sit down and negotiate with workers’ representatives, and workers reinstated after being wrongfully sacked.

Thanks to your efforts, these campaigns often appear in many languages — and as a result are much larger and more effective than campaigns that appear only in English or a handful of major languages.

We are strong believers in linguistic diversity and equality, and we believe that workers everywhere should be encouraged to participate in global solidarity campaigns, regardless of what language they speak.

Your work is turning that commitment of ours into a reality.

We also write to all our volunteer correspondents. In this year’s message, we wrote:

According to our statistics, 111 of you posted 55,618 news stories to our site this year. That’s average of 155 news stories every day of the year.

A new labour news story every 9 minutes.

When I look at the mainstream media news sites, I barely see a hint of all this news. Working people and our unions rarely make headlines.

Even some union websites feature hardly any updated news. Some major union websites go weeks without a single update.

But not LabourStart.

If you don’t glance at our site for a week, you’ve missed 1,000 news stories.

This is entirely due to your efforts — and to your understanding of our movement and the challenges we face, in your country and all over the world.

In the last two weeks, despite the holiday season, we’ve been busy as usual.

New campaign: We launched a new campaign in support of Ukrainian workers who have gone without pay for the last three years. The campaign is backed by the Ukrainian union PROFBUD and BWI. Today it already has nearly 4,000 supporters, and appears in 9 languages with more coming.

Our home page: This is now working in Russian and Ukrainian, showing our current campaigns. The ‘more campaigns’ link now works for all languages, which are showing only the most recent active campaigns. All links on the home page that pointed to insecure (http) links now point to secure (https) versions of the same page. We’ve been going through our home pages in all languages trying to make certain that all signup links to our mailing list now point to Mailchimp and not Sendy.

Reviving dormant languages: We wrote to volunteer translators for Finnish and Polish, and are following up also with Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese as well. All of these languages have had volunteer translators in the past, and if we can revive them all, our campaigns will reach much larger audiences.

Outreach: We wrote to a large number if Indian and Pakistani mine workers’ unions, and also reached out to the person who controls the ‘India labour news’ page on Facebook, in the hope of growing LabourStart’s presence in the region.

Bookshop: We’ve added many more titles to our US and UK bookshops on bookshop.org, and are planning to hold live author events on Zoom next month. In December, the US bookshop had 241 views and the UK one had 384 views and two sales.

Correspondents’ webinar: Our first-ever online meeting with correspondents was a success, with 35 participants.

LinkedIn: We now have a page in addition to our long-standing group. It has 33 followers. The group has grown to 2,250.

Resistance: This is the working title of the next collection of essays by Dan Gallin which we will be publishing in the next few weeks. Work on this has now resumed.

Dec
14
2020
0

Victories in Belarus, Colombia; new campaigns in Brazil, Kyrgyzstan; webinars; and we have a bookshop!

Apologies once again as this update has been delayed by a couple of weeks. It’s been a very busy month and here are some highlights:

Belarus: We shared the good news of the release of the jailed trade unionists (pictured) widely across social media and closed our campaign.

Brazil: We launched a campaign demanding an end the anti-union attacks in the city of São Paulo. After one month online, the campaign has 6,198 supporters.

Cambodia: We closed our current campaign after three months. We don’t know the result yet as we have not yet heard back from the sponsoring unions – ITUC and EI.

Canada: We invited our list to view the CLIFF videos — one of which received a LabourStart prize.

Colombia: We won a big victory in the ‘death shifts’ campaign and publicised this widely.(Pictured – right.)

India: We are in discussions with a colleague who had been an active LabourStart correspondent about ramping up our activities by working together on an Indian labour news page on Facebook which he founded, and that already has tens of thousands of supporters.

Iran: We raised the question of a campaign in support of a workers’ rights activists who received 74 lashes — but have not yet heard back from our global union partner.

Kyrgyzstan: We launched a major new campaign, and now have nearly 6,000 supporters. The campaign has benefitted from repeated posts across social media, and the GUF partners all posting news stories on their home pages about this.

Philippines: We gave a lot of publicity to the global unions’ “Workers’ Quest for Justice – an international webinar on human rights and the labour movement” which took place on 23 November.

UK: I gave a talk (via Zoom) to a London branch of Unite the Union. The subject was LabourStart; the branch has made a donation to us.


Books: We have launched — just in time for Christmas — online bookshops in cooperation with bookshop.org in the USA and UK.

Correspondents: We cleared the backlog of new correspondent applications. At the moment, we have 1,007 correspondents, the majority of whom are inactive. Of those, 64 joined us in 2020. (See ‘webinars’ below.)

Internationalisation: We’re checking all our home pages in various languages to try to standardise features and have completed this for the Dutch page.

Interns: In addition to our two current interns in the USA, Nate and Hargun, we have agreed with the Global Labour University (based in Germany) to take on one or two more for a 6-week period starting in mid-February. We have already interviewed the first one, a young Israeli trade unionist.

Labour Newswire: Our language-based newswires have been broken for some time, but we finally managed to find the problem and fixed the Russian and Spanish ones. We can now begin to publicise these again. We purged the Labour Newswire Global Network page of the many websites which no longer use our newswires (or which have gone defunct).

Site security: Due to changes made by our Internet host (IONOS), we were compelled to close our CloudFlare account and instead have bought into IONOS’ system, SiteLock. We needed to work with IONOS tech support to get this all to work properly. We are working to ensure that all pages on our site are now SSL-protected and no longer trigger warning messages in browsers.

Social media: In addition to our LinkedIn group, we now have a LinkedIn page which we are starting to recruit to.

Webinars: We are today holding our first-ever Zoom webinar, for LabourStart correspondents. Over 50 people have registered to attend. We plan to hold many more webinars to support our campaigns, etc. We are hoping to hold another public webinar in support of FLOC in the US, with the support of the IUF, but are waiting.

Aug
31
2020
0

LabourStart in Numbers: 1 September vs 1 August 2020

Mailing Lists:

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 last month.  Where no number is provided for last month this means that the list was re-created this month from our Mail Chimp back-up.

We continue see the impact of the General Data Protection Regulation.  Shrinking lists are in Italics.  Lists experiencing significant growth are in bold.

 

The Top 10:

English: 74,228-73,527

French: 7,679-7,720

Spanish: 5,137-5,141

Turkish: 4,282-4,222

Korean: 3,397-3,399

Italian: 3,322-3,326

Russian: 2,641-2,630

Norwegian: 2,243-2,558

Dutch: 1,455-1,472

 

The Others:

Arabic:  738

Belarusian:  18

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 980-984

Creole:  11

Czech: 66-66

Danish: 103-104

Esperanto: 158-160

Farsi:  212

Finnish:  519

Georgian:  138

German: 5,793-5,844

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  242-243

Hindi:  36

Hungarian:  193-192

Indonesian:  435

Japanese: 404-no change

Polish: 859-863

Portuguese: 1,290-1,258

Romanian:  39

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15-15

Swedish: 1,031-1,036

Tagalog: 160-161

Thai:  153

Ukrainian: 281-277

Vietnamese:  24

 

Flickr:

833-834 members.  10,220-10,218 photos.

 

Facebook Pages/Groups:

LabourStart.org page: 13,410-14,148

Global Labour News and Information: 8,867-no data.

LabourStart UK:  2139-2145

LabourStart Franco: 591-592.

LabourStart Brasil:  506-no data.

LabourStart Turkce:  2191-no data.

LabourStart TV: 431-no change.

 

LinkedIn:

Group: 2174-2150

 

Twitter:

All the major feeds experienced growth starting when the COVID-19 crisis hit.  Accounts experiencing significant increases are in bold.

English: 25,449-25,265

Canada English: 14,132-13,729

USA: 5,663-5,669

Australia: 4,956-4,872

Spanish: 4,557-4,432

Canada French: 2,646-2,612

Portuguese: 3,418-3,176

Italian: 504-517 (last tweet June 2019)

Swedish: 352-361 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 350 (last tweet 2015)

French: 227-no change (last tweet 2018)

German: 126-no change (last tweet 2018)

Russian: 42-40 (last tweet November 2019)

Japanese: 20-no change (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12-no change (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7-no change (last tweet May 2012)

Jul
07
2020
0

5 campaigns launched this month

Since 1 June, we’ve been busy.

Brazil: We launched a campaign in support of Santander workers at the request of UNI Global Union — one of five campaigns we launched in the last month. It is our most successful campaign ever in the Portuguese language, with more than 1,000 supporters in the first few days. It is also on track to be our largest current campaign, with 7,162 supporters and still counting.

Czech Republic: We launched a campaign in support of Ryanair workers at the request of the European Transport Workers Federation. It is also picking up a larger number of supporters than usual and today has 6,603 supporters.

India: We launched a campaign at the request of a number of global unions including the ITUC to protest the new attacks on workers’ rights.  It has 4,456 supporters today.

Kyrgyzstan: We’ve publicised the arrest of a trade union leader and are exploring the launch of a new campaign.

Malaysia: We launched a campaign in support of hospital workers, which has also now been translated into the Malay language.  The campaign has 3,618 supporters.

Mexico: We raised the possibility of doing a campaign in support of a jailed labour lawyer and are still waiting to hear if there is interest.

Palestine: We are in discussions about the launch of new campaign.

Peru: We launched a new campaign to urge Falabella (a Chilean multinational home retailer) to reinstate 22 workers who have been dismissed for asking for better protection against Covid-19, at the request of UNI.  This campaign has 6,055 supporters

Philippines: We shared the IUF campaign in support of Coca-Cola workers widely through mass mailings, our website and social media.

Poland: We are awaiting to hear back from UNI about suspending our campaign here, which has been live for some six months already.

USA: We sent out a mailing to our English list in support of a campaign by farm workers union FLOC.

Campaigns: We noticed that we were having a problem with our script that shows campaigns — it was taking very long to load campaigns. We fixed this by removing the live counter, and later replacing this with one that is updated manually a few times a day. Loading speeds are now much faster, and this is probably contributing to increased support for our campaigns.

Correspondents: Now that we have completely cleared the email backlog from the last few months (yes — inbox zero at last), there are no longer any individuals waiting to become LabourStart correspondents. A total of 43 new correspondents signed up in the first half of 2020, and of these 10 have already posted news.

Country names: This has been an issue for some time as quite a few countries have changed their names in the last few years (most recently, North Macedonia and eSwatini); we have developed a work plan to solve this issue across both our news and campaigns platforms.

Donations: The European Transport Workers Federation has made a generous donation.

Global Labour University: We have been approached to make a presentation about LabourStart to their students later this month.

Health & Safety: We have new Health & Safety news pages in many languages and these have been promoted across the net. We’ve encouraged all correspondents to make use of this, posting and tagging health & safety news.

Interns: We are working with the Industrial and Labour Relations school at Cornell University about getting interns and they are enthusiastic to work with us on this.

LinkedIn: Our Group there continues to grow, despite the fact that we do nothing to promote it, and we picked up over 60 new members this month. Most of what we post to Facebook and Twitter is also posted here.

Mailing lists: We imported 1,107 new subscribers during the last two weeks (and two more imports in early June as well), with large groups joining the English and Portuguese lists.

Jun
01
2020
0

LabourStart in Numbers – May 2020

1 June vs 1 May 2020 Numbers

Flickr:

834 members, 10,210 photos. No Data for May.

Facebook Page:

14,133-no data from May.

LinkedIn:

2,077.  No data for May.

Twitter:

During this period we have not made any concerted efforts to build the accounts. All the major feeds experienced growth starting when the COVID-19 crisis hit.  Accounts experiencing significant increases are in bold.


English: 24,364-23,798
Canada English: 12,394-11,706
USA: 5,609-5,526
Australia: 4,344-4,227
Spanish: 3,674-3,493
Canada French: 2,429-2,277
Portuguese: 2,132-1,816
Italian: 517 (last tweet June 2019)
Swedish: 361 (last tweet 2016)
Indonesia: 350 (last tweet 2015)
French: 227 (last tweet 2018)
German: 126 (last tweet 2018)
Russian: 40
Japanese: 20 (last tweet 2012)
Dutch: 12
Arabic: 7

Aug
12
2019
0

LabourStart in Numbers – 1 February – 31 July 2019

In this report, which covers the last six months or so, I’ve added a new feature at the very top — the numbers regarding our campaigns. These numbers, important though they are, do not reflect the success of those campaigns. Some of the smaller ones actually achieved good results, while larger ones had little impact in some cases. In any event, please note that we’ve not run a campaign for some time that got more than 10,000 supporters — and we should aim to achieve that again, and soon.

Our mailing lists continue to shrink thanks to GDPR, and of the large lists, only the Turkish one has experienced any growth.

On social media, we’ve seen very small growth in our presence on Facebook, but some very good growth in some of our Twitter feeds. This is particularly evident for our global Spanish and Portuguese feeds, and our Australia and Canada feeds.

The first number below is today’s count, the second is from six months ago.

ActNOW campaigns

Currently active global campaigns

Pakistan: Reinstate the Karachi Eight – 7,489
Philippines: Holcim workers demand justice – 6,507
Turkey: Reinstate municipal workers in Alia?a – 6,390
Poland: Hutchison Ports must reinstate union activist Marek Szymczak – 6,288
Cambodia: Solidarity with workers at the West Mebun temple – 5,573

Other campaigns closed in 2019

Canadian Postal Workers Forced Back to Work, Supporters Jailed – 8,875
Turkey: Release jailed construction workers – Ensure occupational safety at Istanbul Airport – 8,800
China: Release Jailed Labour Rights Activists Exercising Rights to Freedom of Association – 8,559
Kazakhstan: Stop repression and physical attacks on leaders of independent unions; hands off Larisa Kharkova, Erlan Baltabai and Dmitriy Senyavskiy – 8,508
Philippines: Teacher unionists under threat – 8,130
Guatemala: Union leaders imprisoned for having negotiated a collective agreement – 8,128
Thailand: Olympic 2020 partner Mitsubishi Electric humiliates workers – 7,798
Iran: Stop jailing teachers now – 7,671
Thailand: Union leaders sacked, fined for demanding rail safety – 7,494
Hungary: Stop the slave law – 7,288
Kazakhstan: Erlan Baltabay sentenced to 7 years in prison for union activity – 7,070
Jordan: New labour law must recognise workers’ rights – 5,472
Korea: Stop the Outsourcing of Danger – Justice for Kim Yong-gyun! – 3,983
Jordan: King must reject flawed labour law passed by Parliament – 3,539

Mailing lists

The top 10:

English: 76,387 – 79,891
French: 8,277 – 8,531
German: 5,940 – 6,065
Spanish: 5,164 – 5,228
Turkish: 4,266 – 4,243
Korean: 3,742 – 3,791
Italian: 3,563 – 3,663
Russian: 2,694 – 2,725
Norwegian: 2,481 – 2,553
Dutch: 1,597 – 1,638

The others:

Swedish: 1,080 – 1,098
Chinese: 1,026 – 1,037
Arabic: 954 – 957
Portuguese: 866 – 849
Polish: 680 – 713
Finnish: 532 – 538
Japanese: 421 – 446
Indonesian: 394 – 395
Ukrainian: 296 – 247
Hebrew: 251 – 257
Farsi: 218 – 218
Georgian: 217 – 217
Hungarian: 185 – 178
Tagalog: 175 – 203
Esperanto: 175 – 179
Thai: 154 – 64
Danish: 81 – 83
Czech: 71 – 71
Greek: 57 – 57
Romanian: 39 – 41
Hindi: 37 – 37
Vietnamese: 25 – 25
Bulgarian: 18 – 18
Slovakian: 15 – 15
Creole: 12- 12
Sinhalese: 1- 1

Social media

Facebook

Like LabourStart.org page (English): 12,986 – 12,835
Members of LabourStart group (Global Labour News and Information): 8,631 – 8,629
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 2,256 – 2,314
Like LabourStart UK page: 2,097 – 2,075
Like LabourStart page (French): 585 – 581
Like LabourStart page (German): 502 – 495
Friends of LabourStart Brasil: 481 – 468
LabourStart TV: 420 – 404
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 156 – 157
Members of LabourStart Vostok (Russian): 114 – 111

Twitter

English: 22,578 – 21,374
Canada English: 10,547- 9,578
USA: 4,822 – 3,584
Australia: 3,986 – 3,075
Spanish: 2,177 – 1,200
Canada French: 2,155 – 1,956
Portuguese: 1,397 – 321
Italian: 517 – 516 (last tweet June 2019)
Indonesia: 354 – 354 (last tweet 2015)
Swedish: 361 – 364 (last tweet 2016)
French: 230 – 235 (last tweet 2018)
German: 122 – 123 (last tweet 2018)
Russian: – 34
Japanese: 19 – 19 (last tweet 2012)
Dutch: – 12
Arabic: – 7

Linked In

LabourStart group: 2,130 – 2,119

Flickr

Union group on Flickr: 835 – 834

LabourStart’s news website

Correspondents: 930 – 905

Website traffic to the main news website

Visitors 371,877 – 391,616

Feb
03
2019
0

LabourStart in Numbers – 1 November 2018 – 31 January 2019

Highlights:

  • Thanks to GDPR, almost all the mailing lists are shrinking in size. The only ones to grow in the last quarter are Korean, Russian, Hungarian, and Esperanto.
  • On social media, the big news is the spectacular growth of our revived Twitter feed in Spanish – thanks to Derek’s hard work. LabourStart’s Spanish speaking correspondents, translators and supporters are invited to help keep this growth going.
  • Traffic to the main news site was relatively stable, with just under 400,000 visitors this quarter.

In the list below, the first number is the current total, the second one is our previous total.

Mailing lists

The top 10:

English: 79,891 – 80,850
French: 8,531 – 8,610
German: 6,065 – 6,103
Spanish: 5,228 – 5,356
Turkish: 4,243 – 4,260
Korean: 3,791 – 3,740
Italian: 3,663 – 3,719
Russian: 2,725 – 2,450
Norwegian: 2,553 – 2,603
Dutch: 1,638 – 1,669

The others:

Swedish: 1,098 – 1,179
Chinese: 1,037 – 1,043
Arabic: 957 – 957
Portuguese: 849 – 859
Polish: 713 – 798
Finnish: 538 – 562
Japanese: 446 – 446
Indonesian: 395 – 395
Hebrew: 257 – 262
Ukrainian: 247 – 254
Farsi: 218 – 232
Georgian: 217 – 217
Tagalog: 203 – 203
Esperanto: 179 – 177
Hungarian: 178 – 159
Danish: 83 – 86
Czech: 71 – 72
Thai: 64 – 64
Greek: 57 – 57
Romanian: 41 – 41
Hindi: 37 – 37
Vietnamese: 25 – 25
Bulgarian: 18 – 18
Slovakian: 15 – 15
Creole: 12 – 12
Sinhalese: 1 – 1

Facebook

Like LabourStart.org page (English): 12,835 – 12,698
Members of LabourStart group (Global Labour News and Information): 8,629 – 8,899
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 2,314 – 2,365
Like LabourStart UK page: 2,075 – 2,088
Like LabourStart page (French): 581 – 575
Like LabourStart page (German): 495 – 493
Friends of LabourStart Brasil: 468 – 450
LabourStart TV: 404 – 405
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 157 – 157
Members of LabourStart Vostok (Russian): 111 – 126

Twitter

English: 21,374 – 20,878
Canada English: 9,578 – 9,549
USA: 3,584 – 3,586
Australia: 3,075 – 2,863
Canada French: 1,956 – 1,939
Spanish: 1,200 – 70
Italian: 516 – 525
Swedish: 364 – 366
Indonesia: 354 – 353
Portuguese: 321 – 307
French: 235 – 236
German: 123 – 94
Russian: 34 – 31
Japanese: 19 – 19
Dutch: 12 – 12
Arabic: 7 – 7

Linked In

LabourStart group: 2,119 – 2,088

Flickr

Union group on Flickr: 834 – 831

Website traffic to the main news website

Visitors 391,616 – 399,164

Top countries (by sessions):

USA 39% – 38%
UK 13% – 12%
France 5%
India 5% – 6%
Canada 4% – 4%

Correspondents: 905 – 900

Nov
02
2018
0

LabourStart in Numbers – August-October 2018

Some highlights:

* There seems to be an increase in traffic to the site, with our internet host showing a rise to almost 400,000 visitors in this quarter — half of them coming from the USA and UK.

* As before, our mailing lists are shrinking in size, largely due to the effect of GDPR – which prevents us from automatically signing up new supporters for our campaigns. All of our top 10 lists except for Turkish have gotten smaller, and the only lists to grow were relatively small ones (Chinese, Esperanto and Hungarian).

* There has been some growth on Facebook — we’ve picked up over 300 new followers for our main page, and about another 100 have joined our group there (which is no longer branded as LabourStart).

* On Twitter we did much better, picking up 333 more followers for our main English global feed, 80 more for our Canadian English feed, and 187 more for our revived Australian feed.

* Our group on LinkedIn continues to grow, picking up 60 more members in this period.

* We are now back at 900 volunteer correspondents, as people continue to sign up to post news, but only a fraction of them remain active at any time.

In the list below, the first number is the current total, the second one is our previous total.

Mailing lists

The top 10:

English: 80,850 – 81,559
French: 8,610 – 8,658
German: 6,103 – 6,131
Spanish: 5,356 – 5,372
Turkish: 4,260 – 4,189
Korean: 3,740 – 3,740
Italian: 3,719 – 3,733
Norwegian: 2,603 – 2,644
Russian: 2,450 – 2,484
Dutch: 1,669 – 1,669

The others:

Swedish: 1,179 – 1,180
Chinese: 1,043 – 1,040
Arabic: 957 – 957
Portuguese: 859 – 861
Polish: 798 – 798
Finnish: 562 – 595
Japanese: 446 – 447
Indonesian: 395 – 395
Hebrew: 262 – 264
Ukrainian: 254 – 273
Farsi: 232 – 232
Georgian: 217 – 217
Tagalog: 203 – 203
Esperanto: 177 – 174
Hungarian: 159 – 156
Danish: 86 – 91
Czech: 72 – 73
Thai: 64 – 64
Greek: 57 – 57
Romanian: 41 – 41
Hindi: 37 – 37
Vietnamese: 25 – 25
Bulgarian: 18 – 18
Slovakian: 15 – 15
Creole: 12 – 12
Sinhalese: 1 – 1

Facebook

Like LabourStart.org page (English): 12,698 – 12,395
Members of LabourStart group (Global Labour News and Information): 8,899 – 8,795
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 2,365 – 2,368
Like LabourStart UK page: 2,088 – 2,033
Like LabourStart page (French): 575 – 576
Like LabourStart page (German): 493 – 493
Friends of LabourStart Brasil: 450 – 428
LabourStart TV: 405 – 403
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 157 – 159
Members of LabourStart Vostok (Russian): 126 – 126

Twitter

English: 20,878 – 20,545
Canada English: 9,549 – 9,469
USA: 3,586 – 3,560
Australia: 2,863 – 2,676
Canada French: 1,939 – 1,957
Italian: 525 – 532
Swedish: 366 – 366
Indonesia: 353 – 353
Portuguese: 307 – 291
French: 236 – 231
German: 94 – 95
Spanish: 70 – 69
Russian: 31 – 28
Japanese: 19 – 19
Norwegian: 18 – 18
Turkish: 17 – 14
Dutch: 12 – 12
Arabic: 7 – 7

Linked In

LabourStart group: 2,088 – 2,028

Flickr

Union group on Flickr: 831 – 831

Website traffic to the main news website

Visitors 399,164 – 239,465

Top countries (by sessions):

USA 38% – 32%
UK 12% – 7%
India 6% – 6%
Germany 4% – 7%
Canada 4% – 7%

Correspondents: 900 – 883

Aug
22
2018
0

Nearly 800 more supporters for our latest campaign in the last two weeks, and two more campaigns in the pipelinee

August is generally a slow month for the international trade union movement, and this is reflected in the lack of new campaigns. Here is what’s happened to our existing campaigns this month — the number in brackets is the total from 17 days ago. Note very significant gains for the Russian and XPO campaigns.

Russia: Union-busting at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology – 9,050 [8,278] +772
Norway: Sekkingstad and Sund, stop union busting! – 7,449 [7,408] +41
XPO: Time to talk about your behaviour – 7,406 [7,155] +251
Korea: Oracle workers on strike – 7,272 [7,223] +49
France: Rail unions fight against privatisation – 7,188 [7,156] +32
USA: Time for Wendt to negotiate with the union – 6,755 [6,743] +12
Australia: Exxon Mobil – time for a fair deal for your workers – 6,412 [6,377] +35

In other news this month …

Brazil: It seems like we are about to launch a campaign here — stay tuned.

Europe: We boosted coverage of the Ryanair strike both on our news pages and on social media.

France: We asked the ITF for permission to close our French railway workers’ campaign, now running for more than three months. As you can see above, very few new supporters are signing up.

Germany: We promoted a story on social media about the youth section of the trade union federation DGB reiterating their opposition of boycotts of Israel.

Indonesia: We promoted the IUF’s Bali campaign in a mailing to LabourStart’s English list, and throughout social networks.

Iran: We publicised a new story about repression targetting teacher trade unionists.

Israel: We widely publicised a story about a big nurses strike across the country.

Kenya: We promoted a story about a tear gas attack on striking hospital workers on our news page and on social networks.

Romania: We gave extensive publicity to an IFJ story about attacks on journalists.

South Africa: We gave prominence to a story about the AMCU threatening to shut down the platinum mining business.

Sri Lanka: We’ve been approached by a global union federation and are about to launch a campaign targetting an employer in this country.

USA: We promoted widely a Boston Globe story about the increasing use of lockouts by employers. We also promoted the story about unions winning the referendum in Missouri, defeating a “right to work” (for less) law.

Campaigns: We discovered a problem with the code that made some of our pages appear to be security risks for users; now fixed.  It looks like we are about to launch two new campaigns — details above.

Donations: We received a generous donation from the steelworkers in Canada.

Mailing list: We promoted signups to our mailing list on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We added 34 new subscribers to our lists. We also completed posting translations of texts so that when people support one of our campaigns in any language, but fail to check the box to sign up to our mailing list, they receive a reminder on the landing page.

Publicity: At the request of the International Centre for Trade Union Rights (ICTUR), we submitted an article on online campaigning for their quarterly journal International Union Rights.

Social networks: We did a mailing to our English list encouraging people to sign up to our pages on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. As a result, we picked up 181 new likes on Facebook and 141 new followers on Twitter. Our group on LinkedIn, oddly, seems have gotten smaller.

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